Home Archive Did Razer’s Project Christine draw inspiration from Thermaltake?

Did Razer’s Project Christine draw inspiration from Thermaltake?

by GH Staff

Razer’s Project Christine has been stealing the spotlight at CES 2014, showing off a concept for a completely customizable modular PC setup. Project Christine essentially aims to make PC upgrades and assembly a breeze for those users that aren’t necessarily tech-savvy, or simply cannot be bothered to tinker with their desktop PC’s.

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When looking at Project Christine, I immediately said to myself “I’ve seen this before somewhere”. Digging through my memories, I went back a couple of years, and remembered that I’ve stumbled upon a very similar looking PC case a few years ago. And I’m talking about the the Thermaltake Level 10, an extremely expensive case that first showed up at CEBIT 2009.

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The Thermaltake Level 10 was designed by Thermaltake and BMW Group Designworks USA. Besides sporting an exceedingly expensive price-tag (the case was retailed for around $700-800 back in 2010), Thermaltake’s case aimed to make cable management and cooling much easier, while allowing users easier access to individual components, for the purpose of easily taking out or putting in components.

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Now, Thermaltake’s case faded away and was quickly forgotten. At the time, the price of the case was the equivalent of a mid to high-end PC. In addition, while it looked great, the case still required some effort to manage and didn’t completely solve the problems of less-experienced PC builders. Razer’s Project Christine is much more complex, and comes with multiple features that Thermaltake couldn’t even dream of 5 years ago. Hell, Razer officials actually mentioned including a monthly subscription for Christine, which would allow a constant exchange of components for premium users (basically Razer would send you the latest hardware, while you’d have to send the old one back, and everything would go as easy as plugging in and plugging out components).

Still, I can’t help but wonder if the general design for the Project Christine (they really need a better name for it) didn’t draw inspiration from Thermaltake’s design. After all, the similarities, at least visually, cannot be contested.

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