Bit-tech forum member John Hanlon is to some people a PC modder, to others a mentor and to many an inspiration. Unfortunately, he's also a sufferer of asbestos poisoning, currently living in a condition where he's unable to work.
In such situations of course, financial concerns can be more unwanted than ever. So in what is both an homage and a sterling effort to help avoid such difficulties, the modding community has responded in the best way they know how: building a custom John Hanlon fund raising PC.
Using a Define R3 case donated by Fractal design, this unique – and patriotic – machine features some custom American iconography from MNPCTech, with a bald eagle draping two American flags across the base of the front and side panels. There's custom grills fitted to the top and bottom fan mounts, along with larger feet to increase base airflow. Mounted to each of these are twin fan radiators: 2 x 12cm and 2 x 14cm. They hook up to some unique pieces of water cooling gear, including a Steel loop reservoir and hand made waterblock and waterpump.
These last two items look fantastic and can be seen in action here.
In terms of the actual hardware, there's an Intel 2500K CPU, twinned with a Zotac GTX 580, 16GB of Viper Extreme RAM from Patriot and a 120GB Patriot Pyro SSD. The operating system is Windows 7. All items were donated by forum users and select companies and the worklog can be found here.
It also comes with Steelseries gaming gear, including: Siberia headset, Merc Stealth keyboard and Sensei mouse.
The system is currently up for grabs on ebay, where at the time of writing it's going for $1,275 with a further six days to go until the auction is complete.
If you feel like doing a little more for John, then you can make a direct donation here.
