$14,000 for a PC with titanium-alloy flowers that unfurl as your system temps get toasty? Well, okay then...

RGB lighting? Storm-trooper-white styling? Real wood accents? Fuggedabowdit. What you really need to stand out in today's crowded custom PC market is heat-reactive titanium-alloy cherry blossoms that unfurl as your CPU and GPU temps climb. Yes, really.

I give you the Cherry Bloom from Aussie PC maker Aftershock, a custom PC you can actually order today. To quote the company: "Inside the system, 70 handcrafted cherry blossoms made from a special heat-reactive titanium alloy open as the PC comes alive, turning power, temperature, lighting, and performance into a living showcase."

It's a bit of a sidenote, but the rest of the specs involve an AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D CPU, Nvidia RTX 5080 graphics, a 2 TB NVME drive from Lexar and 64 GB or memory. All told, you're looking at a retail price of $19,995 Australian dollars.

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That works out at a sniff over $14,000 in USD and about £10,000 in old money. That's a hill of cash, obviously. Okay, an RTX 5080 is about $1,500 alone these days, high performance DDR5 in that capacity is probably getting on for $1,500, the 2 TB Lexar SSD is nigh on $500, likewise the 9800X3D CPU.

But even throwing in some fancy liquid cooling complete with a full curved display on the CPU block, a 1,300 W PSU and the APNX V2 White case (which provides wrap-around glass on three sides to ensure optimal viewing of the cherry blossom sculpture), you're at, what, about $8k for the titanium animated flowers? Still, at least those flowers should be reliable.

(Image credit: Aftershock PC)

After all, they don't use motors. Instead, the movement is a function of heat generated by the system components being conducted through the metal petals. Shut down and as the heat is dissipated, the petals will curl up, again.

It's a pretty neat idea, even if the resulting banzai-tree-style aesthetic may not exactly be an obvious choice for most gamers. And I think once you're at $14,000 for this configuration, you way as well pile another $5-8k on top and stick in an RTX 5090.

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But who am I to judge what you spend the thick end of $15,000 on? In the end, I suppose it's nice to know that the cost of living clearly doesn't apply to everyone. And, heck, this Cherry Blossom PC is only a little more expensive than the $18,000 AUD Medusa rig Aftershock built a few years back.

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