Has anyone seen the movie PI? i remember the guy in it had the coolest computer- each component was on a different wall of his room- hard drive to the left, processor on the ceiling etc. All this was connected by cables and led to a huge monitor in the middle. Is this possible? Maybe not to dismantle my desktop and scatter it about, but can you buy components seperatley and assemble them in this fashion? No real explanation was given in the movie as to why he had this arrangement, but i remember he had a superfast proccessor, so maybe it was heat issues.
You could do it, but it would require specialized cables, and long ones at that.
This is obviously unscientific junk, created to make the movie look ‘neat’.
It just doesn’t make any sense.
For “superfast computers”, you want to make them as physically compressed as possible. Electricity, after all, can only travel about 11 inches (~ 1/4 meter) in a microsecond*. So if you want microsecond speeds, the components have to be within that distance of each other – not spread out on different walls of the room!
A big battle that computer designers fight is the inherent conflict between 2 physical properties:
- the speed of electricity is limited; you need to keep components close together.
- the closer you keep components, the harder it is to prevent them from overheating.
And this is not even getting into the broadcasting effects of those cables strung around the room! Probably would have been easy for anyone nearby to evesdrop on his computer processing.
Just the usual silly movie ‘science’.
- Look up Grace Hooper and her famous “copper microsecond”. I’ve got one around here somewhere. And look at photos of real supercomputers, like the CDC 7600 or the Cray designs. Note how they are designed in a compact manner.
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- I don’t really see any good reason for doing such a thing, but don’t let that stop you. If you wanted to be able to use easily-purchased parts, I think you’d have a tough time getting the CPU off the mobo and still have it work. A Pentium-4 CPU has up near 600 pins now. …I mean, you can take the CPU off the motherboard easily enough, but rigging up a setup that still got all 600 pins connected would be a bit of a project.
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- As far as the other cables:
----you can get 18-inch power extension cables to connect the power supply to the mobo; QuietPC is one place that sells them. As far as I know there is no immediate limit on the length of the power cables you can daisy-chain, it’s the data cables that are limited.
----IDE disk drive cables have a limit of around 18 inches. Beyond that plain ones begin to pick up RF and cross-talk interference, and various types of shielding have to be used on the cables–and there’s no easy way to “boost” the signal strength.
----SATA drive cables can go a bit farther than IDE cables, 24 inches I have seen printed online somewhere.
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That’s Grace Hopper. Admiral Grace Hopper to you. 
Also, it’s 11-inches in a nanosecond, not a microsecond. A microsecond gets you significantly farther.
Sorry, I always seem to get those mixed up.
Actually, anything faster than 1 second falls into the class “too fast for my aged body to keep up with”! 