If you are one of the very few people left who are not affected by rising component prices and, in fact, want something even more expensive than a $10,000 RTX 5090, Aftershock PC might have just the thing.
Meet The Cherry Bloom, a $14,200 gaming PC with 70 handcrafted cherry blossoms made from heat-reactive titanium alloy that physically open as the system heats up during gaming and close again as it cools. No motors, no RGB tricks, no electricity powering the blooms. Just heat. AFTERSHOCK says all 70 flowers can open under load, while powering the system down returns the tree to its closed state.
The tree sits inside an APNX V2 chassis with 270-degree wrap-around glass, presumably so you can watch the flowers open rather than hide the whole spectacle under a desk. Under the sculpture, the hardware includes an AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D, a Zotac GeForce RTX 5080, 64GB of DDR5-6000 memory, a 2TB PCIe Gen4 SSD, a 1300W Platinum power supply, and a custom open-loop liquid cooling system.
Normally, you'd want your PC to stay cool, but with this one, you'll actually want to put it through its paces and run those temperatures up. We don't expect the flowers to sit there waiting until the CPU hits 90 degrees before they finally bloom, either. AFTERSHOCK's presentation shows the tree resting at 18°C, so the flowers likely open gradually as the system heats up during gaming or other heavy workloads and close again once it cools down at idle or during lighter tasks.
Aftershock lists the Cherry Bloom at AU$19,995 with next-business-day dispatch, and that price does not include shipping. It is available to purchase right now, which means it is a commercial product, not a one-off custom mod.
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How do the heat-reactive titanium blossoms actually open and close with temperature changes?
Does the APNX V2 chassis affect airflow or cooling performance in the Cherry Bloom build?
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There will be a very small number of people for whom this makes sense. For everyone else, it's an extraordinary thing to exist at a time when CPUs are getting hit with price hikes and GPU prices are up 28% above MSRP on average. But hey, at least you're getting fake flowers that bloom. Try beating that, RGB lighting.
