by These days, PC cases are all about showing off: tempered glass panels, RGB lighting, sleek metal designs like alien spaceships, the works. However, many manufacturers are bucking trends to create the most ridiculous “sleeping PCs” with high-end hardware cloaked in outdated or nondescript cases, like some sort of warrior monk incognito.
Enter YouTuber Tech By Matt (opens in new tab)‘s Ryzen, RTX gaming PC in, uh, hottest Small form factor cases around: the OG Xbox 360 case. These original 360 models were decimated by the Red Ring of Death, a hardware failure caused by the console’s poor ventilation and frying the components to excessive temperatures. In an act of hubris straight out of Greek tragedy, Matt gutted his 2009 childhood console and replaced the innards with bigger, stronger, hotter components that were never meant to be squeezed in there.
He’s largely hollowed out the inside of the console, and even a bit of one of those curved, fancy-looking hard drive extensions you can get (it’s just a standard 2.5-inch hard drive buried in there at the end of the day) to make room With admirable attention to detail, Matt re-soldered and re-wired the console’s front daughter board so that it looks a little like the Pokémon Tangela, but the power button and green LEDs also work with the new system.
The PC inside runs a Ryzen R5 5600x processor, an RTX 3060 graphics card and 32 GB of RAM. Putting a power supply in there was out of the question, so Matt opted for a similar solution to the original 360 deadly cudgel of an external power brick (opens in new tab)in this case a gaming laptop charger connected to an internal power converter in the console.
The end result is cozy and hot as a cabin on a cold winter morning. It runs games as well as you’d expect from current-gen hardware, but it also clocks GPU temps north of 80C and CPU temps consistently in the mid to high 90s. Matt considered potentially manipulating some higher-intensity server fans — the same solution that saved YouTuber Shank Mods’ Hot Wheels PC (opens in new tab) – but for now the master builder’s mission is accomplished. If you’re interested in Matt’s other projects – like a similar build in a Gamecube (opens in new tab) Chassis— You can check out his YouTube channel (opens in new tab).
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