When building a gaming PC, you can tell a lot about a person by the type of case they choose to house their components. There are those that go all out for the most premium brands, packed full of features. There are others that budget more for their components, saving some of the cost with a cheap chassis. And then there’s Reddit user Ohmke, who packed a fully functioning Mini ITX system into a case made entirely of Lego.
While it doesn’t include Intel’s strangely appropriate Lego Lakefield processor, the specifications are no slouch. Inside, AMD’s Ryzen 3600 and Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 1660 Super are doing the heavy lifting. And speaking of lifting, Ohmke has kitted out the interior with Lego to give it the structural integrity to move without things falling apart.
Standing at just 32x16x25cm (HxWxL), the Lego PC is actually more compact than most keyboards. For a fun project that began during an extensive lockdown period, Mike, who wishes to remain on first name terms, seems to have created the perfect LAN companion for when the world returns to normal.
The usual trade-off with size is cooling, particularly with Lego’s plastic exterior, but Mike assures us that his Lego PC actually vents heat quite well with two RGB 120mm fans and a dedicated GPU pointing outwards.
“The components don’t seem to interfere with the temps too much,” he explains. “I’m going to run some more tests, but thanks to the two fans blowing cool air right to the components and one exhaust expelling it out at the top, things seem to be pretty good. Including the M.2 that’s on the back of the motherboard.”
If you’re marvelling at the relatively sleek design, that’s because this isn’t Mike’s first attempt. The prototype was made without the same level of coordination, resulting in chaotic patterns through random bricks. Fortunately, the one we get to see is quite a bit more polished, even if he didn’t have enough bricks to avoid repeating colours.
If you find yourself tempted to try the same thing in preparation for Nvidia’s RTX 30 series or AMD’s Zen 3 CPUs and Big Navi GPUs, keep an eye on Mike’s YouTube channel, as they might just create a guide.