A gaming PC doesn’t have to be the standard tower shape, as this modder demonstrates by managing to use a hollow HTPC for his custom setup. What used to be a home theater system from the bygone era of the early 2000s is now something more worth playing.
Posting a video on YouTube, Val N’Taïn, who describes himself as an independent game developer, initially wanted to make the best gaming PC in a horizontal chassis, rather than a typical vertical build. They tried and failed to make their own, but then they came across the empty case of a Zalman HD135 home theater PC and knew they had found something special.
For the next 14 minutes, Val N’Taïn takes us through the construction process. His first challenge was making room for the Hydro PTM PRO power supply and GPU cables, by creating custom cutouts in the Zalman HD135 chassis. In another section, they insert an ASUS Blu-ray drive into an open slot and a Lamptron FC5 V3 fan controller where an IR sensor used to be.
There are no major details on the specifications of this custom gaming PC, but you can see that there is at least one AMD Radeon graphics card. A final overview of the finished product also shows a Ryzen 7 label, suggesting that this is the CPU that powers everything. Another label on the front gives the impression that it was built with an ASUS ROG motherboard, but we can’t say for sure.
Several Noctua fans have also been installed, two of which can be seen protruding from the top of the case attached to the CPU cooler. And of course, what gaming system would be complete without some state-of-the-art RGB lighting? It’s pretty cool to see a turn-of-the-millennium piece of tech turn into a cool platform.
Learning how to build a gaming PC can be an annoying process, especially for newcomers. But doing it on an old HTPC that wasn’t made for gaming in the first place is another matter. For some older readers, video can even rekindle those heady days when vertical home computers were the norm. Such designs are very much a relic of the past, but perhaps there’s room for a comeback if manufacturers are interested.
Image Credit: Val N’Taïn/YouTube
