90s PC With Modern Parts Throws Many Off Track

When building a desktop computer, usually the budget is the limiting factor. Making sacrifices on one part in order to improve another without breaking the bank is part of the delicate balance of putting together a capable PC. If you’re lucky enough to have the sponsors that [Shank] has though, caution can be thrown to the wind with regards to price for some blisteringly fast parts. Putting them in a ’90s Hot Wheels case to build the ultimate sleeper PC, though, is just icing on the top.

This isn’t quite as simple as replacing a motherboard in a modern PC case, though. The Hot Wheels PC used a mini-ITX standard and is quite a bit smaller than most modern computers outside of something like a Mac Mini. To get the RTX 3060 GPU into the computer the shrouds needed to be removed to save space, plus an unusual 92mm form factor liquid CPU cooler needed to be installed. An equally obscure power supply was included to round out the Ryzen 9 build and after a lot of tinkering eventually all the parts were fitted into this retro case including the original, working floppy disk drive. After that some additional case modding was installed such as RGB lighting, wheels with spinning rims, a spoiler, and an exhaust pipe.

The main issue with this build was temperatures, and both the CPU and GPU were topping out at dangerously high temperatures until [Shank] installed a terrifying 11,000 RPM case fan. With a series of original CRT monitors to go along with this sleeper PC he can have up to 9 displays with surprisingly high video quality thanks to the fundamental properties of CRTs. The video is definitely worth a watch and falls right in line with some of [Shank]’s other console mods that he is famous for such as this handheld Virtual Boy.

Thanks to [Fast Rock Productions] for the tip!

17 thoughts on “90s PC With Modern Parts Throws Many Off Track

    1. Got my first AMD K6-2 350 right in front of me. Got rid of most of my old PC stuff but saved that one from the trash. Back when Intel and AMD used the same socket for a while. Go figure…

      1. I’ve got a few of old CPUs laying around as mementos. I smile every time I pick up the 486 100Mhz chip on my shelf as I clearly remember making the statement “This is the last processor I’ll ever need for a looong time”. How wrong I was. Now I think I could almost say it again with a Ryzen 5900X running KUbuntu….. I have no clue how I am going to max out it’s capabilities for how I use it at home….. Even running several VMs, running several apps I use, and compiling code, it barely breaks a sweat.

          1. Then that CPU really should last you a very very long time, providing the rest of the system lives that long… Gaming (and a few similarish tasks) really are the big loads these days…

            Heck my old workstation that finally died recently was still managing to play most modern games quite acceptably at 1080p (GPU limited) and it was nearing 10 years old – though poorly threaded and CPU intensive titles it didn’t like much (it was a dual CPU monster as at the time I was playing with VMs and hoping to play with more of them at once – it even ran a windoze gaming VM with the GPU pass through method (once with Windon’t running off a ramdisk, which was interesting performance wise) while running other vm and the host OS that was my daily driver – in most ways other than power efficiency and single threaded performance it wasn’t all that far from the upper-middle sort of region in modern single CPU desktop systems – if it hadn’t started to get wonky and die I think I’d have upgraded the GPU and kept it for some more years yet…).

          2. One of the major reasons I upgraded to a Ryzen 1600 back when was working with VMs. The AMD Phenom x4 processor just wasn’t handling VMs well at all. Slow and sluggish. What a difference Ryzen made on that front! My current Gigabyte Ultra motherboard has seen the 1600, 2600, 3600, 3900X and now a 5900X. Why? Just because I could. All I had to do was buy a new processor, update BIOS which was/is cool. I agree with ‘it should last a very long time’ now providing…. So far it is very solid performer. Knock on wood. GPU is a 1060 Ti, if I remember correctly, so do me for some time and in todays GPU environment it better!!!

  1. It is great fun to see such a high investment in what is really a stupid idea, just because you can (thanks to the sponsor anyway), while simultaneously doing it in a way that actually is really functional in the end – could have made the components fit and called that a victory, still be an impressive feat and with a little detuneing run just fine.

    1. Neat! But for gaming/Windoze, a Ryzen 5 5600 would have worked just fine rather than a Ryzen 9 he used. Cut down on the heat generated significantly. 64GB of memory is a bit overkill also for the project. But hey, his box :) . I actually like that case design (without the tail pipe that is!) .

      1. True, and you can get not bad performance, infact with his insistence on low resolution CRT screens very good performance just using one of the Ryzen 5 series with the onboard graphics if you really want to, that is another 300w of heat taken out…

        The whole thing is clearly, and deliberately as overkill as possible – really channeling the budding engineer child doodling race cars with stupidly large rockets and jet engines all over it that runs the toy car track out of the window on the second floor for more speed!

        Which is part of what makes it such fun, I generally go in for practical, effective, efficient type things myself, but its very hard to argue with letting your inner 4 year old out to play sometimes, even more so when you aren’t paying for it…

  2. What it needed for a fan was cutting out the back of the case to exactly the shape of the radiator core so that airflow would not be obstructed at all. Those punched holes or slots really choke off the airflow. I’ve done that with fans on several cases. A simple round hole with a wire grille is better but the best is to cut the corners out so the hole matches the shape of the inner surface of the fan housing at its edge.

    Then after doing that, it needed an AC powered fan, turned on by a 12 volt controlled 120 volt switching relay. I had such a setup in a 12 bay tower case over 20 years ago. Quiet and pulled a lot of air into the case. I still have that case though it’s been empty for years. Its original occupant was a brand new slot 1 Pentium III.

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