1. Home
  2. Computing
  3. News

This gaming PC inside a vintage radio is truly amazing

By

Here’s a truly unusual PC build. It’s a gaming PC inside a vintage 1940s Motorola radio case. And believe it or not, the thing actually works!

YouTuber Carter Hurd, who goes by AltaPowderDog on Reddit, is no stranger to builds that are off the beaten path. He’s built a PC tower out of concrete, 3D printed a stainless steel watch, and water-cooled a laptop.

image: Carter Hurd

Hurd is an engineer and inventor by trade, with a background in robotics and automotive sensing technologies. Today, he considers himself an artist, and after watching a few of his YouTube videos, it’s hard to argue with him. This latest vintage PC build tops everything he’s done thus far.

Recommended Videos

“I’ve built a number of weird computers on this channel,” Hurd says at the end of his video about this vintage PC build. “But this is my favorite.”

The build features vintage wood, stainless steel, and leather instead of plastic. It eschews RGB lighting for a plasma tube. There’s even an old-style mini fan front and center to draw in fresh air.

Better than the CyberDeck? Wood and Leather Gaming PC Build

The specs on the PC he slapped into the vintage wooden case are unknown. The title of the video says it is a gaming PC build, but when he tests the temperatures at the end of the video, he compares it to a laptop.

The motherboard itself looks like a custom job. At least, it has had parts added to it, including various USB slots.

The good news is the big stainless steel USB fan he used does the job. The temperatures of his build are in line with what you’d expect from gaming on a laptop. He pulled it off with one single fan, although he had to reverse the blades to pull air into the case, and he installed a clear plastic fin to help guide the air across the motherboard.

This isn’t the first merging of vintage home deco with modern tech. Check out Jeffrey Stephenson’s slipperyskip.com site for some weird examples. But Hurd’s creation is in a class by itself.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Nathan Drescher
Computing Writer
Nathan Drescher is a freelance journalist and writer from Ottawa, Canada. He's been writing about technology from around the…
The surprising reason your powerful PC still can’t handle the latest games

We're off to a rocky start with PC releases in 2023. Hogwarts Legacy, Resident Evil 4 Remake, Forspoken, and most recently and notably The Last of Us Part One have all launched in dire states, with crashes, hitches, and lower performance despite a minor increase in visual quality. And a big reason why is that the graphics cards of the last few years aren't equipped to handle the demands of games today.

The GPUs themselves are powerful enough; games haven't suddenly gotten more demanding for no reason. The problem is video memory or VRAM. Many of the most powerful GPUs from the previous generation weren't set up to handle the VRAM demands of modern games, which may explain why your relatively powerful PC can't handle the latest and most exciting new games.
What does your VRAM do anyway?

Read more
How Unreal Engine 5 is tackling the biggest problem in PC gaming

During its State of Unreal address at GDC 2023, Epic announced a wide-ranging suite of features for Unreal Engine 5.2. But perhaps the most important feature coming in the updated engine doesn't relate to lighting, geometry detail, or ray tracing. It's all about performance.

Unreal Engine games, rightly or wrongly, have been associated with stuttering and hitches over the past few years. With the new release, Epic is finally tackling the problem head-on, so I thought it was high time to break down why Unreal games so commonly show stutter, what Epic is doing to solve the problem, and when we can expect to see those efforts show up in new releases.
Remember the stutter
These frame time spikes manifest as severe stutters in Gotham Knights. Image used with permission by copyright holder

Read more
AI is coming for your PC games, but you should be excited, not worried

The tech community has been oversaturated with AI this past week, from ChatGPT to Google Bard, but not without reason. We see fads like NFTs and web3 come and go, but AI is here to stay -- even in your PC games.

It's not all doom and gloom, though. AI and machine learning has already proven itself wildly useful in PC gaming, and it has far-reaching implications for how games are made and experienced. I'm not trying to fit a square peg into a round hole here -- and if you stick with me, you'll see why.
How it's being used now

Read more