So your probably reading this thinking, OK its a PC same old stuff. Well here is a long story.
so about a year ago myself and 2 friends would get together on weekends, my friend who we will call ash. Owns a Xbox One S, so we all were hanging out on Friday night the weekly ritual , and we got tired of playing UNO. so we Decided to play the Xbox we played about every game and it was starting to get quite dry on selection. Ash read off many games from the roster, to which just sounded repetitive, So at this point we all kinda agree there wasn’t a game we wanted to play. So we checked out the Microsoft store, this was around Christmas so games were on “Sale”. More like for sale not on sale, every game was just so expensive compared to Steam at this point lightning struck me. what if i built a PC to use as a console, so the following day after the rather dull Friday night.
I went onto the apocalyptic wasteland that was Facebook marketplace, full of tweakers and entitled Karrens. To which i found a i5-2500 motherboard CPU combo, Sweet i thought now i just need a few more parts. I used a 550W Bronze PSU, bought some used ddr3 ram from eBay as-well as a 1tb ssd and had a rx570 laying around. All i then needed was a case, Now im a cheapskate and wanted a nice case but couldn’t feel the need to buy one. So i went to a junkyard and found some recently thrown away office PC case. however the case was to bland to me, so i made the joke of its not an Xbox its a Ybox when myself and the boys hung out. So i attempted to do a paint job the PC case,
which wasn’t a Picasso but it started to rain and i was to lazy to redo it.
So the other thing i wanted this PC case to have was a handle, so i took a piece of 6061 extruded aluminum and some bolts and nuts that i bought at a flea market and made my handle. Originally the nut could fit with the PSU in but the bench grinder fixed that.
I was rather giddy at this point, as it is now time for the OS. I am a real big fan of Linux as i run Nix-OS on my main system, so i decided to use Chimera. i unveiled the Ybox to the boys and we play many many cheaper steam games that are rather fun. Eventually Chimera felt rather closed because there wasn’t a traditional package manager. I installed Ublue Bazzite (i stole the idea from action retro trash can mac video). We played on the Ybox for many many months and eventually i talked my friends into building PC’s and they went with some pretty good specs. ryzen 7 5800x, 6900xt, i7 12th gen NVIDIA 4050. so we had LAN partys playing lots of games. The Ybox was pretty good for the 300ish dollars i had in it, however i wanted something that looked nicer and could run higher end games. as alot of the time when we would group buy games my PC was the biggest qualm.
So the Ybox Pro was born, it is my tote-able gaming/VR-rig. I built it using a machinist x99 motherboard with a 8 core Intel Xeon E5-1680 V2. 16Gb of ram and a junky vega 56 bios flashed vega 64 graphics card. It Runs VR great games look awesome. However one design choice i did not like about the case i bought was a glass side panel. Now for alot of people they really like tempered glass however i am always paranoid about the glass breaking in transit. And i bought a 120mm thermal take AIO which i couldn’t find a good mounting place for. it was rather going to be at the bottom of the case or mounted sketchily on the roof of the case. So i have a side business where i have a Omtech 60Watt C-02 laser and a little bit of an engineer background. and decided to engineer a wood side panel which would have a mount for the AIO and look nice. I laser cut the side panel out of cherry paneling and stained it. I am very happy with the end result.
also i plan to like the cheap case i bought and a thingiverse/printables file for the side panel if anybody want to replicate my build.
(printables)https://www.printables.com/model/818028-gopie-t07-mini-tower-pc-case-wood-side-panel
pc parts used in build (Case) https://www.amazon.com/GOPIE-T07-Portable-Computer-Al-Alloy/dp/B0CGD9PSPH/ref=sr_1_21?keywords=microatx%2Bpc%2Bcases
(AIO fan) https://www.amazon.com/Noctua-NF-F12-iPPC-3000-PWM/dp/B00KFCRATC
What a nice story, and yes closed console stores are too expensive.
My frend was asking me for a recomendation for a tablet to game on in ~2019. I bought a cheap office PC and upgraded the CPU to a firstgen like Intel xeon x3440~ and gave him my old gtx1060. Turns out he plays mostly stategy games like old anno, Aoe and citybuilders. (What was his intention to play on Android?). Anyway he has now a decent Ryzen system and 32Gb of RAM.