Tag Archives: desktops

A Walnut and Brass Desktop PC That Still Runs an RTX 5090

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The PC industry has spent decades optimizing for a buyer who tolerates ugly hardware. Not a buyer who wants it, necessarily, but one who accepts it as the cost of performance. The tradeoff between raw computing power and the aesthetic quality of the object sitting on a desk has been so consistent for so long that it’s stopped feeling like a compromise. Most high-performance desktop computers look like something between a server rack and a concept car that got stuck in the concept phase, and they live under desks partly because there’s no reason to keep them visible.

The Nocturne is a desktop PC built in direct opposition to that assumption. Its chassis is sub-11L, which makes it compact enough to actually sit on a desk rather than beneath one, and its materials are a considered departure from the standard palette of tempered glass and injection-molded plastic. The side panel is a single plank of American Black Walnut, laser cut, hand finished, and polished with organic beeswax, a finish that deepens naturally with age rather than fading or yellowing. The front face is walnut as well. The feet, badge, buttons, and screws are turned from solid brass. The top panel is individually airbrushed per unit.

Designer: Ren Zhen (Optimist)

Every Nocturne is assembled and tuned by the same small team at Optimist’s shop in North Carolina before it ships. That includes a photography session for each unit, which is both a quality step and a signal that the people building these take the object seriously as a designed thing rather than a configured product. Nothing in the process is shared with mass production. The Optimist emblem is laser-etched directly into the walnut, not applied as a sticker or decal.

The hardware inside doesn’t make any concessions to the visual restraint outside. The Nocturne supports configurations up to an AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 processor and an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 GPU with 128GB of DDR5 memory available at the top end. The acoustic performance matches: the system runs at sub-decibel levels, which matters as much for the room it sits in as for the person sitting in front of it. A machine that sounds like an appliance disappears into a space in a way that a machine with a fan you can hear from across the room never does.

The warranty structure reflects the relationship the company expects to have with buyers after the sale. Parts are covered for two years and labor for six, and if a repair is needed, the unit can be shipped back for in-house service without conditions. That’s a longer commitment than most pre-built PC companies offer, and it makes more sense when the object in question is hand-finished wood and brass rather than standard black plastic.

The Nocturne first appeared in 2024 and garnered quite the attention. Optimist keeps no more than five designs available at any time, retiring past builds as new hardware and new aesthetics arrive. The Nocturne has persisted through multiple cycles. That’s a harder thing to maintain in a market that typically treats last year’s chassis as obsolete the moment a new one appears.

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Lenovo Fit a 16GB Intel Lunar Lake PC Into the Size of a Coffee Table Book

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Here’s a business plan Lenovo isn’t charging me for. Take the ThinkCentre Neo 50q Gen 6, wrap it in a fake hardcover dust jacket, maybe something moody like a Wes Anderson film still or a Rothko print, and suddenly you’ve got a Windows PC that looks like Design Within Reach decor instead of IT department surplus. The dimensions practically beg for it already, a 7 by 7 inch footprint with the thickness of an actual coffee table book sitting on your shelf. Nobody’s ever accused a mini PC of being aspirational furniture before, but this one has the bone structure for it. Every competitor in this category is still shipping matte black rectangles that scream “asset tag pending,” while Lenovo accidentally built something you’d want visible on a shelf. All that’s missing is the marketing team connecting the dots.

Underneath the cosplay, the Neo 50q Gen 6 (Intel) starts at $1,179 with a Core Ultra 5 226V, 16GB of soldered LPDDR5X-8533 RAM, and a 512GB SSD, replacing the Snapdragon X1-26-100 that powered the previous version of this exact chassis. That base chip brings 8 cores, clock speeds up to 4.5 GHz, a 40 TOPS NPU for local AI tasks, and Intel Arc 130V graphics, which is a lot of silicon to hide behind a fake book cover. Stepping up to the Core Ultra 7 256V for $1,619 doubles storage to 1TB and adds a faster NPU with Arc 140V graphics. Ports hold steady across both configurations, including a 10Gbps USB-C port, Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5.1, HDMI 2.1, DisplayPort 1.4, and Gigabit Ethernet. At 5.27 lbs, this thing has actual heft to it, further selling the illusion that you’ve got a hardback sitting there instead of a full Windows desktop.

Designer: Lenovo

Swapping Snapdragon for Lunar Lake says something about how the ARM-on-Windows experiment is actually going. Qualcomm’s chip inside the original Neo 50q promised efficiency and always-on connectivity, the same pitch Microsoft has been making since Windows on ARM first launched. Lenovo clearly wanted an Intel option sitting right next to it on the shelf rather than retiring the ARM version outright, which suggests demand for x86 compatibility hasn’t disappeared just because Copilot+ PCs got a marketing push. Lunar Lake specifically brings a 40 TOPS NPU into a category that rarely got AI acceleration until recently, putting a genuinely modern chip inside a chassis that hasn’t changed its footprint at all. That’s the quiet story buried under the spec sheet, a company hedging its bets on which architecture actually wins the office desktop in 2026.

Positioned against the rest of the mini PC market, the pricing lands in a strange middle ground. Intel NUC successors and Beelink boxes routinely undercut this by a few hundred dollars while offering comparable specs, though usually without Lenovo’s enterprise support and warranty backing. Mac mini buyers get more raw performance per dollar from Apple silicon, but obviously lose Windows compatibility entirely, which matters for any office still running legacy software. The ThinkCentre badge itself carries weight here too, since IT departments buying in bulk care more about fleet management and driver support than they do about a machine’s coffee table book cosplay. Lenovo isn’t trying to win on raw value against the Beelinks of the world. It’s selling reliability with a side of, apparently, unintentional interior design cred.

Whether Lenovo ever leans into the aesthetic angle on purpose remains the real open question here. Right now the ThinkCentre Neo 50q Gen 6 is being sold purely on specs and price, with nobody at Lenovo seemingly aware that they’ve built something small and handsome enough to just leave out in the open. Somebody in an office is going to genuinely mistake this for a book at some point, and honestly, that’s a better problem to have than another beige box nobody wants to look at. Until Lenovo catches on, you’ll just have to buy the sleeve yourself.

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Lenovo built an AI-ready Mac mini rival for $440… and it’s only available in China

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For the past two years, on-device AI has been a hardware arms race, a contest to see whose NPU could post the most TOPS before the next product cycle. Qualcomm claimed the Snapdragon X Elite was the laptop chip AI deserved. Intel answered with Core Ultra and its own NPU tier. Apple quietly kept winning by making its Neural Engine feel native to everything the operating system actually does. Lenovo’s AI Host Mini, a $440 mini PC launching in China on July 1, approaches the whole argument from the opposite direction, starting with 8,000 software tools and asking how little hardware you need to run them well. At 45 TOPS and 8GB of RAM, the answer it proposes is going to make a lot of spec-chasers uncomfortable.

The physical object is a plain black box, 10 x 10 x 4.8 centimeters and 0.48 liters in volume, smaller than the Mac mini, which starts at $769. The processor is a Cixin P1 CD8180, a Chinese ARM chip with twelve CPU cores and an Immortalis-G720 GPU carrying ten cores, backed by 8GB of LPDDR5-6000 RAM and a 256GB SSD. Lenovo runs the platform on Ubuntu Linux with a proprietary Tianxi Claw layer handling access to the AI skills marketplace, and the system reportedly handles multiple agent instances running simultaneously. Connectivity covers two USB-C, four USB-A, 2.5 Gbit/s Ethernet, HDMI 1.4, and DisplayPort 1.4. CNY 2,999 (about $440) buys a China-exclusive launch with no confirmed path to international shelves.

Designer: Lenovo

The Cixin P1 chip is the most politically loaded component in any mini PC announced this year. US export controls have cut Chinese manufacturers off from TSMC’s advanced nodes and Nvidia’s AI accelerators, forcing a generation of engineers to solve hard problems with constrained tools. That pressure has already produced genuine surprises: Huawei’s Kirin 9000s proved domestic silicon could power a sold-out flagship, and DeepSeek R1 showed that a frontier-class language model could be trained on a fraction of the compute budget everyone assumed was mandatory. The Cixin P1 follows that lineage, delivering 45 TOPS from hardware no Western analyst would have put on a competitive spec sheet two years ago. Doing more with less has always been a survival strategy; in China’s tech industry right now, it looks increasingly like a competitive advantage.

A skill, in Lenovo’s Tianxi Claw framework, is a purpose-built AI agent: a compact, fine-tuned model trained to do exactly one job well. Whether translating a document, transcribing audio, or automating a repetitive workflow, each runs lean and fast by design. A 1-billion-parameter model fine-tuned for translation outperforms a general 7-billion-parameter model on that same task while consuming a fraction of the memory, which is why 8GB can feel adequate here when it would feel genuinely limiting on a machine trying to run a full LLM. The system handles multiple agent instances simultaneously, so one processes voice input while another works through an image task in the background. That is a fundamentally different vision for personal AI: less one omniscient assistant, more a small and efficient team of specialists.

The honest caveat sits in the software stack: Tianxi Claw is a proprietary platform built for Chinese consumers, and the skills catalog is oriented toward Mandarin-speaking users for now. There is also a China-exclusive July 1 launch date with nothing confirmed internationally. The 8GB RAM ceiling matters at the edge of demanding generative tasks, where the Yoga Mini i Gen 11’s 32GB ceiling and the Minisforum MS-S1 Max’s 128GB unified pool have headroom this machine simply doesn’t. But none of that changes what the AI Host Mini signals: if domestic Chinese silicon delivers 45 TOPS at $440 in 2026, the trajectory points toward personal AI computers that cost less than a mid-range smartphone within two product cycles. China’s tech industry is answering the affordability question faster than almost anyone predicted, and as usual, it is doing it with whatever tools the room allowed.

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This zero-gravity motorized workstation replaces your setup to eliminate back pain and boost productivity

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If you’re working out of a desk with a triple monitor setup and a regular office chair, you don’t have a workstation worthy of 2026. To upgrade your working environment, MWE Labs has created a zero-gravity ergonomic workstation, which it calls the Emperor S2. Dubbed the world’s most advanced workstation, the Emperor S2 actually has some distinctions to qualify the humongous claim.

Transitioning the setup from a regular table and chair into a more integrated system that looks uniform, the Emperor S2 resembles a simulator you would get into and start flying a fighter jet. It is engineered to ensure you feel relaxed while working, and to that end, the workstation comprises an ergonomic chair with lumbar support, a magnetic pillow for the backrest, and a footrest right underneath the monitor setup to stretch your legs and relax during long hours of sitting.

Designer: MWE Labs

This unification of table and chair for a functional workstation that you and I can use with convenience is designed and built in Canada. It’s beyond the usual workstation, somewhat in the domain previously explored by this portable workstation that goes outdoors with you or this workstation that converts into a dining table in minutes, but still feels worth your money for a few reasons.

The setup is clean, and it comes in a carbon black color theme. The workstation is targeted more toward the work-from-home generation, and I feel it has a little bent toward gamers. But no one is stopping you from throwing in a multiple-display setup and getting into high-stakes gaming action. From its appearance though, which lacks the colorful, flashing LEDs and futuristic decals, it’s easy to presume that people focused on productivity will give this one a good look.

“The Emperor S2 transforms your workspace into a fully supported, ergonomic environment built for long-lasting comfort and performance,” the product listing page notes. It allows one to sit back on the zero-gravity chair, adjust the monitor positioning, and set out on a productive work day with the least distraction. The entire system, especially the seat, adapts to your posture throughout the day with a range of motorized adjustments that you can personalize to your convenience.

The “all-in-one workstation with a minimal footprint…is ideal for home offices, corporate environments, and flexible workspaces.” To match different environmental needs, MWE Labs offers the workstation in two configurations, with a single monitor and an option to install a dual or triple-display setup. With the option to adjust the monitor height, the footrest position, and the height of the armrests on the press on a button located on the right side of the frame connection the seat and the monitor, the Emperor S2 also arrives with a keyboard extender and side-tray for accessories.

The workspace engineered to maximize focus, productivity, and well-being starts at CAD $5,795 (approximately $4,200) for the single monitor setup. A three-monitor setup will set you back CAD $6,140 (about $4,500). If you like more colors or want some feature specific to your work setup, you can have the Emperor S2 customized, though we believe that would entail some additional cost.

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Aston Martin themed Chillblast gaming PCs are fit for a Bond flick

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Let’s be honest, gaming PC case designs have gone overboard over the last few years. There’s too much RGB involved, and most gamers enjoy it for a few days before the blinding lights become more distracting than immersive. Somewhere along the way, many PC makers seem to have forgotten that not every enthusiast wants their setup to look like a nightclub.

There’s still room for designs that are restrained and still genuinely premium. When I first laid eyes on the Aston Martin collaboration with Chillblast, it was refreshing to see a gaming PC that embraced elegance instead of excess. Finished in Aston Martin’s satin Iridescent Emerald paint and crafted with the same attention to detail associated with the British marque’s grand tourers, these machines look less like gaming hardware and more like automotive sculptures.

Designer: Aston Martin x Chillblast

The British PC builder has created three limited-edition gaming systems inspired by Aston Martin’s design philosophy. Prices start at £3,749 and climb all the way to £15,999, placing them firmly in luxury territory. Yet for buyers seeking exclusivity and top-tier performance in equal measure, these systems offer something that few gaming PCs even attempt.

What makes the collaboration interesting is that Aston Martin’s involvement goes beyond simply lending a badge. The design team worked closely with Chillblast to create a collection that reflects the same principles found in the company’s sports cars. The signature Iridescent Emerald finish immediately sets the systems apart, shifting subtly under different lighting conditions much like it does on Aston Martin vehicles. Copper-toned accents and carefully integrated branding further reinforce the automotive connection without feeling forced or overly decorative.

The range consists of three models, each targeting a different type of enthusiast. At the entry point sits the Icon Edition, offering high-end gaming credentials while introducing the collection’s distinctive design language. Moving up the ladder is the Iconic Edition, which balances premium styling with even more powerful hardware. At the top is the truly extravagant Ultimate Edition, a machine that combines uncompromising performance with collector-grade exclusivity.

Underneath the custom exterior panels lies hardware that can rival some of the most powerful gaming systems available today. Depending on configuration, buyers can expect flagship AMD processors, NVIDIA GeForce RTX graphics cards, generous amounts of DDR5 memory, and high-capacity NVMe SSD storage. Advanced cooling solutions ensure the systems maintain peak performance during extended gaming sessions, content creation workloads, or demanding professional tasks.

What stands out most, however, is the restraint. Instead of relying on aggressive angles, oversized vents, or endless RGB strips, these PCs demonstrate that gaming hardware can feel mature and luxurious. They look equally at home in a high-end office, a modern living room, or an Aston Martin showroom. The Aston Martin x Chillblast collection won’t be for everyone, as the pricing alone ensures that. But that’s also the point. These machines occupy the same space as luxury watches or limited-edition supercars!

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Microsoft RTX Dev Box Has 1,000 Holes, All of Them Intentional

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The economics of AI development have been quietly changing how developers think about their hardware. Cloud GPU bills compound fast when you’re iterating through a model dozens of times a day, and every fine-tuning run or inference loop on a remote server adds to a cost that has no natural ceiling. The push toward local AI compute isn’t just about performance. It’s about moving from a metered relationship with infrastructure to one you own outright and sit in front of.

Microsoft announced the Surface RTX Spark Dev Box at Build 2026 as its answer to that shift. It’s a compact mini PC powered by the NVIDIA RTX Spark superchip, the same ARM-based silicon debuting in the Surface Laptop Ultra, and it arrives on a developer’s desk already configured and ready to run serious AI workloads without touching a cloud endpoint.

Designer: Microsoft

The device’s most distinctive quality isn’t anything in the spec sheet. It’s the body itself, a 3D-printed anodized aluminum chassis perforated with exactly 1,000 vents arranged across its surface in a precise grid. Those vents are functional, the aluminum chassis doubles as the passive heatsink, managing a 100W sustained thermal envelope without a traditional cooling tower. They’re also a deliberate reference: 1,000 vents for 1,000 teraflops, or 1 petaflop, of AI compute. It’s a design that’s equally a statement and an engineering solution, and nothing else on a desk looks remotely like it.

That petaflop is delivered by NVIDIA’s RTX Spark, which combines a 20-core Grace CPU with a Blackwell RTX GPU carrying 6,144 CUDA cores, connected via NVLink-C2C. The 128GB of unified memory shared dynamically between the processor and GPU is what separates this from a high-end gaming box. That memory ceiling is what makes loading a 120-billion-parameter model possible without partitioning it or shunting inference work to the cloud.

The software side ships pre-configured and aimed precisely at the developer who doesn’t want to spend time on setup. WSL2 with native GPU passthrough and full CUDA support comes pre-installed and ready to use, alongside Visual Studio Code, GitHub Copilot, and PowerShell 7. Windows settings are tuned specifically for development work rather than general consumer use, a small but meaningful distinction when your machine runs long overnight training jobs and needs stability rather than a live tiles grid.

Connectivity covers HDMI, Ethernet, USB-C, USB-A, and a headphone jack, nothing exotic, but a port set that covers what a desk-based development machine actually uses. The machine runs under 100W during intensive workloads, which means it can sustain training jobs and agentic pipelines without the kind of thermal throttling that eventually frustrates sustained use.

For a machine announced without a price, the Surface RTX Spark Dev Box is already doing a specific kind of work. It positions local AI inference as a fixed cost rather than a running expense, and it makes that argument in a chassis that doesn’t look like any other mini PC on the market. A 3D-printed aluminum grid covered in a thousand deliberate holes is an odd form for a developer tool, but it makes the machine’s purpose unmistakably legible from across the room. Availability is expected later in 2026 in the US through Microsoft’s online store.

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ASUS ProArt Just Closed the Gap Between a Laptop and a Workstation

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Creative professionals have been carrying a compromise for years. The laptop powerful enough for serious work tends to be too heavy or too loud, and the one thin and light enough for a day bag can’t handle the work. Purpose-built workstations solve the performance side but solve nothing about portability. The gap between the two has been a persistent frustration, not a deliberate choice most people would make.

ASUS is addressing that directly at Computex 2026, where the ProArt P16, ProArt P14, and ProArt Mini PC were unveiled as the first ASUS devices powered by NVIDIA’s RTX Spark superchip. The same ARM-based chip combining a 20-core Grace CPU with a Blackwell RTX GPU and up to 128GB of unified memory runs across all three products, making the performance difference between a laptop and a desktop largely a matter of form factor rather than capability.

Designer: ASUS

The ProArt P16 and P14 are the portable entries, and they arrive 13% thinner and 16% lighter than the previous P16 generation. The P16 weighs 1.77kg at 12.9mm, and the P14 comes in at 1.48kg and 13.9mm. Both are CNC-manufactured in Nano Black and Neo White finishes, and carry 99.9Wh batteries for all-day runtime, a detail that matters when the work is intensive enough to drain power quickly. The machines don’t sacrifice weight for performance or performance for weight.

The display on both laptops is ASUS Lumina Pro OLED, calibrated to Delta E < 1 color accuracy, Pantone Validated, and certified for VESA DisplayHDR True Black 1000. Peak HDR brightness reaches 1,600 nits, which is more than three times what the previous ProArt generation could manage. A 120Hz variable refresh rate, 0.2ms response time, and an anti-reflection coating that cuts glare by 65% complete a panel that keeps color decisions accurate regardless of the lighting conditions a shoot or edit session happens to land in.

Under the hood, RTX Spark’s 1 petaflop of AI compute and unified memory pool change what locally processed work looks like. Rendering a 90GB-plus 3D scene, editing 12K 4:2:2 video, generating 4K AI video, or running a 120-billion-parameter language model locally are tasks that previously needed significantly bigger machines. Adobe is rebuilding Photoshop and Premiere specifically for RTX Spark to deliver 2x faster AI and graphics performance, and a three-month Creative Cloud subscription ships with the ProArt laptops.

The ProArt Mini PC extends the same logic to the desk. At 150 × 150 × 51mm, it fits anywhere a small speaker would and carries up to 128GB of unified memory, 10GbE wired networking, M.2 PCIe Gen 5 expansion, and up to 140W of thermal headroom for sustained demanding workloads. A single RTX Spark-powered box of that size, running AI renders or local large language models around the clock, is a genuinely different proposition for a small studio or home setup than what was available previously.

All three products sit within a broader ASUS ProArt ecosystem that integrates displays, peripherals, creator apps, and AI workflow software into a connected end-to-end experience. ProArt P16, P14, and Mini PC are expected to be available in fall 2026 in select regions, with additional configurations announced closer to launch.

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ASUS V400 All-in-One Ditched Intel for Snapdragon to Stay Slim and Silent

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All-in-one computers have always promised clean desks, but they rarely deliver a truly minimal presence. Traditional AiOs hide their processors inside their displays, and those chips generate enough heat to demand substantial cooling, adding bulk to what should be a space-saving device. The result is often a thick, monitor-shaped box that makes you wish the cables were the only problem.

ASUS’s answer to that problem isn’t a slimmer chassis on paper, but a different processor choice entirely. The V400 AiO is the first all-in-one PC built on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X platform, an ARM-based chip with mobile roots. Because it runs more efficiently than conventional desktop processors, it generates less heat, which means the cooling system can shrink significantly, and so can everything around it.

Designer: ASUS

The lean stand and uncluttered rear panel make the V400 AiO look more like a monitor than a desktop. In a living room or study doubling as a homework station, it doesn’t demand attention the way a traditional AiO does. The quieter cooling helps too; no loud fans cycling up during video calls or while someone streams in the next room.

The 23.8-inch Full HD IPS display supports touch input and covers the full sRGB color gamut, making it comfortable for both casual browsing and creative work. With up to 32 GB of LPDDR5X memory and up to 1 TB of PCIe 4.0 SSD storage, it handles simultaneous tasks without hesitation. The 5-megapixel IR camera gives video calls a cleaner look than most built-in webcams manage.

The Snapdragon X’s 45 TOPS NPU qualifies the V400 AiO as a Copilot+ PC, meaning it runs Microsoft’s on-device AI features without routing anything through the cloud. Smart photo management, real-time voice processing, and intelligent assistance all happen locally, keeping personal data off third-party servers. For a machine that’ll likely sit in a shared family space, that kind of privacy has practical appeal.

Dolby Atmos handles the audio, which makes a difference when the V400 AiO doubles as an entertainment hub for the family. Connectivity includes HDMI output, USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A, and USB-C ports, covering most peripherals without adapters. A wireless keyboard and mouse ship in the box, so the whole setup can be up and running without hunting for extra accessories.

ASUS priced the entry-level V400 AiO at $649.99 in the US, with 16 GB of RAM and a 512 GB SSD. The Indian market gets a 512 GB model at ₹1,01,990 and a 1 TB version at ₹1,11,990. For an all-in-one that doubles credibly as a piece of furniture in a modern room, that starting point asks less than many Intel-powered competitors.

What the V400 AiO makes clear is that the Snapdragon X choice isn’t incidental. The chip’s lower heat output is why the chassis stays slim. Its efficient architecture is why the AI runs locally rather than through a server. Its quiet thermal profile is why it belongs in a living room as much as a home office. The processor determines the design, not the other way around.

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Chinese modder builds human-sized PC large enough for a person to sit inside and play games

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Have you been criticized for your compulsive gaming? Has your mom lost her cool and said, “You play computer games all day, why don’t you just live in a computer?” If your answer is yes, then thanks to a new PC case mod made in China, the idea could literally be possible. At least if you’re modder Soda Baka. For everyone else, it’s a fish-tank PC case humans can live in like figurines in a regular PC.

From how it appears in the images, Chinese modder and creator Soda Baka has built what is literally a walk-in PC, where humans can live with computer innards. The video of the entire build has been shared by the modder on China’s premier video-sharing platform Bilibili. It is literally a PC case with enough room for a person to live in and play video games sitting inside.

Designer: Soda Baka

Easily the largest gaming PC case ever made, it is not only huge in its structure, built as a functional PC in human scale; in fact, the PC components including the fan, mainboard, RAM, and graphics, have also been scaled up to complement the size. The most interesting still is the air conditioning setup included to keep the system cool when the gaming gets hot.

From what we can fathom from the uploaded video, the mammoth system can actually be used as a gaming PC. The modder can be seen sitting inside the huge PC and playing games on it, with a small monitor, also placed inside the computer itself. The entire creation – which seems to be created only for the video, or an advertisement for the included Midea air conditioner (we have no real proof at the time of writing) – looks amazingly realistic with giant rotating fans and functional RGB LED lighting.

Video of Soda’s build of the massive PC starts out like a serious project, blending construction and modding. Many humongous replica components like the wall-sized fans, GPU, AiO CPU coolers, and RAM, etc., are built and installed along with RGB lighting to create something that you can enter, sit in, and play some games. In addition to liquid cooling and dummy fans, a 12kW Midea AC unit has been installed inside the PC to maintain temperatures from rising above 100 degrees Fahrenheit, or 38 degrees Celsius.

The massive computer case is definitely a treat to the eye, and a dream come true for anyone who’s ever been told to “live inside the computer,” but it does seem a gimmicky creation. Of course, its sheer size grabs attention instantly, but it also means that it is not something you and I can recreate at home. It’s a result of dedication and hard work and not a child’s play. Still, if you can manage to build one like this, you could certainly live inside and play games to your heart’s content.

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Dwarf Factory’s Hyper-real 4/20 Resin Keycaps Are Handcrafted Miniature Gardens You Can Type On

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The countdown to 4/20 has begun, and if you’re the type who celebrates by upgrading your workspace aesthetics rather than raiding the nearest dispensary, Dwarf Factory sees you. The Vietnamese artisan keycap maker has built a reputation for encasing impossibly detailed miniature scenes in resin, transforming individual keyboard keys into tiny dioramas. Their Terrarium V2 collection has featured everything from succulents to seasonal florals, each one hand-painted and assembled at a scale that borders on obsessive. Their latest drop leans into the holiday with zero subtlety and maximum craft.

Rasta Jardin swaps the usual botanical lineup for miniature ‘ahem’ plants, complete with serrated leaves, decorative baskets, and what looks like actual soil composition at microscopic scale. Each keycap gets hand-painted, which means every Rasta Jardin has slight variations in how the leaves angle, how the rocks settle, how the light catches the resin dome. Standing 16mm tall in SA profile and compatible with Cherry MX switches, these caps are designed for your top row function keys or Escape, where they can sit pretty without making your fingers work harder to reach them.
Designer: Dwarf Factory

Designer: Dwarf Factory

The Rasta Jardin construction starts with hand-assembled miniature plant elements, built at a scale where individual leaf serrations actually matter. The plants get positioned inside tiny woven baskets, the kind of detail that requires steady hands and magnification. Substrate gets added at the base, rocks get arranged for visual balance, and then the entire assembly gets encased in layers of transparent resin, cast in a way that avoids bubbles and maintains optical clarity.

Dwarf Factory’s command over resin is truly impressive (go check out their other work too). The dome shape creates a lens effect, magnifying the scene inside while also playing with light refraction depending on your viewing angle. Sit directly above your keyboard and you see one composition. Lean back slightly and the light shifts, catching different facets of the leaves and basket weave. The transparency means RGB backlighting (if your board has it) will glow through the keycap, turning the whole thing into a tiny illuminated terrarium when you’re typing in the dark.

The hand-painting step happens after the resin casting, adding color gradients to the leaves that give them depth and realism. The plants have a specific visual language, those jagged leaf edges and the way the foliage clusters around the stem, and Dwarf Factory nails it at a scale where most makers would just paint a green blob and call it done. The baskets get individual weave lines. The soil gets color variation. Even the rocks have shadows and highlights that suggest three-dimensional form rather than flat decoration.

Dwarf Factory ships each Rasta Jardin in a sliding kraft paper box with rubber finger gloves, because resin surfaces and fingerprint oils are enemies. You also get a user guide, which feels almost comically formal for a single keycap but reinforces the idea that you’re buying a miniature art piece that happens to be functional. At roughly $73, pricing sits in line with other premium artisan caps from established makers. You’re paying for the labor-intensive handwork and the design execution that makes these feel like gallery-quality miniatures rather than novelty garbage.

What makes the Rasta Jardin compelling is how it treats the 420 aesthetic with the same design rigor Dwarf Factory applies to cherry blossoms or desert flora. There’s no cartoonish stoner imagery here, no neon green gimmicks or Rastafarian color blocking that screams cheap novelty. Just meticulous botanical miniaturization that happens to feature a plant with significant cultural weight. Your productivity won’t improve, but your keyboard will have a story worth telling when Monday rolls around and someone asks what the hell is on your Escape key.

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