If there’s one thing to settle the perennial schoolyard “my dad’s better than your dad” debate, it’s the ability to make your gaming PC look like it’s come straight out of Borderlands or a comic book. Which is exactly what Nathan, SuccessfulHost6375 on Reddit, did for his kids.
I remember my first gaming PC case. It was silver, incredibly cheap, and had a giant plastic squiggle down the side of its windowed side panel. Nothing to write home about, and in fact probably something to hide away, though I didn’t realise that at the time, at age 12. It was trash.
Not so for this Redditor’s kids, as their new PC case looks better than just about any I’ve seen in as long as I can remember.
“Couldn’t afford a PC so I drew one,” the Reddit post is titled. And drawn it does indeed look, fully adorned with sweeps and swooshes that seem like they’re torn straight from some anime dude’s billowing trenchcoat. (Sorry, some manga dude’s billowing trenchcoat—pitchforks away.)
“Rebuilt this older PC for my kids to bash Minecraft on, and wanted something that didn’t look as boring as that poor old Antex case looked in genetic plastic black. so opted for the cartoon/anime effect,” Nathan explains in the post.
I dropped him a message to find out a little more about the project, and he explains to me that while much of this was planned and borne of many years of experience, some of it was somewhat of a happy accident:
“I was a car painter of sorts about 12 years ago, so know my way around spray painting. As for the sketch effect, I literally had an idea in my head, and just winged it. And it turned out the way it did. Way better than I ever expected it to turn out!”
The case is an Antec VSK 3000 Elite-U3 (try saying that three times over), and atop that are now many layers of paint. Nathan explained to me how this was added. After taking the case apart, the surfaces were roughed, primed and sealed, and then base-coated in flat white. An area was then masked out to be sprayed with two coats of flat red paint. Then, after drying for 24 hours, all the line work and accents were added with black POSCA paint pens of different sizes.
“The line work is all done by hand, using a piece of wood wrapped in soft cloth to rest my hand on. Lots of stopping and starting and waiting for things to dry. All up about 7 hours of actual work, but split up over 4 days as things dried. And once all the line work was done, 2 light coats of matte clear to keep it all protected.”
Best gaming PC: The top pre-built machines.
Best gaming laptop: Great devices for mobile gaming.
The build inside this gorgeous straight-out-a-comic case consists of an Intel Core i5 10400, 16 GB of DDR4 RAM, and an Nvidia GTX 1070. (Great GPU by the way, Nathan, I still have my old one in the cupboard and upgrading was a very bittersweet experience because I loved it so much.)
That might not sound like much for modern-day AAA gaming, but this build isn’t for that. It is, as Nathan says, just for Minecraft (and presumably similar games):
“This was basically a project to make the computer my kids jam Minecraft on something a bit more interesting, and hopefully something their friends can think is cool when they are at the house … I have a collection of consoles, but the kids seem to always gravitate back to my Fish Tank PC so hopefully this makes their PC more interesting! Overall though, just a cool thing to do to something that could’ve just been e-waste.”
He says he’s also in the process of painting the screen stand, keyboard, and mouse to match.
Forget the kids, I reckon I’d be booting up Minecraft myself. You know, in the dead of night, screen glow illuminating those chassis pen lines while villagers ‘hmmm’ in the background. It’d make for a very peculiar noir scene.