I Built A GameCube Gaming PC!

what's going on guys my name is Matt and while this may look like an old beat-up GameCube on the inside is actually an AMD APU gaming PC along with this there are a number of cool features like having the original power button turn on the PC and functional front controller ports this video is made possible by today's sponsor Squarespace from websites and online stores to marketing tools and analytics Squarespace is the all-in-one platform to build a beautiful online presence and run your business so like I said before I built a PC inside of this Gamecube and while it was a lot of work I'm really happy about the end result this can not only play PC games like csgo and fortnight well but it's also great for emulating a ton of console games in this video I'm gonna tell you about all the features of this system talk about the process I went through to mod this and I'm gonna be showing you the system's performance in a number of different games going into this I had a few different goals and tentative plans but until you actually have everything in hand and start modding there's no way to know for sure how everything's gonna fit together I wanted to do a GameCube PC because I haven't seen that many instances of people doing this so I thought it would be pretty unique the first order of business was getting a Gamecube to act as the shell of this PC I went on eBay and purchased a broken GameCube in the classic silver color it wasn't in perfect condition but that was fine because to me this just adds to the kind of old-school / sleeper aesthetic once in hand I needed to tear this GameCube down to find out how its constructed and be able to measure for parts I had my tools in hand and was ready to start but then I came to the realization that none of my dozens of security bits would open the system lo and behold Nintendo being Nintendo they made their own security bit that was only ever used on their products this is referred to as the game bit one five dollar Amazon order and a few days of waiting later and I finally had the necessary tools to crack into the Gamecube sure enough the game it opened the system right up and after the first four outer screws everything else in the system just used standard Phillips head screws pulling the top outer shell off I was greeted by what I would consider a very dense and well thought-out design an ex pulled off the front portion and easily disconnected the Kable then slid out the back panel as well next I had to remove about 12 screws to continue disassembly - which allowed me to remove the power button and side fan assembly this side 50 millimeter fan was the only fan in the entire system and from what I remember this little guy was able to keep the Gamecube pretty quiet next came off the disk drive and beneath that was the system mainboard after a few more screws this came off and allowed me to take a closer look removing the heatsink revealed one a ridiculous amount of thermal paste definitely gives me flashbacks to a certain PC build video and - after a bit of cleaning I was able to look at the system CPU and GPU the Gamecube actually had an IBM processor and an ATI GPU well by today's standards these are very weak back in the day the Gamecube was competitive in terms of graphics quality finally I removed the power unit and a few more metal pieces with that out I was left with a blank shell to work in now I knew an ATX motherboard or micro ATX motherboard were gonna be out of the question for this system but surprisingly enough even a standard ITX board is too big to fit in this guy because of this I need to get the smallest form-factor motherboard available which is actually called mini STX these are so small they don't even have a 16 X PCIe slot and only support laptop style so damn Ram because I want this to be an AMD APU system I needed an a m4s TX motherboard asrock does make one but the only way to get it is to purchase an asrock desk mini which I'll talk about more later but getting the desk man he not only got me the motherboard but it also got me a power supply and a number of other accessories opening it up and taking the motherboard out you can see that even the super tiny STX board will just barely fit even though the Gamecube looks pretty tall in reality the bottom 20 or 25% of it isn't open because of these indents for other types of cables and expansion I knew I wanted as much room as possible so I decided to hollow this section out and basically make it an open bottom box the problem was there was a ton of plastic to remove I decided to start by trying the cutting tip that came with my soldering iron I realized how careful I need to be with this after messing up part of the exterior the caisson literally the first cut luckily that was a good lesson because there really weren't too many major mistakes after that so I began cutting some more and found that this worked decently well it gave me good control over the cut and allowed me to get into tight spaces but it definitely left some ugly burnt plastic edges after this I whipped out the yield dremel to do some of the longer more open cuts using a combination of both I was eventually left with this this is definitely ugly but it gave me a nice hot out show this added a few inches of available height within the enclosure which in a small form-factor build is a godsend I then cleaned the inside up a little with the Dremel and a low grit sanding wheel because the bottom had so many holes in it from the original removed covers I need to make a bottom mounted tray that would close off the system and be a backplate for the motherboard to mount to so I cut out a piece of picture-frame backing that seemed like it would be a good fit I then used that as a template to mark out two pieces of thin sheet aluminum I had on hand from another project I made most of the first cut with some aviation shears and bent the piece back and forth until it snapped off I shaved a little bit off of the other side then test fitted in the bottom cover I realized that while a single piece of aluminum would be too thin and flimsy two of them would work fine together so I cleaned them off spread some jb weld on one piece sandwiched them together then applied a comical number of spring clamps and left it to cure overnight once done I did a little extra trimming to make sure I had the perfect fit to mount this to the bottom panel I drilled a few holes in the plastic and in the metal I originally intended to use rivets but quickly found out that this wouldn't work so I ended up just screwing the two pieces together and using a bolt cutter to cut the excess sticking out once done I said in the STX motherboard and marked for motherboard standoffs then came screwing for holes and installing for standoffs for the motherboard to mount to once the motherboard was mounted I installed the CPU CPU cooler and Ram so I could visually see what room I had for adding other features to this system I knew I wanted to add another fan and use the original fan mount but to do this it needed some heavy modifications I was hoping to just pop out the old fan and add a new one but after removing the old one I found it had a non standard mounting design that wasn't going to I first wanted to remove any unnecessary plastic that might get in the way of the other components I did this with a dremel while also removing the original mounting pegs with this done the new fan could fit in a place and I just attached it with a few zip ties which worked pretty well part of the reason I'm using the original fan bracket is because it also houses the original power switch this I wanted to reuse as the PCs power switch I just unscrewed this from the bracket then soldered on to jumper cables that will plug directly into the motherboard I also D soldered and remove the original power input because it would have gotten in the way I then drilled a hole for the cables to pass through put the power button PCB into place and screwed it down next I lined up the fan where it would stay making sure the power button was easily able to be pushed in and out and then applied some glue set the whole fan assembly into place and clamped it down next came the most difficult and ambitious part of the project which was trying to make the original front controller ports functional with the PC the plan was to buy one of these generic USB GameCube controller adapters and somehow rig it to work with the original ports opening up the adapter I found it consisted of two PCBs one to accept the inputs from the controllers and another that interpreted those inputs and transmitted them through USB the port spacing wasn't the same so I couldn't just switch the old port PCB with the new one the thing I figured would work the best was to make the contacts from the original ports extend to the new board to do this I first need to remove the ports from the adapter and desolder all the connections I then soldered wires to act as extensions from each of the original contacts I'm a soldering noob and found using these jumper wires I had on hand was the easiest way for me to do this I just added some solder to each end and soldered them into place once all this was done I could take the other board and solder each wire to the corresponding contact on that board once again this is basically making an extension from the original ports to the new ones the controller board that was part of the adapter had all of the USB contacts and looking at them you can see only two data cables which means one of the two USB ports is only used for power now obviously fitting this cable in the case and routing it to the back USB ports wouldn't make any sense so I had to find a way to connect it internally luckily the motherboard I'm using has an unpopulated usb2 header so I first disordered the original USB cables then I cut one end of each of these jumper cables I added a little bit of solder to each cable and connected each one to the corresponding solder point on the board I made sure to use these same colors as original so I could easily tell what each wire was doing with this done the controller adapter is now able to plug directly into the motherboard through the USB header so just to recap the original connectors extend to the adapter board that used to hold the controller ports that connects to the controller board which then connects to usb on the motherboard I'm pretty happy with this solution and the only thing I was worried about was managing all of these cables the next thing I wanted to do which didn't end up happening was make a functional top loading disk drive I bought one of these slim laptop optical drives but wasn't able to use it the first problem was the fact the original opening wasn't big enough for a standard disk secondly while it may have been possible to fit installing it high enough would have interfered with stuff like the power button the eject button and the hinge mechanism because of all this I decided to scratch that part with a lot more time effort and technical know-how this probably is possible but for now my little GameCube PC will have to go without one for the back panel the i/o shield that came with the motherboard pressure fits surprisingly well to fill the gap between the i/o shield on the top I cut out a small piece of sheet aluminum this was glued in a place and when everything is said and done I think the back panel looks pretty decent doing a quick test out of the show I found the system and all of the mods to be completely functional which was great to see now all that was left to do was assemble this guy and start playing some games assembly went pretty smoothly I condensed the front port cables as best I could plugged everything from the top panel in this included the USB connectors the fan connector and the power button then I carefully put the two halves together oh no it doesn't look perfect from the outside but at a quick glance no one would guess this Gamecube was housing a PC so now that you've heard about the mod let's go ahead and talk about the parts in the system like I said before this an APU build an APU is basically a CPU and GPU and one what I went with is the AMD Rison 330 200 G there's a risin 5 APU but I have this one on hand still works great for what I was wanting to do with this piece seed it is four cores with four threads and has integrated Vega eight graphics this is perfect for stuff like csgo fortnight and overwatch and is perfect for most emulators the slots into the asrock a320s TX motherboard this board is almost comically small and it has all the features I need for this build this came as part of the asrock desk mini a 300 W this is a bare-bones computer that I was able to use all the parts from except for the case the a 300 W is perfect for someone wanting to build a really small APU build for $150 you're getting a case motherboard cooler I'm not - Wi-Fi card and a power supply all you need to add is a CPU RAM and some storage I can highly recommend the a 300 W and I'll have it linked below if you're interested for RAM I won with a 16 gigabyte kit of sodam ddr4 at 3200 megahertz this really wasn't not expensive at around $75 and it worked perfectly at it's rated speeds it installs just like regular ddr4 but the DIMM slots are much smaller for storage this board supports two SATA drives but I just went with a single 500 gigabyte nvme SSD this is an old OCC drive but a link a more modern Drive I recommend in the description the fan I used is a 50 millimeter fractal design fan which is actually surprisingly quiet this acts as exhaust and indirectly pulls air through the other vent which actually as a built-in dust filter all in all this isn't a crazy powerful system but you really can't get anything much more powerful in this small of a package finally a quick note on the power supply this is a 150 watt brick that came with the desk mini and it works great for powering the system so now that you've seen the mods and learned about the parts let's talk about PC game performance and emulation but before that I want to take a minute to talk about today's sponsor Squarespace I've been a user of Squarespace long before they were a channel sponsor a while back I had a business making and selling custom 3d printed phone cases I use Squarespace because they did and still do have in my opinion the best e-commerce system available Squarespace is an Almond platform that handles all the confusing aspects of creating a website beyond just design with stuff like SEO tools and a really robust set of analytics if you're doing busy us online you need a website and Squarespace offers the best solutions available I recently made a new website for myself that links all my different online presences into one location if you want to build a beautiful website and support the channel then head over to Squarespace comm for a free trial and when you're ready to launch go to Squarespace comm slash tech bi mát to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain thanks again to Squarespace for sponsoring this video and now let's get back into your regularly scheduled content so let's now talk about gaming performance in terms of emulation I didn't try a ton of stuff but I didn't know exactly what to test so if you want to see more games emulated with this system let me know your recommendations in the comment section below for GameCube I tested the Legend of Zelda Twilight Princess this seemed to run perfectly fine and I played it with a GameCube controller plugged into the front which was a pretty cool experience I also tested super smash bros melee this again ran great which is to be expected because you don't need that much horsepower to run GameCube games for wii I tested Super Smash Bros Brawl which is always fun to play it seems to run fine and I played it a lot longer than I needed to because you can never play too much smash the last game I tried to emulate was breath of the wild which is a Wii U game in which is notoriously hard to run the game didn't crash or anything but it was not a smooth experience with frequent lag spikes I did take some time to try and optimize the settings and with more tuning I may be able to fix this but for now this is how it's running again let me know what games I should emulate in the comments section below now let's move on to pc game benchmarks moving on a fort now at 1080p competitive settings the system averaged around 60 FPS which honestly was a pretty smooth and enjoyable experience next I tested csgo at 1080p competitive settings the system produced FPS that averaged in the low 100s this was a pretty good experience an overall gameplay seemed pretty smooth the third game tested was Far Cry 5 to show you this ap use performance in a triple-a game and from the 25 FPS average it received at 1080p low you can see that the system isn't really meant for triple-a gaming overall for eSports games and games on consoles like the Wii and GameCube this PC works great I'm pretty you with how this system turned out and hope you guys liked it to let me know what you liked about this mod and also let me know recommendations for games to emulate and recommendations for other features I could add to the system so yeah guys I think this wraps this video up if you did find this video entertaining then give it a thumbs up and also consider subscribing for more PC and tech related content in the future and as always this is matt from tech bye Matt signing out

Channel: Tech By Matt

Views: 1,344,173

Keywords: gaming pc, sleeper pc, gaming computer, sleeper computer, pc in console, computer in console, pc in gamecube, gamecube mod, pc mod, apu, apu gaming pc, asrock deskmini, a300w, stx motherboard, ddr4, techbymatt, tech by matt, usb gamecube, nvme, sffpc, itx pc, emulation, pc emulation, dolphin, gamecube emulation, wii emulation, gamecube controller on pc, best sleeper pc, best sleeper computer, pc gaming, fortnite, pc, computer, gaming, sleeper, amd, radeon, vega, 3200g, ryzen, ryzen 3 3200g

Id: wINo_Uc3uVU

Length: 15min 59sec (959 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 31 2020