Transforming a 90's Hot Wheels PC into a Modern Gaming Beast

hello I'm shank and this is the Hot Wheels sleeper PC it's a current absolutely top of the line gaming PC crammed into the infamous 90s computer piece but what's even crazier than this monstrosity is the story of how I wound up building it all started with a phone call from my friend kale [Music] hello kale told me a story of an old computer Warehouse called computer reset whose owner had been collecting computer hardware for decades however due to declining health of the owner the warehouse was being liquidated I wasn't much into Retro Computing but the warehouse was full of CRT monitors something I am very much into upon my Adventures digging through the warehouse I acquired many of the CRTs I was looking for but also something I wasn't looking for check it out there was also a Hot Wheels computer or two lying around somebody else picked that up it was me I grabbed it and I began to wonder the Hot Wheels computer was sold as a set could the Hot Wheels CRT one of the two tubes on my CRT bucket list be here too well I didn't find the Hot Wheels CRT or any Hot Wheels accessories for that matter in a desperate last-ditch effort I made sure everyone there was aware I was on the hunt for the blue flame engulfed monitor they said they would let me know if they found one but you know how that goes when I got home I opened up the Hot Wheels PC to discover that the motherboard was completely corroded and Beyond repair since restoring it was not an option I opted to give it New Life as a sleeper gaming PC my budget for the project at the time was thin so I began accumulating scrap Parts a mini ITX board an older mid-range processor and a sketchy power supply from Goodwill with these parts in hand I bit the bullet to buy the remaining parts spending around three hundred dollars on a GTX 1650 super graphics card 16 gigs of RAM and a low profile cooler I got to work assembling with the only required modification being cutting out a hole in the back of the removable frame for the GPU and with an afternoon of work I had an older mid-range computer and a Hot Wheels chassis with no accessories not something cool enough for a video but at least it well it turns out word about my hunt for the Hot Wheels CRT got around not one but two members of the DFW retro Computing Community had Hot Wheel CRTs for me Abraham had a monitor and a keyboard for me while David had a second Monitor and a pump test rather than making a video I decided I would unveil it at LTX 2020 where I had been invited as a featured guest but then this uh thing happened in 2020 and plans changed nevertheless I continued to keep my eyes out for other Hot Wheels computer parts slowly working my way towards a complete set but things really got interesting when I received another message from David who had a very special surprise for me as some of you may know the Hot Wheels PC had a sister and her name is Barbie David hooked me up with a Barbie PC and monitor along with the original box and much of the original documentation with both the Hot Wheels and the Barbie PC walking away from this was no longer an option and while neither was a complete set I was on my way there as I tracked down more and more parts I was convinced nothing was going to stand in my way of getting the missing parts that is until one Friday when I was watching the WAN show uh do you want to do the Bounty now we got a bounty ladies and gentlemen this is the Hot Wheels PC I I want to do a video I've actually wanted to do a video about it for a long time there's also a Barbie PC and I'll accept either I will give you five grand for a full set 5K I reached out through Twitter and email offering to lend them mine for the video but it was too late [Music] thank you people who own these parts now believed because a single YouTuber was willing to pay five thousand dollars for one that everyone was willing to pay that much listing prices skyrocketed and have stayed there ever since despite the fact that nobody is actually buying these PCS really aren't that rare but are rarely sold on eBay due to their large size at this point I felt pretty defeated there was no way I was going to be able to afford to buy the remaining parts at the newly inflated prices and by the computer parts to make a sleeper the project was dead that is until Microcenter caught wind of what I was trying to do not only did they want in but they wanted me to crank it to 11. they offered to supply the parts for two PCS and told me they wanted to help me make the builds as crazy as possible I was intrigued and took it upon myself to see just how absurd I could make the parts list before they said no they didn't so armed with a new seven thousand dollar shopping list I hopped in my car and headed to Micro Center to take on my first ever big budget project for the uninitiated Micro Center is a computer retail store that's basically a Haven for nerds the store is just aisles and aisles of cool stuff and more than just computers they have a whole maker section with supplies and tools like 3D printers and soldering equipment but by far my favorite part about Micro Center is their massive computer component selection I'm looking for a keyboard that says I'm a Barbie girl in a Barbie world funny enough back when I used to work for one of Micro Center's now defunct competitors I still purchased my CPU and motherboard from Microcenter because their prices were lower than my employee discount they have an online pc Builder tool to easily make a list of compatible parts available for same day in-store pickup or for an added fee you can have a technician assemble the parts into a gaming rig for you Microcenter also has a promotion where if you walk into the store with a coupon they'll give you a free 128 gig flash drive with no purchase necessary I'll have a link to that coupon in the description [Music] you're right I don't think it's gonna all fit do you think you could pick me up in the Jeep [Music] [Music] but before we get to work assembling this monster first let's take a look at the Hot Wheels PC case itself and more importantly why building a high performance gaming PC inside of one of these is not a walk in the park to open the computer first we need to remove these screws then the main chassis slides right out this metal frame houses all the computer parts while the Hot Wheels body is just a shell that slides over it right off the bat you can see there is not a lot of space to work with unplug some cables remove a few screws and the floppy drive tray slides right out this tray holds the floppy drive and two three and a half inch hard drives two more cables four more screws and the CD-ROM drive slides right out the motherboard is mounted to a metal plate on the back which after removing two screws slides right out this plate has screw mounts for many ITX and mini DTX motherboards anything larger will not fit the power supply is like a weird sfx power supply with mounting ports on the short side rather than the long side the Hot Wheels power supplies were Infamous for their High failure rate which was supposedly so bad it led to the company producing these PCS to going bankrupt and to be honest pretty much everything about this computer's design and construction is pretty awful finally we gotta talk about the fan this single 80 millimeter case fan is mounted to the only case fan port on the entire PC that's right the only place to put a case fan is a single 80 millimeter exhaust Port what's even worse is the air intake when assembled the only place for air to get into the PC is through these two tiny slits in the front and a small grate under the case modern high performance computers produce a lot of heat and that heat needs to be dissipated for the computer to work properly dissipating all that heat with such restricted airflow is going to be a nightmare but we'll cross that bridge when we get to it now that we know what we're dealing with let's get to work for the CPU I'm using a top of the line 16 core 32 thread ryzen 9. I paired it with a gigabyte mini ITX motherboard and 64 gigs of RAM the maximum supported by the tomb dim slots for the boot Drive I went with two Samsung 980 Pro drives for four terabytes of total storage configured in raid 0. for the cooler the first thing I went with was the noctua nhl9a low profile air cooler for the gpus on these builds Microcenter hooked me up with the EVGA RTX 3060 for each of them this is the biggest card I can possibly fit without a custom water cooling Loop something I'm currently not comfortable doing on my own to say this was a tight fit would be a complete understatement once I removed the heat shroud I have less than one millimeter of clearance to work with it won't be the happiest graphics cards given the tight space but at least they fit as for the power supply I went with a Corsair 750 watt sfx mod power supply but problems arose when I went to install long story short the modular connectors created clearance issues against the cooler this means I either had to find a different power supply or a different cooler I reached out to the small form factor PC Discord server for help and after careful measurement we concluded that a 92 millimeter liquid cooler radiator might possibly just barely fit baby 92 millimeter all-in-one liquid coolers are pretty Niche and they definitely aren't designed for cooling a CPU that is power hungry once they sent me a link to a boutique that carried them I immediately ordered two while waiting for the cooler to arrive I got to work tearing down or shucking these two 14 terabyte external drives to reuse the hard drives inside depending on the hard drive shucking can be a much more affordable way to get a great high capacity Drive mine had white label 7200 RPM helium filled Enterprise drives which is pretty neat I installed them in the floppy Drive Bay giving me 28 terabytes of additional hard drive storage to get the floppy Drive working I purchased a simple USB to Floppy adapter to save space I replaced the connector with a direct solder connection and replace the USB connector with a connector to plug directly into the motherboard I can confirm that the floppy Drive works but this is the only floppy disk I have and I don't feel comfortable opening its contents once my core arrived it was time to rebuild the PC this time I was using a fancier Asus motherboard and the new CPU liquid cooler after lots of finagling I was able to get both the liquid cooler and the power supply installed and I genuinely cannot believe how close this was to not fitting the bottom wall of the case CPU radiator graphics card CD tray and top wall of the case are all butt up against each other with no clearance if this case was even a millimeter shorter I don't know what I would have done finally we have the CD drive frequent viewers in my channel know I am not a fan of optical charts but since this isn't a portable battery-powered project I'm willing to make an exception while I could have used the original CD drive I wanted to take things a little further and pack in a Blu-ray Drive instead Micro Center loved the idea and overnight shipped need two Blu-ray burners without a second thought and after a little bit of painting I had a matching Blu-ray burner for each computer [Music] so after routing power and data for everything I powered it up tweaked the BIOS installed Windows and got to work testing I ran the shadow of the Tomb Raider Benchmark on default settings and as I suspected the cooling was nowhere near adequate both the CPU and GPU were pegged at over 90 degrees Celsius that is way way too hot running the chips at those temperatures continuously will eventually toast them but fortunately I had a backup plan allow me to introduce my Brute Force solution some call it the pfr0912xhe some call it the blowing Metron but no matter what you call it there's no denying its ability to go Burr alright here we go [Music] this fan is rated to draw four and a half amps which is over 20 times the power of the premium noctua I was using before the blades are rated to spin at 11 000 RPM with a dangerous amount of force I expected these fans to move a lot of air but I was blown away by just how powerful they actually were with how much power these fans draw I can't just plug them directly into the motherboard without damaging it instead through the power of soldering I ran power to the fan through a pcie power cable and connected the pwm and Tack pins to the regular fan header I also added a switch to disconnect the pwm pin so at the flip of a switch I can run the fan at full blast and with that the case frame was fully assembled but it was still missing the most important part of any gaming PC there we go that's more like it the Hot Wheels PC was finished but I wasn't done yet I still had one more computer to build no expenses were spared on the barbie PC either I packed the same insane Hardware in it as the Hot Wheels PC but this time I knew what I was doing and I had the right tools to get it done [Music] [Applause] [Music] days [Music] while my Barbie computer setup may only have two monitors and no steering wheels it's got a few exclusive accessories of its own like a matching printer I also have two cameras for a multi-cam stream setup along with a huge backlog of all the classics but something was still missing from these setups as great as mouse and keyboard is some games just aren't the same without a control I gave both the Barbie Gamepad and the Barbie PC Pro pad a try but they were honestly not the best what I really wanted was a modern custom controller to match one of my setups but as returning viewers know painting is not one of my strengths instead I reached out to spicy frog one of the best controller painters I have ever seen she wanted it but now we had to decide what was the controller going to be Xbox or dual sense Barbie or Hot Wheels after putting a lot of thought into it we knew there was only one real answer all of the above spicy frog did an amazing job with these controllers I sent her pictures of the computers and told her to do her thing with complete creative control she went above and beyond and I couldn't be happier with how they turned out so if you're looking for a custom painted controller be sure to check out spicy frog finally it was the moment we've all been waiting for it's time to crank some settings and play some games [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] I used Nvidia surround to effectively turn the three monitors into a single 30-72 by 768 60 hertz Ultra wide display while that resolution may sound kind of low CRTs have the ability to make modern games look amazing at lower resolutions they even have some distinct advantages over modern top-of-the-line gaming monitors I will say high refresh rate on a CRT looks better than every single LCD ever made period in motion and I stand by that gaming on CRT monitors like these is unironically an amazing experience running at lower resolutions means I can crank the settings to the max without sacrificing frame rate with dlss off RTX on and settings crank to the max the Hot Wheels PC smoked any Benchmark I threw at it and for those wondering yes it runs do and doom and doom and doom and tomb and of course Doom and crisis while the setup looks great it didn't sound great thanks to the fan this PC sounds like a leaf blow well these plastic speakers did have a base button that boosts the rolling frequencies to try to make it sound more full it just couldn't compete so I was very excited when I discovered there was actually a beefier premium set of Hot Wheels speakers made but then I noticed something on the front and I knew I had to make it happen [Music] and thus the Hot Wheels subwoofer was born now the PC can finally sound as obnoxious as it looks what do you think setup I only had two matching monitors instead of three so I took a different approach that gave me one high resolution screen and one 120 hertz screen gaming at high refresh rates was awesome but what I really wanted was more screens I didn't have any more Barbie monitors but I had the next best thing a Disney princess CRT sorry did I say a Disney princess CRT I meant for Disney princess CRTs and through the power of wasting sponsorship money on retired professional AV Equipment I was able to unite these tubes into a single 3x2 CRT wall but I still wasn't satisfied six monitors wasn't enough I needed more there we go that's more like it but looking back at this stock looking Hot Wheels PC I thought to myself what if it wasn't a sleeper what if I fully embraced the horrors of aftermarket car mods is it even possible to make this build even more obnoxious the answer is always yes spinning rims carbon fiber Wing a flame grilled exhaust pipe and of course simulated head gasket failure this video has been a series of dumb ideas but there's one idea I have left that is just too dumb for me to do on my own and it involves the fact that the 3090 is a half length card so Linus if you're out there and want to help make this dumb idea reality I've got a present for you hit me up this video was by far the most expensive project I've ever taken on on this channel and I couldn't have done it without Microcenter they gave me the budget to make this project exist and the creative freedom to make it the way I wanted to if you live close to one of their stores and are even remotely into computers you should definitely check them out thank you to everyone who has subscribed liked and shared my videos with their friends genuinely read as many of the comments as I can and I love how supportive they have been thus far it really does make a difference and helps keep me motivated to take on bigger and more ambitious projects I go all in on my projects and videos so they can take many months to complete although I only upload a few times a year I work really hard to make each video special I have many upcoming projects in the pipeline I'm extremely excited about you can find teasers on my Discord server Twitter and Instagram and last but not least I'd like to thank my patrons for their continued support they all are awesome thank you for watching and I'll see you next project [Music]

Channel: Shank Mods

Views: 6,762,202

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Id: KLGfeiMdi1Q

Length: 22min 4sec (1324 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 12 2022