When most of us build a PC, we're probably happy enough to have it boot and to arrange all the cables and connectors in a tasteful enough manner for side-panel viewing. There's something to be said, though, for pushing the hobby to its (il)logical conclusion, maximizing form over function to sculpt something truly silly out of consumer computer hardware.
Enter Mark Celica and Mark's Fabrications out of Taiwan, recently featured on GeForce Garage for his build in a replica BFG-10000 from Doom: Eternal. From August through October of last year, Celica built the custom housing—complete with a rotating platform and hydraulics to raise and lower the cannon—and the attendant system inside. Celica kitted it out with an i7 10700K and 16GB of DDR4 memory on a mini-ITX ASRock Z490 motherboard with a Founder's Edition RTX 3080 for the GPU.
From the video, it looks like Celica has the graphics card at the back of the gun, with a riser cable linking it to the motherboard in the middle. He set the radiator of his AIO CPU cooler farther down the barrel, with two case fans on the very end. I don't know what would give better thermal performance here, exhaust or intake, but with this build we may have left pedestrian concepts like "thermal performance" behind for the truly avant-garde and conceptual.
There's a lot of complaints out there about RGB everything and gamerfied design language, but even those of more subdued tastes have to recognize that there's something charming about pushing through to the other side of ultimate gamer maximalism. It's a cool project that demonstrates a high degree of PC building and mechanical know-how, so cheers to Mark Celica on his delightful excess.
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