This Adorable Little Gaming PC Fits in the Palm of Your Hand

The term “gaming PC” can really refer to any kind of computer that someone uses to play games, but most gamers picture something far more specific than that when they hear the term. That mental image includes high-end hardware with the power to run modern triple-A games at decent settings, and often a lot of colorful LEDs. The stereotypical gaming PC contains more multicolored lights than a Las Vegas casino and fans that sound like a jet taking off. Michael Pick channeled that aesthetic when he built this adorable little gaming PC that fits in the palm of your hand.

If you just saw a photo of Pick's creation without any context or other objects to show scale, you’d probably assume it was the kind of gaming behemoth that you would have found next to the desk of any World of Warcraft player in 2006. It has colorful fans behind a mesh grill on the front and a clear acrylic viewing window on the side so you can gaze upon all of the wonderful hardware inside. In reality, the entire computer is smaller than a box of tissues. Even the monitor and keyboard attached to the computer are to scale in order to really sell the effect.

Instead of purchasing a motherboard, graphics card, and so on, Pick used a Raspberry Pi 3B+. But don’t worry, that’s still capable of playing modern games thanks to Parsec, which is software that lets you stream games from another computer on your network. The computer’s case was 3D-printed and coated in a layer of Bondo automotive body filler to smooth out the layers. The rest of the build process is straightforward, with the exception of the status LEDs. Pick cleverly used fiber optic cables to direct the Raspberry Pi’s lights to the outside of the case. On the inside, he even attached a faux graphics card to the Raspberry Pi to make it look like a “real” gaming PC. As you can see in the video, Pick can play modern games, such as Apex Legends, on the tiny computer.