Turning the Diamond Play Button Into a Mini PC

A Brief History of Linus Tech Tips

For anyone familiar with YouTube, a creator on the platform receives "play buttons" for various subscriber milestones. For instance, the silver one is for reaching 100,000 subscribers, and the gold one is for one million. But when someone reaches 10 million, they receive a diamond play button, which is a large, machined piece of aluminum with a large "diamond" set in the middle. This is a massive achievement, and Linus Sebastian from Linus Tech Tips (LTT) wanted to make it into something a bit more special. His channel is all about technology, computers, and gaming, so what's better than turning the play button into a mini gaming PC?

Modifying the Play Button

To start, the play button had to have several parts of it removed to make room for the internal components. This included an area for the IO connectors (such as USB and audio), along with space for a power button. Since YouTube's lawyers refused to give the 3D CAD model, the team resorted to using the professional scanning services at Laman to get it scanned, since amateur methods are nearly impossible to do, owing to the play button's mirror-like finish.

After making the modifications virtually in SolidWorks and 3D printing a test piece, they sent the design over to SS CADCAM, a professional machinist shop, that was able to generate precise toolpaths and mill out the button on his 5-axis CNC machine.

Computing Innards

Finding a PC small enough to fit inside of the play button was tough, as it had to not only have a small footprint, but also have enough power to run modern games, all without overheating. The team at LTT was able to find one: the Intel NUC 10 Performance Kit, which sports a 10th gen Intel Core i7-10710U that has 12MB of cache and can turbo up to 4.7GHz on its 6 cores (with 12 threads total due to Hyper-Threading).

The NUC also has space for an NVME m.2 drive for ultra-fast storage and two SO-DIMM slots for a couple of sticks of DDR4 RAM. Its Thunderbolt 3 supports means that an external GPU can be connected to provide a massive boost in FPS within a video game.

Cooling Everything Down

Running in an enclosed space at high speeds generates a lot of heat, so having a way to transfer that heat away from the CPU as quickly as possible is imperative. This was accomplished through two main techniques. First, the play button itself is massive heatsink since it is, after all, a giant piece of aluminum. The channels cut at the bottom act as fins to give the button more surface area for heat to exchange.

Second, the CPU's heatsink was created from a piece of milled copper, and when combined with a series of heatpipes, this setup can move heat from the CPU to the area where the fan is very efficiently.

Finishing Touches

A gaming without RGB lighting feels lacking in the modern era, so an LED strip was placed at the bottom of the button, which lets the light shine through the translucent diamond at the top.

The play button has been thoroughly transformed into the essence of what the LTT channel is all about: fast computing, DIY projects, and plenty of RGB lighting.