Modding News - Page 1

NVIDIA and Blizzard have partnered with GeForce Garage collaborator Ron Lee Christianson to create a pretty amazing one-of-a-kind custom Diablo IV PC that doubles as a shrine to Lilith - Blessed Mother.

Custom GeForce RTX 4080-powered Diablo IV PC mod, image credit: NVIDIA.

The Lilith bust here is hand-crafted using source files from Blizzard, with modifications and adjustments made to create the stunning sculpture. The base is awesome, too, with sculpted laval rocks featuring some neat LED lighting taken from artificial fireplaces. There's leather, wood, a custom frame, and so much that if you were to look at the mod head-on simply, you probably wouldn't even think that it was, in fact, a gaming PC.

Turn it around, though, and it's a different story, and it's here where you'll see the components and motherboard cleverly mounted and supported. And it has the hardware to match the formidable and imposing Lilith. Here's the breakdown.

KLEVV, the consumer brand of Essencore, was at Computex 2023 to showcase the latest in its storage and memory technology for PC gaming.

The CU Century Engine with KLEVV's CRAS V RGB memory and CRAS C950 storage.

If you're unfamiliar with the KLEVV or Essencore name, all you need to know is that it's one of the world's top vendors of DRAM modules and NAND flash, so its gaming products come with the same focus on performance, stability, and quality.

Taking a stroll through the KLEVV (and Essencore) booth at Computex 2023, it was great to not only to see the new CRAS C950 PCIe Gen5x4 M.2 SSD (with funky aluminum heatsink) push sequential read speeds of up to 12000MB/s and the CRAS V RGB and BOLT V DDR5 gaming memory push speeds of up to 8600MT/s with capacities of up to 48GB - but that all of this hardware was put to good use, in awesome PC mods created by some talented artists and builders.

YouTube channel The Eric Experiment has documented how he built - from scratch - a tiny custom, fully functional 486 PC. Using actual parts, this is not a Raspberry Pi system emulating a classic MS-DOS PC; the video outlines a fascinating, cool, and brilliant journey to create a mini 486 PC. Here's a look at the final product sitting next to what an actual 486 PC looks like. And, yeah, like us, you're probably wondering how he fit all of that hardware in such a tiny space.

Tiny Intel 486 next to the real thing, image credit: The Eric Experiment/YouTube.

Hardware-wise, this is rocking an Intel DX4 100 with 32 MB of memory with sound and video compatible with old-school Windows 3.11, 95, and MS-DOS.

The short answer is that it wasn't easy, even with a four ISO-slot backplane, to stack all the cards and hardware in a compact space. From custom PCB designs and other hacks, it's a masterclass in modding.

Fandom can be wonderful, where passion and dedication can lead to some truly impressive feats. Case in point, The Time Trekking Technologist and his Star Trek-inspired Shuttle PC created in part to celebrate the new Star Trek Picard TV series. With three months of design, 3D printing, painting, and wiring, the DIY PC build is always exciting to see.

Star Trek PC mod, credit: The Time Trekking Technologist

The video covering the build is a fun watch, as it covers the build and includes some of the 3D printing failures. There are some excellent touches, with the windows acting as vents for cooling and the power and reset buttons assigned to panels next to the windows.

There's some clever PC-building expertise, too, with additional Noctua fans used to vent air like an actual working engine on the back. There are even hidden USB ports on the front alongside the motherboard and other parts being installed on panels that can easily slide in and out.

When it comes to handheld gaming in 2023, there's the Nintendo Switch, and then there's Valve's Steam Deck - one being a traditional Nintendo-style console and the other being a portable gaming PC. What if you could hack the Switch to make it run Steam and fire up PC games? Wouldn't that turn it into a Nintendo Switch Deck or a Steam Switch?

That's the question YouTuber SpikeHD set out to answer and hopefully pull off - except it was impossible using existing tools and hacks. The idea is sound; a jailbroken Switch can run Ubuntu, so there should be a way to run the Linux version of Steam on the Nintendo console.

It's worth pointing out that only older models (from the console's launch) can be hacked in the first place, but that wasn't what ultimately led to the Steam Switch journey ending. Even though that requires a lot of SD card action bypassing boot loaders and compiling and even shorting connections on the Joy-Con rails to get working.

Manufacturers have been toying with new smartphone form factors in recent months. The most notable new form factor has been folding smartphones. We've seen some that bring dual screens with a separate second screen. A new smartphone form factor has turned up in the form of a leaked LG device rumored to be codenamed the LG Wing.

The top screen is said to rotate, allowing it to be swung from portrait to landscape position uncovering a second screen beneath. In the leaked image the second screen acts as a keyboard. When unfolded, the LG Wing resembles the letter "T." We most certainly aren't sure the LG Wing is anything more than a hastily photoshopped device.

There are some rumors about hardware to go along with the leaked image. Those rumors suggest that the Wing will use a Snapdragon 7-series processor and have a 64-megapixel primary camera. The main screen is said to be 6.8-inches. We could see the form factor getting a YouTube usage experience similar to what the Galaxy Z Flip features.

The force is strong with DIY electronic toymaker, littleBits. They have just released an amazing toy that is supposedly aimed for users in the age bracket of 8-12 years old. Introducing the 11-inch tall, fully-functional R2D2 Droid Inventor Kit. The R2D2 Droid kit features everything you need to get your own R2D2 droid moving around your living room bleeping and whistling with 20 authentic sounds directly from the Star Wars movies.

The accessories kit consists of 20 parts that snap together magnetically, so no screws are required. 3 sticker sheets that allow yourself children to customize R2D2 to their liking. Electronically, we see DC and servo motors, 9V battery, proximity sensor that detects hand movements for Force Drive and also detects objects in its path and more.

The most interesting part is the control hub, effectively the Droid's brain that allows communications with your smart device using Bluetooth technology. With the use of the free Droid Inventor Training app, users can view video instructions ,program secret missions by drawing maps for their droid and simply control their droid, making this app an essential tool.

Samsung is just days away from unveiling its new Galaxy Note 8 smartphone, with what looks like a big emphasis on the rear-facing camera, which I think will be one of the first big tease of Qualcomm's next-gen camera tech.

Qualcomm held an intimate conference at SIGGRAPH a few weeks ago, showing off what I think will be one of the larger steps in smartphone camera technology (something you can read here). But now Samsung's marketing hype train is in full swing for the Galaxy Note 8, which is being unveiled on August 23... next week.

In the embedded video above, you can see the 'infinity' zoom that Samsung should bake into the Note 8. Samsung will be using a dual camera rig on the Note 8, and I'm sure there will be some impressive tricks up Samsung's sleeve.

AMD launched its new EPYC 7000 series processors last week, and now GIGABYTE is one of the first to unveil its new MZ30-AR0 motherboard that supports AMD EPYC 7000 series processors, and has a ton of awesome, server-grade features.

GIGABYTE's new MZ30-AR0 packs 8-channel DDR4 support with 16 x DIMMs, supporting up to 1TB of RAM through LRDIMM/NVDIMM modules, while 64GB of DDR4 support is provided through RDIMMs. GIGABYTE includes 2 x SFP+ 10Gb/s LAN ports, M.2 with PCIe 3.0 x4 ports, and more. Storage wise we have 16 x SATA 3.0 ports, 4 x SAS, 7 x PCIe 3.0 x16, and 1 x M.2 capable of 32Gbps. The board supports CPUs with up to a 180W TDP, eating up the new EPYC-based CPUs with 32C/64T of power.

An Iron Man glove created by laser gadget maker Patrick Priebe is 3,000 times more powerful than a typical laser pointer. As shown by Wired in the demo video below, that's enough to let you indulge your inner pyromaniac a little by igniting cigarettes, ping pong balls, and matches. You can also show up to children's birthday parties and make them cry by popping balloons with it (that's a win my book).

If you want to get your hands-on one, contract Priebe through his official website. Although after the press he's been getting, you may have to wait awhile for a response.