Forget Lego Smart Bricks — this ‘ridiculously wild’ home-built Lego PC is the coolest thing you’ll see today | Tech Radar
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Forget Lego Smart Bricks — this ‘ridiculously wild’ home-built Lego PC is the coolest thing you’ll see today
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The computer houses a repurposed cryptocurrency mining rig
It incorporates a monitor and built-in keyboard, too
Computing enthusiasts can be a creative bunch, with PC builders cooking up intriguing custom rigs built to all sorts of interesting specifications. But few have crafted a gaming desktop out of Lego pieces, as one intrepid Redditor did — and it could redefine what we understand by the term “Smart Bricks.”
Posting to Reddit, user Ok Debate 6649 documented their attempt at building a working gaming PC housed entirely inside a Lego brick chassis. The computer has been “designed in a modular way,” its creator explained, “so it can be used with monitors I made before” and includes a display and built-in keyboard.
The device is centered on an AMD BC-250 motherboard. These products were originally designed for cryptocurrency mining and feature what is essentially a cut-down Play Station 5 APU that comprises six Zen 2 CPU cores, 24 RDNA2 Compute Units in the GPU, and 16GB of memory.
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Its performance is roughly akin to that of an Nvidia GTX 1660 Ti graphics card, making it suitable for 1080p gaming at medium to high settings. “It’s not a very powerful PC,” Ok Debate 6649 conceded, before adding that “it runs stably at around 75°C (45°C idle).”
It’s far from the beefiest gaming PC around today. But when it looks as cool as this, I’m sure many people wouldn’t mind. Indeed, the Reddit comments are full of enthusiastic admirers, with people calling it “ridiculously wild” and an “absolutely sick build.” User Lorenzo_95 was effusive in their praise, saying: “I’m afraid you have to stop posting, you’re too cool, it’s unfair on the rest of us.”
Interestingly, if you want to use this motherboard in a computer as Ok Debate 6649 did, you need to run your system on Linux, as the board is not compatible with Windows 11. And it seems that the Redditor leaned into the anti-Windows direction by applying a Linux skin that apes Apple’s mac OS operating system.
And they didn’t stop there. The entire Lego chassis has been crafted to resemble an old-school Macintosh of the type sold by Apple in the 1980s and 1990s. The computer itself sits in a cuboid Lego box with the monitor — whose casing is also made of Lego bricks — sitting on top. An old Apple logo and rainbow decal signal another link to the Cupertino firm.
Given that the BC-250 is a repurposed mining board, Ok Debate 6649 had to make some adjustments. Traditional CPU coolers wouldn’t fit, so the creator had to remove the motherboard’s heatsink and sit a 120mm fan on top instead. With the keyboard and monitor included, the entire system weighs 11kg, so it’s not particularly portable either.
If you’re wondering whether the Lego housing can withstand the heat of a fired-up gaming PC, Ok Debate 6649 is confident that it can. As they explained: “I’ve added protective measures in areas exposed to heat. If you look at the third photo, you can see that I applied protection where the motherboard backplate makes contact.”
With creative builds like this doing the rounds, there’s plenty of inspiration to be had if you’re interested in putting together your own custom PC. Combined with the recent “Superdome” Noctua computer, it’s a good time to be a fan of this kind of work.
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Alex Blake has been fooling around with computers since the early 1990s, and since that time he's learned a thing or two about tech. No more than two things, though. That's all his brain can hold. As well as Tech Radar, Alex writes for i More, Digital Trends and Creative Bloq, among others. He was previously commissioning editor at Mac Format magazine. That means he mostly covers the world of Apple and its latest products, but also Windows, computer peripherals, mobile apps, and much more beyond. When not writing, you can find him hiking the English countryside and gaming on his PC.
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Forget Lego Smart Bricks — this ‘ridiculously wild’ home-built Lego PC is the coolest thing you’ll see today
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