Have you ever wondered if you could combine your PC with some of your more traditional home furniture? This custom-built rig does just that, featuring a fully sized Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Ti inside a specially designed wooden case that doubles up as both a desk lamp and a fully powered gaming PC.
This DIY PC with its AMD Ryzen CPU is definitely one stylish build, even compared to some of the best gaming PCs like the Corsair One i500, which also rocks a wooden case design. Thanks to its Nvidia GPU, this PC also has more than enough power to handle games at 1440p, especially if you’re using Nvidia DLSS to boost frame rates.
This PC is the brainchild of Matthew Chew (mxc_builds on YouTube), who posted about the build in a YouTube video and on Reddit. We’ve chatted to Matthew in the past, discussing another incredible custom walnut gaming PC that he built himself earlier this year.
In his latest YouTube video, Chew explains that the initial inspiration behind the build came from an Instagram post, where a designer built tall lamps using wood. Chew’s final design here is a homage to those lamps.
Chew’s final creation is impressive, although he does state in the video that it cost him over $3,000 to build, so if this PC was up for general sale, it wouldn’t be hitting our best budget gaming PCs shortlist any time soon. His video covers the entire design and creation process, with each piece painstakingly designed and created himself. In a comment under a Reddit post about the PC, Chew also confirms that the entire build took around two months to complete.
While the design itself is stunning, the PC it holds within it is pretty good, too. Chew used a mini-ITX Asus ROG Strix B650E-I motherboard, along with an AMD Ryzen 7 7700 CPU, an Asus ProArt RTX 4070 Ti graphics card, 32GB of Corsair Vengeance DDR5 RAM, and a 2TB Corsair P5 NVMe M.2 SSD. There’s also an 850W Cooler Master SFX Gold power supply, as well as an ID-Cooling IS55 ARGB CPU cooler.
There’s space for an Arctic P14 ARGB cooling fan at the top, with a wooden cover on top that allows for airflow. The PC itself is surrounded by a removable metal and fabric mesh that acts as a dust cover, while the light source for the lamp is provided by a single LED light strip at the bottom of the case. The components and the dust cover are covered by the outer wooden shell, sitting on the walnut colored base. The power button sits in its own wooden block, much like a lamp switch, and connects via a barrel plug to the PC.
Chew provides some benchmark and cooling tests for us to pore over, and the results are interesting. At maximum load during testing, both the CPU and GPU heat up to 183.2°F (84°C) and 186.8°F (86°C), with the fans “cranked up to an honestly unbearable noise,” according to Chew. Those are both fairly high temperatures, suggesting the case isn’t the most capable when it comes to cooling.
However, Chew says that at a more “realistic” gaming level, the CPU temperature drops down to 158°F (70°C), while the GPU drops to 140°F (60°C), with the fans being much quieter. Even so, this isn’t a top spec build, and Chew himself recommends that it wouldn’t be worth using the case with better components due to the pretty bad thermals.
I’m a big fan of wooden PC cases, and looking back at Matthew’s last few builds, it’s clear this is something he has a real talent for. This custom design is absolutely something I could see myself using for my own custom builds. That said, it doesn’t look like this particular $3000 case is going to be hitting retailer shelves any time soon.
You don’t need to spend two months building your own case to create a great looking PC, though, so if you’re planning your next build, check out our best PC cases guide. With options like the Fractal Design Torrent out there, you can get great looks and cooling for a much lower price that this build, although if you’re keen on wood, you might prefer the wooden Fractal Design Era 2 case instead.
