- 'Heartwood' is a wood-based gaming PC that took seven years to build
- It's stunningly neat, and the hidden trick is that it routes the cooling and other cables outside the PC
- Those pipes and cables run underneath the desk, which the PC is effectively built into, and down into the basement below, where the full cooling system resides
Fancy custom PC builds come along with some regularity, but every now and then something really unusual presents itself — and I'd class this as the smartest and neatest desktop computer I've ever seen.
Wccftech spotted the rig in question, which was posted in the PC build subreddit by Mithiral67. The gaming PC is called 'Heartwood', and it took a rather incredible seven years to build.
It's based on an Inwin 909 case (which looks impressive in itself in brushed aluminum) using a semi-open concept, with the motherboard sitting in an empty space (there's no rear panel with the build here, as you can see in the YouTube video below that shows off this PC).
This desktop looks incredibly neat and slick decked out in wood and aluminum, with the nifty lighting in the top of the case too, but where's the cooling and other cabling? That's when the full extent of this build becomes clear, because it also includes the desk underneath the PC.
What the maker has done is route the liquid cooling and power cables down through the bottom of the case and the desk, with these running around the underside of the desk, and then down a leg into the floor, to the basement of the house, where all the water-cooling gubbins (built around a Mora 400) resides.
Not only was this build a time-consuming labor of love, it was also a very costly one. Another Redditor enquires about the price of the materials, and according to Mithiral67 the wood itself was around $4,000 – and they said they didn't even want to get into the cost of the woodworking tools.
As for the components, the PC is built on a Ryzen 9800X3D processor plus Nvidia RTX 5090 GPU.
Waiting out the GPU pricing nightmares
So, this was a pricey build, and a complex one, but even then, seven years seems like a very long time for putting the PC together — it means Mithiral67 started their project before the pandemic.
What gives? Well, as they explain: "For those asking, 7 years was mostly waiting for a GPU at MSRP, literally took 4 generations to get lucky at Micro Center."
There you have it. Those hoping to feature an RTX 5090 in their custom build are looking at paying an absolute fortune currently, of course, and getting the Nvidia flagship at list price now seems almost as miraculous a feat as the construction and thoughtful crafting witnessed with this PC.
Mind you, even then Mithiral67 had to buy the RTX 5090 as part of a full PC to get it at the equivalent of the sticker price (which worked out fine, as it meant they could use that other PC for playing games while they painstakingly finished off the work of art that is 'Heartwood').
As one admiring Redditor summed up nicely: "This is genuinely the most beautiful setup I've seen, in every aspect from the choice of wood, color, design, and function."
There's no shortage of commenters approving of the build, or indeed those pointing out that Sam Altman doubtless disapproves of the amount of RAM used in this desktop, too. Don't you know that's memory which could have powered another AI agent from a data center somewhere?
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