Xbox living room PC

El_Exodus · February 23, 2019

So I figured it would be cool to sign up here and show a bit of my new Xbox PC build since I got inspired by an LTT video to do this. I planned creating a SFF build for my living room for a while now, but never knew which case to use. So thanks to some inspiration it became an Xbox Classic.

I mostly used parts from my old PC to build this:

i5-4670K

Zotac GTX 1060 3G

16GB DDR3

I bought a "new" ITX mainboard though. I can't OC with this one, but due to thermals this would have been a stretch anyways. So let's get started.

Obviously I started off by taking the Xbox apart and figuring out where to put which piece of hardware. I think I ended up with a different layout than the one in the LTT build, but I guess that's just personal preference.

Then I began working on the front to replace the controller ports with USB 2 and 3 ports. I ordered the USB 3 one and used an old USB 2 one i had laying around from a 10yo PC case.

To properly mount them to the case, I used my 3D printer to print a frame for them.

For some further usability, I built some 3,5mm jacks into the former CD drive front. Thank you hot glue cannon.

Then the messy part began. Dremling all these board supports from the original Xbox hardware away and making space for the mainboard and GPU IO shields. I recommend doing this in a well ventilated area.

I knew where I would end up putting the GPU, but till this point I was unsure how to actually mount it in a way, that it is supported and won't wiggle around later on.

Instead of 3D printing a structure, I decided to use the former CD drive case and Dremel'd the shit out of it to make it fit with the GPU, mainboard and DC-DC PSU.

There you can also see that I made a hole for the bottom 120mm intake fan and mounted a fan protector below.

Pretty much all that was left, was wiring (including some soldering for the front buttons/LED's), cable management and actually putting this thing together. Getting the case closed was pretty hard, as the cables decided to get in all the places blocking the top cover. Got it closed eventually though.

The SSD got mounted to the top of the case, roughly above the CPU as there was the most space left. Sadly I forgot to take a picture of it.

That's pretty much it. It works fine and is actually a little more silent than expected. The CPU gets a little bit toasty due to the riser cable blocking the air flow, but the GPU is cool as heck.

Luckily, the CPU doesn't thermal throttle in workloads like games. I don't need any synthetic loads running perfectly, so that's cool to me. Cool.. hehe.. pun.. ha!