PCii Mk Absol

Ekterm

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Joined
Dec 13, 2018
Messages
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Location
Danville, USA
Portables
Wii Laptop, PCii mk A
Yo dawg, heard you liked Wii
1612808499365.png

So I put a PC in a Wii so you can Wii while you Wii on another Wii next to your Wii


Yes my friends, while not a portable, this is a fully functional Windows PC inside a Wii case. I am pretty happy with how this turned out, it still looks like only a Wii at first glance. And it's no potato either: i7-6500u cpu, Nvidia GTX 940m graphics, SATA SSD. The disc drive slot is now the exhaust vent, using the blue LEDs as the power indicator (dimmed a little running on 5v), the eject button is the power button, the little front door not only still contains an SD card reader in the original spot but also a USB port and headphone jack, and on the back we've got two USB 3.0 ports and HDMI, and even the Novo button. The top gamecube doors open for extra ventilation that is enough to keep the CPU and GPU around 75C with both under full load (the cpu barely throttles at this temperature, about 8%). In case I make more PCiis I started with A and named it Mark Absol as a shoutout to one of my best friends in Hoenn ;)

This started over a year ago when my friend sold me his Lenovo Edge 2-1580 laptop for 20 bucks because it wouldn't work on the battery at all. Wouldn't charge it and would immediately turn off if unplugged. I of course immediately got this idea in my head and went to work. It was a very long process with all the case modding but, I swear, this motherboard was designed to be put into a Wii. It fits perfectly, and when the daughterboard was aligned with the SD card slot on the front, the other ports were right within the rest of the door space and one of the volume buttons was right up against the eject button. For the cooling, I used an old modified laptop fan and cut down and drilled an aluminum heatsink to contact both cpu and gpu dies. A duct is attached that directs the hot air to the grill over the disc drive slot. This is a pretty low-flow vent though, so I realized leaving the gamecube ports and memory card slots open would help with intake and exhaust. So after weeks of case modding I was finally ready for the first test so I put it all together and pressed power... and nothing. It would not turn on and for like six months I thought it was dead and all the effort was wasted. Then recently I got into trying to actually diagnose and repair motherboards themselves, so I decided to give it another shot. And wouldn't you know, without me doing a thing, the little bugger decides to boot. So I took another couple weeks to finish the rest, and now here we are.

The only thing is the power issue that caused the battery to not work in the first place. It makes it whine a little, and it you have to wait a little bit after plugging it in for it to want to work, it just won't turn on until you push its buttons for a while. I just hope it doesn't get worse in the future and the whole computer die. One person has traced what could be the same issue and has found it to be the super io chip degrading, and you would have to program a new one to replace it: https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/Lenovo...g-and-not-charging/m-p/4295320?page=1#4401691

The PCii Mk A Specs: (Lenovo Edge 2-1580)
Intel Core i7-6500U
Nvidia GTX 940M (2GB)
128gb ADATA SU800 SATA SSD (ik its small, its all I had on hand...)
8GB single channel DDR3 RAM

Internals:
IMG_20210204_164911.jpg IMG_20210204_171229.jpg

Exterior and ports:
IMG_20210206_183357.jpg IMG_20210206_183122.jpg IMG_20210206_183106.jpg IMG_20210206_183017.jpg IMG_20210206_182948.jpg IMG_20210206_182811.jpg

Lights in a dim room (irl they're not quite so bright):
IMG_20210204_223627.jpg IMG_20210204_223658.jpg IMG_20210204_224048.jpg

Booted:
IMG_20210202_113417.jpg Annotation 2021-02-02 112821.png
 
Last edited:

Ekterm

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Joined
Dec 13, 2018
Messages
75
Likes
50
Location
Danville, USA
Portables
Wii Laptop, PCii mk A
Just to keep it simpler haha. The daughterboard has volume buttons on it, and when put into position one was already right up against eject, so I just ran wires to it instead of making another entire mount and switch on the power button.
I also tried to power the front LEDs from the actual power LED circuit so they would keep functions like flashing error codes and pulsing during sleep, but it didn't work and I didn't take the time to figure it out so they're just running off the 5v line.
 

CrashBash

No emulation, real hardware
Staff member
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Feb 5, 2016
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MGC
This is dumb yet amazing and I absolutely love it dude.
 
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