Not a Steam Machine, but a 'Meme Machine' - this PC build is simultaneously the most brilliant and awful thing I've ever seen

A Redditor has built one of the most in-your-face PCs that you'll ever see, with the rig being plastered in animated GIFs shown on various displays.

The project is explained in some detail in the Reddit post which was spotted by VideoCardz, and it started out as something considerably less ambitious.

The initial intention was a build with a number of Lian Li screen fans all displaying GIFs, but after finishing that, the Redditor "envisioned something much more ambitious" - and you can see the result in the post above.

There are 13 screens in total inside the PC - of varying sizes, mainly 5-inch and 8.8-inch displays, but also some larger efforts like a 14.5-inch portable 4K monitor. There are three Raspberry Pi boards running the four larger screens present in the PC.

A collection of over 15,000 animated GIFs was put together to show on the screens, and implementing that was where much of the work lay.

The Redditor explains:

"On top of collecting all of those GIFs, I also spent roughly 200 hours video editing alone. I edited every single GIF to better fit the aspect ratio of its respective display tile, adjusted playback speeds to make clips appear as close to real-time as possible when needed, looped gifs that needed looping, and trimmed many clips down to focus only on their most important part - I wanted my gifs to be very sporadic."

Apparently it takes over 13 hours to watch every display tile from start to finish (most of them loop after five minutes, although some run for longer, up to 15 minutes).

Watching the PC in action for only the brief clip provided left me simultaneously in awe of the achievement, and yet slightly nauseous at the effect of so much animation flashing by at such speed. It's quite something to behold.

As one commenter on the Reddit thread deftly put it: "Who needs a Steam Machine when you can have a Meme Machine?"

If you're curious about the spec, this PC is a beast with an AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D processor and RTX 5090 GPU, backed by 96GB of DDR5 RAM (which hopefully for the Redditor's sake was bought some time ago).