Computex is the unofficial World Series of PC modding. The PC mega-convention doesn't host an overall competition for “best in show,” but you can sense a vibe of vendors trying to one-up the rest with sponsored mods that show off their hardware at the center. Some of the planet's most accomplished modders, backed by the leading lights in PC components, use the massive trade show to parade their best work.
You can't help but be inspired, amazed, and sometimes befuddled by the artwork on display. And make no mistake: Modding is an art form, requiring equal parts technical ability, imagination, hobbyist craft, and persistence. You'll see plenty of evidence below of all three, in the 20 top mods we saw at the show. Let's dig in!
Shark X
(Cooler Master Suite)
We saw this mod teased at CES 2023, but here it was, in all its chondrichthyian glory and mounted on a base comprising the Cooler Master logo ringed with RGB. The more-than-2-foot-tall Shark X was built on an ASRock mini-ITX Phantom Gaming motherboard, Kingston Fury memory, and Cooler Master water cooling. The last, because of course it was. How else would you cool a shark?
The company also displayed the mod alongside a summary of its corporate efforts to support ocean preservation. The original inspiration for Shark X stemmed from a design called "Leviathan" by modder Inony in a past Cooler Master Case Mod World Series. More than just a mod, though, Shark X should become a commercially available product at CMODX; there was a placeholder for it as we wrote this.
Sneaker X: Dwight Howard Edition
(Cooler Master Suite)
Got $6,000 to burn on a PC, sneakerhead? Lace up! Cooler Master recently announced that approximate price for its Sneaker X prebuilt PCs, housed in the company’s unique red shoe case/showcase. (The fate of the Sneaker X bare case, as a standalone item, is up in the air, though you'll be able to buy preconfigured Sneaker X systems from CMODX.)
Meanwhile, Cooler Master knocked together some custom versions shown at Computex for (ahem) kicks, among them this one for ex-NBA player Dwight Howard. Howard played for a host of NBA teams but recently joined the Taoyuan Leopards of Taiwan's T1 League. The shoe is kitted out in the Leopards' team colors.
CyberTower
(Thermaltake Booth)
This mod is built on a case that we reviewed from Thermaltake a while back, The Tower 500. Its urbanscape brought to mind one of our favorite Computex mods ever: the whimsical/grim Best Pork Ramen Complex mod shown in 2019, before the pandemic. Here, though, the modder (Samuel Callanta/Samca Studios of the Philippines) put together a modern complex of shops and apartment replete with signage eye candy.
The shops' branding and advertising conceals a liquid-cooled PC while incorporating the cooler piping into the plumbing of the building. (While also probably satisfying a host of hardware sponsors in the process. Slick move!) Nuances pop out as you view it from each side.
Biostar Racing Mod
(Biostar Booth)
This one pretty much speaks for itself. Biostar may be a second-tier motherboard maker, but this mod was absolutely first class. This unit was built around a Core i7-12700KF processor and Teamgroup memory and SSDs, but it's simply the craftsmanship that stands out here. Just look at the manifolds, as well as the pistons and fuel injection fashioned, it appears, from AIO cooler head units, plus the central positioning of the video card, vying for attention with all that chrome around it.
The whole conception looks so natural, combined with a striking combination of digital and analog gauges. Sublime, even if we have no idea where we’d put it.
Double Streacom DA6 Mod
(Streacom Booth)
Case maker Streacom makes nothing, it appears, that isn't a buzzy attention-grabber. (Its giant, fanless Streacom SG10 was one of our case favorites from the 2023 show.) In this mod, credited to a Justin Ohlsen of Sweden, the modder has taken two of the company's DA6 open-frame chassis and bonded them together to create one stunning system. We have here an SFX power supply (the case also supports ATX), liquid cooling, and a stunning front-panel rainbow distribution plate for the liquid, in addition to a second distro plate on the rear for the video card.
The PSU cables resemble cellophane noodles. We're not sure why there's a bottle of hot sauce on the counter, but it seems appropriate. Classy but spicy, this one.
Intel Wafer Mod
(G.Skill Booth)
This was the first of a host of stunning mods lined up at memory maker G.Skill’s booth. The blue-and-white Intel theme is only the start of this nifty mod, which resembles an Intel CPU wafer just off the fab. Here, the modder used a 13th Gen Core “Raptor Lake” chip, the same kind being manufactured when we visited Fab 28 in Israel last year. (Get some insight into that manufacturing process with our tour, at the link.) It's a reminder that, sometimes, the best things in life come in wafer-thin packages.
Purifier
(KLEVV/Essencore Booth)
KLEVV and Essencore are makers of enthusiast PC memory. Something of a deconstructed future PC with a sci-fi medico-pandemic theme, this mod, dubbed Purifier, has the main body, the reservoir for the liquid cooling, and a liquid distribution panel as separate modules. They're connected in places by the kinds of spiral cables and industrial connections you'd see on equipment in a hospital.
A LCD front face embedded in the main PC module shows system status information in a stunning layout, with KLEVV RAM and SSDs in evidence alongside the Core i7-13700K and GeForce RTX 4080. Taiwan modder AK, who designed this mod, has a YouTube page of mods well worth checking out.
CU Century Engine
(KLEVV/Essencore Booth)
Steampunk Gone Wild is the theme with this one, featuring KLEVV memory and storage again. This time, the machine is manufactured by Mark's Fabrications, and the detail work is over-the-top, though perhaps (if we're allowed a quibble) we'd have chosen a more in-sync motherboard than the ASRock Steel Legend here with its snow camouflage.
The case has a small LCD screen off to one side, analog gauges, copper piping (thus the “CU”), loads of weathering, a classy wood base…what more could you want? Given the cost of copper these days, we'd put a security perimeter around this one.
G.Skill Volcano
(G.Skill Booth)
Core i9-13900K with molten lava streaming from the top...what irony? What you see is what you get on this one, spotted in the 1927 Yankees Murderer’s Row lineup of mods at G.Skill's booth. Of course, it looks like an advanced version of every grade school kid's inevitable science project, just minus the hair dryer blowing chunks of styrofoam lava into the air. (Perhaps the modder could get the CPU fan revved up high enough to do the same job. After all, we do see some Noctua fans in there peeking out…get on it, folks!) We do hope though, that the lava does not reflect the temps inside what looks to be a decidedly airflow-hostile, thermodynamically questionable design.
WMP Larval Crab Horror Mod
(G.Skill Booth)
Hands-down winner of the award for “Mod I Wish I Could Unsee,” voted on by this majority of one. This nightmare-fuel, alien-themed PC horror pile is a bit too well-done. The poised-to-attack face-hugger crab bursting from the top of the larvae will trigger your kabourophobia (or broader ostraconophobia), and the faux-slime texture just gives us the creeps. (Or, okay, that may be blennophobia.)
Kudos to modder WMP for easily the best (worst?) gross-out mod of the show. Core i7-13700K, RTX 3070, cool overclocked RAM…who cares? We just wanted to flee it. Unsee!
CloudFactory
(FSP Booth)
This was an interesting one, at FSP’s booth. It’s credited to Vietnamese modder Amber Spider (Nhenhophach) of Modding Cafe, who brought the world the exquisite Best Pork Ramen Complex mod shown at FSP’s Computex booth in 2019. The CloudFactory mod is a rarity, in that it's built around Intel's Arc graphics (here, the Arc A750). Nothing against Team Blue’s budding graphics brand, but the A750, and indeed all of the Arc video cards, face something of a cloudy future...so maybe this mod has an interesting subtext.
The theme seems to be weather control, and the clear plexi chimney section up top did emit puffs of vapor every now and then. Appropriately, the mod uses FSP’s liquid-cooled Hydro power supply, and much less so, a striking vertical LCD screen that played an eye-catching dancing girl on a loop. (She’s probably there to distract from the middling Arc card.)
Terra Drill
(G.Skill Booth)
We're not entirely sure what's going on in this mod; the subtitle under Terra Drill is "Resource Extractor Drilling Platform." But we have to admit that the liquid-cooling work is striking, and the case features one of the better optical tricks we’ve seen in a mod.
We were fooled by the vapor coming out of the liquid area, which suggested we were looking at an open pool of seething water. Looking more closely, it's an LCD screen showing sea life swirling around underneath the opening.
ElmorLabs Pyramid of LN02
(G.Skill Booth)
It's hard to make out what's going on inside this plexi-pyramid due to the vapor emitted by the liquid nitrogen cooling pot on the CPU and the ensuing fog and condensation. You can see some dry-ice residue at the vent up top, which emits vapor from time to time. Not shown: a giant LNO2 canister alongside the table, feeding into the back of the pyramid.
The "point" of this mod, though, is the overclocking that's going on inside. As you can see, the builders have the CPU clock amped up to 7GHz (the Core i9-13900K) and the memory (G.Skill brand, naturally) cranking at 10,000 megatransfers per second on a single installed DIMM. Neither is a world-record holder, but then again, how many word records were set inside a transparent pyramid?
ASRock Arky Mods
(ASRock Booth)
Asrock is apparently trying to establish a generic alien, Arky, as its mascot. He's certainly a corporate-compliant spokes-alien (“I come from outer space. I am outgoing, energetic, full of curiosity about everything....My favorite color is green, symbolizing sustainability like ASRock’s business philosophy”), and while the jury's out on whether he'll stick, kudos to the modders who gamely executed these three variations on the theme. The one below reflects the company's Tai Chi brand and its theme of gears, while the mod above makes use of the company's ultra-high-end Aqua Z690 Motherboard in a build that sticks to an Intel blue-and-white color scheme. The cable work on this one is especially striking.
Korea Showcase
(Raijintek Booth)
This particular mod was themed around Korea, with a narrow LCD screen across the bottom cycling through images of Korean scenery and traditional Korean architecture. The top portion, concealed behind closed frosted-glass doors, opens up to reveal a stunning liquid-cooled system in a seldom-seen orange-and-black color scheme. After a few minutes of contemplating this masterwork, we realized: Forget about the PC. Just look at all that craftwork on the shingled roof!
Kingston Memory Mods
(Kingston Suite)
These two mods were the finale of a tour of the Kingston Suite; somewhere in both of these are the memory maker’s DIMMs. The first, our representative explained, had to do with a health and vital-signs theme, with the three red pistons meant to represent life force. (That's the two images above.)
The second (below) is built on an open-frame case tweaked to the max. Four Kingston RGB-lit DIMMs are front and center in this build. Note how the video card is incorporated into the base of the mod proper, installed face down, and the base seems to be acting as the distribution plate for the GPU liquid cooling. The modder did a superb job in masking the GPU riser cable and covering up most of the cabling on the board.
Lian Li O11 Evo RGB Showcase
(Lian Li Booth)
At Computex, Lian Li extended its line of super-popular O11 cases, which are designed for maximum exposure of your parts behind sheer sheets of tempered glass. In addition to a new O11 Evo XL (as you'd expect, extra large in size), the company released an O11 Evo RGB. It resembles the iconic Lian Li O11 Dynamic models, but with some tasteful programmable lighting trim around the top and bottom edges.
Here, the uncredited builder (whose aim was clearly to show off the case’s potential) went all out with clear liquid-cooling hard lines for CPU and GPU, a spectacular distro plate, seven of the company’s UniFan SL case fans (each with several independent lighting zones on edge and face), twin 360mm radiators, and GPU and 24-pin power versions of the company’s second gen of Strimer rainbow cables.
In Win I.M.
(In Win Booth)
The Mod Free is a case concept that In Win first exhbited at CES 2023. In the simplest terms, it's a set of PC case frames and panels that can be combined in a host of orientations to build a custom chassis that extends in any direction. You can use it to create one mega-PC, or to house multiple systems in the same connected chassis.
In Win, as a rule, always has at least one special system mod at Computex that goes well past the line of reason. And so the company presented I.M., a sort of giant Mobius strip/cube comprising Mod Free modules. We’ll leave any further explanation to I.M.’s philosophical placard below...
The Lich King and Quiet Please Mods
(Be Quiet Booth)
The selection of case mods at Be Quiet’s booth was (wait for it) loud. The first mod, kitted out above in blue, is a World of Warcraft theme built on the company’s Dark Base 802 chassis. (It’s credited to Koursat Afsar of ’R Mods.)
The second one, credited to Cugmag and dubbed “Quiet Please,” above and below, seems to show some seriously suspect goings-on inside an ancient church: skeleton at an altar, pile ’o skulls, creepy green watchman. (All while touting the company’s Pure Loop 2 FX AIO liquid cooler; that's something of a flex.) The balcony made up of the graphics card, masked with faux stone and surrounded by pillars that are actually the liquid-cooling conduits, is much cleverer craftwork than it might seem at first glance.
Cooler Master Immersion Cooling Mod
(Cooler Master Suite)
Last up: This is less a mod than one of the cleanest executions of immersion cooling you've ever seen in a consumer chassis.
Immersion cooling involves submerging the entire motherboard, GPU, or other hot-running components in a non-conductive cooling liquid instead of running the liquid through the series of heatsinks, hoses, and the rest.
This was done in one of the company’s giant HAF towers, with a clear-plastic immersion tank taking up the main cavity of the case and circulating fluid bubbling up on both sides of the motherboard.
For more highlights from Computex, check out our Best of Computex 2023 roundup.