This case mod is built inside the gaping chest cavity of Master Chief

It's probably too early to crown the best case mod of the show at this year's Computex, but I have trouble imagining anything will beat this one. Halo's Master Chief is standing watch in one corner of the Asus booth, his chest cavity ripped open to reveal the PC guts inside him. 

This build of course flies in the face of established Halo lore, which claims Spartan Master Chief is a human who more or less acts like an emotionless robot. Thanks to Australian case modder Stephen Hood, we know the opposite has secretly been true: all along Master Chief has been a machine who acts like a human.

Hood posted a gallery of the case mod on Facebook and a list of components, which includes an Intel Core i7-7700, Asus Strix GTX 1080, and the skeleton of a Cooler Master Mastercase Pro 6. There are some incredible touches here, like the LED lights to the sides of the Chief's helmet.

By far my favorite bit is the graphics card, which is actually outside the ripped open chest cavity, resting casually in the palm of the Chief's hand. I have so many questions about the fiction of this particular situation. Did he rip open his own chest to pull out the graphics card? If those PC guts were organs, what organ would the graphics card be? The liver? Are you okay, Chief? 

Sadly, when I saw the Chief he was powered down, to prevent passers by from stupidly sticking their fingers into the running fan blades of the GTX 1080. That's a PC man's graphics liver you're messing with, for god's sake! 

If you want to see the Chief up and running, check out some of Hood's photos below, followed by some more of our own.

Wes Fenlon
Senior Editor

Wes has been covering games and hardware for more than 10 years, first at tech sites like The Wirecutter and Tested before joining the PC Gamer team in 2014. Wes plays a little bit of everything, but he'll always jump at the chance to cover emulation and Japanese games.


When he's not obsessively optimizing and re-optimizing a tangle of conveyor belts in Satisfactory (it's really becoming a problem), he's probably playing a 20-year-old Final Fantasy or some opaque ASCII roguelike. With a focus on writing and editing features, he seeks out personal stories and in-depth histories from the corners of PC gaming and its niche communities. 50% pizza by volume (deep dish, to be specific).