The best case mods from Computex 2016

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).

Computex. The final frontier. The case modder's mission: to explore strange new methods of water cooling. To seek out new color schemes and new LED components. To boldly go where no modder has gone before.

Ahem. The Enterprise just brings it out in us, you know?

Computex, meanwhile, brings out the best in case modders. All the big component companies sponsor modders to build extravagant systems, which in turn draw awed visitors into their booths to snap pictures and check out the products. It worked on us! We scoured the show floor to find the coolest custom rigs, most of which sport elaborate water cooling systems with intricate hard piping and some equisite lighting and cable management work. The pressure is even higher when you have to build in an open air frame, or fit your parts in the cramped space of a unique shape, like the Enterprise or R2-D2.

Here's a gallery of our favorite case mods from Computex 2016. We'd proudly display all of them on our desks at work. Well, except for the one that's also a car. That can go beside the desk.