I'm not going to pretend my home office was ever tidy but since joining the hardware team, my far-from-spacious Micke desk from Ikea has been besieged. Even something as straightforward and necessary as upgrading my desktop setup for work has only served to highlight just how little space I've got to play with—mind, all of my Miku Hatsune figures probably don't help the space equation, but they really are non-negotiable. If some out-there tech maker was to, say, rock up with a radically space-saving setup, I'd be all ears.
Well, the latest project from YouTuber Basically Homeless has mined a space-saving solution from somewhere you'd find in almost every PC gaming setup—namely, the chair (via Hackaday). But this project doesn't just slot a Raspberry Pi behind the headrest and call it a day; the goal was a largely invisible, "no compromises setup" with an allowance for only one trailing wire.
Using the C7 Max premium ergo office chair from FlexiSpot as a base for the PC's unlikely case, the tech creator got to work sourcing desktop-grade parts small enough to fit somewhere inside.
Drilling holes throughout the wheel base, not to mention feeding the power cable through in such a way that it wouldn't immediately get snarled up by the chair's castors, was arguably the easy part. Beyond simply using small form factor parts, the tech creator also had to figure out where the parts were going to even fit. After some intense Tetris-ing, the parts found their home right under the seat.
50 mm aluminium spacers support the wooden base of the seat, while allowing for a very narrow amount of space below for an AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D CPU, a low-profile Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 GPU flipped sideways, and 64 GB of DDR5 RAM. But rather than leave this hefty hardware exposed, the maker instead spent months 3D modelling and printing a bespoke housing for it. You can download the files for it from the free tier of the creator's Patreon if you also happen to want to make your own FlexiSpot C7 Max stealth PC.
The (far from) final assemblage of the project just underlines how niche and impractical it is for most—especially when the YouTuber's heavily-used Asus GPU decides not to power on properly, and the chair had to be pried apart to swap it out. Anyway, trials and tribulations aside, the PC chair does eventually power on fully, ensuring toasty buns for every gamer that perches upon its reasonably powerful seat.
If you fancy crafting your own small form factor PC build—chair-shaped or otherwise—a good place to start is with our guide to the best Mini-ITX motherboards. If, like me, you simply enjoy bearing witness to the hard work of others, may I recommend angling your peepers to this incredible 3D printed Palico PC case that was on display at Computex 2025? You're darn tootin' I'm going to keep bringing that one up at every opportunity. If you're still looking to upgrade but in the market for something much less showy, you can take a gander at our best mini PCs guide instead.
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