Streamer Uwos Lab built an entirely battery powered gaming PC over the course of a five-hour stream last week. The rules were simple: no laptops, and no lithium ion AA batteries. The build had to be a desktop that could play a game while only relying on battery power.
The self-described ‘Mad-scientist streamer’ explained their plan simply enough, saying, “We’re going to wire eight AA in series to get 12 volts. And then we’re going to take 50 of those banks and wire them in parallel to get a high current, 12 volts, feed that into a DC to ATX power supply, and get our desktop online.”
A bit of quick and dirty maths initially suggested the streamer would need about 400 Alkaline AA batteries to pull this project off, but they ended up only wiring together 192 in total. These were split across three laser-cut wooden boxes. Each one contains 64 batteries, plus all the clips and contact pads needed to transmit power to the desktop, and then is wrapped in duct tape (via Tom’s Hardware). I’d say ‘Now, that’s mad science,’ but we’re not quite there yet.
As for the PC itself, Uwos Lab didn’t say much about its specs. However, we do know its based on an AM4 motherboard, and does not have a discrete GPU, so it likely uses a G-series AMD processor. The build doesn’t even have its own internal storage.