A slightly crazy but ultimately viable project, this 3-in-1 console should make more than one gamer dream.
When you're a video game fan, you obviously have several machines at your disposal, and that's nothing new. So, to enjoy the best of all worlds and be able to play all the exclusives, you need four machines, so to speak: a PC of course, but also a Switch 2 and a PlayStation 5, while perhaps the Xbox Series is the most questionable, its software library being almost entirely available on PC.
In China, on the Youtube channel XNZ, talented hackers have set their sights on combining all three consoles into a single machine. In a nod to this, the machine in question has been christened "Ningtendo PXBOX 5", and it combines the three platforms imagined by Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony. To achieve this, XNZ used three home consoles that had to be stripped down to their bare essentials. What's more, not just any box was needed to integrate three machines into one in a way that was as functional as it was aesthetically pleasing. That's why XNZ thought of the Mac Pro of 2013: it integrated three PCBs. The main one was, of course, a motherboard, while the other two were dedicated to a GPU.
As you can see in the video above, the shape and organization of the Mac Pro were a huge source of inspiration for the chain, which therefore put, vertically and back-to-back, the boards from each of the three consoles. It's important to note, however, that in order to simplify the assembly and cooling of this little world, XNZ opted for "digital" versions of the consoles. In other words, none of them has an optical drive.
And while the machine is not intended for sale, it is perfectly functional. XNZ has provided a 250-watt power supply for the machine, which cannot, however, run two games at the same time on two of the three platforms: the power supply would not keep up. We also salute the attention to detail, with the inclusion of an Arduino board to install a platform selection button at the top of the case. The "Ningtendo PXBOX 5" has no chance of ever finding its way into your home, but the work done by the XNZ team is striking.
