Have you ever thought the Nintendo Wii would make a good enclosure for a mini PC? Tech By Matt clearly did— on November 3, the YouTuber uploaded a video showcasing a custom mini PC build taking the original Wii enclosure and repurposing it with the internals of a Minisforum UM773 Mini PC, which is an AMD-powered rig using a Ryzen 7 7735HS APU and Radeon 680M graphics.
The Radeon 680M iGPU features 12 RDNA 2 Compute Units— combined with the 8-core, Zen 3+ Ryzen 7 7735HS. This means you can expect performance akin to a souped-up Steam Deck and its custom Van Gogh APU, which uses 8 RDNA 2 Compute Units and 4 Zen 2 cores. Some modern laptops and Mini PCs with Radeon 780M or 890M iGPUs are even more powerful, but 680M is no slouch— and is demonstrated in the original build video emulating games up to PlayStation 3 and even running some modern AAA titles at 40-60 FPS.
Those who watch the full video will get to see a detailed run-down of how the final mini PC was assembled, including how the I/O cover and motherboard mount was measured out and 3D printed. The disassembly and trimming process of the original Wii is also shown, and the GameCube controller ports from a dedicated Wii U GameCube Controller adapter end up repurposed into the Wii shell rather than using the Wii's original GameCube controller slots. This was by far the most space-effective way to do it, and some additional 3D printing secured it properly to the system.
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The final Nintendo Wii sleeper PC build ends up looking fairly clean, and gets benchmark testing across quite a few emulators (up to even Nintendo Switch, though that console proves not quite playable on this Mini PC hardware— emulation overhead can be quite demanding), eSports titles like Valorant, and even AAA games like Borderlands 3.
The most demanding tests end up being for Switch emulation and AAA gaming, where the PC seems to falter when tested at 1080p, often dipping to 40-50 FPS in more demanding titles, as one may expect from the slightly outdated mini PC. Had Tech By Matt utilized a more cutting-edge Mini PC, this sleeper Wii PC build could have ended up being a proper modern mini console— but as-is, it's still massively more powerful than the original Wii or Wii U, so it's still a solid, well-executed effort.
