WTF?! As the famous quote goes, just because you can do something, it doesn't mean you should. A prime example of this warning has been illustrated by a Redditor who built a PC with more than 15,000 GIFs playing across 13 screens inside the case.
Several-Bar-6512 had the goal of building a PC that was unique, long-lasting, and something to be proud of. The result is certainly something we've never seen before.
Unlike most builds, this one started with the Redditor downloading over 17,000 GIFs. After editing and organizing them, the total number came to over 15,000.
Several-Bar-6512 downloaded several thousand GIFs at a time from various sites, then used random naming software to scramble all the filenames. After that, they used the same tool to rename the files sequentially with numbers. It was their way of keeping track of everything while making sure GIFs from the same topic didn't end up clumped together.
Editing all the GIFs to fit the aspect ratios of the screens they would be shown on, adjusting playback speeds, and trimming and looping them took a stunning 200 hours.
My Very Distracting 15,000+ GIF PC
by u/Several-Bar-6512 in pcmasterrace
The build uses five WOWNOVA 5-inch USB displays (800 x 480), four WOWNOVA 8.8-inch USB displays (1,920 x 480), one MAGICRAVEN 14.5-inch 4K portable monitor (3,840 x 2,400), one VSDISPLAY 12.7-inch stretched bar display (2,880 x 864), and two Wisecoco 14-inch 4K stretched bar displays (3,840 x 1,100).
Nearly all of the display video loops run for 5 minutes before repeating, apart from two of the five-inch screens, which run for approximately 10 minutes and 15 minutes, respectively. Because the setup contains so many individual GIF tiles across those loops, watching every one from beginning to end would take 13.5 hours, not that anyone would want to do so.
Powering this ungodly GIF apocalypse are three Raspberry Pi 5 boards, all mounted inside the case and set to power on and off alongside the PC and screens.
The four larger displays are driven by the Pis, though the builder had to add an extra board after running into problems getting a second screen working alongside the 14.5-inch 3,840 x 2,400 panel, despite the Pi 5's supposed ability to handle two 4K displays at once.
The remaining nine screens play their videos directly from microSD cards, meaning they need only USB power, with no display cables and no load placed on the desktop's own hardware. One of the bar displays is also mounted on a magnetic hinge so it can be moved aside to check motherboard debug codes if needed.
The hardware alone makes this an impressive gaming PC. The parts list includes an AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D, MSI X870E Carbon WiFi motherboard, MSI Ventus 3X GeForce RTX 5090 OC Edition graphics card, Samsung 9100 Pro 4TB NVMe SSD, a Lian Li O11 Dynamic Evo XL case, and a stunning 96GB of DDR5 RAM. The whole setup must have cost a small fortune.
It also features Noctua fans, a push-pull radiator setup, and 3D-printed mounts and brackets to hold the displays.
Several-Bar-6512 admits that this PC is "absolutely not practical whatsoever" and doesn't recommend that anyone try a similar build project. But that's unlikely to stop people with time and money from making their own GIF-based PCs.