Yesterday, we announced the winner of our "get creative with PC parts" contest. The contest involved fashioning PC parts into something anthropomorphic-looking, and we were very impressed with the craftsmanship of our winning entry. The low-resolution photo didn’t entirely do it justice, however:

Happily, our winner—who goes by rookiebeotch in the forums—has snapped some higher-resolution glamour photos of his work. He’s also shared some details about the components he used and how he put them together. It’s all quite interesting:

The Samurai is the lightest of the 3, no heatsink. His body is fleshed out with keyboard keys, although it is hard to notice unless you look at his messy back. In addition to the general frame of the figure, an additional line of coathanger material had to be run down the left arm to support the solid metal sword. Dremeling the gpu cooler housing was difficult, at fast or low speeds the plastic would melt away from the cut path and solidify next to the blade. Then the entire housing would vibrate and begin to heat up until it was too hot to hold in any position. I felt particularly lucky in finding suitable Katana and Wakizashi scabbards.

The Archer is extremely top heavy. I had originally intended to layer PCB paneling to form armor similar to the samurai’s but it became obvious that cutting the PCB with the dremel would create excessive toxic fumes. I just quickly made some crude cuts and was done with it. Notice his ethernet port quiver stores the majority of the arrow length in cyber space! Just kidding, its another cheat.

The Gunslinger was always only meant to be half a robot. The camera angle was going to hide his missing lower half. He is extremely dense, not only because of the heatsink, but the blower fan hat is super heavy. I had to shove all sorts of random plastic struts into his head and I dumped an entire stick of glue in there just to keep his head on.

According to rookiebeotch’s forum post, the characters were designed from reference material and mocked up in advance. The results speak for themselves. For his trouble, rookiebeotch was awarded with our grand prize: a PowerColor Radeon HD 7950, a Samsung P3 1TB portable external hard drive, and a Rosewill Throne gaming enclosure—all of which were all donated by Newegg. We also had two runners-up in the contest; each of them was awarded with an A8-6600K processor donated by AMD.

You’ll find high-res photos of rookiebeotch’s characters in the gallery below. The forum thread with all of the other contest entries can be found here.