5 weird retro PC parts that make today's modern PCs look boring

Published Nov 15, 2026, 11:31 AM EST Ismar is a Senior Author at How-To Geek. He previously worked as a writer, editor, and general manager at a content agency before joining the team in 2023. He began his writing career in 2021 after completing a BA in English Language and Literature. Beyond How-To Geek, Ismar has contributed to Red Stag Fulfillment and Authority Hacker. He has also worked on various SEO projects to help clients improve their search visibility. Ismar has been around Windows PCs since the age of three, so friends and family naturally chose him as the resident tech support. His projects often involve tinkering, such as disassembling mechanical keyboards and gaming mice to mod his beloved gear. He also enjoys pushing hardware to the max through overclocking while staying on a reasonable budget. An avid gamer, Ismar has logged thousands of hours across various genres, including first-person shooters, RPGs, racing games, and roguelites. When he is not at his desk, he is probably exploring other people’s phones to discover their quirks and features or experimenting with the latest AI tools. In his free time, Ismar enjoys spending time with his wife, working out at the gym, playing guitar and bass, cooking gourmet meals, and traveling. Above all else, he’s a proud cat owner. Computer parts were genuinely crazy in the 90s and throughout much of the 2000s. It seemed like every few months, some company would come up with a crazy new concept that completely revolutionized how everything worked. Much of it stemmed from our obsession with cool aesthetics and innovative cooling designs, but some ideas went so far as to revolutionize the very hardware that powers the PC, like putting two full-size GPUs onto a single PCB. Some ideas were so unique that they made you wonder who could come up with something like that, let alone actually deliver the final product. The Cooler Master V10 was a CPU cooler that looked like a high-performance engine A mini fridge inside a CPU cooler One of my earliest memories of PC hardware, and one of the coolest things I'd ever seen in a computer, was the Cooler Master V10, a high-end CPU cooler that belonged to a line of engine-inspired air coolers. Several came out over the years, like the V8, the V6 GT, and the crazy V8 GTS, but none of them were as cool and crazy as the V10. The Cooler Master V10 was a massive, engine-style cooler that extended drastically beyond the CPU socket on both sides. This hybrid design combined a 70W thermoelectric (TEC/Peltier) plate, which has a hot and a cold side, with a more traditional heatsink design. In theory, the TEC plate would help transfer heat from a separate set of heat pipes to the rear heatsink, while the rest of the cooler handled CPU heat conventionally. As cool as the design looked and seemed on paper, unfortunately, the TEC plate didn't really do much. Peltier coolers draw a lot of power, which is eventually converted into additional heat that also needs to be dissipated, so the end result was a temperature reduction of only a few degrees. If you love cars and wish you could get your hands on one of these cool coolers in a modern PC, I've got some great news for you — Cooler Master has revived the V-Series with a more modern design featuring its proprietary 3D Heat Pipe (3DHP) technology. These coolers don't have the same crazy, gimmicky design as the old ones, but they're designed for more practical cooling performance and still feature a cool, engine-cover-style faceplate. Asus thought motherboards deserved liquid cooling too and gave us the ROG Blitz Extreme A surprisingly elaborate cooling system Credit: Asus There have been numerous crazy motherboard designs over the years, but one of the coolest (literally) and most over-the-top was the ASUS ROG Blitz Extreme. This LGA 775 motherboard came out in 2007 and had every high-end feature you could want at that time: four DDR3 RAM slots (when DDR3 was brand-new), six SATA II ports, two eSATA ports, two FireWire 400 connections, dual Gigabit Ethernet, and a bundled SupremeFX II audio card. But none of those are why the ROG Blitz Extreme is on this list. What made this motherboard special was that it was among the first motherboards to integrate a water block into its cooling assembly. This so-called Fusion Block System worked as a conventional passive heatsink, but it also featured an integrated water block that enthusiasts could connect to a custom liquid-cooling loop. It connected the northbridge, southbridge, and MOSFETs for optimal motherboard cooling that overclocking enthusiasts could use to push the FSB (Front-Side bus) to the max. Unfortunately, the trend of liquid-cooled motherboards has mostly died down in the modern era, with only a handful of modern examples like the ASUS ROG Maximus Z790 Formula and MSI MPG Z690 Carbon EK X. The Antec Skeleton was an open-air case with a gigantic fan hanging over your build A surprisingly unique approach to airflow Credit: Antec Open-air test benches had been around for years by the late 2000s. They were mostly used by enthusiasts and reviewers who frequently swapped out parts to test different configurations. Antec saw an opportunity to bring this concept to a wider audience, which eventually resulted in the Antec Skeleton, an unusual open-air case. It's hard to overstate just how crazy this case was, as it came out in an era when conventional desktop towers were enclosed. Instead of hiding your hardware behind panels, this open-air frame left most of the components visible and easily accessible. To provide adequate cooling, the case had a massive 250mm multicolor fan mounted on top, with physical switches to control its speed and lighting. The whole thing looked a bit like a spider's body, with the frame extending out around your actual build. Open-air frames still exist today, but many look much more industrial and utilitarian than this case. They're mostly designed for reviewers and tinkerers instead of the average gamer. The Asetek VapoChill turned your build into a refrigerator Sometimes, water cooling just wasn't cold enough Credit: Asetek Have you ever wished that you could turn your PC into a fridge that keeps the internals chilled and then just dumps that heat out in the back? Asetek founder Andre Eriksen had that same idea too. The company's first product was the VapoChill, a PC case built around a phase-change CPU cooler that could achieve sub-zero temperatures for extreme overclocking. The case worked more or less like a mini refrigerator: a cold plate was mounted directly on the processor, transferring heat from the CPU to the refrigerant. As it absorbed heat, the refrigerant boiled and turned into a gas. The compressor then pressurized the gas and sent it through a condenser, where a fan helped dissipate the heat into the surrounding air and turn the refrigerant back into a liquid before making its way back to the CPU to repeat the cycle. This worked surprisingly well, so well in fact that the sub-zero temps caused condensation to form, which could potentially cause a short-circuit somewhere inside the PC. It was also expensive to manufacture, so Asetek later released standalone units that could be used with existing cases, which were eventually followed by smaller, compressor-free hybrid CPU coolers, like the Asetek Vapochill Micro High End. Even though refrigerant-based systems are far from practical, I can't help but wish we still had something like this instead of boring AIO liquid coolers. The Asus ROG Mars II squeezed two full-fat GTX 580s onto one massive graphics card It makes the RTX 5090 look mediocre Credit: Asus There have been dozens of insane graphics cards throughout history, but if I had to pick just one to top this list, it has to be the ASUS ROG Mars II. This crazy card featured two full-spec GF110 GPUs (the GPU used in the GTX 580) and 3GB of VRAM on a custom PCB, an impressive feat considering that NVIDIA's own dual-GPU GTX 590 ran its two GF110s at considerably lower core and memory clock speeds compared to a standard GTX 580. Asus only made 999 units of this extreme card, and it set the original buyers in 2011 at a whopping $1,500, well above the $499 MSRP of a single GTX 580 and $699 for the GTX 590. The most impressive feat of this entire card was the cooling. Asus managed to optimize the cooling enough for this triple-slot card using just two fans, despite the card drawing north of 500W through its triple 8-pin PCIe power connectors. The Asus ROG Mars II and other dual-GPU cards from this era were a thing thanks to on-board SLI. Many games scaled well with two GPUs during this era, so it actually made sense for some gamers. The craziest part is that since this card had an external SLI bridge, you could technically run two of these cards in a crazy quad SLI setup. It's extremely unlikely that a card like this could be made today.GPUs are much more complex and power-hungry, which would make powering and cooling two of them on a single PCB unnecessarily difficult. The cost of this would be just too high, the appeal too niche, and, worst of all, modern games don't even support multi-GPU implementations. PC hardware needs to get weird again Modern hardware is much more practical, but I can't help missing the era when hardware manufacturers weren't afraid to experiment with ridiculous designs just because they could. Most enthusiast-grade hardware today looks like slightly fancier versions of the same thing, with RGB lighting, tempered glass, and plastic and metal shrouds doing most of the heavy lifting.