B2G BattleStations: HyperX Engine Rig by Ai Mask Wei

During Computex, Kingston held numerous activities including a media conference and a public demo featuring Youtube star Luo Shi Ru, who goes by S.White, featuring an insane drum cover of English, Korean, Mandarin and Japanese music. Also present in that public event is gigantic Harley Davidson-inspired rig made by Chinese modder Wei Zheng. We sat down with Wei for an interview to discuss his creations.

Introducing the: HyperX Engine Rig – A Scratch Built PC

A bit of background about the custom Harley Davidson case: its actually a part of the MICLE “Proud of Blood” Custom Engine Case series created by Wei Zheng himself. The chassis will be purely scratch-built in partnership with In Win and is available in stock chassis or pre-configured PC setups with the Kingston HyperX setup featuring the specs above. Kingston reps tell us the chassis weigh an astonishing 60KGs and had to be hoisted to its pedestal via a forklift.

For a quick breakdown, the HyperX Engine Rig features an ASUS RAMPAGE V EXTREME board with a Core i7-5960X 8-core processor complemented by 4x4GB DDR4 Kingston HyperX Predator memories with the system booting from a HyperX Predator PCI-e SSD with a insane 1400MB/s 1000MB/s read and write throughput. An ASUS MATRIX R9 290X serves primary display duties for this rig.

Interview with AI Mask Wei

If you want to do more, you need to create. – AI MASK WEI

B2G: Hi! Nice to meet you. So to start off, what was the inspiration going into this project? What inspired the concept?

MASK-Wei: I bought a Harley-Davidson last year and since then I would always ride with my bike gang and some of them came up and said “Hey, since you’re already a modder why don’t you build one [Harley-Davidson themed case]?” And that was it.

B2G: There are a lot of builds out there. What makes this build unique?

MASK-Wei: I have produced around 70 of the Harley-Davidson casemods and one is built only when someone orders one so each build is unique. For each build, there’s a different set of colors and different materials. I’m planning on building one with carbon fiber materials soon, for the Harley Davidson casemod, on a future project.

B2G: What was the hardest part in doing this build?

MASK-Wei: The biggest challenge was keeping temperatures down. We had to make provisions for letting the air flow through and we spent months planning that before this project. The other challenge is choosing the right materials for this case mod. So the one we have outside, its not the final ideal one. Hopefully I’ll try and make more… improve the materials.

B2G: Expanding on that last note, is the design right now final? Are you happy with the look of the build right now?

MASK-Wei: So far, this one, has some issues with transportation especially long distance. So we’re working on making it more durable and endure more bumps during travel.

B2G: So moving on the Kingston products, we’re here seeing all these new HyperX products, does the designs inspire him and what can you say about the designs?

MASK-Wei: I actually want to build a smaller case. My idea is to combine Rex, which is inspired by the Moai statues, and put X designs on the sides but right now its all ideas.

B2G: Right now what’s your favorite Kingston product?

MASK-Wei: DRAM! The reason is that since I was starting out learning and building computers, I was using Kingston DRAM. And I’m really happy with after-sales support.

B2G: Kingston sponsors and helps out a lot of upcoming and young modders, what advise do you have to these new modders?

MASK-Wei: So there are two kinds of modders: one is looking for better appearance, so if you’re an amateur you start off by changing appearance and I’m okay with that but for those that want to do more you need to create. You transcend modding, the word is “create.” Like create a case. For you to create, you need to know every detail, every basic knowledge, every standard for this case to make sure the case is safe enough, that it works well, and its without any problems. So if you want to just mod a case for fun, just to improve appearance, its fine but if you want to make a really good casemod, you need to get familiar with all the related knowledge PCs. Basically engineer the chassis.

B2G: Thank you for your time! And we wish you the best in all your works.

MASK-Wei: Thanks!

This interview was conducted in person with the help of a translator. Some parts were edited for clarity

You can follow MASK-Wei in his Weibo account.

We would like to thank Kingston APAC for making this interview possible.