We have all been there, staring at a cluttered entertainment center overflowing with black and white plastic boxes, a tangled web of HDMI cables, and more power bricks than a construction site. For years, the dream of having just one box to rule them all has been exactly that: a dream. But a Chinese modder known as Xiao Ningzi, or XNZ, decided that waiting for Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo to play nice was a waste of time. Instead, she took matters into her own hands and built what she calls the Ningtendo PXBOX 5. This is not just a hack job with some tape and luck. It is a fully integrated hybrid gaming machine that crams the guts of the three biggest consoles into a single, sleek tower.
Getting rid of the excess weight
When you look at a modern console, most of what you are seeing is actually just air and cooling. The actual silicon that runs your games is relatively small, but the power supplies and massive heatsinks required to keep them from melting are what give them their bulky footprints. XNZ realized that if you strip away the plastic shells and the proprietary cooling solutions, you are left with three motherboards that are surprisingly manageable.
The real genius here was not just putting them in one box, but making them share the same lungs. By designing a unified cooling system and a single power source, the footprint of this hybrid gaming machine is significantly smaller than the three original consoles combined. It is a reminder that while these companies build for mass production and durability, there is a lot of “fat” that can be trimmed if you have the technical skill to rethink the architecture from the ground up.
Ancient crafts meet modern silicon
The centerpiece of this build is a triangular heatsink that looks like something out of a high-end laboratory. Creating such a specific shape with traditional CNC machining would have cost a fortune, so XNZ went back a few thousand years for the solution. She used lost-wax casting, an ancient metalworking technique. She 3D printed the design in plastic, encased it in a heat-resistant material, and then melted the plastic away to leave a mold for molten aluminum.
It is a fascinating juxtaposition. You have the most advanced gaming hardware on the planet being cooled by a block of metal made using a technique that was around long before electricity. Each side of this triangular block is home to one of the console motherboards. The PlayStation 5 sits on one face, the Xbox Series X on another, and the Nintendo Switch 2 on the third. A large fan at the base pulls air through the center of the structure, cooling all three platforms simultaneously.
The technical trade offs
Building a hybrid gaming machine like this requires making some hard choices. The most obvious one is the lack of disc drives. To keep the design tight and cylindrical, inspired by the 2013 Mac Pro “trash can” look, the physical media drives had to go. This makes the unit a digital-only beast. For many modern gamers, that is a non-issue, but it is a reminder that the “all-in-one” dream still has its limits.
Then there is the power situation. The system runs on a single 250W power supply. While that is enough to run any of the three consoles individually, you cannot fire them all up at once for a triple-screen madness session. An Arduino-based controller handles the switching logic, ensuring that when you press the big button on top, the system swaps the HDMI signal and manages the power states. It takes about three to five seconds to jump from an Xbox exclusive to a Nintendo title. It is smooth, efficient, and honestly, a bit surreal to watch in action.
More than just a novelty
While some might see this as a “because I can” project, there is a genuine practical side to it. The reduction in cable clutter alone is enough to make any setup enthusiast weep with joy. One power cord and one HDMI cable are all you need to access the entire current generation of gaming. XNZ even went the extra mile with the Switch 2 integration, building a custom spring-loaded dock so the handheld can still be popped out for portable play.
It is a project that highlights the frustration many of us feel with fragmented ecosystems. We are forced to buy three different pieces of hardware just to follow our favorite franchises. While the Ningtendo PXBOX 5 will never see a retail shelf, it serves as a proof of concept. It shows that the technology exists to make our gaming lives much simpler if the corporate walls weren’t so high.
A symbol of peace in the console war
XNZ joked in her video that this console is a symbol of friendship, a way to end the console wars once and for all. Seeing a blue light for Sony, green for Xbox, and red for Nintendo all coming from the same glowing ring on a single machine is a powerful image. It is a high-performance hybrid gaming machine that does not care about brand loyalty; it only cares about the games.
For those of us who have spent decades tracking the evolution of hardware, this is the kind of project that keeps the spark alive. It is raw, it is experimental, and it solves a problem that the multi-billion dollar manufacturers have no interest in solving for us. It might be a digital-only, DIY-heavy monster, but it is the closest we have ever come to the “one console” future.
Release and availability
As you might have guessed, the Ningtendo PXBOX 5 is a one-of-a-kind prototype created for a YouTube project and is not for sale. The cost of parts alone, including a PS5, an Xbox Series X, and a Switch 2, puts the baseline price well over 1300 USD, not including the hundreds of hours of labor and custom casting. If you want to see the full build process, XNZ has the entire journey documented on her YouTube channel.
