I hope you like warlocks. Well, if you're someone who regularly delves into Diablo, I hope you at the very least don't detest warlocks with all of your hellish heart. Because yesterday evening's Diablo 30th anniversary shindig was rather heavy on warlocks, with the class coming to not just Diablo 4's next expansion, but also Diablo 2 and Diablo Immortal. Meanwhile, Diablo 2: Resurrected has moseyed on over to Steam.

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Back in 2023, a (slightly) more innocent time before Microsoft ravaged its games studios with layoffs and made itself into a BDS priority target, Blizzard held a competition: To promote Diablo IV’s second season, it raffled off a PC "infused with real human blood in its liquid cooling" as part of a blood drive seeking 666 quarts of the red goop that keeps us all alive. I was desperate to know more. How much blood? Whose blood? Can blood reliably and sustainably cool a PC? And, again, whose blood?

At the time, answers proved elusive. Blizzard PR failed to reply to my requests for additional details, and a person I reached out to at Corsair – an expert, albeit not with regard to this particular PC – did not seem interested in discussing the infernal blood engine’s more theoretical aspects. So, dejected, I called off the hunt. But then, last week, via the replies to a Bluesky post by freelance writer (and occasional Aftermath contributor) Jay Castello, I learned that the winner of the competition had semi-recently surfaced on Reddit. Once again, the game was afoot. 

Turns out, Blizzard’s diabolical blood PC went to a streamer who goes by the handle Storms888. He received it at the tail end of November 2023, and – despite or perhaps because of the blood – it’s still going strong.  

“The PC is virtually perfect,” Storms888 told Aftermath. “I haven't seen any drops in performance since the day I got it. … It’s incredible for streaming/recording. Right now I've been streaming Battlefield 6 at ultra settings with easily over 200+ [frames per second].”

Unsurprisingly, given that pure, thick, coagulation-prone blood seems like it’d be an awful coolant, there’s probably some smoke and mirrors happening here.

“It appears that the coolant is mostly regular standard coolant and that they had added red blood cells inside of it,” said Storms888. “They did not specify what the ratio was, but it's dark red.”

Whose blood, though? Sadly, that, much like blood, is unclear. 

"There is not [information about who exactly the blood came from]," Storms888 said. "There was a donor slip that specifically said it was a confirmed blood sample/donation, but that was all."

But OK, say something goes wrong, or the blood-tinged coolant loses its luster, as all things do with time? Don’t worry: Blizzard thought of that.

“[Blizzard] did not specify any need to replace it,” said Storms888, “although they did give me a replacement vial/bottle of blood. ... This did leak a ton though. I had to put the bottle in a separate bag.”

For reasons that probably should be obvious by now, upgrading the blood PC is out of the question.

“I have not upgraded it,” said Storms888, “and yes, the custom nature of it does play a role. I don't want to change any aspect of it for the novelty factor – would love to give this to my future kids some day – as well as the technical limitations, since the CPU and GPU have custom water blocks mounted on them, and I'm not experienced with messing with those.”

But Storms888 also doesn’t think he’ll need to start thinking about buying a boring, bloodless PC any time soon.

“I will keep using it until a [Nvidia] 4090 [graphics card] and [Intel] 14900k [processor] are no longer serviceable for modern games. So I assume at least for the next 7-10 years,” he joked. “Overall I am still shocked to this day that I won it. The majority of my life I've had absolutely terrible computers. … This genuinely has been a life-changing experience, and it's opened up so many doors for me professionally with streaming.”

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