Lots of folks these days choose to build their own computers, either to save money or just because they like to customize it themselves. In the following report NY1 Tech Beat Reporter Adam Balkin introduces us to a Manhattan man building a computer guaranteed to be one of a kind.

Nathan Sawaya is building his own fully functional computer, which isn't terribly out of the ordinary. The fact that he's building it out of Lego’s is not something you hear every day.

“PC Magazine approached me with a great idea; why don't you build a Lego PC for their ‘How To Build a Computer’ issue. And so I took up the challenge,” says Sawaya. “This is an entire PC that's built all out of Lego, so it doesn't function, it's just a replica of a PC. So they come back to me, they see what I've done and PC Magazine decides, ‘Why don't we build a working PC and use Lego bricks as part of the building parts?’ PC Magazine has supplied me with the interior of a monitor and the interior parts of a hard drive, and I'll really encase those with Lego to give a real Lego look to it.”

The PC, made of 3,000 bricks, will take around 25 hours to build, almost twice the time as typical desktop Lego sculptures. That's just a guesstimate though, as the working version is still under construction.

“We're about halfway there. We have a working LCD monitor, a 17-inch LCD monitor - it's actually a Samsung Synchmaster monitor - and it's encased in Lego’s,” says Jeremy Kaplan of PC Magazine. “I'm thinking we're going to have two CD drives, there’s going to be a host of USB ports, it's going to be close to a 2-Gigahertz processor, and 512 MB ram - standard stats. It'll be a pretty decent computer. It won't be a barn burner, but it will be a decent computer.”

Nathan says building the PC isn't necessarily more difficult than his tradition Lego sculptures, just different, because whereas the traditional sculptures just sit there for people to look at, the computer is his first functional model.

“This was a challenge to build a functioning unit,” he says. “It's a little harder because people know computers and they know what they look like, so I really wanted to capture it in a sense that people would recognize it immediately.”

If you'd like a Lego PC, but don't quite have the computer or Lego construction know-how to do it yourself, PC Magazine is giving this one away through a sweepstakes on its website, PCMag.com.

Oh, and incidentally, Nathan says he has no immediate plans to build a Macintosh computer.