it won't fit what am i gonna do hey there little buddy don't you worry
that's the sugo 16 a case that opens up
so you can slide your GPU in from the front giving it nearly the performance
potential of a mid tower but in a tiny little enclosure it's kind of like you
wow can i help you sure can by listening to this
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there have been a number of conflicting trends in the pc building space over the
last few years consumers want their cases to be smaller and more quiet while
gpus keep getting larger and more power
hungry meaning that they require more cooling now theoretically the solution
to this is simple just nip here a tuck there get rid of all this dead space and
you're good to go at least as long as you can find a way to get fresh air from
outside the case to your hottest components
on that subject let's have a look at them spread out over our northern lights
desk pad here we've got everything we need starting
with our aorus x570i pro Wi-Fi motherboard this thing is not cheap at
210 but it's got PCIe gen4 room for two m.2
ssds and ample cooling for both the chipset and the vrms which we are going
to need because for our CPU we've gone with the ryzen 9 5900x it runs a little
toasty but if we can get all 12 cores
boosting up to their maximum we are going to be pushing the limits of what a
small form factor gaming slash content creation system can do and at least
unlike the alternative from Intel it might be possible to cool this thing
with a single 120 mm radiator we've got
two options for that the master liquid ml 120 lv2 RGB and the arctic cooling
liquid freezer 120 are both worth around 75 us dollars so the question becomes
which trade-off do we prefer thin radiator 90 millimeter front fan
and then silent full size atx power supply
or thick radiator 120 millimeter front fan
and little sfx l power supply
now as an sfxl fanboy obviously i'm
gonna go with this incredible 1000 watt
unit from silverstone but it should be noted that we could have easily saved
over fifty dollars and still gotten something like a seasonic prime tx850
watt titanium which would have been basically silent in this config albeit
at the cost of case airflow and CPU
cooling capacity for RAM since we've basically given up all pretense at this
being an economical build we've gone with 32 gigs of crucial ballistics max
4 400 mega transfer per second cl 19
memory gonna be a little bit fast and then
we've gone with a sabrina rocket one terabyte gen four NVMe SSD for our boot
drive optionally we could add something like a two or a four terabyte wd green
three and a half inch hard drive but i'm not sure if we're gonna bother because
what are we gonna do with that hard drive after you know what
sure screw it we're gonna put in the hard drive
we lose the front fan we're not gonna put in the hard drive if we need more
space we'd go with an eight terabyte rocket cue now that our motherboard's
prepped we're gonna go ahead and open this baby up with any small form factor
case i can tell you you're going to want to remove as many pieces of it as you
can in order to get as much access to it as you can because cable managing these
things is always a bit of a nightmare and in a design that requires the
motherboard to go all the way to the back of the motherboard tray like this
one it's especially important this is not a sandwich style case so that means
that almost all the building is going to be done from one side i'm just going to go ahead and lay it down not like that
because then you guys wouldn't be able to see what i'm doing motherboard goes in upside down compared to what is
typical these front panel connectors are sort of unreasonably long considering
that they're going to go into an itx motherboard and they're only this far
away but the reason for that is actually a pretty good one and that's because if
you have a cooler here or power supply here or
other things that are interfering at the front of the case you need to be able to
go around them so you just end up with all this extra
slack unfortunately here's another cool thing silverstone's documentation
doesn't seem to mention it but this looks like an SSD mount in the bottom
here and it lines up as an SSD mount maybe
they intended for you to put something else there but gosh darn it i'm going to put in another
7.6 terabytes of solid-state storage
unfortunately this means adding more cables which in the case of our SATA
data cable is no problem because i managed to find one of these old super
small form factor friendly silverstone cables but in the case of our power
cable means adding considerable bulk to the
build with that plugged into the board side and kind of cable managed down here
we can talk about a benefit of modular power supplies that doesn't really come
up with normal sized cases and that is that they allow you to plug in the
component side of your cables before you
actually have the power supply itself anywhere near the build this is great
because it means that if your power supply would have been in the way of
plugging this stuff in you don't really have to deal with that ah come on
sideways is considerably more ergonomic and we've
got eight pin eps oh my goodness i wish
i had put this on before i even put the motherboard in at this point look how
deeply buried in there it is and the problem is that as a right-handed person
i can't even get the hand in there to guide it in
we're going left-handed ladies and gentlemen okay
it's all coming together now it's time to talk about fans a conventional
cooling layout would have us drawing air in at the front bottom and then
exhausting from the back and the top but we are going to do the opposite today in
order to get the freshest possible air to our water cooling radiator here and
to our GPU which is gonna be up here we're gonna draw air in at the back and
top and then we're gonna blow it all out the front so when this thing's going
full bore if you were you know having a cold gaming day your hands are cold you
could put your hands in front of it you'd have about a probably a solid 500
to 600 watt space heater just blowing
air on you all right so we want this radiator in a pole configuration that
just means that cleaning it off is going to be a little bit easier in the future
so you can see we're using okay there we go this fan to pull air in
this way um
one second one nice thing about Noctua nff12 fans is they have these nice
little airflow guides that keep anything from accidentally bumping into the fan
blades at least on the backside they don't have anything like that on the
front however so we're going to grab one of these old-school style
wire fan grills put that on there
then mount our front fan because this is going to make it so that when we're
packing in our power supply and all these cables nothing's going to get in the way and
prevent that fan from spinning and now you can really see why we weren't able
to have a full-size exhaust fan here along with an atx power supply so the
atx power supply would go all the way over to here meaning that we're limited
to just this but our sfxl power supply
ah no this guy you know what i think i want
this to ah we're gonna use this to exhaust air from the system yeah one two
three go
yes success so wait what just happened
oh had it really
oh interesting so this goes under the
GPU right because this is the front of the case and you don't want to be
plugging your power supply into the front of your stupid computer so it just
chills here oh silverstone you're so creative you
have to give them credit for that you can't you can never take that away from
silverstone bringing us finally to the big moment big reveal
it's true you cannot fit the GPU in because of this power pass through and
that's why they opened up the front of the case like this
so you can slide it in from here
cool right actually before i do that though i never
even mentioned what card we're using this is an rtx 3070 from zotac that we
specifically chose for its shorter length at the expense of taller height
because the case is wide enough to fit a tall card but it's not long enough to
fit a lot of the full length cards on the market okay
i mean that's not bad
this front fan has pretty unimpeded
access to you know pull air away and
i just need one cable tie man this is a kind of a sick machine our CPU is being
cooled by this radiator that's drawing fresh air in fresh brand new ambient air
from the outside and our GPU is
okay well our GPU we have some concerns because theoretically it's right up
against this top intake right here drawing in equally fresh air meaning
that our hottest components are being cooled by ambient air
unfortunately this gap here means that the GPU could end up kind of hot boxing
itself so to speak fortunately
we have an idea to solve that so we're going to test the thermals in this case
two ways first like this
then we're going to pop this front panel back off
and put a little shroud in here you see that
like that so that the GPU is sucking in only fresh
head shots okay because it's got a shroud
it's a hi mike no lie man i don't think i've
ever seen anything quite like it in a small form factor build
this is a really really cool layout and i mean that quite
literally we haven't quite reached equilibrium yet you can see that each
run of cinebench here is seeing the CPU temp spike a little bit higher but this
is a 5900 freaking x
running at four gigahertz all core that is still
even when it settles in just looking at the way this curve is flattening out
not going to reach higher than about 75 degrees
and our GPU is settling in around
70 probably around 75 as well that's
crazy like normally with these kind of small form factor builds we would say
okay you know in games it doesn't thermal throttle but if you hit it with
a full synthetic stress test right like
fully loading the CPU and the GPU you're gonna have to expect it in an
unrealistic load like that at thermal throttles
but this just doesn't no matter what we do to it
and that's exactly where we ended up our highest peak on the CPU is 78 degrees
78.4 and our GPU ended up at 73 degrees
with the most impressive part being listen to this
oh wow the case is freaking hot at the
front holy crap
everywhere else though not bad and the internal components not
bad either now it's time to see if we can kick things up a notch so let's go ahead and
position our shroud we're not going to go all the way up to the card here
because as we learned when we tried to make our own janky Noctua edition GPU
you don't actually want to block off these exhaust fins so we're just going
to go kind of to here okay so we're trying to block it off so
that GPU only pulls in fresh air shroud
works confirmed we dropped from 73 to 71
71 and a half degrees and we went from around 2100 RPM and change to about
2070. so
not as dramatic a difference as i might have hoped and certainly not as good as
just taking the side panel off and giving it a little bit more room to
breathe but a lot better than nothing but wait
there's more what's this this is our this is our GPU isn't it
no we have gone one step farther and we've
actually put an AMD Radeon 6800 xt in
here and it just barely fits and get this we are still
topped out at 79 degrees
it's still whisper quiet and our CPU
still hit a maximum of 78 degrees it's
like right there
right there at the front of the case freaking crazy
they made such efficient use of this thing to the point where if they had
made it even one centimeter longer 10 millimeters longer
they would have been able to put a 3080 in it and i think with this design they
might have actually gotten away with that from a cooling perspective
10 millimeters wider they would have been able to fit a 120 millimeter fan
with a full-size atx power supply and if they made it just five millimeters
taller they could have actually fit triple slot gpus in here honestly though
even with all those little compromises made i am really
really happy with this case i think it's super cool and unique and when it comes
out either in december of this year or early next year i think this thing is
going to be a sleeper hit just like oh shoot i hit the power
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this thing's just awesome