bu an unlocked Intel 4th gen core i7 or core i5 processor and get a free copy of
Rome 2 Total War click now to learn more this is the first time we've ever done a
system review on Linus Tech tips and frankly I wasn't 100% sure where to
start and while you might be thinking to yourself well Linus you could start by
showing us the system rather than a monitor I would reply to that I am
showing you the system this is heavy and
it's the crate computer from crate computers and it is one heck of a unique
high performance gaming system so let's
kick things off with an overview of who exactly this is built for I mean I see
this as the ultimate Land Machine or the
all-in-one PC for people who think being Limited in terms of performance and
upgrades the way a traditional all-in-one would be is for chumps okay
but the next question you might ask me is well why would I even want an
all-in-one and you know what I don't have a solid answer because personally
I'm good with my full tower I've got a whole house with three whole people
living in it one of whom is a baby and I never ever remove my computer but for
the folks that are interested in all-in ones I'd love to hear from you in the
comment section tell me what is appealing about the all-in-one form
factor where you've got the PC and the Monitor and they take up basically the
same footprint as just a monitor I mean the way that I see it is I'm put putting
words in your mouth but this is for folks that want the flexibility to be
able to pick up and move it wherever they need to go and the space savings to
have their entire high performance gaming rig take up as much space as a
monitor I mean I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that if that's what you're trying to achieve the crate
computer has a higher performance to foot print ratio than pretty much
anything else on the market the system arrives extrem
extremely well packed the Box both the outer one and the accessory one has a
spray painted logo on it and the inside
of the packaging uses those oh yeah you get a t-shirt well kind of like a nice
Polo and then the inside uses those bags
that expand and fill in the gaps as the chemicals inside mix I'm really glad to
see crate be smart and use these they are really really expensive but they're
the only real option for small companies who are serious about their computers
around driving in one piece and are not shipping high enough volume to justify
fully custom packaging so next up is a
tour of the outside the front is a monitor that's sort of a dur moment
there it's an all-in-one so it stands to reason you can actually pick your
monitor on their website this particular one is a vonic 1080p 27in LED back lit
one but they have a 24in there's also a 3D capable gaming monitor from isus and
what's cool is that if you ever decide down the line to switch to something
else the attachment system used here between the system and the monitor is a
standard vase amount so you'll have the option to change to something else if
you want that's a nice touch from a diy's perspective the monitor stand is
where things start to get interesting it's one of the heaviest most robust
feeling hunks of solid metal that I've ever encountered on a computer I guess
given that it's designed to hold a 27in screen and a full gaming computer means
that that sort of makes sense but I was still in awe of it when I pulled it out
of the box with much difficulty unfortunately it replaces the stock
stand so you lose any tilt swivel height
adjust or any other adjustments that you would normally be able to make to the
monitor you'll pretty much put it down on your desk and short of an aftermarket
riser to put it on top of something or something like that that is pretty much
how you will use it on the top we don't
find a whole lot there are a couple of decorative Fasteners so hopefully you
guys can see that okay then on the right side we find the stickers that matter
including the Windows Kaa and a core i5 sticker as well as a single lone power
switch the left side is full of ventilation holes but there are no fans
installed WTF ah yes here on the back we find out
that cooling is handled by four 120 mm
fans all of them configured by default as intake which I'll touch on more later
at the bottom we find a nice little short DVI cable that's already hooked up
running between the Monitor and the PC IO courtesy of an EVGA Stinger Mini ITX
motherboard and two power inputs since this is kind of a DIY all-in-one and
you'll have to run two separate power cords in order to get her fired up
opening up the system is actually quite simple just remove the eight- old thumb
screws on the back and you can pop it right off the first thing I noticed is
that those fans that we saw from the outside those 120 mm fans are actually
cougar fans the second thing I noticed is that the back has a nice decorative
crate computers logo on it but that's actually protective as well as being
stylish so it separates the intakes of
the fans from any obstructions that might be behind the computer by a little
bit just so that no matter what there will be enough of a gap for you to get
some air flow in there the third thing I noticed unfortunately was the use of a
stock Intel cooler ouch inside a small
case like this I would have to at least initially question the wisdom of that
but I will let the performance tests tell the whole story the system is
compatible with two and A2 in drives only but you can use any thickness so
while this one is configured with a single 500 gig Neutron SSD from Corsair
and crate computers offers up to a 1 tbyte hard drive as an additional option
because it's not light restricted you could even go after market and pick up a
wd 15 mm thick 2 terabyte 2 and a half
inch Drive to go with your boot SSD for great performance and tons of storage
wiring inside is handled very tidy with all the cable management done behind the
motherboard tray although I've got to question the use of a very industriall
looking power supply it's a 600 wat 80 plus bronze unit so that's all good so
far but that tiny little fan actually two fans seem like they would get
unreasonably loud the manufacturer went
with Patriot Viper series RAM actually 16 gigs in there and uh I'm not really
particular about memory so as long as it runs well on this board I have no
quarrels with that choice we also find ah yes here we go finally an EVGA GTX
780 with an ACX style cooler on a PCI
Express extension their PCI Express
extension solution is actually one of the most interesting things about the
case design it positions the card right next to the external vents on that left
hand side which is definitely plus given that the card uses an open a design
cooler and it will be dumping heat all around it and it also seems to utilize
some kind of like shock mount system that appears to have some Flex to it
rather than being firmly bolted in place this may seem like a pretty questionable
thing to the Casual Observer but in my estimation this should actually give the
card a better chance of making it to your door by acting as a bit of a shock
absorber during shipping it did manage to arrive here in Canada
in one piece at least and while that is a small sample size it's at least proof
that it's not guaranteed to cause problems the centerpiece internally is
of course the EVGA Z87 miniitx
motherboard that makes this whole creative unique and very interesting
system possible now moving on to Performance
the number one concern I have about any compact gaming machine is thermals we we
saw this with the ASRock M8 which is actually a similar size although it
doesn't strap to the back of a monitor um but that one uses 60 mm cooling fans
which in their stock configuration will actually cause a GPU of this caliber to
throttle even at stock frequency so I wanted to put the crate to the test the
unreasonable unrealistic test that is
mAh haa my opening Salvo was good old
furmark it Rose to 80° on the GPU which is perfectly normal but what was
impressive was the fact that it was still running at over 900 MHz boost
clock which is the advertised average boost clock of a referenced GTX 780 so
either evga's ACX cooler or the cooling in the chassis itself is doing its thing
pretty effectively and Fir Mark ran just fine without any tweaks this is a very
solid result and it means that heat is not an immediately limiting factor like
it would be on many cases this size such as the aforementioned azrock M8 and I
mean most cases this size won't even fit a GTX 780 in them never mind cooling it
adequately my next test was for the CPU only so I ran Prime 95 with four threads
on the 4670k which is enough to pretty much fully load it and we got a result
of around 75° that's okay that's great that's fine but it wasn't until I loaded
up furmark at the same time with an open
air cooler on the GTX 780 in this tiny
little case that I got really impressed cuz that is a T of heat to deal with in
a very small space and the CPU only got to 83° on the hottest core I mean fan
noise didn't even get unreasonable even that whiny looking power supply fan was
surprisingly well behaved and didn't have any discernable whiny motor noise
and of course due to the use of those high quality cougar fans on the side
panel the overall system sounds like air whoosing as opposed to Motors whining so
that is a very strong result cooling wise now the crate uses h a strong
positive pressure concept to control airf flow and keep it intaking in the
back and then exhausting only out the left and then of course a little bit
goes out from that active fan on the power supply and this system works with
everything running full blast this vent right here on the side in spite of the
fact that it doesn't have its own fans feels like a space heater there's like
there's like air like coming out of it like that I mean I suspect that by reor
orienting the fans on the side panel you might be able to achieve slightly better
temperatures on one component or another
but I don't think it would have the same overall effect that crate computers is
going for of dispensing the heat um from
the GPU with getting rid of it immediately and pushing it out the side
panel rather than allowing it to affect the other components in fact I believe
that that's a big part of why the CPU temperatures only went up about 8° from
turning on fur Mar at the same time as Prime 95 so great thinking on their part
there so I've talked up their cooling approach a fair bit here but um you know
that's is that really enough torture let's torture it some more this time I
want to go with a more realistic use case scenario actual gaming but to bring
on the pain I'm going to be overclocking the graphics card so I fired up EVGA
precision and dialed in a quick and dirty overclock of plus 200 MHz on the
core and plus 250 MHz on the video r
I then cranked the maximum voltage and cranked the power limit and thermal
limit to their absolute maximums and fired up Batman Arkham Origins Color Me
impressed with the game max out it was playable which is great at 1080p but
this isn't exactly news to anyone who's ever seen GTX 780 benchmarks before more
importantly the GPU never went over 80°
even in this scenario and sat between 11
60 MHz and 12200 MHz a very healthy real
world frequency for an aircool GTX 780
at the best of times never mind when it's in a tiny little enclosure like
this one all right lonus so we get it
performance is a strong point but um you know what about the bad stuff well I
don't know guys I mean the stock cooler on the CPU didn't impress me that much
uh although I plan to because it's very modular and you can Tinker around with
it if you want I plan to experiment with removing the necessary side panel fans
to allow me enough clearance to put a non-reference cooler on the CPU I think
other than that the system is pretty much ideal but I mean being able to
achieve slightly better overall performance by throwing a a few more
gigahertz on the core couldn't be a bad thing um ergonomics could probably use
some improvement in a generation 2 product the base is solid and feels
really good and in my opinion actually has a like a rugged Industrial Beauty to
it but not everyone will feel the same way about not having tilt height adjust
Etc on their monitor and not to mention accessing the io on the bottom of the
system is not the easiest thing in the world another thing I'd like to see
added to a generation 2 product would be um some front USB 3 on the side or maybe
monitor selections that include a USB 3 Hub so that we have easy access to that
and then with a nice little cable like they've done with the DVI one
pre-connected that would be a great way to deal with that um I guess the last
thing I'd like to see a better implementation of out of the box is dynamic fan control for the case fans
the system is not unreasonably loud especially under load where it's very
reasonable but at idle it could easily
be quieter with just one small tweak so
evga's BIOS has a really cool smart fan option that lets you set up a custom
curve for your CPU fan that is controlled via pwm swifttech has a pwm
splitter that would be a low costway to have all four case fans powered off the
power supply yet controlled by that one pwm s signal so that would be a great
way to handle them that other than that it's a cool Innovative product and I'm
really excited to see more it's basically a clean non- bloatware
infected customizable and upgradeable Boutique system that is small enough to
fit on your desk in the same space as just a monitor so you can check out
create computers's configurator in the link below the video and it would I
would definitely recommend that you do they're not the cheapest systems in the
world and they're not perfect but if you are looking for the answer to what is
the smallest footprint into which I can fit a full powered gaming rig on my desk
this is the best answer that I have yet encountered thanks for watching guys
like the video if you liked it dislike it if you disliked it leave a comment
and let me know I think I asked for a comment earlier in the video it was something to do with um let me know what
you think about you know who would need an allinone and as always don't forget
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