contrary to what you guys said the legs never fell off and my original desk pc's
performance has held up nicely as my daily driver but there are a few quirks
that never got addressed so we're going completely back to the
drawing board and building a brand new desk pc from the ground up
with a challenge we're gonna cram a complete water cooled
gaming system into the thickness of a regular desk
introducing the LTT d2 it's got more d
than we've ever had before elgato's new wave 1 and wave 3 usb
broadcast microphones are here use their wavelink app to control your wave mic
and up to seven other audio sources and create independent mixes we're gonna
have them linked below
let's start with what the original desk pc the d1 did well from the beginning
the liquid-cooled core i7 extreme 6950 performed as you'd expect
great even today if we're being honest and the NVIDIA gtx 1080 and 64 gigs of 3200
megahertz dominator platinum RAM didn't leave much to be desired either but
things have changed and AMD is now the weapon of choice for overkill pc
builders now let's talk about those small issues with the d1 that bother me
on the daily the lack of front i o is something that i miss
almost hourly actually not not just daily the vibrations from the fans and
the hard disks transfer up into the glass causing a weird buzzing sound
sometimes it's not particularly quiet other than that fan and RGB control are
two things that have improved vastly in the last few years and the biggest one
there is nothing more annoying and painful than
scooting my chair up to the front of my desk only to have the corner jam into my
leg and the armrest poke the power button so i made the decision to rebuild with
our new workshop and new talent we're well on our way to making a desk pc that
is gonna blow the old one away i've enlisted the king of builds that take
too long colin to design the new desk that fixes all the existing problems and
fits a few more key requirements as i alluded to before number one is we're
going one u packing everything into a one u space that's the slimmest that
you'll see out of a commercial server is going to be a challenge but
dang is it ever gonna be slick 1.75 inches of height is only a quarter
of the current one number two we're gonna hardline water
cool everything this time no easy route
putting all the tubing under the desk and strapping it to the bottom number
three we're gonna upgrade the performance because we can we started by
getting the main ideas down on paper and by paper of course i mean ms paint what
a masterpiece then with the key deliverables roughed out colin began
pulling existing cad designs from online sources like grab cad and from
manufacturer self-published files to begin modeling up the desk spending time
designing is where a penny of investment really does equal a pound of result
because solving problems in cad ahead of time is much better than fixing them
later for example we originally had the exhaust going downward through large
flat mounted radiators this would have given us great cooling but because of
the lack of space there was no way to get even 90 degree fittings onto our
rads here's another fun one i had assumed
that we would run tubing over some of the components but as it turns out there
is just no room this forced us to make significant changes to the layout to
accommodate parallel runs system-wide as of writing we're on roughly milestone 7
here and realistically we'll probably keep iterating but we're far enough
along to give you guys a closer look at it the overall size of the desk hasn't
changed much from the onset at 60 inches by 32 inches that'll make it a smidge
deeper and about half a foot wider than the d1 the d2 is also going to forgo the
weird glued on table legs that didn't fall off
and use the same standing desk base from vivo that i actually use at home
motorized desks have come both down in price and up in capabilities since they
first hit the mainstream and the dual lift motors on this unit shouldn't have
any trouble lifting our desktop with its 275 pound rating the position of the
motherboard and graphics card have been pretty much set since the early
revisions side i o like on the d1 is a
bit easier to reach around to than having all the ports in the rear but the
only reason that we did it that way in the first place was because we didn't
have any front ports built into the desk i also really like the idea of having
the motherboard and graphics card sitting front and center in front of me
the position has been inset about an inch from the back to give a little bit
of space for cable strain relief the static pressure optimized fans have
moved around a lot they were originally placed on either side of the desk
drawing filtered air into the desk from the bottom to be passively exhausted
through the radiators next to them the problem is that any of the non-water
cooled components wouldn't be getting enough airflow after mocking up some
different layouts for aesthetics we settled on rads on the right and fan
banks on the left our dual 480 millimeter alpha cool x flow rads
well they're not our 480 millimeter ads
because we ended up getting rid of them because of the right angle fitting issue
that i alluded to before and we could have solved this by kind of pocketing
out the desk in the bottom to fit these parts but that was against the clean
sleek design philosophy of the project thankfully alphacool has an exhaustive
list of radiator options so we snagged some 3d models for 40 millimeter thick
1u rads and then doubled the quantity up
to 4 rads to make up for the loss of cooling capacity pretty much every
layout of these small rads was considered up and down left and right
baffled staggered exhausting out the back exhausting out the bottom you name
it in the end we added two more bringing the total up to six with three double
stacked banks around the perimeter of the desk passing warm air out the right
side and back now we're gonna know if this is gonna work by the time
fabrication starts because we've already got our rad stacking follow-up in the
works so make sure that you're subscribed so you don't miss that moving
all the water around is going to be handled by dual ddc pumps mated to
alphacool 1u manifold blocks we're honestly not huge fans of these but
they're one of the only options for fitting into this slim height now they
are technically marketed as reservoirs but a loop this size with all this
tubing could honestly take hours to fill with a reservoir that small so we're
going to be making our own in the shape of a one foot diameter LTT logo with RGB
of course we then threw a little flow indicator between the pumps for good
measure now we didn't want to make any compromises on the actual pc hardware so
we're going to be using an ASUS zenith 2 xtreme a top of the line trx40 board for
our threadripper CPU and then directly beside it is going to be an rtx 2080 ti
both of them topped by sweet ek water blocks we plunked some hard drives in
mostly to take up empty space but i mean come on if it's going to be an ultimate
desk pc design we might as well have 50 plus terabytes of storage in it right
and last but not least is power you might have noticed that there's no
power supply thing is one new power supplies are incredibly
loud so including one was not an option to meet our quiet design goal
the intention right now is to use external power bricks then we're pretty
sure we're going to need two of them and then a pair of hd plex dc to dc
converters mounted in the top left cable runs will likely go under the table but
the thing is that's not because we couldn't have kept them all inside but
rather for aesthetics reasons so that's the plan in our next episode you're
going to see us bringing all the parts together and hopefully leak testing our
custom reservoir i hope you're looking forward to it as much as i am private
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link below if you guys are looking for something else to watch hey it's been a
while maybe go check out the original desk pc build
it's kind of a fun series of videos