when crucial reached out to sponsor a build they didn't just want another
gaming pc they wanted something speedy subtle
and stealthy we said sure but like
don't you guys just make memory and ssds got anything else you can use
and boy did they ever deliver it turns out crucial has a case
or at least
they used to yes my friends this
is the ultimate stealthy sleeper pc
and i managed to break it already damn
it Linus
okay yes technically this is a micron
case yes they made cases way back in the
before four time and this little piece of history was one of a handful of
designs that micron put out in the mid 90s so seeing as micron is the parent
company of crucial it seemed fitting to use one of their old cases for our
ultimate stealth sleeper build it features not one but
two zip drives a cd drive and just a
single fan that's right just one fan in
the entire chassis for cooling like
man they really didn't need a lot of cooling
back then did they that's in spite of the rest of the case having almost no
gaps in it for airflow and the CPU cooler in the original system being
passive
this appears to be the original hardware from the system what the hell is this
well it's agp and it's got two uh i don't know phone jacks on the back i
guess modem that's definitely not agp this predates agp by a significant
margin but those are definitely phone jacks this is a modem why would you
shape your modem like this you need like a more streamlined internet yeah it's
for faster speeds s3 verge dx on board okay so there's our
graphics card this puppy got a nice little upgrade with that usb universal
serial bus and then it's also got oh look at that like why does this not have
a bat did you take the back plates off these yes that's a weird thing to do all
right thanks colin uh got probably 100
lan right there maybe just 10 10 megabit
this thing is so weird so you got your
edo memory up in here you got what appears to be some kind of slotted in
motherboard vrm why would you slot that
in after the fact and then they're probably unreliable wow this is before
ide even had the like things around it this is this is old you know it's an old
motherboard when every trace on it is like easily trackable to where it goes
and looks like it could be repaired with a steady hand and a magnifying glass
that's some fine attention to detail 90s micron got your logo right side up on
your cooler lots of companies still can't handle that what the [ __ ] is
this thing i don't know oh wait it's an aw 32 upg so it seems to be an upgrade
module for a sound card
and they really did made old keyboards right you know the oldest keyboard is
the goodest keyboard see that's why crucial doesn't make gaming keyboards
because they know they could never surpass the excellence they had already
achieved they already peaked in the mid 90s RAM though
RAM has gotten faster so our second focus with this machine after stealth
was speed so crucial hooked us up with some of their ballistix max RAM this
stuff is rated no don't no come on man i
worked so hard on this stand over there
this stuff is rated at up to 5100 megahertz
it's so fast you're more likely to hit hardware limits with other components in
your system like the memory controller on the CPU before you hit the max speed
on these dimms and the reason crucial is able to get this RAM so darn fast is
hopefully pretty obvious when you account for over a quarter of the global
manufacturing output from memory you have both the expertise and the volume
to both tune the chips and then hand pick them from an enormous pool of
memory chips there's just no other way to do it furthermore
crucial being under the micron umbrella is able to go beyond binning after the
cream of the crop is determined crucial puts their chips through a secondary
process that physically unlocks the voltage regulation taking what was
already an outstanding candidate and opening it up to the bleeding edge of
performance that's why their ballistics RAM can hit those extreme frequencies
it's literally designed and then tuned to be gamingram now when it came to
transforming this beast from a clunker to a sleeper it wasn't a task for the
faint of heart after gently removing all the old hardware and putting it to bed
one last time sweet bedtime story by the way guys lttstore.com
colin started figuring out exactly how to fit our array of modern parts into
the case now it is atx so this case was
made right around that transition so on paper the whole transition was supposed
to be pretty simple we chose an AMD ryzen 3900x 12 core CPU with an asustrix
b550f gaming this is a great balance of
performance features and cost giving us all the expansion we need today and pci
express gen 4 capabilities for future SSD and
who knows maybe graphics card upgrades then for our SSD
we chose the crucial p5 it uses their tlc 3d nand with a dynamically sized slc
cache along with a gig per terabyte of dram to maintain performance under heavy
loads it comes with a five year warranty uses micron's own controller supports
all the usual encryption standards and is available in up to two terabyte
capacities we actually put two on there i think yep yes we did now unfortunately
the motherboard and all the stuff attached to it was where the ease of use
ended while the holes for our power supply did in fact line up
for whatever reason 90s micron saw fit
to include this weird support bar that interferes with the power switch on our
new seasonic 850 watt 80 plus titanium
unit which we definitely needed because while our old one was in fact atx
it used oh i just stabbed myself
it used the old 20 pin connector rather than 24 pin connector not to mention
that it was rated for what 200 watts 270
somewhere around there that would get us maybe our rem and CPU so we went with
this particular unit for its super high efficiency which means less waste heat
in the ac to dc conversion process the cross brace problem was solved with a
little bit of percussive maintenance and now the switch here works as intended
note though that we actually turned off the hybrid mode switch that's because
the airflow is so stifled in this case that we are kind of counting on our
power supply to help push some of the hot air from the inside out the back of
the system now with the heart and brains figured out what about the muscle well
um we weren't the only ones who got kind of boninated by NVIDIA's sudden
announcement of a graphics card that's hey actually faster than the old one
gotcha so uh the machine as it is right now was actually built with an rog strix
2080 ti which barely squeezes in there
leaving what i would call the absolute minimum amount of space for some
semblance of airflow like look at this come check this out andy these power
cables are actually squished against the side panel it's that friction that makes
it so hard to get the pedal off
now to try to cool it we wanted to take advantage of the natural tendency of
warm air to rise so our goal was take in
cool air from the front and bottom and exhaust warm air from the back where
this knocked to a pwm fan replaced the old three pin unit and hopefully like i
said before gonna get some help from the power supply so that's fine
but the case didn't come with any intake
holes fair warning guys this is gonna
coming at get like yeah
little kids who ain't never been taught yet i'm about to show you how a real pro
lay it down show you how to hit a figure
with a bit of dremel massaging the front panel was trimmed open for more airflow
and to allow a single 120 millimeter all-in-one liquid cooler to be mounted
that way at least our poor CPU gets nice fresh air
and we used a hole saw to add a second
knock to a 80 millimeter fan now i know that it's not quite factory but we did
allow ourselves to add a couple of 3d printed elevating feet so that the new
fan can actually draw in air and then
hopefully that's the ventilation sorted so it's definitely stealthy
but is it enough did it work
i have to confess cole and i'm a little skeptical
it really does not look like enough cooling oh my god i love
this vintage pentium with mmx designed for Windows 95 stuff we got going on
here see when alex builds a sleeper pc he usually water cools it that sounds
like work that's true he does do seem to do a lot of unnecessary work doesn't he
i love that guy all right we firing up what are we doing we're firing up some red dead redemption here yeah whatever
you want to do all right i think i got a tomb raider on there as well wow look at
that look at that snow fall off that branch there oh we're gonna go stand by
the fire there okay but seriously
why is this not loud yet you're breaking the rules here colin put your hand by
the fan though you took all the pci plates out of the back too of course
that's where you got some more ventilation from you pulled out all the
stops man sneaky guy yeah
you want to know what you want to know what else is sneaky it's toasty all right what else is sneak there's a
little sneaky trick up here you know when you're you're hungry and
you're gaming there's where there's
you know the old man candy got were there's originals how much time did you
spend on this too much
the craziest part is that this isn't just you know a three minute test here
colin actually stress tested this thing in 3dmark over an extended period
without running into thermal throttling issues right yep are you sure yeah i ran
the can stress test ran ran all the way
through and passed with 98 so wow
okay then but can it run an rtx 3080
now i saw you brought down the 30-90 but surely you weren't hoping to actually
put this in there it was optimistic like like real yeah
yeah by the time we have the 12 pin plugged into the top of it there's no
way now let's see if this boy will fit
um do you want to grab that 12 pin adapter
yeah it's right here oh you've got it all right look at that
okay we're gonna run same thing i ran on the 2080 ti so the time spy the long
stress test so this will take i think it's 10 or 15 minutes and it's gonna get
real hot and we'll be able to see it i'm actually expecting this to be better
because the new cards are more efficient and the exhaust that's going to be
coming out of the back of it will hopefully help me
i think it was around 65 70. so we're pulling over
107 right now you hear the fans ramping up the amount of heat this thing is
thrown out the back is kind of astonishing
we passed and if we look at the actual data
our CPU hit a peak of
70 degrees and our GPU rode 74 degrees
the whole way there there's the odd blip but like 97 and a
half percent i'll call good no way i can't believe
that worked like it's significantly more power than the
2080 ti but that goes to show you the strength of
NVIDIA's new like flow-through cooler right because that's exactly how they
designed it right to have cool air coming in from the bottom front i mean
that's the atx standard obviously but like to assist that natural convection
and like this is the same thing we saw in our review where even though it draws
more power it actually managed better overall system cooling i'm absolutely
freaking loving it just like i'm loving telling you one more time thanks to
crucial for sponsoring this video go check out their high-speed memory and
storage products at the link in the video description and if you guys
enjoyed this video and you're looking for one of our other sleeper machines
hey we've got a whole playlist absolutely chalk full of them so don't
miss it