My name is David Pancrretz and I am the technical production assistant here at
Linus Media Group. I use test benches regularly. Everything from cardboard
boxes to something a little bit more sophisticated. That is why I am really
excited to show you this
the Durbench table. This is a product that was developed by Thermal Grizzly
and Derbower in conjunction with Elmer Labs to bring the bench table into 2026
to modernize the platform. Let's take a look. The thing that excites me most is
the potential versatility of this platform and what you can do with it
versus other benches. Taking a look at this, this top piece is already so
different from what you would typically see in a bench. I've got another one
here that's just a regular aluminum plate. You've got all of your standoffs
and everything, but it's nothing
like what you've got here. We've got spots for some SATA drives. We've got
fan headers, SD card readers, [music]
we've got more fan control over here, and of course, there's RGB that goes
around the whole thing. We have these
brackets here that look like they're for mounting an AIO onto the back of the
bench. And we have this box. Nice little
Thermal Grizzly logo on it with screws. These look to be
different types of screws, but there's no labeling on them. That may be a
challenge for some people if you don't know what you're looking at.
It is nice to see, however, that they include some Allen keys. And here, I
believe we have the main feet for the bench itself and a few more accessory
pieces. These guys are your PSU mounts. And this guy is an AIB securing bracket.
Oh, these are little plastic pieces for the
bottom of your feet so that you don't have just metal. And in case you didn't
catch it before, we've got this bag full of cables to hook it up to whatever
platform you're going to be testing with. Nice. They include some Velcro strapping for you, too. It can get
pretty messy when you've got a whole bunch of power supply wires running all
over the place with these open test benches. All right, time to put this
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order. >> Wow, there are a lot of
different little bits that without the
manual you would really struggle to put this together for a first time. First
thing here we're installing is the AIB bracket. There were a couple of screws
and nuts pre-installed, but that may have just been because Labs was playing
with this first. So far, the instructions are descriptive as you
would expect from a German product. [music] Uh, but there is a lot of
different types of fasteners here. I'm going to take an educated guess that
these are the right ones, but we'll see. While they do include these handy Allen
keys, I'm going to use one of our precision screwdrivers because it's a
little easier to get around with. It's all coming together again. I mean, I'm
like two steps into this and having
labels on bags would have been really nice. This is starting to look more like
a bench now. Now, where is my PSU
bracket? This one I am going to have to use the Allen key for because there's
not enough clearance to get in here with the screwdriver. I'm trying to figure
out what I did wrong because I've got holes that don't line up. If you look at
the schematics very closely, it is
clear. This is my bed. [music] have some holes and they are supposed to be on
that side of the board because this guy does a little zigzag. It's on the
correct side here, but we need to flip everything around. Now that we've got
things flipped around, we're back on track and this is lining up. There are
so many spots on here where it feels like they have doubled up the amount of
screws that you would normally see on something like this. On each corner,
you've got two screws holding the feet in. Why? Because one would let you pivot
it, but once you've got the other side in, that's not a problem. More than what
I would have typically done. Now that I'm this far into the instructions, I
see that they have a uh compact configuration as well, [music] where
instead of having these large metal legs on the bottom, you can actually just
attach the feet straight to the bottom of the board here, but you don't have a
spot to mount your power supply. This is pretty cool. All of these little cutouts
that they have on the board are for you to thread the Velcro strap through and
then build your own kind of cable management through these holes. For
today, I don't think that we need to put that in there, but it's something super
handy. Now is the point where if you are going to load this thing up with a
drive, you're going to want to get it installed because your motherboard is
going to cover up those spots in just a moment.
It's just that easy. I actually had a PC case that had some SATA ports exposed
kind of like this right at the very top of the case to be able to just load
drives in and out. It was super super handy for the time. Now would be a great
time to get a look at some of the sidemounted ports that we have all the
way around the board here. We have a bank of three fan headers right here
that you can control either with this switch or you can just have it connected
directly to the board and have the board control the fans for you. We have a USB
header to go to your motherboard for a bunch of the other bits that we're going
to look at here. A reset switch, a power
switch, the two ports so that you can get those to the board. We have our SD
cards over here, our SATA ports for our
two drive bays over here. We have two USB typeA ports here, and two more over
here, as well as a couple of USBC ports over here. One thing that's worth noting
is that all of these USB ports are USB
2.0 only. Having something with USB 3
support would be a nice addition. Uh,
two is pretty slow for a lot of devices these days. We have another set of fan
headers over here as well as a spot that they call the pump zone. The pump zone
has more amperage per header so that you
don't have to worry about your pump overdrawing and burning circuits out.
Again, we can control all of these with switches or you can just set it to
external and have your motherboard control those. We've got a PCI Express 6
pin to deliver power to all of the things that we just talked about as well
as a bit more in terms of your fans. Here is your external fan hookup that
goes to your motherboard and the allimportant RGB. Now, we're going to
grab a board and stick it on top.
This is just the board that I use at my
desk for doing a bunch of testing as I need it. So, it is nothing special, but
it is a fulls size ATX board and it fits. It's worth noting that the bench
does come preset up to use a fullsize ATX board, but you can move those
standoffs around as you see fit. So, if you've got an MATX board or an ITX
board, they will fit here, too. Now, if you're just keeping your bench at your
desk, this next step may not be necessary. But if you're going to move
it around, they do include these little barrel guys that go on top of the
standoffs so that you don't have to worry about your board falling out. A
downside to these barrel nuts that they've chosen to use is this is not a
super common fastener. So, if you lose these, you're going to be having a hard
time trying to find some replacements. So, now that we got those guys on there,
our motherboard's not going anywhere, let's throw a power supply in here. This
is just the power supply that I use on my test bench. So, I've got a bunch of
cables pre-installed for whatever I would need. I must say that I don't like
loading this one in as much as some of
the other benches I've used, but
it does work. It does get the job done.
Guess what? Yet another type of screw. While I'm connecting this RGB cable, I
am noticing that the one they include is fairly short, which is nice when you
have the header right at the very top of the board like this one. I have seen
some boards where they don't have the RGB connector there, though, and it's
somewhere down at the bottom here where this is not going to be long enough.
USB, on the other hand, I'm not nearly as concerned about. Pretty much every
board has some USB 2 headers right on the bottom. With how the rest of this
product was designed, I'm almost surprised that these little jumper
cables they have for power and reset don't have power and reset labeled on
them. You wouldn't want to use the wrong one. Just kidding. There is no wrong
one. I'm not going to go through and mount the entire AIO on here, but you
can see this is where it would go. And there you have it. Our assembled test
bench with all of our hardware in place. Now we get to turn it on and see what
that RGB looks like. It definitely lights up. I think what's
happening with the rainbow effect is you're getting weird bleed through
different parts of the diffusion. If you had this set up as just one color, it
would probably look a lot better. Right now, this rainbow is not doing it,
though. Having all of these integrated features are pretty cool. They are a bit
niche in terms of how you would be using them. You'd have to be going and
swapping out kind of your main hardware up top fairly frequently for you to get
the benefits out of them. and the things
like the dedicated fan control would be useful for some people's testing. I was
more excited about the product before going through the process of building
it. One of the things that was frustrating was the sheer amount of
different types of screws that we had to use throughout the process. And on top
of that, there's no place to put some of the screws that you would need when
you're swapping hardware in and out, such as these barrel nuts on the
motherboard or these screws right here. I guess you could have them seated in
here while you're not using them. For comparison, here's the Streetcom BC1.
This is the one that I use on a daily basis at my desk. The things that I was
calling out in terms of the screw storage, you can see that they just have
all of the screws in spots along the board itself. It fits super nicely just
all integrated so that you don't end up losing these things and having to go
track them down. The motherboard standoffs on this one as well, you get
the option for these kind of sprung ones
where you have a little bit of tension holding the board in place if you're
just letting it sit there. Or you can pull out one of these other guys
that sit flush at the same height and
you can put a screw into the top there. All of the screws that they have are
nice and chunky thumb screws as well.
These are improvements I could see integrating into
the Durbench table because you've got a
lot of space that you could be storing things all the way down the legs just
like the Streetcom one does. And having thumb screws would be great so you don't
have to be using an Allen key or a
screwdriver to be getting a bunch of these parts in and out. Day-to-day, I
think I would gravitate towards
this guy more. Even though from a techie
perspective, this one's really cool. One thing that I will say I do like more on
this bench from a purely mechanical
design standpoint is the AIO mount here.
The AIO mounts for this guy sit just off
of the top like that. And it can be a
little finicky to get things where you want them to be. This is kind of nice in
the fact that you've got a nice big arm that you can work off of. Let's talk
about price. Price for the Durbench table is just under $300 US, whereas the
Streetcom is coming in at $200 US.
Neither of these are cheap. I can see where the extra money went into for the
de Branch table. It's hard to say
whether I would use all of the features and say that the extra expense is worth
it or not. I'd have to kind of use it over a period of time and see how much I
would make use of the extra features. From a mechanical standpoint, I still
think that the Streetcom one is my
preferred go-to. Realistically, when it comes down to it though, the original
bench table comes with your motherboard. There's nothing wrong with that. If
you're using hardware professionally and you swap it
in and out all the time, something like this or like the Derbench table could
save you time and really justify the cost. Thank you guys for watching.
Should we cover some more hardware like this? It's definitely a unique piece. Uh
let us know in the comments.