I have got to send a picture of this thing to my old boss check it out the NC
sign PC is off the story piece of cardboard and on the wall and guys look
at this thing I mean what a way to celebrate those formative years of my
career at the computer store and it's even super
fast hey keep it down future lus do you
ever want to get that thing we got a lot of work to do over here Justin did a
great job with this MDF backboard fun fact uh he couldn't just use an NC logo
to design it since their signs and graphical assets were all slightly
different from each other so it had to be painstakingly custom modeled and cut
but now that the paint's dry we are ready for final assembly oh my God this
looks awesome awesome like our sponsor War Thunder War Thunder is an
action-packed and detail packed vehicle combat game you got to have both you can
play free right now on PC and console at the link below since we started this
project basically everything about it has changed starting with the
motherboard we've gone with the b650 aorus ultra from Gigabyte it might lack
some of the nice to Hales like the abundance of ports and PCI elanes that
you'd find with x670 but it features 20 gig USB and CPU overclocking which the
a620 lacks this particular board also
supports PCIe Gen 5 which is an optional
feature of the chipset and uses 2 1/2 gig onboard networking which is slower
than what we used to use for our workstations but that was back when we
were shooting at 8K this should be enough for our modern 4K workflow and if
it's not these handy m.2 network cards
are a great way to add 10 gig to an ITX
board then for our CPU we went with the ryzen 7 7800 x3d it might lag behind the
13700 K or even the 7700 X for
non-gaming tasks but it's still a wicked fast 8 core CPU and it's very power
efficient thanks to its lower rated TDP which is critical for a small form
factor build which okay it's kind of a large computer but it's going to be in a
confined space and that's going to matter also we have about eight of these
left over from the recent video where we bought a whack of them to evaluate the
variation in performance from Chip to chip um so I grabbed one by the way
that's a super cool video and you're going to want to check it out on the subject of cool figuring out how to cool
this machine was a big challenge we wanted all the major components mounted
inside the letters otherwise how is it even a sign PC it would just be a PC
next to a sign but we also wanted the finished install to be as clean as
possible so no gaping holes in the sides
of our letters for intake fans so we settled on a two-pronged approach water
cooling and hope water to carry away
most of the Heat from the major components like the CPU and the GPU and
then Faith along with some teeny tiny
fence to remove the rest not a huge fan
of the mounting on these velocity squared blocks but you can't fault the
look man are they sexy for storage while
this motherboard does support PCIe Gen 5 drives which theoretically are double
the speed of Gen 4 in practice that offers no perceivable benefit for daily
use so I settled on a crucial P5 plus
since all I need is a decent Drive I don't even really need a DRM cache that
isn't going to immediately die almost everything that I work on is going to be
stored in the cloud or on one of our servers which is why networking speed is
much more important to me than the speed of my SSD another area where speed
matters is memory and we've gone with this Manta X prism ddr5 6400 cl32 kit
6,000 to 6,400 megat transfers per second is still The Sweet Spot for AMD
when it comes to price to Performance and this kit is in that range I don't know much
else about it hopefully Works time to mount this boy and how would I describe
this build so far Exquisite exceptional
extraordinary but unless I plan on
running an IG GPU I still have more itms
to install perhaps in the next letter
over the width of this letter was a big challenge for us to overcome when we
went looking for a GPU even with water cooling most modern cards are so tall
that they won't fit in here once you account for the foam for the mounting
even before you factor in that most GPU water blocks have the fittings attaching
up here so we needed something where the fittings go on the back now as a
business machine for business this GPU isn't going to be doing a ton of heavy
lifting but we needed to be able to handle playback of raw 4K footage
without issue high quality screen screen capture and I do occasionally fire up a
game or two just in case I need to you know quickly check something out for
business reasons of course so we settled on this NVIDIA RTX 3070 collab card
between ASUS and EK water blocks now
let's see where should we put the power
supply you see where I'm going with this
right our original plan was to use a Silverstone sfx power supply that we had
fulllength cables for but unfortunately during a test build that ended up
exploding in a most underwhelming way which probably had nothing to do with
the amount of metal shavings around the workshop thankfully we had other options
and this white unit from Cooler Master actually might help us reflect more
light from the RGB strips that we're going to be putting in later as well
it's a bit of a change from the seic focus PX 850s that we usually use in our
workstations but it's a suitable sfx
alternative and with the correct number of wash brers should install just fine
if you plan on getting one of these by the way keep an eye out for the badge on
the front of the box that says 100% Japanese capacitors version one lacks
that badge but more importantly lacks proper fan control and can get kind of
loud thankfully for us we've got the nansai Ichibon version and we can attach
it to our back plate with the screws I showed you before and actually this cool
3D printed Mount that I didn't show you before but if you want to check it out
more closely we're going to have it linked down below if you ever need to
mount a power supply to a back plate for
some reason finally we need the place to put the remainder of our liquid cooling
parts okay that one was not very good
realistically we could have gone for any size of ek's quantum kinetic flat D5 so
we went with the 240 mm version it comes
with a reliable D5 pump and gives us
lots of room to Route tubing first to
our radiator here on the other side speaking of before we put this in we
went with the EK Quantum surface s360 it
uses copper fins and a balanced fin density for solid performance regardless
of your fan speed which matters a lot more to us than usual because even
though these Noca spin at a decent speed they are low profile fans so they have
lower static pressure than usual and we wanted to use these to accommodate the
fact that the N letter is going to be sitting right over top of it and where
is the intake for these rather the
exhaust we're going to do something a little bit different on this one just
because of the lack of space constraint here uh we're actually going to take one
of these fans and we're going to use it as an exhaust instead of having all
intake oh I see okay that is an option
another option would be to just put some speed holes in here as well and then
just have it passively exhaust out the rest of the end can we do the speed
holes recirculating the air that you just heated up not that effective man
this is looking awesome also Tanner did
you realize how big this thing was this is going to take up the whole wall in my
office yeah it's going to take up the whole wall like it would at the front of
a store right which makes perfect sense
yes here if you want a smaller ncx sign here take that where'd you get this the
bottle opener flashlight keychain combo unit I got it from
ncx are we about to make a
fire here we go and I know I know
softline yuck right but come on guys
it's a lot easier to work with we're not going to see the thing anyway and it
gives us a great excuse to show you guys our magnetic Cable Management clamps
that are coming very soon CD store.com I think that's it and if we
were smart especially because this is made out of MDF which gets completely
destroyed by water we would check to see if it leaks before we go ahead and fire
it out properly so I think we can fill it up what is this Canadian
water cooling fluid comes in a bag now yes sir like our milk yep
sure hey there we go there we go that's
more like now we're moving some water
this seems like a good time to talk about our RGB fan controller here oh but
before we put that on I should talk about our PCIe risers we could have used
a single Gen 4 600 mm Riser but you noticed instead we used a 600 mm and
then we used another 100 mm one what the
heck is up with that the problem is that we couldn't find a single Riser at that
length that had a right angle connector on it and we really needed a right angle
Le connector so we had to use an extension that means it might run at
PCIe gen 3 speeds but with this generation of gpus that's not going to
affect performance anyway so
hey Riser connector no problem we hope
come to think of it there's no reason to stay under there while I talk about the RGB lighting we can just talk about it
here and then put it down thereafter each of our letters already has some
addressable RGB strips going all around
the outside you know nothing fancy just a casual 10 m of RGB lighting and then
each letter plugs into the next one using these cool jsts SM connectors or
as I like to call them nice clippies you'll sometimes find these on larger
string lights and unlike okay that looks
amazing sorry um unlike those awful standard RGB header connectors that plug
into your motherboard these things do a fantastic job of staying attached the
only reason that we subbed out Corsair own RGB strips was because we wanted
something that we could a little bit more easily cut and then route as needed
this did present some challenges um
we're using our commander Pro to handle the logic but these lights are a
mishmash of the RGB and AR argb
standards so they're three pins like AR argb voltage data and ground but instead
of the usual 5vt power it's got classic
old RGB's 12vt requirement um this is
for good reason because it helps with efficiency and getting more consistent
brightness out of the first and last LEDs in the strip but it means we can
only use the data lines from our commander and we need to draw 12v power
from somewhere oh so we just used a
Molex connector which is probably say what's the power draw on these 1.5 amps
1.5 amps that'll be fine just fine we're
not ready to put these on are we are we done we should probably do a test boot
and make sure everything actually functions I see other than that it looks
like everything is pretty much ready to go it was all just a setup yeah for the
joke it's yeah yes we should do a quick test we got to hook up the fans too I
see how we're going to hook everything up for our test boot here but have we
given any thought to IO this all the io
is external it's all external
yes oh like with a hub or something yeah
you're going to have one of these ah yes okay thanks for our sponsor ug green who
didn't sponsor this video but they do sponsor things occasionally uh power
button your keys right now oh good there
there will be one there will be one we'll get it figured
out we got letters is the pump running though oh
wow yeah know it just has all the bubbles out of it wow fantastic oh
hey nice oh that's good to
see yes y all right how about
Expo it's really big oh this is a good opportunity for
you guys to check out the back we cable managed some stuff here Justin we can
put it down for a sec oh yeah oh yeah it's heavy this is also my first look at
how we're handling Cable Management networking is going to be coming out
of here neat neat uh where'd that USBC
connector go oh look at that it's right there oh cool and if you look we've used
this gap which is about 3 in Off the Wall not just for bottom mounted IO but
also to have some room for our intake fans wow this is not going to be easy um
it's really heavy yes speaking of heavy
you guys probably noticed these handy dandy handles that's how we're going to
mount it we're going to lift up the ceiling tile and then we're going to hang it over this partition here the
original plan had been to screw it into the wall but what we realized is these
modular panels are just a piece of sheet metal some kind of something in between
basically air and another piece of sheet metal so if we just drilled into this it
would either sag or completely come out and come crashing down onto my desk we
did come up with one idea where we had a backing on the other side and we screwed
all the way through into that but I was told that's not aesthetically pleasing
what's that brick that's your power button it sits on your
desk I see I tried to get one of those
like remote clicker ones but we don't have any PCI slots feel like maybe I
should have specified what I had intended with the power button but you know what we're doing great no Colin you
know what that's it's a really good idea but can we try it this way first Justin
how you doing oh I'm fine okay I've got this Colin if you want to help him
that's probably better okay all right so
that's on and now I am stuck yes um wait
wait wait hold on don't lift it
yet nice that is freaking
awesome all right oh yeah I told man I
didn't need the cable ties at all kind of clean uh okay let's um
oh good thing that didn't break my
Cleveland Browns lava lump did I just say lump
okay big
moment that looks so freaking
awesome no way oh hey oh really you
guys it was like that when I got got it
uhhuh keep changes nice you know what
screw it we're turning HDR on oh good it
looks forget it let's not turn HDR on for office work what we do want to know
even for office work though is whether our cooling system works it's
quiet but does it perform to find out
I'll be running a stress test on both the GPU and CPU for 30 minutes to see if
it can handle the heat all right we've been benchmarking this for a little
while now and the GPU looks like it's good but the CPU is running Mighty hot
and that is very confusing until you take the X off and look at this block
you might not be able to see it right away but some of you might be more
eagley and notice that this Edge is much
farther off than this Edge to the motherboard uh if you look at it through
the thermal camera this thing is just shooting off heat and boy you can really
kind of feel it over here it's uh it's not a happy camper our GPU is fine
though and that my friends is why we run
stress tests it turned out that the fans on the radiator were hooked up to the
commander Pro which was not getting an input from the CPU for its temperatures
so the fans were staying running at minimum RPM and after about 15 minutes
we thermal throttled going from about 80 watts of power consumption on the CPU to
just 30 fortunately fixing it was as
simple as getting those fans plugged into the pwm header that is on the
motherboard itself and we're back up to
78 Watts which okay it's still a little
on the warm side in a perfect world I might throw full thick fans on there
instead of the low profile ones but I will never be running such a long load
on this system and I think I'm just going to leave it alone unless I were to
upgrade the rest of the system like even putting in a more powerful GPU could
dump more heat into the loop then we'd need to take another another look at the
cooling but that's a problem for the future a future where you'll already
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video why not check out part one where we laid out the plan and it didn't go
quite as smoothly as this