after months of trials and tribulations the next gen desk pc has finally gone
from render to reality now our ambitious goal of
creating a water-cooled pc and a desk that's no thicker than a regular desk
all without compromising on either gaming performance or silent operation
has not been easy but by the time we're
done this video you guys are gonna see it all laid out
and operational and i'm a layout for you the
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why don't we kick it off with what went well using the model we marked our
three-quarter inch sheet of birch wood then used a table saw to break it into
all the components we needed to build the box that you're looking at the only
slightly tricky part was creating a little lip here on the side rails so
that the glass top will have a place to sit so once we've finalized the
component placement it's as simple as throwing the bottom piece here onto the
router and going and cutting all the holes that we're
going to need for final assembly but
what about uh what about this why don't you run me through
this well these are our rez's or attempts at
them anyway it's gonna look great whenever i can get it to work we tried
so many different ways so here's the thing clear materials like
acrylic they're not forgiving like wood or aluminum one wrong move can cause it
to crack or even shatter and because
it's clear you can see the damage from literally
every angle yeah a lot of my experience is with metals
which are much more forgiving to work with on my shop laser i just couldn't
get the cut right uh i couldn't get the settings to not light itself on fire and
it's something that i could have probably dialed in but
i decided to move on from v1 here vaporized acrylic likes to get a little
burny and given the 10 watt per millimeter rule of thumb 130 watts of
power for 18 millimeters of acrylic is pushing the limit a little so for the
second go-around our pals over at metalmart gave it their best with their
water jet and initially we had high hopes but the brittleness of the acrylic
reared its ugly head again causing just
these beautiful cuts around the LTT
but unsightly craters everywhere where the
water jet pierced the stock in an attempt to make the holes so i pivoted
from that to the router something i was really trying to avoid because these
parts are really well suited for 2d fabrication and it went surprisingly
well but i failed to brass off or dull
the tip of the drill and it pulled out a huge chunk of material and scrapped this
attempt as well so close yet so far
thankfully though while we were busy with techtimber trotec sent over this
beauty right here and it was time to give it another shot
because while the raw power of this unit is actually about the same as columns
laser at 130 watts as the name suggests
the speedy 400 flex runs circles around
prosumer tools moving literally 10 times faster which we can use to our advantage
now in the router version of the part these slots all around it were designed
to increase volume and improve water
flow but the thing is partial cuts like this aren't something
that a laser can typically do you see an
etch pass only removes a fraction of a
millimeter of material but here's the thing with the speedy i can just run the
same edge over and over and over and over again and this piece right here
oh there it is took a couple of hours but if you look the entire surface of
the LTT is actually a couple of millimeters lower than the outer rim
that's almost as big brain as buying all your clothes from ltcstore.com
now small holes in thick material are another thing that's pretty tricky with
a laser mostly because a laser beam isn't actually cylindrical but rather
conical and as you can imagine a cone shape is not the ideal shape for a
threaded hole so instead of drilling all the way through i just made little holes
and then finished them afterwards on the drill press that way they're on location
and to the correct size unfortunately after solving this problem it went
together great and it even held water ah
that doesn't really sound very unfortunate okay okay i'm getting to that uh in the midst of disassembling it
i got distracted by the camera falling over and i fat fingered the drill's
direction lefty loosey became ready tidy and uh i made a little crater oh no
oh it's otherwise perfect yeah she's dead jim okay but
even though this is just a cosmetic sample then we are confident now that we
can build it since i mean you did do it
once i did what it held water you just had to i was so close
what it means is we're confident confident confident that we can build it
which means we're not going to have to resort to some kind of commercial
off-the-shelf reservoir we know we can rely on having this and we can do the
final layout for the rest of the parts right yes confident confidence he's
confident look at this guy these 1u radiators from alphacool are
super neat they're actually designed for servers but they've got some cool
features that make them perfect for our use case as well they've got the inlet
and outlet on either side of the rad and
then check this out you can chain them together in cereal by using these end
ports or you can go in and out on this side so what we're going to be doing
is we're going to be lining the right side of the table
here we go with these radiators we just made a small oopsie and we only ordered
one of them as part of our proof of concept so you'll have to imagine that
there's more of them over here the only question is is that going to be
enough radiator surface area i think we're going to have about the equivalent
of a dual 120 millimeter red and with the way that we're positioning the fans
we'll show you that in a minute it should be enough first beck the idea
here is massive positive pressure we're gonna have eight Noctua industrial ppc
fans with filters basically creating this pressurized chamber in the case
that's gonna cause the air to kind of passively
whoosh over the components that need air cooling like the motherboard chipset and
vrms for example and then exhaust through the only part of the table
that's not sealed which is going to be the radiators so
like that when it came time to choose a power supply while we did have a lot of
options most of them were absolutely terrible because you can get 1u power
supplies i mean even fancy redundant ones but the issue is they're designed
for servers which are not made to be quiet!
so we went with one of these this is an 800 watt
dc atx power supply from hd plex
super cool product right because we've got enough power for a threadripper and
rtx 30 series graphics card but
passively cooled and super slim
these get used for all kinds of projects from computers to av to i mean pretty
much any situation where you need a high power dc power supply these guys are
super cool of course the thing about ac
the thing about dc power supplies that is ones with a 12 volt input and then
3.3 5 volt and 12 volt outputs is that
they still need to do the ac conversion from the wall so for that we're
employing two of these 400 watt power bricks also from hd plex these puppies
because they're kind of messy looking and because we
want them to have access to fresh air we're actually gonna put on the outside
of the unit on the underside now let's talk motherboard because um
okay i can't come up with a good reason for this because AMD sent it to me i'm
using a ryzen 3970x on an ASUS zenith 2 extreme
is this the alpha or the non-alpha i think it's the alpha it's not alpha
it's the non-alpha which is fine because realistically we are not going to be
overclocking this thing anyway we had to make a couple of small modifications to
the board it was so close to being too thick to
fit in our case we actually had to remove the cover on the vrm fans here as
well as the cover on the i o so it'll look a little more
industrial just like last time we're going to be setting the motherboard and
the graphics card back probably about an inch or an inch and a half from the edge
what this allows is because the i o is on the rear this time some room for the
cables to bend or have large connectors before they just butt right up against
the wall now you might have noticed if you're extremely keen eyed that this is
a 3080 that is not the graphics card that we
actually intend to use for the final project we're gonna go with a 30-70 just
to keep power consumption under control oh god we're going to need custom cables
yes uh actually they're silverstone compatible so i can get custom cable mod
cables perfect so cable mod just yep easy peasy fire that up check the box
while i may be on the record saying that i think the lang ddc pump is a piece of
unfortunately in a 1u enclosure we just don't have a
choice so the next best thing to using a good pump like a d5 is using two ddcs so
at least if one of them fails you've got another one
so i'm just putting these here as like a placeholder for now we're gonna have to
tweak this a little the last piece that i have to show you guys today is our
water block this is also from alphacool and this thing is super neat so not only
does it have a large enough cooling plate for our ryzen threadripper processor it has a total of eight
options for inlet ports and outlets what
that does is it allows us to put it onto the CPU socket and then
figure out with our RAM and our vrm
cooling and all that stuff how the heck we're gonna be able to get tubes in and
out of it i lied there is actually one more thing we've got four two terabyte
crucial ssds with the intention being
kind of to take up space as much as anything else but also that'll give you
know eight terabytes of i mean who cares
we could check them in raid zero yes get that performance eight terabytes of
solid state storage in addition to an m.2 boot drive
but hear me out i know you want this on the outside i do
but could we put it here we could but i really don't want to and
this is just because of the distance that this 12 volt run has to go well
we're putting a heat source next to the radiators you see like if we have these
on the outside of the case then all this heat isn't input into the system and
we're already pretty tight on on air flow in here that's fair so this is i
mean assuming about 90 efficiency that's like under full load that's like 80
watts that we can have yeah outside but under your realistic load we're probably
talking 40 watts but even that do you really think airflow's going to be tight
we've got eight cooling fans but we have a lot of pressure we don't have a lot of
flow it just has such a small orifice to come out of i
think you're going to be surprised probably but i want to plan for less
heat in the system that's why we went with a 30 70. i wanted a 30 80. but like
like then where would those go right i mean we could move the red down
and then like have them here and then they're close to the SATA ports yeah
we're gonna and we're gonna need tubing runs and stuff like that this area is
fine we're gonna use those little end connectors that i used for the
stacking radiators video so these will be tight but what we could do is we
could go pumps and then we could go drives here actually the outlet port for
the water block is in here so there's no sense really having a pump out here well
i couldn't help noticing that our reservoir still isn't actually
manufactured fine i can change that see
if i had done my job and made this right then it would be set and i
wouldn't have to entertain these ideas you like my ideas come on
okay so let's pull the cables off this for now yeah yeah no it's a mess with
them this might seem crazy but we're gonna be painting this for the finished
product anyway so drawing on it is not that stupid
so here's what i'm thinking right angle here into the end cap here then we go
straight out of here here we've got a height problem this is
lower than this we go this way
and then into here we go out from here into the graphics card out of the
graphics card and then out from here into reservoir
very sub-optimal from a filling perspective it will take like an hour or
two to fill this yeah i was kind of hoping to put ports
in the actual desk and have a fill and a drain area
i see that we can also use these because they're
just vertical so we can put the fill funnel up here and just fill it my god
you're a genius so we can fill the res
and flood the pumps so they don't run dry for the filling process yeah
okay build in the quality of life you want right i did not think of that well you
did you know what does teamwork make the dream work for
one okay so can you get me uh my little uh my little valve it's technically not
the symbol for a valve but it'll allow it oh sorry you're right that's that's
the incorrect signal symbol for a valve let me fix it
there fixed it for you
you know the reference right this
is sick man this is good it's gonna be fine i think it'll be yeah just not a
nightmare and whenever you need to look at it oh i'm so glad you used the word
nightmare because i have one for you oh great we've been having some issues with
the aquantia nyx and our new switches okay and this is an on-boarder quantum
there's no way we're fitting a 10 gig card without another riser what if it
was here well how is that going to fit right
why why have you done this well Jake found the problem so Jake is
my issue blame Jake i do but i do need an add-in card
where's it gonna go well if it was here we would just have
another cutout there's a lot of cutouts we're gonna have a cut out here here
here like and this is supporting that huge sheet of glass we could do like a
couple support pillars little bogeys yeah yeah i'm so excited right now
now hopefully i won't have to wait eight months for the next part no guarantees
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if you guys enjoyed this video you'll probably enjoy part one of this video
although you've kind of seen everything that we covered in that one so maybe
just check out the uh the conclusion to our last desk pc
project to demonstrate that yes in fact we do eventually finish these projects
just take some time