no joke my new gaming PC is gonna be
this thin and let me explain why seven
years ago I embarked on a journey to fix my biggest gripes with gaming computers
they make a bunch of noise and they heat up your room like it's a freaking sauna
the solution a rack mount gaming chassis
that allows you to put your PC in an entirely separate room but it's been a
few years and with a new house and a shiny new rack came some new ideas
including building the ultimate land gaming center where my whole family can
game together while moving one or two gaming PCs out of the room is manageable
five of them is no joke we could have
just built five more of that original custom chassis that would have taken up
most of my rack also dumping a ton of
heat we could have done a virtualized setup but due to incompatibility with
anti-cheat it wasn't really practical and had very low wife approval factor
it's time for a new custom chassis built
specifically for my land room I'm talking one U of total thickness
integrated water cooling integrated fiber optic USB RTX graphics and thanks
to pulse weight who sponsored today's video I will be able to remotely Monitor
and manage all of these systems from the comfort of my phone
sick
if we learned anything while we were building my V2 desk PC it's that trying
to cram a gaming system into a 1u form
factor is extremely difficult most
motherboard's vrm heatsinks don't fit you can't use a standard ATX power
supply most consumer water cooling parts don't fit I mean tldr I guess Nothing
fits so you either have to modify to
make your Hardware fit or you have to use server-specific Hardware so Antoine
one of our Engineers had the wonderful idea of doing a 2u chassis so that is
double the height with two systems in it which would allow you to use sfx power
supplies pretty much any motherboard you want and standard CPU blocks but I
killed that for a couple of reasons first you then have to take two systems
offline in order to perform maintenance and second maintenance is also much much
more difficult because there's a lot more Hardware packed into each chassis
finally we need five stations so one of
the machines would end up half filled wasting a precious rack unit in my rack
at home so one you it is Jake didn't agree you can tell from the look on his
face but here we are here we go too late now
now I'm gonna confess uh I'm not actually 100 sure how this goes together
so I'm going to say motherboard here oh there's there's some pre-work we got to
do here oh cool on a standard PC you're gonna end up with standoffs that are
between six and seven millimeters or so yeah that clearly wouldn't work in here
that's like three or four millimeters we could have used elsewhere yeah that's
like a third of our entire vertical budget for the motherboard so instead
protocase pressed in little self-cinching nuts see there if you look
at the bottom oh did I even mention protocase built this one for us as well
just like my old one see absolute Bros
over there and sisters of course this approach isn't without flaws what you'll
see on one use servers is sort of a plasticky insulation layer because the
bottom of the motherboard has a lot of little contact points and you don't want
those to short out on your case we're gonna do the same thing just a little
bit more janky we're using electrical tape yeah where's the electrical thing I
put it away I was like surely we will not need this roll of orange electrical
tape for this Chute honestly I don't really know if it needs it but if you
were to put this in here and have the system on and you were screwing with it
and you pressed in the wrong spot yeah it could be bad news this is a good idea
it's a thing that we should do yeah what about a piece of cardboard
yeah that could also work Hey Jake what you know what's a convenient motherboard
sized piece of cardboard what a motherboard box yeah I'll just cut it up
let her rip you know what I'm saying here
oh my God well it kind of works actually works
really well yeah here this side put your fingers in there nope I see that thumb
there look how tasty I'm guessing you guys already thought of it for like
or anything no I would not anticipate
that this would be a fire hazard you're technically not wrong that you don't
want anything flammable inside your computer it's one of the reasons that an
acrylic case is not actually considered a good idea and you won't find any
commercial manufacturers with an all acrylic case that along with Emi in
Practical terms doesn't really get that hot where is the
fire gonna go from here also the electronics could
also just light on fire on their own yes
I thought you're about to say I have the sick fantasy of Linus's house burning
down yeah like oh
I mean yeah it's sick I'll give you that accurate description
you don't want to eat them without cooking them first I guess you'll need a
fire speaking of high temperatures pulseway's app lets you monitor things
like CPU temperatures when you're on the go and if something catastrophic like a
fire did happen you'd get a notification when your system went offline all I'm
getting from this is Linus is okay with us eating him no I've made it very clear
many times that I would strongly prefer that you guys do not eat me when The
Guillotines come out all right oh that's mint look at that you know what oh I
have the perfect tool for that everything knife now available on
lttstore.com is it actually uh we're ordering more yeah I was like Zach I
mean it sells really well why don't we just carry your knife he's like yeah bro
how much do we make on this knife not very much yeah I like Zach I support this yeah
exactly it's a net benefit to the to the customer to the world you probably
noticed already that we don't have a
traditional like IO Shield place that's
because we don't have enough height to install an IO Shield so we're just not
gonna have one no no we're gonna 3D print one we're gonna oh we're gonna 3D
print one yeah you can totally three it's designed to have like a 3D print one go over top of this you know what I
think our cardboard is going to be too high profile
the CPU backplate so I'm just going to cut a cut out for it yeah well now you
got these holes you can conveniently just line it up on there there to about
there there you go what do you know it's
not this way is this oh yeah it is this way okay I thought it was the uh Shiny
Side town so I was getting very confused oh yeah that's better what is it
touching yeah it's still touching oh I see oh yeah we gotta cut off that part
and then tape that part we're using tape here where there's a sheet metal flange
that's lifting up our board a little bit and then cardboard for the rest of it
and
I think we're good to go I was trying to figure out how these little mounting plates go on this block you see there's
like a little key and it just Clips in
oh that's so cute perfect uh we do not need the stock mounting
bracket well we need the back plate but not these cool oh perfect so I can
install the board yeah all right I'm gonna screw it in shout out AMD I know
I'm always selling the screwdriver really hard but it really does make a big difference when you're trying to do
one of these angled ones like having the nice strong magnet so it doesn't just
like slip around and move around wiggle waggle
okay motherboard's in sick barely clears
over by the audio ports I realize now we haven't really talked about our
motherboard choice we went with matx it's not really as trendy as full-size
ATX or ITX the little one but matx
offers a great middle ground there's more expansion than ITX up to four slots
thanks to the additional board space but it's also not so large as to take up the
entire width of our rack mount case so
for the purposes of our test system here we're going to be using an ASUS Prime
b550m-a CSM it's a pretty budget
oriented board with fairly limited i o but we only need standard gaming
peripheral since it's a lan PC so that's not really an issue and it's also worth
considering that we're going to need to build five of these things so shelling
out for premium motherboards doesn't make a ton of sense then for our CPU
we're using another placeholder honestly this is a ryzen 7 3700x and while it's
totally fine for land gaming PCs for for my kids with both Intel's Raptor Lake
and AMD Zen 4 right around the corner even if I didn't want to Shell out a ton
for the latest and greatest Hardware given that these are Lan PCS depending
on how powerful those are they could have a profound effect on the cost of
ryzen 5000 or Intel's 12th gen which I
mean either of them would be excellent options depending on the pricing and the
secondary Market you did a great job there
thanks buddy just like our video team does a great job of putting together
high quality exclusives and behind the scenes for Floatplane.com you're getting
way ahead of us here talking about storage
yeah he's like going and installing the CPU block I don't even have the m.2 it's
still open we have a number of different options for storage the board has two
m.2 slots on it so we could just you know throw an ND Drive in there and call
it a day we added a three and a half inch Drive Bay at the last second to the
design so we could throw some hard drive based storage in there and maybe do like
all NVMe for boot and then hybrid
storage for game drives or I've been trying to pitch this to Jake here and
maybe you guys can help me we could set up a fancy NVMe Nas upgrade for my house
we already did that well okay he never actually let me take it home so I could
actually take it home and then we could do Network boot for all of these
machines so we could control all the images in one place the only concern
with that is like GPU direct storage some games might start taking advantage
of that that could cause some problems for you that's true I say we just put
eight terabyte NVMe's in each of them what no we we just spent the last like
two minutes talking about being budget conscious Jake playing solder then I've
got a sovereign rocket NVMe 4.0 this is
a PCIe Gen 4 drive that will do fine
just fine for direct storage when and if
we ever get any kind of loading time or
smoothness benefit from it this is going to be too tall is what
going to be to holy I think it'll be okay no no yeah we're going to screw
it in no it's going to be fine I'll just I'll just oh she's mid Bud she's mint
we're good she's mint here you might want to put this other corner on before
you screw the crap out of that we haven't talked about this water block yet but this is super cool first of all
why water we could have gone air especially with the heat output of you
know eight core gaming CPU these days but there are a couple of reasons not to
First is noise yes these systems are going to be in a separate room but a
separate room in a house it's not like there's a concrete barrier so we would
hear them second I have a devious plan to dump the waste heat from these
systems into the pool in the backyard and it's just a little bit easier to set
up a heat exchanger from hot water to cold water why these blocks though
because you can put fittings into the
top of it but you can see the problem with that with them sticking out the top
of the chassis but you can also aha
install fittings in the side or this side
or this side or even this side cool
right there's also the challenge of fitting high speed networking you
wouldn't want a net boot off of one gigabit we could probably find a
motherboard that has onboard 10 gig but then there usually those aquancha Nicks
that we don't really like so and it would be really expensive mat explored
you're talking like some kind of you're buying a 600 one yeah I don't think
that's viable eight terabyte ssds it is no RAM is yet another component where
our choices were dictated by our vertical clearance so while we might
have wanted to put Vengeance RGB in the
system we're going to be sticking with vengeance lpx
close man for our spec we settled on 16
gigs of 3200 Mega transfer per second cl-16 it's a nice bang for the buck at
this stage in the game the Keen eyed among you have probably noticed that we
have a random PCIe slot thing floating
in the middle of the chassis here ah that is where these come in so our
DisplayPort comes from the back of the chassis and then plugs into the back of
the graphics card right over here we're probably going to need a bit of a longer
cable but that's okay infinite cables is going to hook us up right and connect Cable's cool thanks uh we've got two
more of them here one of these is for fiber optic USB 3 and the other one is
for what was it the USB on the dock so it'll come back out and then plug into
the motherboard and then have a little bit we can also convert one of the internal headers and just plug it in
that way but so we'll figure that out yeah we'll figure that out later all
right let's talk GPU this one is a bit of a weird choice this is a 30 90. we
might have some power limitations but the main thing of course water cooled
card right but here's your problem how is a fitting going to fit here yeah
let's let's just illustrate for the people yeah that's definitely not gonna
work remember you also got tubing coming out
of it right yeah or you I mean you could do this maybe
yeah no no no instead EK has this very
special piece of Kit from their fluid Works workstation rather than the old
school terminal blocks where you put like six gpus together in a workstation
and put them all in at once use this instead the fittings come off the side
and you can take out an individual card whenever you want right and that allows
them to pack them in one right above the other single slot super cool this is
where it gets fun this isn't a Gen 4 Riser so it could cause us some problems
given this is a Gen 4 card if you tried to do this a lot of the time the system
will just display nothing your numb lock will work it's posted your GPU is just
not getting the right signals yeah you want to use a Gen 4 Riser but we don't
have one long enough so we're just gonna have to go in the BIOS and set it
explicitly this slot is Gen 3. yeah and then it should work ah the power supply
we went back and forth on this a lot the
original plan was to use dual 400 watt
HD Plex DC to DC converters like we did
in the desk PC so that way the actual PSU the power supply unit is outside of
the chassis and it can be like a power brick yeah like a big leg I mean really
it could be anything you want because you're just taking 12 volt power going
into your system and then Distributing it and converting it to 5 volt and 3.3
volt as needed but an advantage of going
matx for our motherboard is that we can
actually fit this bad boy this right
here is an 850 watt 1u Flex ATX power
supply from fsp it's got 80 plus Platinum efficiency and
if we just do a little something something like this but
that should power everything we need technically this isn't necessary if we
wanted to plug in USB peripherals on the other side and it's just a keyboard
mouse and headset we could probably get
away with just a Cat6 USB extension and
we already have the Cat6 cabling in the wall but we also already have fiber
optic cabling in the wall and these icon docks are amazing they will do USB one
two and three over a single fiber optic
cable and Ethernet the challenge
is mounting each of the systems needs
one of these to plug into a fiber optic cable in the server room and then go all
the way to the Lan room but once you've got all of these in the rack where do
these go so we came up with the idea
of putting them inside the gaming machine now stock we had a bit of an
airflow issue with this in that it would block all of the airflow but by ripping
off the front and the back plate we actually not only can get our airflow
straight through it but we should be able to improve the cooling of the icon
dock itself usually these have a power brick that you'd have to mount I guess
at the back of the case or something like that but Antoine found this cute
little 12 volt to 24 volt adapter put a Molex connector on one side and the icon
connector on the other oh sick that means this thing can get powered off of
our fsp power supply and we don't have to have an external power brake what's
your DVS plan for getting all of these fans hooked up is it devious if you
don't like it you know like lots of extensions okay proof of concept fine
but I think we should probably use a Fan Hub in the final deployment as somebody
that's been using a fan hub for many years they all suck and they always break
Am I Wrong hmm
at least extensions just work
they won't just randomly die six months down the road and then your fans don't
work and this tubing is super cool okay
it's got these super impenetrable walls
so you're not going to lose a lot of your fluid to evaporation and even
though it's a thin wall tubing this is what 3 8 inch I guess I'm not sure the
bend radius pretty tight this is going to help us navigate the twists and turns
in our tiny chassis here as for how to get the water in and out of the system
this is yet another advantage to our matx motherboard because it gives us
room at the back of the chassis for these quick disconnects sorry this is
that does that tube fit over those quick disconnects uh it's gonna be tight but
that means it won't leak I am all about stretching tubing over barbs that are
way too big back in the day I used to put 3 8 inch tubing over half inch barbs
because not only would it mean that it would never leak but there's actually a
flow rate Advantage because the tubing stretching out like this over the
flangement that it was a very smooth trend position between the water flow
through the tube and the water flow through the Barb are you ready to just go for it yeah so are you gonna go is
this going to be the inlet um
oh crap which one's which okay this is out okay let me get a sharpie yeah let's
this is wet erase
perfect oh this is awesome once again
the Keen eyed among you might have noticed a little problem with our system
we don't have a pump or a radiator of course we do
but it'll be like a big pump that will
handle all of these systems together and the radiator is going to be the coils of
tubing that are embedded in the concrete floor of the pool this will be a
standing we'll also have a backup radiator just
in case it gets too hot but I don't think that's ever going to be I don't think it's going to happen Jake before
we fill it with water I confess I am a little curious is it actually I don't
need a lot going to fit I wouldn't put the lid on yet well no
I'm just checking Jake I'm checking a little bit of Bulge uh hard to say
exactly um no it's not what is it it's just this uh
24 pin cable here oh this needs to be mashed a little bit more oh yeah that'll
do it it's done it's done he's here
everything's done look at how beautiful it is it's actually not bad I put some
fans in they all only have one screw they do like nothing no no when it's
close it's not bad they do nothing they're also running at like normal
speed I think these fans can go like 5000 RPM if they want and the Top's not
on you feel them here stick your hands right here oh yeah yeah they're doing stuff
is the game running shut up like I mean actually yes
why do server power supplies sound like they do if this is possible this system
has absolutely no right to be this quiet
what kind of like black magic are they putting into this power supply you stick
your ear next to it but it's no louder than like a normal laptop fan this is
cyberpunk 2077 with Ray tracing up the
butt at 1440p on an RTX 3090 this is not
some trivial load I should just convert mine and Yvonne's
machines to these things I know these are this is awesome a few little tweaks
yeah not as awesome as pulse way though let's see where your CPU four percent
you close the game what no oh okay well apparently
cyberfunk crashed but that's no surprise it's cool that pulseway was able to uh
tell us hey your CPU usage is super low your game probably crashed what are you
doing they got lots of other cool features specifically for your land
Center too so I set up a little automation here what's something that's
really annoying when you want to go play games updates right yeah so we can set
up Windows updates to be automatic you could set it to launch steam at 4am
every night and run updates if it's not already running it'd be a shame if somebody did something with a great
remote monitoring and management tool like pulseway Hey Siri shut off the Lan
PC oh come on oh my God it thinks I'm saying lamp one moment please oh no no
no CPUs at 56 gpus at 42 we do need to
figure out the game crashing issue that we're running into hopefully it's not
like power supply related or anything like that realistically this computer is
not going to have a 30 90 in it that's true yeah hey Siri
shut down computer bye bye see you later it's dead yeah
it's bedtime kids yeah wow you could
turn on like a a parental control thing absolutely yeah it would be sick and
once you have five of them you can set it up so they're all in the same command
so you say Hey Siri update the computers and they'll update them like
I should totally just do them all as one use for the whole house
time we just gotta do a little tweaking and then we'll be there get it stable
it's probably more Windows things than anything this drive has been on like 17
different chipsets it's probably probably that and it's probably time for
you guys to go check out pulseway they're the sponsor of this video head
to the link in the video description where you can try out pulse way for free with no commitment and lock in a special
offer exclusive to our audience and if you're looking for something else to
watch pulseway actually sponsored our last attempt at this where we tried to
do a single virtualized machine with gpus for each of the five stations it's
too bad that didn't work it is too bad that didn't work you guys can watch the video and find out why