so
ah yeah collector's edition graphics card scrolling text intro whatever you
guys get it so anyway the Dan case's a4
sfx was a great if imperfect step in the
direction of ultimate compact gaming it
allowed a full-size GPU which is great but it forced you to compromise on CPU
cooling meaning that our xeon e5 2699 v4
last time around wasn't able to reach quite its full potential
well stay tuned because with the a4 sfx v2
we were able to one-up every small
form-factor pc we've ever built again
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okay so step one was to outfit our build with the fastest
and sweetest gaming card on the market the jedi order star wars collector's
edition titan xp step two then was to actually trade some
cores from our xeon last time around for
the much higher clocks on an Intel core
i9 7980xe this thing runs at up to 800
megahertz higher so we already know from our
review that the core i9 7900x outperforms the 2699v4
in many workloads so the 7980xc
we're expecting that to totally smoke it
there's one small problem though
the area for the CPU cooler on this case it's right here it is literally
small and that CPU is a
165 watt part putting it at roughly 12
to 13 percent higher thermal output compared to our last ultimate compact
build and if you guys recall the all copper dynatron vapor chamber
cooler that we used previously hit around 80 degrees under load so
we're gonna get to the real solution in a minute here but first let's walk
through the process we started by breaking out the dare
bauer x299 d-litting tool popping the ihs and applying some
thermal grizzly conduct-a-knot we're going to need every advantage we can get
here so yes my friends you've been begging us to do it and here it is
a liquid metal infused 7980xe
but what to put on it ah how about an
nhl 12. this this looks pretty good right
just put that on there and uh oh temps are good too
but that's outside the case and uh
it's also nowhere even close to fitting and it can't be cut to
fit so back to the drawing board well
we had some success with our dynatron cooler last time so how about we just
grab the square ilm version of what is
essentially the same cooler so you can just see it has a different screw layout
and success
sort of see while we were able to get reasonable
temperatures with this thing we also had to use a knock to a 120 millimeter
industrial fan in order to get them which wouldn't be so much of a problem
if we didn't also need this 92 millimeter adapter to ensure proper air
flow over the CPU heatsink and around the socket and that whole arrangement
just won't fit and our low profile fans didn't cut it
so by this point we had completely exhausted our stock of compatible
coolers before finally coming to a realization the a4sfx v2 has a mount for
a 92 millimeter radiator so that's why
this video ended up delayed there are very few aios out there this size none
of which we had on hand so after a trip to asatech's website and another week of
waiting our 545 lc arrived
this thing is not much to look at honestly and we weren't really expecting
it to perform much better than our dynatron cooler did but when we fired it
up for a dry run not bad
after two and a half hours at stock voltage under full synthetic load our 18
core 7980xe hit a maximum of 68 degrees
celsius on any one core
d litting man what a drug
on a 92 millimeter cooler
anyway next order of business then is to get it
all together and this is no small task
the asrock x299e itx ac motherboard with
its 64 gigs of g-skill ripjaws memory
and Corsair NVMe ssds in raid 0 are easy
enough as is the GPU but the cooler required us to remove the
front usb 3 port the lower drive tray and the side panel clips at the front of
the case in order to get it mounted properly and to make matters worse
even with the 14 millimeter variant of the Noctua a9 fan
getting an sfx power supply in there
is an absolute nightmare
with some determination though and a healthy serving of elbow grease
we got it all in so we just need one final check to make
sure that everything is bolted in correctly and nothing's obstructed and
our fan spins moment of truth time
oh damn it did we leave the power supply switch off
oh oh crap yep
yay all right moment of truth time
i wonder what that is no i don't have time for this
so this is not bad like it is not
elegant to get the cooler in there at
all and uh like you could even potentially
damage stuff trying to cram all of that in there but the results we can't really
criticize running a CPU and GPU synthetic load
it's topping out at just over 90 degrees celsius on the hottest core like that's
hot but it's also not thermal throttling
now let's look at some GPU specific tests so we've had the unigen
superposition stress test running for almost 10 minutes now
i'm wearing my microphone here so you can hear it's actually pretty quiet
and check this out we're seeing turbo speeds up around
15 80 16 20 16 30 megahertz
not freaking bad and as for the rest of the benchmarks both synthetic and real
world this thing has absolutely chewed
through them we are really seeing the hardware not just work but actually flex
its muscle so in the end then
the success that we saw here goes to show you just how much power you can
pack into a tiny space like the a4 sfx
v2 without making any compromises on
performance i mean halfway through this project we flat out didn't expect it to
work but we're really glad that it did this
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the link in the video description so thanks for watching guys if this
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