nine months ago we designed the perfect rack mounted gaming PC it's got it all
it's a completely custom skinny one you
chassis it offers Up Maximum performance while using custom water cooling to
achieve dead silent operation and it
keeps all the heat out of the room for those hot summer gaming sessions and now
we're throwing all of it away why
price it was too darn High especially if
I want systems for me my wife my kid my other kid and my other kid and this
isn't just me being a cheapskate dad the quote I got back for the cases was 1700
each and I'm thinking to myself there's got
to be a cheaper way a jankier way a
Linus Tech tips way and ladies and gentlemen
we found it meet the almost ideal one
new gaming case
yeah awesome just like this awesome
segue to our sponsor covalence set aside
your unused flash sale discount Dev courses with untethered access to
covalence's comprehensive web development curriculum you'll learn to
build websites and applications as efficiently as possible check them out
using the link below it's toasty yeah it's a big problem all
the heat generating Electronics in the house are in this room which is
insulated with not even so much as a window to the outside
fortunately there's a plan for that that's why these 1u gaming machines are
designed with those external water cooling fittings because the idea is
that they're going to be plumbed up to these pipes right here that are going to
carry all the heat from the CPUs gpus to
the outside where those lines actually run to the outer walls of my swimming
pool so all the heat from this room gets dumped into the pool hopefully helping
save on my gas bill for now we need to do a proof of concept build and
one of the challenges is that there's already not a ton of space left in my
rack down here and I really don't want to add a second rack so that's why each
of these systems is just one rack unit
deep that means we can do five for the entire land Center in half the space
that it would take if we did 2u systems which would be a lot easier but
completely fill up my rack as you can imagine building a gaming PC into such a
slim profile just 4.4 centimeters is a
real challenge because everything from the usual power supplies to gpus to even
things like motherboards will typically exceed that profile so
what's a slim gaming PC Enthusiast to do
well for starters we ended up with this really cool motherboard from ASRock rack
it takes a regular LGA 1700 processor
it's got four dimm slots PCIe by 16 m.2
actually dual m.2s for storage onboard
10 gig networking and all in a really
weird form factor this is what ITX like
wide Edition this doesn't have a 24-pin
power connector we can talk about that later first I
want to talk about this case rather than custom fabricating something Antoine
from the Labs team thought I bet we could find something off the shelf that
could be modified to meet all of our requirements and he came up with this
which costs just a fraction of the custom solution at two hundred dollars
well not quite Inman sent us the more
expensive version of this case that comes with the power supply and it's
about 700 to 800 uh that's not the budget that I approved
I mean anyone sent it to us for free yeah but I need four more how much is it
it's it's it's four hundred dollars
it's a server man it's for businesses not normal people okay we're not using
the power supply for the rest of the units then what else have we changed well
all of these Drive mounts they're gone yeah they have no back plane that
they're connected to so see you later buddies those are going to be replaced with your fiber optic USB extender these
are super cool these docks from icon allow you to plug a USB device in from
functionally anywhere that you can run a fiber optic cable so I guess that just
goes into the front kind of hereish yeah and we also printed this custom front
plate for it there's a nice honeycomb pattern the next modification we had to
do was replace these super noisy server fans so we got these 40 millimeter knock
to a fence that squeeze right on in there are we worried that that's not
going to be enough airflow uh no we're not it's that's your problem
basically cool but these fans have to
move back from where they are so this has been drilled out yes it's uh just
press fit in it's a there's literally the case there's no
screws for it maybe having engineer's isn't as great as I thought this is the
final version of the stubby by the way knurling is now in place we've got the
tension of this fixed and this is the final molding for the handle
lttstore.com this doesn't fit at all nope okay we 3D printed a customer oh no
way all that sick oh yeah and it's even got a fiber optic
pass-through for the fiber optic USB thankfully Alpha cool makes these
awesome low profile CPU water blocks so
theoretically we shouldn't be giving up basically anything in terms of cooling
wait how the devil is this supposed to install
long story short our mounting hardware is missing so we're going to move on
from that for now RAM
hey we're using the custom RAM that I
built at Micron that is almost too tall
but not quite nice how much is this board
669 what the heck I guess I have to give
up on Remote Management and having the memory oriented correctly in favor of
something much more affordable with only a single 10 gig Network Port thanks to
this cool little m.2 to 10 gig adapter
from innodesk all right we're going AMD
baby so I don't even know what CPUs in there I don't know what CPUs in it
either did you guys notice that this motherboard is bowed due to the back
plate here you realize this is becoming a pattern right fit before
no what a mess yeah don't no what are
you doing these are all laid out this is your 12 volt to 24 volt converter ah
this takes power off of our power supply you can see it's modified with a Molex
connector here and then adapts it to oh
what used to be the barrel Jack power
supply for this icon fiber optic USB dog
thing DC DC conversion is much more
efficient than going from AC to DC so that's why this thing can be cooled
passively rather than with a fan we're just gonna
put it there I am Gravely worried this bracket was
supposed to go in when we had a smaller motherboard I see
I mean I am no longer Gravely worried phew What GPU are we using well this is
still the placeholder one so it's a 30 90. okay I mean that's a little op do
you have any idea of like What GPU you actually want in these systems eventually used 30 series might actually
be the way to go right now man I bet I could get cheap water blocks for them
last gen water blocks always discounted one of your big
complaints the last time we did this was that the GPU was upside down you want
the water block to be visible when it's in your rack this is a platform to place
the GPU on and also run the Riser cable underneath so it can plug in here so
that it shows up nicely when you open the case hey that's pretty cool my brain
hurts Antoine from the Labs team just sent us this picture
of the block and a back plate mounted to another of this board
the block came with the right mounting hardware but we've decided to move ahead
with our cheaper board anyway due to cost but we'll still show you some of
the cool Solutions we came up with for this one let's look you can get right angle adapters
for your internal USB header cool right
we actually probably still need that cool we don't need it are you sure
that's it was a height issue for us yeah should be fine
I'm getting flashbacks to when you broke my motherboard I did not yeah you did
the port's all wonky now oh my God Linus did we break the USB 3
everything's fine you know what this is better I accept your solution where did this
come from though is this part of the case the brackets part of the case but
these were sent from alpha cool they're like the old school pass-throughs with
PCIe slots for when you couldn't fit water cooling in your case wow that is a
really over engineered solution for that when you can just drill a hole and run a
tube through it I just got all the front i o hooked up here we were pretty close
to powering this thing on I think yeah we just need our drives oh or drive yeah
I only have room for one yeah I wasn't sure which one you wanted if you wanted to go price conscious or just price
conscious sweet that's a two terabyte sabrin rocket cool that's a very
affordable Drive these days but still ripping fast where is this supposed to
go to oh I know this just passes through
anywhere at the back of our case I guess and then plugs into a USB 3 port on the
motherboard because this is how we get our USB signal to our
fiber optic adapter and then you've got DisplayPort right yeah this we actually
have the proper pass-through for because it's tied to our PCI pass-through
bracket thing for the water cooling I think nope it's just under it so we got
this handy dandy right angle connector ooh things are kind of coming together
here I think we just got to get the tubing runs done okay let's do it so I can just
plumb this up however I want now yep all right I know guys I said that this was
going to be the final form the next time I did an update on this thing and
there's still a fair bit of Jank here but
what were you expecting this is pretty good for me there is one more thing
before we can try to actually deploy this will it close
um yeah oh hey look at that
wow that is a lot of gaming PC in a very
very thin enclosure oh why is it wet
oh is this just dripping out from here no no that's a lot of water uh
oh oh it's coming from inside I think are these not even quick disconnects
they're just draining water oh well
that's good then awesome
that's actually great news though yeah it's not in the system uh it's under the
power supply but that could just be coming through
the bottom power supply is sealed I think it's probably fine I mean okay
you need to turn this off now
okay well that's where it was leaking
I'm just glad it all still runs I don't know if there's any additional
water I think these collars are doing basically nothing though
they're just looking pretty
that's why it leaked then because the tubing was stretched and the collar is
not actually compressing the outer part of the tube against the inner Barb
let's just try again I mean what could go wrong
since we're on our way the goal is to replace this station first this is my
sun station or as I call it the shrine to how a temporary solution is the most
permanent solution we've got the egpu equipped laptop we've got the power bar
down there it all is great got this dongle
no more all right let's see if our
DisplayPort pass through Works before we put it in the rack I uh was gonna
just put it in the rack and hope for the best but it hasn't been that kind of day
fresh boot attempt here we go
and it's powered off the issue right now is that the system
does not stay on it could be anything could be the flex
of the board from when we screwed it down
could be the water it could be the PCIe
extension that could be broken boys I um
I don't know if this system is powering on today
you know in a way I think the leak was a blessing in disguise because while the
system probably doesn't look very different we took the opportunity to use that time
to clean up a few items that weren't really final form the icron dock at the
front now for example is screwed into place from the top the GPU is now
screwed into place using the PCIe Riser so that's not going anywhere we figured
out the missing shark teeth on these fittings were why they weren't sealing so we added a couple zip ties those
shouldn't be coming loose we 3D printed an i o shield for the new motherboard
including proper pass-through for our 10 gig as well as our fiber optic cable and
replace these Quick Connect fittings at the back with ones that don't lose quite
as much water when you unplug them all of which means this should work
perfectly this time with no hiccups whatsoever why would you say that
oh yeah it's going
hey there we go it's a ryzen 7 3700x oh
it's the third gen man it's quiet what is making all the
noise in here these days anyway
oh right old old wanek which is not at
my house let's get into the
wrap mine and my wife's gaming machines look just downright inefficient okay so
maybe it's this one to go oh yes
Adam we forgot a solution to remotely power it on oh no we didn't look at all
of our wonderful options oh my God oh my God oh wow which one are we using
um we've got 2.4 gig we've got Wi-Fi we've got a pi KVM oh Pi KVM is super
cool that sounds like a bigger project for another day though this is probably
gonna be the easiest for today you just use it like a little car
starter oh no way yeah this solution
comes to us courtesy of Silverstone maker of things you never thought you
needed until the moment you need them it plugs into a USB 2 header for power
it appears that this is so you can
Orient it any number of different ways
depending on your system layout which is
pretty clever all right and then this
plugs into the hell my God this is a one
new system Adam I don't know if this is going to work this board plugs into your reset and
your power switch and then the ones on the front of your case plug into these
male extensions that way both the remote starter and the
original one from the case should work funny thing about usb headers I've never
done this on purpose but technically nothing would prevent you from bending
the pins I'm doing a very bad thing right now
should we try it okay yeah let's try it if it still works oh oh you want to
power it on let's fob it
hold on am I about to see something that I have literally never seen before in my
life okay watch this all I'm gonna do is
turn it around what and then we get this weird Behavior
where it powers on right away and then Powers off because I think it's
being held down if I do it in that orientation
and then I press it and it does nothing wow I reverse it
I have never seen this before in all my
years and it works normally learn something new every day
now let's see if this Powers it off we
did it but can it power it on
ah yes okay let's go
it occurs to me we haven't tested the range on this
um Adam you ready yeah ready
did it turn on nope
how about from in here it did it yeah it's on oh okay well
that's not too far almost Moment of Truth time
all I gotta do is patch the fiber optic
connection from that USB dock into the fiber optics that are in my walls
already so just all right there we go
one of those plug my DisplayPort which
is already run through a fiber optic cable through the walls
it detected something but did it detect enough
this wall plate is still using this big
style adapter that I had intended to replace
well at any rate the reason I was opening it up was to try plugging
directly into the optical cable rather than through a pass-through plate and
the fact that we have the worst kind of pass-through plate here is well it gives
me hope
I think it doesn't like having an extension on the other side I think it
wants to be plumbed straight into the source so we got to move that GPU over
I might have done a thing wow wow the kids have a lot of Minecraft
worlds on here okay fancy stuff to see here why don't we go with that one uh oh
um no oh no no no no no no no no no no no
no Squarespace if you're looking at
creating and sharing your own content online give Squarespace a try it's the
all-in-one platform for building top tier websites and growing your brand
online you can upload or embed your video library and organize it in one of
squarespace's Best in Class templates to explore the new ways that you can
monetize your work you can both display your social media posts and push website
content out to your social media channels it plays both sides so you
always come out on top then you can unlock a whole new Revenue stream for
your videos by posting exclusive content in member areas behind either a
subscription or a one-time fee and squarespace's analytics and insights
will help you make your site just right for your fans and customers so don't
wait head to squarespace.com LTT and get
10 off today if you guys enjoyed this adventure you
might enjoy the one where we actually set up the whole server water loop that
is going to ultimately cool the five of these once they're all in the rack it's
also pretty chaotic