I love tiny computers and I love all of the cool premium innovations that are being done in the
space, which is why I'm excited to look at the ThorZone NanoQ R and S. A really cool small form
factor option that has been had a lot of hype around it lately. And oh, look at the color on this.
And also interesting packaging. This is a, there's like no cardboard. I guess there's cardboard
inside the case, but other than that, it's just foam and the outside of it. I love this color
already. This is sick. It comes in three colors. It comes in a graphite, which is what I imagine
this to be. Silver and black. White, black, and black. Some of the front pieces appear to have
fallen off in shipping. Is that supposed to be, like what happened? Is that supposed to be glued?
Did this come out? Oh, it broke. Okay, a bit of a rough start. On top of the hype for this case,
there's also been a little bit of controversy about QC issues. ThorZone, they're a really new
case manufacturer. They've only been in the game for like five years. I think they had a kickstarter
a couple years back that was successful. They released and got the case to a lot of people,
but obviously it was not without troubles. Like any sort of kickstart operation. Scaling up is
always difficult, but they're back again. And it, well, it seems like they still need to work on
their QC because that's tough, but we can talk about that. This is actually a feature they have
swappable things. What? Front pieces. When they don't fall off, these are supposed to be replaceable
with like a walnut or a carbon one. I think the walnut looks pretty sick. It reminds me of like
the Fractal North or the Terra. This is their bigger case. This is the R. I do want to take a quick
peek at their smaller case and also see if we've got a different color. So this is what the silver
looks like. It's funny that the packaging didn't match the color because this one, the packaging
matches that one. They said, nah, too tired, too hard. The color is very, uh, mac. It,
Johnny Ive would be proud. The outside frame on this is anodized aluminum and the inside is
steel mostly. It's kind of like a frame with a really nice shroud that goes over the outside of
it. And I'll show you what I mean in just a bit. So the two sizes, the S and the R are 11 liters and
16 liters respectively, and both are fairly compatible with a lot of different hardware.
The R supports up to four slot GPUs, whereas it's just three slot GPUs on the smaller one.
And there's a slight bit of difference in height for CPU coolers. Um,
but this being kind of an AIO focused case, at least that's how I see it,
you're not going to have too many problems with compatibility because of our part selection. We're
going to go with the big case. Also, I think the colors better. This doesn't come with instructions.
There is a QR code on the box that has a link to the instructions. I printed them off for my
convenience and I forgot to double side it. So I feel bad about the environment. To unlock it,
we just move these and then look what's in here. It's our sponsor. This is, this is a lot of metal,
just this, like look at how thick that is. That's like, gotta be like a half, like four millimeters
or maybe five millimeters of metal all the way around. And it's really smooth. The edges are
really, really well done. It's not sharp. This is, this alone is not cheap. It comes with an AIO.
It's not in its original packaging, which is fine. It, it's the least premium thing I've encountered
so far. This is an ASI tech pump. Uh, it's their gen seven pump. ASI tech, you might not know of
them, but they actually make like most of the AIOs for other companies. Um, you can see that this
one's really small. So like what a lot of companies do is that they get this AIO, they swap out like
the cold plate, they swap out the housing, and then Bada Bing, Bada Boom, you have a different AIO
with your own brand name on it. This is a very basic AIO. This just has a header for your pump.
You'll have to plug your fans into different headers. This also doesn't come included with
the case. It is an optional add-on for 110 euros, which is basically 110 dollars, but I'm not doing
the math editor. We'll do it right here. Tip, put a soft cloth underneath to avoid scratches
like an LTT Store, desk pad. Oh, look at that. So in our accessories bin, we have screws,
handles, and the light rays, which are just RGB strips. These are both options as well.
You don't have to purchase them, but the handles apparently are kind of neat. So I'm looking forward
to those. And then wow, the screws are like in a foam housing. Look at that. That's bougie. For all
of the fancy stuff they give you, they don't give you the hex key to unscrew some stuff. So thankfully,
it's a relatively common hex size in H2. So you'll likely have one in your arsenal, but if you don't,
a key would have been really nice. Oh, cool. Some magnetic mesh fan filters for all of the sides.
What am I supposed to do? There's a spot at the top for a 120 or 140 millimeter fan. And other than
that, I believe that all the fans have to be attached to a radiator or like your GPU or something.
To accommodate more configurations of hardware, say you have a taller CPU cooler or a smaller GPU
and you want to get it closer to the side for some reason, you can adjust the spine. It's just
the matter of loosening this thumb screw down here. And then once you get the sixth screw out,
it looks like, yeah, it just kind of slides over there. Shifting spines is something we've seen
a few times in cases. The Fractal Terra is probably the most popular example of a case that has a
shifting spine. And it's honestly a great feature that allows for way more compatibility. Because
now, as I said, you can put a pump here, you can put a bigger power supply, you can have a smaller
GPU, or you can get a really big GPU and compromise on the CPU cooling. It's awesome. We're going to
keep it with the, we gotta have three slots. So I think we are actually keeping it over this way.
But we're like slightly taller than three slots, as you can see. So for that position,
with no work key. This is the colorful iGame 4090 that you may have seen in the all-screen PC on
LTT. It's a beaver. Triple and a half slot, which means four slots because you can't have half a
slot. It's tough to fit into much. So we're going to go with the largest configuration and I guess
I'll put all those screws back in after taking them out. We do put our LED strips in right now,
according to the instructions, and those go on these little spines. You can see if we look at
the layout of the case, motherboard around here, power supply around here. Here's where our radiator
is going to go. And it's going to be an intake that's going to be blowing air to both of our,
to both halves of our system. And so you can see that this side has all of these little mounting
points for our radiators and our fans. And this side is solid because of RGB, baby. Let's go.
I know this is like a premium case, but it is funny to me that they are like, yeah,
we're going to have tooling to put screws in here so that you can exclusively screw these into here.
That's like what this is for. Why didn't they just save money and give me some sticky boys?
So the light rays are an additional 30 euros, which is kind of a crazy price point considering
that they're not even diffuse light strips. I guess the plus side is that they do work with
signal RGB. The motherboard, all right, we're getting somewhere now. In addition to our 4090,
we're going to be putting in a AMD Ryzen 97950X. So a pretty beefed up system. Not going to lie,
but I mean, that's like what this is for. You're not going to be buying this case
if you ain't putting some real beef in it. Non-ferrous screws. These aren't magnetic.
Come on. How much did I pay for this case? Unbelievable.
Now we're making progress. They really did put it down to the wire.
If you look, this goes exactly to the width of this. I think you might even lose some
compatibility if you put the LED strips in. Because if you had one of those ROG
motherboards that has the SSD mount up here, you might bump into this. Even the plug for
the LED is actually interfering with my ability to plug this in a little bit.
The following steps are only necessary when using extremely long GPUs. So you can actually
unscrew these screws at the four corners and you can take the whole front of the case off
if you have a very, very long GPU that you need to get in there. All right, power supply time.
It's the CoolerMaster V1100. It's an 1100 watt SFX power supply that kind of cheats the SFX spec
by having these little things sticking out. But it's still crazy that they fit that much power
into such a small, small little guy. It would be nice if they had like the other components
printed in the instructions. So you kind of had a little bit easier time, you know,
orienting yourself. But they don't. I find this level of GPU sag very concerning.
And there's no screws or anything to mount it into the actual back panel. Like you can see,
we're just kind of hovering here. It's a lot of stress on the PCIe slot. So I'm going to just
like kind of tie it in while I'm working with it. And then hopefully that'll prevent that.
Because once the side panel is in, it's not going to sag too much. I'm really like wondering
if I missed something. So I thought that this like power supply was going to be kind of like
mounted like on these two top bars here. But what it's actually going to be doing is just hanging
from these little bars as they insert from here. And then it will screw in through the backside.
And then this will just be like attached there. A little bit weird, again, a little bit less
stable than I would kind of want. Especially for a case that comes with a handle, which means
like maybe you'll be moving it around. But again, once we get all the cables in, maybe things will
kind of hold themselves into place, though I don't usually want to just rely on the rest
of my hardware to hold my hardware in place. One thing I do like is that you can see on the
mount right here is that we do have, again, an adjustable height for increased compatibility.
That's something like everything in this case seems to have that. We'd like just
don't have enough to get this power supply in this orientation. That's because I screwed
it in upside down like a dumb, wait, if I go the other way, if I screwed in like this,
the plugs the wrong way around and I don't have quite enough slack
to get there. Oh no, I do. A lot of times people are worried about like hot air going into their
power supply. That's not really something you should be worried about. Power supplies are rated
withstand a lot of heat in your case. And in this case, it's actually going to be helping us by
encouraging our flow through cooler and exhausting stuff out of the back. So this is actually a
good way of orienting this and you don't have to worry about it. It's not like it's going to get
choked out because we have a flow through cooler. If this was a solid back GPU, I would flip it
around the other way to make sure that you're getting enough air to your power supply. But in
this case, it's going to, it's going to have no issues with airflow. That's going to, that clears
it. But we're going. It's funny that there wasn't that much cable management to be done because
there's not that many cables. There's no front IO really. There's just the power button and
the RGB ends right by your motherboard. So this cable is really easy to just install. Though it
is kind of a, it's a little too short to be like conveniently routed. The ASYTECH AIO didn't come
with any fans. Luckily, I got these really cool metal fans from Alpha Cool that we saw at CES
last year. And I was planning on using just one of them for the top, depending on the color. So
they're, they're not going to be matching, but we're going to use them. Yeah. They come in matte
black. They have a chromed out version. And then this one I think is gold. They also have a white
version. The gold though. Look at that. Luckily, we have some 280 fans from the RAD that I was
going to use. And we'll toss those on because these, they're 120s. We've got our fans on our
radiator now and we're about to put stuff in. And now I am seeing that this isn't as spacious as I
once thought. First off, this cable is kind of getting in the way in a big way. It's kind of
crossing over where we want our radiator to go. It looks like you're able to pop this out and
flipped around, but I do not have the strength to do so. It's got these weird clips in it. Another
thing to worry about is all these cables coming from your power supply because they could get jammed
into your fans. So I think we're going to be okay. It's just going to be a little bit less than
pretty. After finagling with the screwdriver, we were able to pop this out. We're going to
turn it so that it goes 90 degrees the other direction and then we're going to pop it back in.
Let's just get this screwed in and then we'll deal with the cable routing. Now we just got to get
our two radiator fans plugged in and then we are good to go. I need a wine splitter. Yeah. The last
thing that's going in is our fan and I need to make sure which screws we use the long screws for
these fans. Alrighty. And now these screws are going to be nicely hidden by our little posts
that Andy nicely fixed for us by putting the magnets back in. We're just about done
fielding right on up. Important thing to note, we put a 120 fan at the top. This also supports
140 millimeter fans at the top. So if you have a bigger fan, go for it. Moment of truth to see if
posts or stays on. The power supply has no switch. So the other issue, the other thing,
might be that my front panel connector is plugged in incorrectly. They're going now.
This is looking great. And I just missed the chance to go into the BIOS and also don't have a
keyboard. I'm going to try and get this thing on. What is happening? Why has this been disconnected?
Oh my gosh. Oh no. Look at what happened to the magnetic dust filter. Look at this. Oh gosh.
Oh wow. Look at this. Look at that. You got to be really careful. That's their rated height.
That's default. So here's something you should be really careful about is that this PCIe cable,
if you have it extend all the way over this pole, it can get caught. It looks like they don't actually
show anywhere in the actual PCIe installation instructions that you shouldn't run it there.
But in an earlier picture, they have the cable run in between the motherboard on the other side of
this pillar. But like it's still going to be the motherboard is still the further ascension. And
I guess we need to adjust. We can't adjust the spine. So this goes here. It plugs into there,
but there's no depiction of that. It actually has to go behind this little post, which if you've
already had your motherboard mounted, like they ask you to in the manual, you might not be able
to squeeze it. Like I can't get this because of this m dot two slot on the back of the motherboard.
I'm not going to be able to get this in around there. So I'd have to like remember to have that
routed ahead of time. What happened? What is going on here? Look at what the f***. Okay, you have to
be really, really careful about your cables and stuff inside because it's a really tight fit.
There's not a lot of wiggle room between the outer walls of the case. I was like, I slid it in there.
And now it looks pretty freaking sick. Not going to lie. I'm now really excited about this again.
Now this case actually supports a couple of different orientations. You can put the feet of
the case on in multiple spots. Oh, we also have to install the handles. So yeah, the case feet
are included with the rest of the screws and stuff. And these are just like those stick on ones.
You go into these little holes so you can orient your case anywhere where you have these holes.
The locks are disengaged. It's just that I think there's just so much pressure from the
cables. Andy, can you put like a hand here? There we go. You just need to make sure that your
cables are really tucked away because we didn't have this much trouble getting it out before
the cables were in. Here we go. So now what I was trying to say was that if we want to get
the handles in, we have to take out these bottom posts. And I don't want to do that because boy,
am I tired. Then you get the handles at the back like this. It's kind of a weird spot for handles
in terms of carrying the case, but it does allow you to mount it vertically without having your
cables be totally blocked off, right? So you'll be able to have a nice case that's taller but
takes up less desk footprint. It's not perfect. There's some issues with like overall refinement,
like especially on this middle piece. I mean, Andy, you also saw that the front things fell off.
But the finish on this middle piece is kind of rough. The GPU mounts really sketchy ended up
having to use cable ties and stuff like that. So I would love to see like a proper bracket
integrated into this system. And the final kind of big issue is the price. This thing ain't cheap.
This version, the NanoQR is 364 Euro, which is a lot of money. And the smaller cousin,
the S is 320 Euro. But you can also get both of these cases as open frame cases,
basically without the outer shell for 249 Euro for the small one and 274 Euro for the big one.
So you're kind of paying like 90 bucks just for this outside shell, which I mean, listen,
cutting big pieces of metal is very expensive. And I think in terms of aesthetics, they have
knocked it out of the park. In terms of parts compatibility, they've done a great job.
In terms of the build experience, I'm impressed by the manual, especially for a small company.
There's airflow on every side of the case. There's room for lots of radiators and our
other coolers. So if you're like kind of looking for something in this space that has a similar
amount of hardware compatibility, but probably isn't as premium of price for the big guy, I would say
look at something like the SUP D mesh licious. That's a great case that's about the same size.
It's only $160 compared to like the 360 that this is. And if you're looking at something
comparable to this in terms of volume, look at the form DT1. If you can get it,
I know, right? It's so nice. We're just running Cinebench and combustor at the same time. We're
not having any problems. Like obviously our CPU is running really fast. After toying around with
like fans and stuff, I kind of realized there's a bit of an issue is that this is the right side
up orientation based on the nano queue logo, which means our feet should be going under here
so that we can display it properly. But the feet that are included, they don't provide much clearance.
And that is where our radiator fan is. What I think would be worthwhile would be actually having
this flipped upside down. This is the bottom so that your radiators can exhaust out the top
and everything can kind of breathe a little bit better. Unless you're on a hard surface,
this is really going to choke your intake even on a hard surface. That's not a lot of clearance.
Quick little pickup. Turns out that they actually are fixing a lot of the problems that I had with
it in the production version. They're fixing the GPU mount. Apparently they're adding another
screw to the back. Hopefully they add a little bit more because I still worry about sag even
with their solution. They also include a hex key in the box now. Thank you. It was annoying to
have to get my own. The front little logo is now flippable. So it works in both orientations of the
case, whether they have the rad up or down. And they're fixing the magnets so that they don't
like fall off. But they haven't fixed the PCIe cable, which I'm still a little worried about.
So who knows? Overall thoughts. I just think this is a really cool case. It's really expensive,
but it is very premium. There is a little bit of controversy about QC from their previous case.
And it looks like they're still kind of working on those considering that they sent us one that
kind of broke on the top as well as some weird finish issues. Despite the fact that they're a
Swedish company. But gosh, is it not just beautiful? I mean, look at it. Do you know what else is
beautiful? People who subscribe to ShortCircuit. So why don't you click that button down there?
And then you can watch more awesome content. And if you've got time right now, why don't you check
out my unboxing of the Fractal Terra? It's a pretty cool case. I own it myself.