WEBVTT

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a while back we got a tweet from a viewer who suggested we take a look at

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the S4 Mini by NFC a completely unheard

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of Indie outfit run by this guy Josh

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sniffing well I'm not sure what he's been sniffing but it must be some pretty

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good stuff because basically out of his garage He is building what appears to be

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by far the smallest case for custom

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gaming PC Builders out there measuring

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just 2 and2 in thick the diminutive S4

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Mini case pushes the definition of small

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form factor cases to the absolute breaking point but will it break when we

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try to cram a Zotac GTX 1080 and a core

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i7 7700 K into a system that's even

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smaller than the PlayStation 4 there's

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only one way to find out

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out we're hosting LTX 2017 on July 29th

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2017 it's a Meetup Tech Carnival thing

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and uh it's going to be a lot of fun learn more at the link in the video

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description distilling a gaming PC down

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to this degree comes at a cost the the S4 Mini has no front IO to speak of the

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CPU Cooler and RAM module clearance is 40 mm and GPU options that don't require

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some uh creativity are pretty limited

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thankfully more powerful mini cards have come into fashion and our MSI GTX 1060

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ocv1 fit quite easily without even being

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so tight inside that we couldn't fit two

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2 and 1/2 in drives which will take gladly but even that it's probably not

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enough so what other tricks did they use

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well unlike oems like MSI and Zotac the

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S4 Mini uses an off-the-shelf miniitx

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motherboard and a desktop graphics card

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but like them they're relying on a main

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external power brick with a high efficiency DC todc power supply mounted

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inside there are a handful of options including some lower cost ones for more

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pedestrian system configs but to give ourselves some breathing room we are

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using a Dell 300 30 W brick with an hdplex 300 power

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supply inside now without any modifications we

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ended up with what we'd consider to be a pretty decent machine we've got a low

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voltage core i7 7700t a GTX 1060 16 gigs of Vengeance

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lpx memory and an mp500 m.2 SSD for

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Speed and a little bit of space saving savings behind the video card and firing

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it all up we found ourselves greeted with actually pretty great thermal and

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acoustic performance it's right in the middle of the other competitors in our

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recent small form factor case Roundup impressive perhaps even most impressive

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but I wouldn't call it a Jedi if it was another one of those stupid looks great

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but can't perform cases would I well

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good news my friends the limit here is not our power supply or our thermals

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thanks to the S4 Mini's perforated side panels just volume so let's see then how

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far we can push our luck I mean if we

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look at our CPU cooling results we've got a lot of Headroom there so step one

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we go ahead and upgrade to a

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7700k as for the RAM well come on this

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stuff's clearly not cool enough for a rig like this but ah ah A Stroke of Luck

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Corsair contacted us and asked if we wanted a sample of their new Dominator

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Platinum special edition torque we took

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one look at that stuff and said f yeah

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seriously orange fins and labeling heat

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treated titanium styling on the top bar

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32 gigs of this was definitely worth the

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$75 we paid to have Josh overnight ship

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us a custom hot rod style side panel to

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go with it moving on to the GPU while we

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were scratching our heads trying to figure out how to get something bigger

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than a 1060 in here I mean we're kind of

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coming to the point where we can almost fit a card like Zotac GTX 1080

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mini if only the case were a little

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bigger or the card were a little

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smaller so if

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we yes my friends I hope you saw this

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one coming because we went there after taking the plastic shroud off we

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carefully trimmed down the rear of the

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heat sinks fins as close to the heat pipe as we D to no not that close dang

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it Ivan so one quick call to Zotac and

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another overnight shipment later and it's time for round

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two now we're talking now we can get the

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card inside the S4 Mini but the stock

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cooling is still an issue but if we

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can't fit a Noctua F12 maybe a

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Silverstone slim 120 mil on this Mount

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here will be enough fire up fir Mark

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and crap okay let's go back to the Noctua n

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ff12 i mean it's only a couple millim

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off so I think you can see where we're going with this we shaved off just

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enough to make it fit in under the 120 mil fan mounts and make it fit we did I

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mean this is lonus Tech tips we always fit it in there if you know what I mean

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as for temperatures though we're stable in the high 80s we made it work but it

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was a little loud due to the lack of clearance between the fan and the side

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panel at about 50% fan speed though we

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got to the point where our noise level was acceptable without giving up too

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much of our GPU boost clock as for the

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CPU with some careful undervolting and tweaking we got it to hold at 4.2 to 4.3

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GHz boost under synthetic load staying

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comfortably at 4.5 GHz that is full

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turbo under Li workloads like games our

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Dominator Platinum Torx didn't want to go past 2400 MHz but this is an x99 kit

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on a z170 board with a seventh gen chip so we made up the difference by

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tightening up the timings as far down as they'd go and all of this taken together

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gives us this tiny gaming rig whose only

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outward indication of its potency is the

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ba RAM vent and maybe the massive

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external power brick so let's take a few moments then to put into perspective the

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sheer amount of raw power contained in

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this little box we only planned to run a

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couple of benchmarks you know just to make sure that it was working okay but

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we were so blown away that we had to run

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more to make sure we weren't dreaming

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our Decked Out S4 Mini runs with the

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best single GPU systems we've tested

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even beating out our KB Lake bench system with a Founders Edition card

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thanks to the additional turbo enabled by an overclocked card and it comes in

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at the top of the pack for what we've

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ever seen in terms of performance per

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liter now at $195 not including the power supply and

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without a fancy paint job not to mention

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the fact that it's completely sold out of pre-orders the S4 Mini slots in with

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the rest of our premium small form factor cases it's compact reasonably

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lightweight features rugged aluminum construction is near impossible to

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actually buy and isn't the easiest thing to work in but so far this is the

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closest I think I've seen to the idea that I pitched to Cooler Master four

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years ago and to say I love it would be

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an understatement tunnel bear is the simpl

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to use VPN app that literally takes this

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long to turn on Boom the app loads up

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you go okay yep that's the country I want you click one button and Bam no DNS

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settings and port forwarding or any of that kind of nonsense and once you turn

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tunnel bear on you get a couple of key benefits your connection gets encrypted

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keeping your traffic safe and private

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LTT so thanks for watching guys if this video sucked you know what to do but if

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it was awesome get subscribed hit that like button and maybe check out the link to where to buy the stuff we featured in

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the video description okay maybe the parts inside

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also down there is a link to our merch store which has cool shirts like this one as well as our community Forum which

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you should totally join