the fans inside your computer probably look something like this or this or
maybe this but what they don't look like
is this that is unless you happen to have a meshless aiio by meshless design
a case that contrary to its name does in fact contain some mesh but the mesh or
lack thereof is not what Drew Us in it was MD's claim that round fans are
sickness and our long fan is the here
really though guys a 14900 K and an RTX 490 in this case with
no other fans not even on the
radiator I'm skeptical and so is our
sponsor nexigo whether you're in need of webcams or accessories for your VR
device nexo has a great selection of products to choose from check out their
giveaway at the link down below cross flow cooling fans have been used in
gaming PCs before creative modders have used them to cram water cooling where no
water cooling was intended to go and the Silverstone fx11 was available as an
optional accessory for their first generation compact case the sg1 way back
in 2005 so then where has this
technology been all of my life hiding in
plain sight it turns out cross flow fans are favored for their compact size Even
airf Flow distribution and low noise and can be found in everything from
household fans to air conditioners to gas fireplaces to computers apparently
that also have seat bels in them yeah but to really see how cool it is we have
to get inside so let's take off these panels ooh that is a tight fit good
gravy promise you it's not cheap we'll get to that later how does this side
come on it doesn't oh the rest of this is all like one connected piece of metal
no yeah it totally is did they extrude this
entire piece yes like that's amazing
like how are you like this wow you're
just so cool wow sorry sorry is he even
famous anymore to be clear there are some screwed on pieces the power supply
Mount right here this angled SSD Mount that's made out of I think PL oh
metal that's fun the optional carrying handle and what
appears to be an adapter for the top that allows you to mount conventional
fans if you really want not quite that's for the radiator for your aiio
oh I get it your motherboard goes here
there's a little clip and a routing path for your tubes over here and then you've
got this one fan that blows air out the
top of the radiator no it actually pulls through the radiator and blows all out
the side right here oh oh one fan to
rule them all except for this guy oh
presumably it's for RAM not for sheep only RAM that was a bad joke I don't
know I think it was the goat you kid you kid a I'm
defeated so let's Shepherd this away from the puns and back towards the
case yeah otherwise we might not be able to keep the uh viewers
hooked ooh I like
it and there it is custom cross flow fan
apparently the manufacturers not just sourcing these from AliExpress or
whatever but rather they've sourced a motor an impeller and put together an
assembly that they think offers a unique value proposition for cooling well your
entire system just this this is cool I
don't think I've ever seen a small form factor sandwich style case before that
fits a quad slot GPU is this a
490 actually they claim that this case was specifically designed for 490s and
I9 core processors like absolutely crazy
specs you are putting the GPU in upside down oh yes I certainly
am really yeah it's okay this is the
first of many wacky mechanisms in here ah GPU installation bracket I see I
don't know what that's for I thought you said there was an airflow guide that
must be what it is it must be it oh yes I saw that as an option on their website
but I didn't realize that that's what it was at the time because when I built this and tested it we did not use it I
don't know where it goes and I couldn't figure it out so I just didn't put it in
okay fair enough they're working on manuals right now they're in the process of making it they sent us some early
versions but it's all like Laura mipm stuff right now GPU bracket is that what
it was oh good what you just got to get some
screws on there that's pretty clever it allows you to just screw your standard
screws into this and then something yeah
NE I'll put the screws in sounds good is
that an 1100 watt power supply mhm dang
I feel like we do this every time we bring this out we're always like holy crap there's 1100 watts in there and
before I put this in I'm going to put the cables on what is this for this is
one of our many quirks we have our GPU
support bracket that just kind of like sits in there it kind of fits between
the case and the fan uh-huh and then it just just kind of sits on there just
it's really weird okay sure fun fact we can actually screw this into this one oh
well that's cool want to see Quirk number two I guess I haven't even put
the GPU in yet though they give you custom length cables oh well that's cool
yeah is that just for reviewers or is that a thing that's for that's you ask
for the kind that you want with the case oh wonderful yeah and they're super
flexible do you know why they aren't all this flexible is it like a safety thing
because the silicone covers are more expensive I know this because we're
going to be making our own cables and we're going to be using really really
soft silicone covers yeah cuz these are nice yeah they're so nice to work with
LTT Store.com at some pointtm all right
I think I figured out how to get the uh GPU connector plugged in yeah sure
actually there's a smarter way oh if you look at the bottom of the case there's
panels oh look at that
you can just uh open that up and then
you can plug it in like well I didn't do that well you're going to have some problems in a moment but I I'll let you
discover those on your own okay I need this to go in you should go from the
other side oh you made this so much harder for yourself yeah no no just just
give up no I can do it no stop no I can do it no cuz you got to hook it on it's
going to make it no it's going to It's The Little Engine That Could the little
GPU that could go in this way you mad bro a little but like not
mad that you did it I'm just mad that you refused to do it the right way so
you're mad that it worked no oh no is that does that have
to oh do I have to slide it all the way out this way now in order to latch it
onto a thing yep I was I was I was
telling you dude I maintain that my way still worked ooh that's cool look where
the bracket mounts onto have you noticed
the doohickey super cool wait a doohickey I noticed this wa and there's
a do hit key so because of how tight it is to get it in that allows you to
disconnect the PCIe slot oh no way it's
so fun to spin it goes okay how about it goes in
the computer yeah how about you put that in there yeah okay dude did you get this
in here with this GPU before yep it's
not even what what have you done I have done nothing I have broken
nothing I just need a little bit more sag I hate that that's the solution to
their credit it's not that hard to build in though it's surprisingly easy power
supply bracket just goes in a little something like that and we're about to
get our motherboard in and then we're almost there wow I realized now we
haven't really talked about the rest of the specs of this build at all oh yeah
well we got a 7950 X so not quite I9 territory in terms of thermal output but
a lot a lot of thermal output uh we got 32 gigs of DDR 6000 RAM your five 6,000
RAM and did we throw a PCIe Gen 5 m.2 in
here just for good measure um I'm not sure what the m.2 is in there it's one
of our standard I think it's a 990 Pro it's a lab standard one nice and now
it's oh not going anywhere because the screws are in the standoffs and now we
get to see yet another fun Quirk of this case well how am I supposed to screw
these in I introduce you to Tiny screwdriver wait they even have a little
Notch shut up this comes out and I do
that that from the all metal construction to
like all of these weird unique bits you can kind of see the costs adding up
we'll get to that yeah later now I just got to run the CPU power connector which
conveniently goes right here look at that and I can put in our
aiio oh yeah uh something no fans no
fans at all you don't even have space for them it's like me in
August no fan why why don't you have fans in August last August oh the oh I
was thinking like house fans and I was like dude that's the hottest time of the
year interesting thing to note about this case is that currently it only
accepts 2 80 mm radiators which is why
we went with a white one cuz we don't have another black one curly no that's
an aesthetic Choice that's valid um is
there a reason this is not going in uh yeah the the the pipes don't want to you
really got to put them in there they're really bent oh I'll let you do your
thing I'm GNA come over here and install the 24 pin there we go wow that's tight
yep good gravy even to the side panel it's tight very delicious gravy wait did
we put thermal compound on did you I
didn't yeah um that's a lot of goop yeah
you managed to not goop the part that you tried to goop that's good that's
okay oh jeez do you not wipe when you're finishing oh sorry what no the
hey that's it folks it's all in this didn't take that long no wait the strap
that just slides in on top oh just going the other side get a little oh
yeah look at that you can just like you
can just hold it you could just wave the whole thing around like that that's
enough of that that's a lot of money there I can't believe how painless this
build was yeah they've put in a lot of thought as to how to put it together and
they also actually have like really really nicely done build videos to show
you as an instructions which we didn't even look at no we didn't need to it
blows it blows oh yeah I want to see the cross flow
fan o it does move yeah wow and that's
interesting I don't know whether they've got any kind of ducting on it or
anything but it doesn't blow straight I can't feel it at all
here I feel it here so when that hot air
is coming out of your system it's not coming out somewhere where these fans on
the GPU are just going to suck it right back in it's going
away yeah that is super cool let's hear
this fan spin
up I need to feel
this she moves though she really does
it's a lot of air you could probably see my ARM hair blowing in the wind here
that's quite the thing oh my God you're going to hit the GPU now too yeah why
not I mean sure we actually have head room on our CPU right now that won't
last forever I want to hit it with combuster first first because one of the
things we'll notice is that it'll prevent our CPU from getting hotter it's
really good at throwing air out of the case in general something I'm noticing here is because we're using pwm control
for the fan that means that the hotter the CPU goes the faster the fan spins
well the GPU doesn't affect it and as long as our GPU stays cool enough which
it looks like we're going to level out around 65 to
70° I mean it's a it's not that loud it's a four slot 490 it's going to be
fine if it was a thinner 490 I would have more concerns about it I mean even
then not necessarily I've seen small for Factor designs where the exhaust is
basically just kind of getting sucked back in and recycled even though it is being thrown out into the room and you
can kind of stand near the computer and go oh yeah this is The Hot Zone heat
dome right yeah but this thing it just
it's at 550 watts and it's just hucking
the heat away let's crank them both let's go okay 800 watts the number
number I'm most interested in is our liquid temp because our ryzen CPUs are
going to boost all the way up to 95 just by how they're designed so it's tough to
tell how hot it's actually getting seeing our liquid temp going up over
there is kind of giving us a better idea when we were idle CPU it was like 26°
we've seen it climb to 30 over the course of like a minute maybe and I've
also found a bit of a flaw in the design of this carrying strap it tends to get
sucked down onto the rad which is a good indication that it's pulling a lot of
air into it but is giving up some of our surface area to
strapp oh yeah there it is CPU clock
speed is going down as the liquid temperature goes up our GPU is fine yeah
that's Rock Solid don't need to worry about it it's made byus cuz it's heart
touching remember their old slogan Rock Solid heart touching no I don't yeah it
doesn't matter you know it's loud but it's a pretty broad spectrum noise it's
very tolerable yeah it's like a white noise machine it's not whiny at all yeah
and if you were to have like a bunch of like 40 mm fans or even 120 fans you're
usually going to get more noise than this well even right up against mesh
have you listen to the have you heard of fractal Tera with fans right up against
it it's
bad the performance of any thermal solution comes down to three main
elements air flow static pressure and sound air flow refers to how much air
can be moved without any restriction static pressure refers to the ability of
a cooling solution to over come obstructions like radiators and dust
filters and sound is obvious how loud it
is of course this casual onset test
isn't enough to draw a real conclusion so we had the Labs team test the case at
the low medium and high presets um before the button broke in combuster we
see our GPU like we saw here totally fine cross the board uh it doesn't get
that hot but the CPU really wants that high preset and even then it stays it's
at 40 it's at 4 no then it's good yeah
but it does need to max out yeah and you can see like even with a 15-minute test
we still had a little bit of climbing to do it's not quite flat and in the
acoustic tests yeah it reaches as high as 54 DB from the left side where most
people would be positioned but like we said before
subjectively the quality of that noise is not that bad and if you're not
running all core loads you don't ever really need to have it run that fast no
I mean if you're gaming you're not going to see anywhere near that yeah so in
summary then cross flow fans are fine
which doesn't answer the question of why they aren't more common well one reason
is that their best quality is their compactness if you had components spread
out laterally a cross flow fan takes up minimal space in two of its three
dimensions and creates a laminer airflow stream across its entire length ensuring
that everything ends up evenly cooled only problem is that makes them kind of
irrelevant for to style PCS so I guess
that answers that question but in theory they should be great for servers then so
why isn't that a thing to answer that we need to talk about the downsides servers
need minimal downtime and having five small axial fans instead of one big
cross flow means that one or more of those little fans can die without losing
all of the cooling capacity of your server this gives the administrator time
to install a replacement of course that could be overcome if it was for some of
the other issues that we've uh tiptoed around until now in addition to our
original three factors there's money and
niches crossflow fans being less common
and more complex tend to fail more often
and tend to cost more than typical PC cooling fans not to mention it can be
harder to find replacements and in an industry where every penny counts and
standardization drives prices down well
the cheaper standard solution is going to be the one that wins anywh who are we
finally going to talk about the price of this thing yeah it's uh it's expensive
$360 is the price and that's just for
the case yeah that's not including some of the extras that we got like the
handle and stuff I see to be fair
they're a really small operation just a few people it's a small run of a case
it's all metal incredible premium build that's true and I got no problem with
any of that and really weird just doing something different and non-standard
means that they're going to have to come up with all sorts of solutions to manufacture it which is going to drive
up the price further the fans are expensive compared to like a $6 whatever
fan for a normal computer you have to spend like what did you what did we see
like $30 minimum they were in the range of like 20 to $30 starting price that's
for the manufacturer not for the end consumer so like the whole thing is just
expensive but it's also really really cool but that's not the same thing as
overpriced because there's a justification for why it costs so much
just like I Justified the price of this segue to our sponsor paper like if
you're looking for a screen protector for your iPad paper like has got you
covered the paper like 2.1 is manufactured in Switzerland so you know
it's good and is designed to help you write and draw on your iPad just like
how you would on paper but without annoying bugs like real paper it uses
their exclusive micro bead technology called Nano dots to emulate the stroke
resistance of paper without sacrificing on screen Clarity make sure to check out
paper like at the link below so you can write right baby that's a w and an R see
what I did there if you guys enjoyed this video why don't you check out the
last time Adam and I built a computer together I don't remember what that was
there was another small computer that was frustrating yeah let's usually how
it is