one of the most unusual products that we have ever looked at this is the Drone
Station high performance DIY a IO that
is do-it-yourself allinone
PC the Corsair flash Voyager go is the easy way to move photos music and videos
between your Android device and your PC click now to learn more now given the
weight this thing the packaging quite frankly doesn't really Inspire
confidence it did arrive in one piece but with a full system built in it I'd
be a little bit scared the exception here is the styrene like plate armor
piece that goes in front of the LCD panel that is attached via a reusable
strap to the rest of the system the monitor would likely be fine even if
every single other part of it died in the shipping process now even though
this is an AIO it's a product that really Embraces the do-it-yourself
spirit so the first thing to do with it is build a standard ATX computer inside
it with the parts of my choice the handles are very robust and ergonomic so
even though it's large and very heavy it's got those so you can lift it and
move it around to a table where you can work the user manual which I've
misplaced but don't worry about it it's good trust me is
uncharacteristically really good I mean this is where I usually expect a lesser
known company like AIO to falter but the
English in it is excellent It's got guidelines for component selection uh
some best practices and a pretty complete stepbystep build guide A+ right
there for the manual taking the Drone station apart Reveals All the interior
uh wiring that passes through from the inside computer to the front or rear of
the uh outer shell uh Ethernet and a single power connector that handles both
the Monitor and the PC come out the back and then the front has two USB 2.0 ports
two fan controllers monitor controls headphone and microphone jacks two USB
3.0 ports and then finally power and reset switches topped off with a couple
of 5 and a/4 in Bays that uh can be
populated by actually screwing an optical drive or something else into the
bottom of the chassis inside uh one quick note about the fan controller is
that you can run the fans on the left and the right side at either 1/3 2/3 or
full speed and they are control independently with those two switches
now the inside chassis once removed is a
fairly bog standard PC case with a couple of modifications so there's no
Front plastic bezel because that would just take up unnecessary space inside
there's some mesh over where the 5 and a/4 in Bay would be there's a hole cut
in the back to interface with the outer shell and then a repositioned a tooless
drive cage in the top for your 3 and 1/2 in bays and then finally a 2 and 1/2 in
Bay cage that takes four drives in the bottom for ssds now the drive cages are
functional but I don't think I would trust them in shipping or even if
someone who isn't as careful as me with my PC were handling it they are not
reinforced in any way which isn't a problem for the ssds but for hard drives
can be a major concern because they're actually quite heavy the PCI slots in
the back really took me you know back to the good old days of PC Building but
unfortunately not really in a good way I had to pry them out something I've cut
my hands doing enough times to be upset that I had to do it and their toolless
design just isn't very good toolless PCI
remains a bit of a holy grail of case design because most of them don't work
and the Drone station is no exception they didn't work with my dual slot
graphics card but it gets worse because unlike most of the ones I've encountered
in the past the tooless hold Downs cannot be unscrewed and removed you
would actually have to drill out the rivets so I had to force a screw into my
graphics card from a weird angle in order to get it in there oh well the
good news here is that the case easily accommodates a
7990 graphics card which is about as big as a consumer graphics card can get and
so now All That Remains is to find out if we can cool it the fans in the outer
shell are controlled by those switches as I mentioned before but the included
fans in the chassis so there's two in the top there need to be plugged into
your motherboard fortunately they have such long leads that you could reach a
suitable software controlled header on almost any motherboard overall the build
process was painless enough I didn't end up cutting myself which was nice um and
there's no real Cable Management to speak of but at least it has a CPU
cutout for easier mounting and there wasn't really anything unexpected inside
so we're not completely back to the Dark Ages or anything like that it was it was
easy enough once the PC is assembled you hook up all the wires and slide it
inside the the plastic outer shell it it's in there pretty snugly and uh you
can see now how the cooling strategy is supposed to work so there are removable
dust filters in place and then the left side is intake and the right side is
exhaust the top is also exhaust all in all looking at this strategy whether
you're running on low or high on those fans it should be able to handle almost
anything in there without overheating with the PC in place you close the very
DIY you know bought these at the hardware store feeling butterfly latches
and you're pretty much ready to go on inspection though the latches aren't the
only homemade looking thing about the outside of the Drone station the Finish
is quite imperfect in some places and the window on the back doesn't make a
whole lot of sense to me even with the LED lighting and even if I took off the
side panel of the PC inside um I mean it's there but it seems very uh very
optional maybe they have another option coming in the future where it'll make more s but yeah I don't want all of that
stuff though to take away from the strength in the key areas like the
handles and the fact that once it's closed up it doesn't feel like it's
going to come apart or anything so while the fit and finish might not be perfect
it's solid enough that I'd be confident having my PC inside when I first fired
up the actual PC I immediately noticed that even though I didn't get the 120 HZ
premium monitor option the screen has a surprising amount of color depth and
very strong viewing angles for a TN panel I wish they'd offer an IPS option
or even a VA option but if I'm going to be stuck with a TN monitor I'm glad it's
at least a pretty strong one and all of this leads us to actually sitting in
front of the thing using it in actual use the angle of the monitor which is
slightly angled back is better in my
estimation than the Crave computer high performance gaming aiio that we checked
out recently but has the same disadvantage as the crate and that it's
not adjustable at all so you would need to actually angle or elevate your entire
PC to change it the 5 and 1/4 inch Bay are a nice touch even though I'm
unlikely to want an optical drive it gives a lot of expansion flexibility um
even if you're not sure if you're going to need it so uh you know you could put
something like uh you know fan control I mean you've already got fan controls you
fan controllers card readers stuff like that in there so I think that is a
definite plus for it um in practice I
didn't find it very appealing to plug my keyboard and mouse into the very front
of my PC and unfortunately the Drone station doesn't have any side or rear
ports at all other than that Ethernet port in the back and the power uh plug
in the back but it does have one redeeming feature and that is if you
don't mind routing the wires through a gap in the outer shell you can actually
plug in stuff that you never want to remove internally to the back of the
inner chassis and then leave those front ports open and then just have the wire
snake out the only issue there is that if you ever need to pull that thing out
for some reason you actually need to take the back off of your AIO in order
to do it and if you have a mouse like my old one that used to from time to time
just need to be unplugged and plugged back in that'll get real old real fast
all right so I talked a lot about the cooling but I haven't talked
temperatures yet now I intentionally loaded this thing up with a rad on HD
7990 one mother of a hot graphics card
and I was actually very pleased with the results at about 45% fan speed Max on
that card we reached 80° and we were bouncing between 950 and 1,000 MHz on
the cores in our stress testing staring into the fire in Far Cry 3 The Core i5
CPU maxed out at around 80° with an aftermarket Cooler Master cooler on it
also in that gaming scenario so all in all there isn't too much for me to say
about the Drone station it performed very well in the areas where I expected
it to and that is cooling it performed well in areas where I didn't expect it
to like the LCD on the front and I understand where they're going with all
of this I mean it's an all-in-one that's fully upgradeable easily capable of
housing the latest gaming components and has you know rugged handles on it for
Easy Transport but the overall product feels more like
an interesting experiment rather than something that I would actually spend
,000 on the inner chassis needs to be
prop more properly integrated and more robustly built for that to happen you
can see that putting the kind of pressure on the graphics card that might
occur during transport flexes the motherboard tray and the rear panel of
that case in a way that I found quite unsettling and the fit and finish of the
outer shell needs to be better to command such a price tag for what is
essentially a case and a monitor with
nothing else really included I could be
wrong though in all of this guys if you're looking at this going lonus
totally doesn't get it I want to hear
from you in the comments tell me what you'd use it for a PC with a 24in
monitor integrated into it that you can put basically any hardware you want into
I mean please go ahead and argue your case I want it I want to know if you
guys think I'm totally wrong about this anyway guys thank you for watching my
aiio drone station drn stn I'm assuming
it's pronouned drone Station review like and share this video if you liked it
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