here at LTT we're all about pushing boundaries
far beyond what anybody asked for like when we brought you the pc made of
radiators cooling insane hardware with zero fans
but ever since then we've wondered what would it look like if some actually
smart people tried to achieve the same thing well today we get to find out
because the good people over at monster labo have done just that creating a case
that supposedly is capable of cooling up to an Intel 8 core 9900k and an rtx 2070
completely passively
but don't pass by private internet access private internet access gives you
a safe and protected ip and it's got loads of other features as well check it
out at the link below
with this being monster labo's first product actually it's even called the first we
were naturally a little bit skeptical but now that we've built an entire
system inside it there actually is some truth to their claims but
more on that later starting on the outside the first has an understated
look well i mean ours does have a custom paint job so
it's visually a lot louder but normally it's painted in either black or white
satin metal finish along with a metallic accent piece which kind of to me makes
it look like a mini fridge but i'm not mad because with everything else these
days trending towards rainbow barf i personally appreciate the more subdued
look up top we get dual usb 3.0 audio
and a pretty sh power button that frankly just loves to get stuck around
back there is access to the psu and that's about it with the motherboard i o
relying on pass-through cables limiting you to five ports max on this oddly
unfinished backing piece it seems like this was kind of an afterthought
especially since the included displayport pass-through doesn't have
mounting holes and the HDMI pass-through didn't come with screws but enough of
the boring stuff inside is where things get interesting after removing all three
outer clam shells and they're accompanying 14 screws we finally get to
get a glimpse of the internals and right about now it also starts to become
apparent that this case isn't for first-time builders or even pretty
experienced ones since we ourselves were kind of lost at this
point but okay we're humble why not just consult the manual
because there is no manual no monster labo instead opted for a series of
assembly videos which are way more annoying to scrub through than a regular
print manual but nevertheless they did help us find a few more screws that were
hiding behind this weird fabric tape that we quickly introduced to the trash
bin once it is opened up though man is it ever cool looking i mean literally
look at that heckin heatsink it's massive and the heat pipes the heat
pipes oh the heat pipes
both the CPU and the GPU each get six of
their own evenly spread throughout the heatsink now i'm starting to think their claims
might actually have some merit alright so time to throw some hardware in it and
boot it up right well because of the first totally non-standard mounting and
form factor planning ahead is kind of a must thankfully monster labo has vetted
a bunch of hardware already with compatible parts listed on their site
including what motherboards and gpus work and what brackets or modifications
are necessary in our case the triple fan rtx 2070 we chose was supposedly a
non-issue all we should have to do is remove the cooler and strap on monster
labo's provided vrm heatsink but it wasn't that easy the screws for the vrm
cooler weren't long enough so we ended up having to use zip ties to hold it all
together it is worth noting though that this accessory isn't yet available so
hopefully they'll have all that ironed out by launch
and then again maybe quirks like this are to be expected in this wacky realm
of custom cooling as for our x-470
motherboard it too called for some minor modifications but thankfully both went
as described first it requires the use of their custom riser which is only
included on the premium model so watch out for that and second the audio
chipset had to be removed as on this board it's installed on a riser and
would otherwise block the heat pipes this sucked so again plan ahead
don't be like us we suck hopefully on monster labo's
second case the heat pipes are positioned to better accommodate boards
like this as daughter boards aren't uncommon on itx motherboards things did
start to look up though when it finally came time to put all the pieces together
that is until we went to mount the motherboard and found that there was no
mention anywhere of which bracket to use for AMD's am4 socket fortunately though
monster lava's customer service was pretty quick to respond and they
informed us that am4 boards actually used two of the brackets in tandem which
was easy enough after we figured it out once that was out of the way the rest of
the assembly was pretty straightforward you might have to bend the heat type
just a little bit and slide the motherboard and GPU mounts back and forth in order to make sure that
everything lines up properly but that's apparently pretty normal installing
Corsair's sf600 sfx power supply was a
walk in the park and its fan doesn't even spin up at full load with this
setup nice storage wise we opted for a samsung m.2 SSD but the first does
advertise support for three two and a half inch drives along with one three
and a half inch drive if that butters your biscuit just above the psu is where
the included 140 millimeter fan can be mounted or it can be removed to
accommodate full atx power supplies a nice touch but
who cares about all that we want to know about performance and as you can imagine
with a high-end setup like what we chose temperatures are simply not going to be
as low as with a fan-cooled setup but for something that's entirely passive
this is pretty impressive we did notice when running without the fan the 2700x
loses some boost clock while hitting 84 degrees celsius under an eye to 64 CPU
load but if you remove the top cover panel like they recommend it's really
competent monster labo does mention that the actual passive TDP rating on the
first is only 215 watts but you'd be hard-pressed to find an application that
would actually load both parts to 100 power draw consistently hence why you
could run a higher end config like we did once the fan is added into play
temps are a lot more comfortable we set ours to run at 700 RPM which was
inaudible even as close to a foot away from the case
speaking of inaudible the coil wind from the GPU is not
because of the way it's positioned the GPU's power distribution is right near
the big fat opening on the top of the case and without the higher noise floor of a
typical fan cooled build the video card's high pitched wine is
surprisingly irritating even from a sitting distance
it sucks and i guess that's kind of where the concept of these passive cases
starts to fall apart for me coil wine imo is actually way more
annoying than the low hum of a fan and frankly with a decent aio on your CPU
and the gargantuan GPU coolers of today most regular rigs tend to be pretty
inaudible anyway so if it were me i'd stick to the aforementioned fan setup
but if you're not an audiophile or just hate hearing your pc you can find a GPU
that doesn't suffer from much coil whine and if you don't mind your hardware
running a little hotter than most this can be an awesome way to achieve a
nearly silent pc as for the first itself
for a 400 plus case it's kind of a hot
mess but honestly i love it i i just like it i don't know
that i'd recommend it full-on clearly one or two corners were cut but uh it's
just so freaking cool it kind of looks like a like a build your own Corsair one
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