let's face it most small cases make some
big compromises whether it's noise cooling or expandability and those tend
to scare a lot of people off but
not today it's like having a space heater the craziest thing to me about
all of this you can't even can't even hear it
so streecom set out to build a case that
uses a unique modular rail system to allow high performance components to fit
comfortably in a small form factor and we're going to find out just how
comfortably that can be done thanks to seasonic who sponsored this third
installment of our compact powerhouse
build series your psu is the heart of your system and
see sonic is a leader in the category offering efficient power supplies with
outstanding features and performance for your next build or upgrade check out
season's products at the link in the video description
starting on the outside the da2 is the perfect case for the minimalist mac user
who has a pc at home because gaming on
mac os is a subpar experience at best in typical strecom fashion the entire
case is beautifully finished in either black or silver brushed aluminum and in
keeping with the minimalistic design there's no rgb anywhere honestly the
thing's kind of a breath of fresh air in a market that's crowded with rainbow
unicorn vomit on the front the only i o you get is a power button with an
integrated power led and a single usb 3.2 gen 1 5 gigabit port
now this is something i was a little torn on because i'm all for switching
literally all the things over to usb type c
but the thing is most desktop peripherals still use type a so not
having at least one regular port and audio might have been nice too
is a significant compromise that is unless you've got an external
usb sound card and a usb hub on your desk or built into
your monitor which i do in which case i
guess you probably won't care the stock side panels don't come with a window but
rather are nicely perforated for airflow so if you're not much into cable
management then that's a plus for you but if you do like to strut your stuff
streecom has you covered there as well with their tempered glass side panel kit
with that said that side panel will limit your cooling options more on that
later at the back the i o situation is pretty
solid with a 90 millimeter fan slot and full access to both the motherboard and
gpu's i o and the only shortcoming here is the positioning of the power supply
pass-through it's right above the gpu which means it's basically impossible to
cleanly route it in case you have the glass side panel it will probably get
covered by your cpu cooler but your mileage may vary now removing the side
panel is a bit unique
it's actually just held on by the friction of these little rubber mounts
which is both confusing at first and a blessing in the future because
you'll probably be pleased but you don't need to go find a screwdriver
here's one to get inside and inside is where the da2 starts to
get really interesting like don't get me wrong brushed aluminum definitely gets
the juices flowing but modularity
that would be my kryptonite and conveniently it's where the da2 shines
so the inside of this case is essentially just a metal frame there's
no motherboard tray no front panel and no power supply mount
these features instead get screwed into the base chassis so in much the same way
that a car company can build multiple different cars on the same basic frame
you could technically build multiple different configurations in the same
case so their first party accessories allow for a vertical gpu mount the tempered
glass panels we mentioned earlier and even an inverted motherboard layout
but if you're a bit handy the possibilities go even further than that
so let's take a look at the rail system you pretty much just slide the mounting
rails wherever you want to mount something and then screw them in you can
use them for a pump hard drive fan maybe
even a secret place to store that nickelback cd that you don't want anyone
knowing about it's okay we don't judge
so to start with we wanted to see how the da2 would handle a pretty normal
but clearly enthusiast level gaming rig
overall the build process was fairly smooth thanks to the modularity of the
case you can take off all the external panels allowing for 360 degree access
making the usual itx build headache a lot more manageable you can use a
regular atx size power supply in the da2 but you'll lose most of the space on the
storage bracket as well as most of your gpu space so instead we went for our 650
watt sfx power supply from seasonic with all of that installed we got to try out
the rail system and it's actually super easy to use
all of the components are nice and rigid just screw a rail onto each side of
whatever you're mounting slide the rails onto the mounting screws and tighten
we did notice that more premium all-in-ones like the corsair h100iv2
that we're using can be tricky to mount because of how thick and rigid the
tubing is so we'd recommend something with thinner tubing if you plan to do
this yourself so just button it all up and wha bam
finished sexy rig so we've got metro exodus running rtx is
enabled and this is at 1440p should be pushing our 2080 pretty hard i guess we
should check the temps right yeah i guess so uh you can definitely
hear it yeah i was gonna say the the fans pretty apparent
i mean i wouldn't describe it as loud but yeah from like a seated distance
it's not too bad it's noticeable it's noticeable
and especially when you consider that it's not that small yeah but it's also not that
big and you know if you have a regular
founders card it seems to be kind of the noise level you're going to get i mean
this obviously doesn't have the same level of sound deadening as like a an r6
or something like that but i think it's it's good enough
i mean every time you die it's just going to screw it up a little bit
you should probably just stay in this room for a couple minutes
no i'm not going to die this time
oh i died
that's fine we just need to check what we're boosting to anyway
okay yeah and we're boosting anywhere from around 1830 to 1860. and temps not
bad well temps are going to be 82 right because they are always there excuse me
yeah not quite there but yeah that's what they always are and cpu just over
50. okay so we're getting honestly
about what we'd expect from a decent mid tower yeah i'm not really
surprised at all but i mean it's smaller probably half the size of a regular mid tower if not
less all right let's pop this thing off so
that doesn't mean there's not room for improvement though so the motherboard
area actually does get a fair amount of cool air drawn over it and we could even
improve that by throwing a 92 millimeter fan here at the back because we've got
our aio drawing air from sort of the filters at the top and
the bottom and then pushing it out the side but our gpu we
actually found the ambient air just around it was quite hot
and it's just kind of sitting in its own recycled exhaust
i think if we put a fan at the front that might be better but you can't
really it's right completely flat
you know i was thinking maybe if they had sort of to expand on the modularity
a panel in the front that you could remove and if you didn't want a fan up
front you could just put a flat piece or
another option if you've got room for a dual rad then you've got room for two
single rads what if we water cooled the gpu
what if we just custom water cooled the whole thing
okay so confession time this is linus tech tips and we never really intended
for this to be just a regular case review because one of the first things
that stood out to us about the da2 is that while it's not that small for a
super compact case as long as you stick with the perforated
side panel it supports a 280 millimeter
aio liquid cooler and where you can fit an aio you can fit
a custom loop if you're determined enough
of course we weren't just gonna water cool the 9700k and 2080. that wasn't
gonna cut it rather we wanted to go with something a little more extreme edition
like the core i9 9980xc
it fits perfectly onto asrock's x299e itx motherboard which is pretty much the
most badass itx platform to ever exist
and we slapped on a bits power monoblock to keep the vrm's nice and cool then
after mounting one of ek's gorgeous blocks onto our titan rtx and installing
it things started to get a bit tricky now
we didn't intend to mount just one radiator rather we figured with a small
amount of modification we could put a second ultra slim xspc radiator under
the gpu now that it was only a single slot with some slim scythe fans mounted
to the bottom thanks to performance pcs for sending that over by the way we
mounted that through the bottom filter and it wasn't all that difficult but it
was becoming clear that even with the super small power supply and ddc pump
there was no way we were fitting a reservoir in here that wasn't going to
stop us though even if we needed to use a vacuum pump to fill the darn loop
thankfully using a t-fitting to fill combined with a bit of patience we were
able to get it juiced up the last challenge then was cable
management with the da2 i don't think they really
put a ton of effort into this but you do have just enough room to tuck away all
the excess cable from a stock sfx power supply with lots of mounting points
coincidentally on the rail system if you had custom cables you'd be in even
better shape so it's done i gotta say this is an
absolutely incredible
amount of raw power for the size like
it's smooth yeah i mean we might not get a better
gaming experience than the previous setup because it's obviously not optimized for gaming you know an 18 core
but but holy crap and
the craziest thing to me about all of this
you can't even i can't even hear it like
i i can feel it yeah yeah yeah like
it's like having a space heater next to you like do you have uh do you
have a stress test running in the background right now no this is just this game this is just the game yeah
oh wow like the metal of the case is like
warm to the touch i left it for a couple hours earlier and it's like the whole
case is just like burning hot but these fans are
barely running the parts like the actual cpu and gpu it
themselves are at a very reasonable temperature
and it's basically silent yeah so there's two noctua fans on here that are
each running at a thousand rpm and then you got the slim scythe ones that
they're not pdm controllable so i just put them to like 30 duty cycle you can't
even see them at a normal angle either like it's absolutely crazy
all right so for a final torture test i've gone ahead and fired up 32 threads
of prime 95 so that leaves four threads
for our game still running good and we're still running metro exodus
and at least to my eye this is still pretty darn smooth
um i mean this is like
400 to 500 watts in a box this size so
no guarantees it's actually still running particularly well and yeah if we
check out afterburner our boost clock on our gpu is down to like 1600 megahertz
and change that that's a little on the low side
our cpu still looks good though around 60 70 degrees
so uh yeah don't do stupid things like this
but other than that this is a pretty freaking incredible machine
thanks good job
oh feeble that was really rough
and can we just pretend like that dude so in conclusion for all its beauty
the da2 does require a little bit of extra work to truly shine like you don't
necessarily have to go as far as we did with full custom liquid cooling maybe
you could make uh you could modify an aio to run both your cpu and gpu or run
two single 140 millimeters one for each or something like that it's just that
without that it still does force you to compromise a
little bit whether on cooling or on acoustics though in fairness i guess
that does make sense it is just 17.5
liters and if you're willing to dial back your crazy specs or get creative
it's got a lot else going for it it's incredibly modular with a stunning
minimalistic design that would make even joni ive proud
i think the only thing really missing here is a rose gold color option
speaking of options if you do end up buying a da2 for your next build or
really any case you should pair it up with a power supply from seasonic
they've got tons of options see i was getting there for super efficient and
high quality power supplies with excellent performance at all ranges of
different price points and wattages they've got models that are
perfect for small and compact builds like this one all the way up to
full-sized atx power supplies for your epic battle station like in our gaming
lounge pcs so check them out at the link in the video description for your next
build so thanks for watching guys if this video sucked you know what to do
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