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let's face it most small cases make some

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big compromises whether it's noise cooling or expandability and those tend

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to scare a lot of people off but

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not today it's like having a space heater the craziest thing to me about

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all of this you can't even can't even hear it

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so streecom set out to build a case that

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uses a unique modular rail system to allow high performance components to fit

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comfortably in a small form factor and we're going to find out just how

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comfortably that can be done thanks to seasonic who sponsored this third

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installment of our compact powerhouse

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build series your psu is the heart of your system and

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see sonic is a leader in the category offering efficient power supplies with

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outstanding features and performance for your next build or upgrade check out

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season's products at the link in the video description

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starting on the outside the da2 is the perfect case for the minimalist mac user

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who has a pc at home because gaming on

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mac os is a subpar experience at best in typical strecom fashion the entire

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case is beautifully finished in either black or silver brushed aluminum and in

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keeping with the minimalistic design there's no rgb anywhere honestly the

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thing's kind of a breath of fresh air in a market that's crowded with rainbow

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unicorn vomit on the front the only i o you get is a power button with an

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integrated power led and a single usb 3.2 gen 1 5 gigabit port

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now this is something i was a little torn on because i'm all for switching

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literally all the things over to usb type c

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but the thing is most desktop peripherals still use type a so not

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having at least one regular port and audio might have been nice too

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is a significant compromise that is unless you've got an external

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usb sound card and a usb hub on your desk or built into

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your monitor which i do in which case i

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guess you probably won't care the stock side panels don't come with a window but

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rather are nicely perforated for airflow so if you're not much into cable

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management then that's a plus for you but if you do like to strut your stuff

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streecom has you covered there as well with their tempered glass side panel kit

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with that said that side panel will limit your cooling options more on that

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later at the back the i o situation is pretty

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solid with a 90 millimeter fan slot and full access to both the motherboard and

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gpu's i o and the only shortcoming here is the positioning of the power supply

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pass-through it's right above the gpu which means it's basically impossible to

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cleanly route it in case you have the glass side panel it will probably get

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covered by your cpu cooler but your mileage may vary now removing the side

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panel is a bit unique

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it's actually just held on by the friction of these little rubber mounts

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which is both confusing at first and a blessing in the future because

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you'll probably be pleased but you don't need to go find a screwdriver

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here's one to get inside and inside is where the da2 starts to

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get really interesting like don't get me wrong brushed aluminum definitely gets

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the juices flowing but modularity

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that would be my kryptonite and conveniently it's where the da2 shines

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so the inside of this case is essentially just a metal frame there's

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no motherboard tray no front panel and no power supply mount

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these features instead get screwed into the base chassis so in much the same way

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that a car company can build multiple different cars on the same basic frame

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you could technically build multiple different configurations in the same

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case so their first party accessories allow for a vertical gpu mount the tempered

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glass panels we mentioned earlier and even an inverted motherboard layout

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but if you're a bit handy the possibilities go even further than that

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so let's take a look at the rail system you pretty much just slide the mounting

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rails wherever you want to mount something and then screw them in you can

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use them for a pump hard drive fan maybe

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even a secret place to store that nickelback cd that you don't want anyone

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knowing about it's okay we don't judge

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so to start with we wanted to see how the da2 would handle a pretty normal

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but clearly enthusiast level gaming rig

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overall the build process was fairly smooth thanks to the modularity of the

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case you can take off all the external panels allowing for 360 degree access

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making the usual itx build headache a lot more manageable you can use a

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regular atx size power supply in the da2 but you'll lose most of the space on the

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storage bracket as well as most of your gpu space so instead we went for our 650

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watt sfx power supply from seasonic with all of that installed we got to try out

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the rail system and it's actually super easy to use

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all of the components are nice and rigid just screw a rail onto each side of

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whatever you're mounting slide the rails onto the mounting screws and tighten

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we did notice that more premium all-in-ones like the corsair h100iv2

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that we're using can be tricky to mount because of how thick and rigid the

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tubing is so we'd recommend something with thinner tubing if you plan to do

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this yourself so just button it all up and wha bam

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finished sexy rig so we've got metro exodus running rtx is

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enabled and this is at 1440p should be pushing our 2080 pretty hard i guess we

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should check the temps right yeah i guess so uh you can definitely

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hear it yeah i was gonna say the the fans pretty apparent

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i mean i wouldn't describe it as loud but yeah from like a seated distance

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it's not too bad it's noticeable it's noticeable

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and especially when you consider that it's not that small yeah but it's also not that

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big and you know if you have a regular

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founders card it seems to be kind of the noise level you're going to get i mean

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this obviously doesn't have the same level of sound deadening as like a an r6

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or something like that but i think it's it's good enough

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i mean every time you die it's just going to screw it up a little bit

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you should probably just stay in this room for a couple minutes

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no i'm not going to die this time

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oh i died

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that's fine we just need to check what we're boosting to anyway

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okay yeah and we're boosting anywhere from around 1830 to 1860. and temps not

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bad well temps are going to be 82 right because they are always there excuse me

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yeah not quite there but yeah that's what they always are and cpu just over

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50. okay so we're getting honestly

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about what we'd expect from a decent mid tower yeah i'm not really

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surprised at all but i mean it's smaller probably half the size of a regular mid tower if not

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less all right let's pop this thing off so

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that doesn't mean there's not room for improvement though so the motherboard

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area actually does get a fair amount of cool air drawn over it and we could even

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improve that by throwing a 92 millimeter fan here at the back because we've got

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our aio drawing air from sort of the filters at the top and

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the bottom and then pushing it out the side but our gpu we

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actually found the ambient air just around it was quite hot

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and it's just kind of sitting in its own recycled exhaust

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i think if we put a fan at the front that might be better but you can't

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really it's right completely flat

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you know i was thinking maybe if they had sort of to expand on the modularity

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a panel in the front that you could remove and if you didn't want a fan up

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front you could just put a flat piece or

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another option if you've got room for a dual rad then you've got room for two

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single rads what if we water cooled the gpu

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what if we just custom water cooled the whole thing

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okay so confession time this is linus tech tips and we never really intended

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for this to be just a regular case review because one of the first things

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that stood out to us about the da2 is that while it's not that small for a

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super compact case as long as you stick with the perforated

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side panel it supports a 280 millimeter

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aio liquid cooler and where you can fit an aio you can fit

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a custom loop if you're determined enough

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of course we weren't just gonna water cool the 9700k and 2080. that wasn't

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gonna cut it rather we wanted to go with something a little more extreme edition

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like the core i9 9980xc

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it fits perfectly onto asrock's x299e itx motherboard which is pretty much the

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most badass itx platform to ever exist

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and we slapped on a bits power monoblock to keep the vrm's nice and cool then

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after mounting one of ek's gorgeous blocks onto our titan rtx and installing

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it things started to get a bit tricky now

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we didn't intend to mount just one radiator rather we figured with a small

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amount of modification we could put a second ultra slim xspc radiator under

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the gpu now that it was only a single slot with some slim scythe fans mounted

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to the bottom thanks to performance pcs for sending that over by the way we

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mounted that through the bottom filter and it wasn't all that difficult but it

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was becoming clear that even with the super small power supply and ddc pump

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there was no way we were fitting a reservoir in here that wasn't going to

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stop us though even if we needed to use a vacuum pump to fill the darn loop

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thankfully using a t-fitting to fill combined with a bit of patience we were

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able to get it juiced up the last challenge then was cable

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management with the da2 i don't think they really

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put a ton of effort into this but you do have just enough room to tuck away all

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the excess cable from a stock sfx power supply with lots of mounting points

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coincidentally on the rail system if you had custom cables you'd be in even

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better shape so it's done i gotta say this is an

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absolutely incredible

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amount of raw power for the size like

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it's smooth yeah i mean we might not get a better

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gaming experience than the previous setup because it's obviously not optimized for gaming you know an 18 core

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but but holy crap and

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the craziest thing to me about all of this

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you can't even i can't even hear it like

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i i can feel it yeah yeah yeah like

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it's like having a space heater next to you like do you have uh do you

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have a stress test running in the background right now no this is just this game this is just the game yeah

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oh wow like the metal of the case is like

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warm to the touch i left it for a couple hours earlier and it's like the whole

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case is just like burning hot but these fans are

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barely running the parts like the actual cpu and gpu it

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themselves are at a very reasonable temperature

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and it's basically silent yeah so there's two noctua fans on here that are

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each running at a thousand rpm and then you got the slim scythe ones that

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they're not pdm controllable so i just put them to like 30 duty cycle you can't

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even see them at a normal angle either like it's absolutely crazy

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all right so for a final torture test i've gone ahead and fired up 32 threads

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of prime 95 so that leaves four threads

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for our game still running good and we're still running metro exodus

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and at least to my eye this is still pretty darn smooth

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um i mean this is like

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400 to 500 watts in a box this size so

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no guarantees it's actually still running particularly well and yeah if we

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check out afterburner our boost clock on our gpu is down to like 1600 megahertz

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and change that that's a little on the low side

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our cpu still looks good though around 60 70 degrees

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so uh yeah don't do stupid things like this

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but other than that this is a pretty freaking incredible machine

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thanks good job

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oh feeble that was really rough

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and can we just pretend like that dude so in conclusion for all its beauty

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the da2 does require a little bit of extra work to truly shine like you don't

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necessarily have to go as far as we did with full custom liquid cooling maybe

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you could make uh you could modify an aio to run both your cpu and gpu or run

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two single 140 millimeters one for each or something like that it's just that

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without that it still does force you to compromise a

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little bit whether on cooling or on acoustics though in fairness i guess

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that does make sense it is just 17.5

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liters and if you're willing to dial back your crazy specs or get creative

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it's got a lot else going for it it's incredibly modular with a stunning

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minimalistic design that would make even joni ive proud

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i think the only thing really missing here is a rose gold color option

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speaking of options if you do end up buying a da2 for your next build or

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really any case you should pair it up with a power supply from seasonic

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they've got tons of options see i was getting there for super efficient and

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high quality power supplies with excellent performance at all ranges of

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different price points and wattages they've got models that are

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perfect for small and compact builds like this one all the way up to

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full-sized atx power supplies for your epic battle station like in our gaming

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lounge pcs so check them out at the link in the video description for your next

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

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but if you liked it hit like get subscribed or check out the link to

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where to buy the stuff we featured in the video description also linked in the

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description is our merch store which has cool shirts like this one and our community forum which you should totally

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join