All right, guys. Welcome to what I think is like part two of my build vlog. This
is the continuation of Squirtle. We've ditched the 800D disgusting mess that I
had before, and now we've moved to this partially built test bench. Huge
improvement. Um, what this video is really about is asking questions about
what I can do with this test bench. So, I'm trying to figure out things about it
as there's not a ton of information out there as I went with something fairly obscure just cuz I thought it looked
pretty cool. Yes, it's 8020 extrusion, so I could have just built this on my
own, but I didn't want to rip the guy's design off. That's not really fair. What
I am going to end up doing, though, is butchering this thing like crazy and
changing it a lot to make it my own. And in that, we're going to be trying to
figure out how many rads I can fit to this thing because the most I've ever
seen it with is one triple, and I want
to fit four radiators on it. I was kind of hoping two uh 3x120s and two 2x120s.
I don't think I'm going to get quite there, but I still want to get four radiators on it. I want to see where I
can fit this fairly large reservoir, especially for this style of computer,
and I want to see if I can do that in a pretty cool place, which you'll hopefully see later. And I want to see
about how I can access things in the bottom of the computer. So, we're going
to try and answer all those questions in this video where I kind of mess around
with this test bench. If you want to see all the rest of these build log videos as they come out, stay subscribed to
Linus Tech Tips. Let's get a move on.
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First things first, we got to do a little bit of out with the old, in with
the new. So, I'm going to get rid of that pretty old power supply. I'm going
to get rid of that old uh not very usable at this point for what I want to
do graphics card and that gigantic air cooler. I'm going to leave the
motherboard because while I won't necessarily be using this motherboard
specifically, uh it's the right size, so
it's not really that big of a deal. And I do need it to be there so I can kind of see how stuff like cables are going
to be routing and stuff like that, which I won't need the GPU for, and the GPU
would be more annoying than anything. Later on, I'll have to have a placeholder GPU so I can see how like
the water cooling is going to come up and get to that, but for now, it should
be fine. Now that all the old stuff has been removed, it's time to start
strapping radiators to it. So, the first thing I'm going to do is grab one of the
spare alpha cool radiators that we had at work, the 3x120, and try to put it on
alongside my other in parallel, at least my other 3x120 mm radiator. My current
one is really thick. This one is not quite as thick, but it's still pretty
thick radiator. Um, but we'll see how that works. Uh, I know this is going to
fit. This isn't actually really a problem, but I do need to strap it to
the bench just to make sure that other things will be able to fit alongside it.
it itself fitting is not necessarily the most important thing. Everything else
being able to fit inside the same ecosystem is also extremely important.
Now that that's strapped to the bench, I need to go to the smaller end cap where
I find out that as I expected, the 2x120
mm radiator is too long. I do not want to have it on the outside. I do want it
to be on the inside of the bench just so it won't get hit by anything or anything
like that. So, it's too long. It's not going to work. I was kind of hoping it
would. And I could custom fit the bench to make it bigger to accommodate for it,
but that would make the bench really big and get rid of the whole compact nature
of it, which I do like. So, not going to go that route. Moving onwards, the 140
mm single radiator also didn't fit. This
got me a little bit worried. I actually kind of thought that one would work. Um,
but no, it the the the fitting where the fittings should go on that radiator
collided with another one of the radiators that I had inside. And I don't
want to swap either of those out. I like the thick 3x120s. So, that one didn't
work. Luckily, moving on to the single 120 mm radiator. That one fit pretty
much perfectly. So, we're pretty good for rads at this point. All right. So,
we're three for three for radiators so far, and we've covered the whole side of
the bench in radiators that has the kind of like power supply on it at the bottom
of the motherboard area. Something to take note of here is before I started
strapping radiators to it, my plan was to have the reservoir come out of the
cable management hole for the power supply as I thought that would look
really cool and I space tested it before I put the radiators in. Just hold that
in your memory for now and we're going to move on to fitting that last radiator. Now, problem with fitting the
last radiator, I don't have another 120 mm radiator to test here, but I'm not
worried about the spacing as the spacing is exactly the same as on the other side. So, the idea of fitting a radiator
here, well, the idea of fitting the radiators all around the bottom is I
thought it would look cool to have kind of like a radiator blackout on the
bottom of this test bench. So, that was a huge part of the inspiration of doing
this. I wanted to make sure it fit. I'm happy it fit. I also kind of need to be
able to access the bottom of the computer, though. Of course, if I tilt the entire test bench up, I could reach
up from the bottom and access it there, but that's really annoying. So,
solution, put one of the 120 mm
radiators on hinges. That's going to be this side where the top of the
motherboard is facing the CPU end of the test bench. So, I'm going to put this
radiator on hinges. I still have to go pick those up, though. But, it will fit.
I'm not super worried about that. to be able to manage the tubing under there.
I'm fully expecting to utilize a combination of putting key rings over
the tubing and then hooking those key rings up to springs so that when I pull
the uh radiator out, the tube will pull
along with it but not kind of go everywhere. I want the springs to be able to manage it properly. It's going
to be an interesting project, but that's for a different video, not this video so
far. All right, so that kind of concludes rads. We're essentially four
for four at this point. The last one, while I don't have the hinges already on
it, where that'll mess with the spacing a little bit, will fit. If it doesn't
work with the hinges, it'll work with the flat plates. That's fine. I can just access it from the bottom, but I'm
pretty sure it'll work with the hinges regardless. So, we're fine for radiators
at this point. Not too worried about it. Need to move back to the reservoir. Need
to figure out how I'm going to mount mount it from the bottom. Okay. Well,
this is where the figurative poop started hitting the fan. Things were not
okay. The radiators were in the way. The 7-in power supply, which was actually
longer. My my power supply personally was longer than the one that I used to
have on the bench. Things were not going to work. I would have needed a reservoir
that was less than half the diameter of this one to be able to make it actually
work. Not good news at all. How am I
going to fix this? Well, there's a lot of fancy extrusion work that I could do
by taking the motherboard support braces and chopping them off at the end of the
motherboard so they don't go all the way down. Um, I could take the power supply
support brace, which also supports the motherboards, and shift that up more
towards the motherboard and then add a little bit onto the side to make sure
that it could still support the power supply. I could do a whole bunch of this
stuff with the extrusion to try and open up that space. Still didn't solve the
problem, though. The radiators aren't going to move, and I already don't have
a thick uh 3x120 alpha coal radiator
like on the other side on that side of the computer. So shrinking the rads
isn't really going to help a ton either. It might help a little bit, but not much. What really needs to happen is the
power supply needs to be swapped out. Again, the power supply that I have
personally was never actually tested on this bench, but it's just over 7 in. And
I tested one that was just over 7 in. That was not going to work. First
solution that I came up with was a Silverstone short SFX 600 watt power
supply, which you guys have probably seen in a video featured by Lionus. It worked. It made sense, but it
didn't look good. and it's only a 600 watt. There's not a ton of flexibility
in terms of cabling and or power. So, I
wanted something a little bit more. I wanted an ATX size power supply because
it looked kind of weird having an SFX on this bench. So, I found Silverstone's
other kind of short power supply, which is one of their 850 watts. More wattage.
Cool. More flexibility in terms of cabling. Cool. And also an ATX format.
So, it fit. Cool. Triple cool. It worked. And it worked by what I would
say is less than millimeters. How the reservoir fits in there right now, it is
touching on every single side. It is touching the motherboard. It is touching
the radiator on its other side. It is touching the other radiator and it is
touching the power supply. There is literally no extra room at all. I can't
believe I got this to work. Um, there's a couple options that I can do for
fitting the cables around it, but it's
going to work. You can ask Brandon. I was pretty freaked out at this point in
the build. I was like, "Wow, my entire plan is not going to work. I'm going to
have to change how I'm mounting a whole bunch of stuff. I might have to ditch
some radiators all just to be able to fit a reservoir in there. I might even
have to ditch this reservoir altogether cuz it's too tall to realistically fit
into the bottom of the case. Unless I can have it poking up the top. My whole
plan from the beginning was to have this reservoir poking up through that hole
and it might not have worked. So, pretty stoked that it did. So, with that all
figured out, what are my actionable items? Well, I need to figure out
exactly how I'm going to mount this. To be able to do that, I need to finish
that extrusion job. So, I'm going to have to go shopping at a metal shop, try
to figure out the exact lengths of all the extrusion I need and do the tedious
job of setting that all up. Then, I need to figure out how to mount this, which
will probably be an extrusionbased box with a plate on top of it, so it can sit
there and I'd screw it into that. Hopefully, that will work. We'll have to
see. That'll probably be next video. I also need my motherboard RAM and CPU to
kind of show up. So, that'll happen at some point, but I'm not too worried
about that. Then, I need need to figure out my like fittings set up. The bottom
of the computer is already set up with how the radiators are orientated so that
um they kind of feed into each other in a big square, which is fine and logical.
Because of how messy the area where the reservoir is going to be is, I'm going
to have to have the water cooling for the graphics card come up just below the
motherboard on this side. And then I'll have a right angle on the graphics card
so it can grab it from there. Then I would just go straight up to the CPU and
have it drop down just above the motherboard on this side. Obviously, I'm
going to have to see like, oh, should I have a right angle here? Should I not have a right angle here? All that kind
of stuff. But it's fairly straightforward as of now. So, I need to
go shopping for fittings. I need to get some extrusion and I need to have my
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you for continuing this adventure with me. Hopefully, I can keep doing Squirtle
updates. Um, there's definitely a lot more work to do, so I'm sure I will. If
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up, you'll definitely be able to understand him properly in that video and that should be coming up fairly
soon. Stay subscribed. Thank you guys for watching and I'll see you next time.