okay i'm just playing he may have mistaken it for an external hard drive
or maybe a Thunderbolt dock but no
this is actually a powerful pc
given the size of course now most small form factor pcs are sized to be built
around a CPU cooler but streetcom said
screw it let's just make the entire case the
cooler that's right this is a completely
fanless case at this size
question is did the fancy engineering that they had
to put into this puny passive powerhouse make it a complete nightmare to work
with we've got our heat pipes and we're
going to find out nzxt wants to make building a custom pc easier and with
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the streacom db1 max looks exactly like its sister case the explicitly non-max
db1 but there's one big difference the max
variant uses not one but both sides of the chassis as heat
sinks for the CPU or really apu is
there's no standalone graphics card here nor space for one that increases the
total heat dissipation of the fanless design from 45 watts up to 65
but it creates an interesting problem getting heat from the apu to the left
panel slash heatsink is straightforward enough endeavor a couple of these
u-shaped heat pipes a bunch of thermal compound and another heatsink to spread
the load but how do you do that for heatsink that's located on the
opposite side of the case you know around the back of the
motherboard well that's where some clever engineering comes in
these u-shaped heat pipes bend around to the back of the
motherboard and contact the right side plates as well now before we get to what
is surely the most finicky cooler install ever there are some concessions
that need to be made to get a fanless pc under six liters of volume that promises
some serious gaming chops and it starts with the motherboard asrock's x300 tm
itx this isn't a uh run-of-the-mill itx board no this is thin mini icx it's the
same footprint as itx but adds a 2.5
centimeter i o shield height restriction if you stare at it long enough you can
start to see how the design differs there's no fitting desktop RAM in this
thing so sodium laptop memory sticks are used instead we have a couple of these
here and uh where
is the usual atx power input there isn't
one this board is powered from 12 volt via a little four pin up here or
with a quick jumper swap like so
you can feed it 19 volts via a barrel plug on an external power supply like
we'll be doing here we have this boy here
what makes this build actually work is the small wonder that is AMD's ryzen 7
5700g apu the rated TDP for this thing
is 65 watts which is actually precisely what this case is
rated for too even though TDP isn't really a useful
number these days as chips can boost for as long as they want as long as there's
headroom it flaunts eight cores and 16 threads that can boost up to 4.6
gigahertz and there's eight cores of Radeon GPU baked inside that should give
us ample gaming performance but we'll see that once we get this whole shebang
together let's go over what we have here so we've already talked about the CPU
this is the motherboard itself we went over a little bit but let's let's take a
look at the more typical components of it right here
we've got three usb 3.2 gen one type a
ports and a gen one type c port
we've got audio in and out it's pretty standard
it's nothing special a serial port it's kind of interesting i appreciate it but
yeah it's whatever we've got two HDMI 2.0 ports but only one of these is going
to be accessible because one of them's on the other side check that out that's
i don't think i've seen that before that's thin mini itx for you i think i
would have given up that serial port for uh two hdmis but that's just me uh let's
see two soda imports these are gonna be used for our crucial ddr4 3200 kit these
are about as fast as we can reasonably expect out of sodim's i think
i took a quick look around and i couldn't find anything faster
unfortunately that's just kind of what you have to live with on a low profile system like this but you
also get two m.2 slots one is a 2230 for
your wi-fi or a very small form factor 1.2 SSD and you've got a full-size m.2
SSD port up here as well the SSD we're going to be popping in here is a crucial
p5 we're just going to be using collins bench drive to speed things up you
probably want to have something a little bit bigger and or faster
depending on what your use case is i think this is just a 512 gig
this is all you get and um yeah that's all the components i guess
it's not going to be a very complicated build at least not as far as component
density goes that i guess leads us to the fun bit it's time to put it all
together installing the CPU is pretty easy but
you're going to want to pay attention to the little golden triangle here to
tell you where to put it because this is a very weird orientation for this socket
but if you orient it just right it should slip right on down there
and you're good to go now the RAM is a little different than you might be used
to i'm not sure how many of you might have installed sodium before but basically
you got to get it in underneath these clips
because they're in the way there we go
aligned up with the notch slide it in then push it down until you
hear a click SSD is the same as any other SSD you might install an m.2
socket now you just align the SSD with this notch here and then
screw in the screw you don't want it too tight you just want it to hold down
these screws are very easy to share off if you tighten them too much okay and
that's it for the build yeah that's it bill's done um you know we could run the system like
this actually it wouldn't run very well it might shut
off but you know we could do it let's get in the case i mean i was kind of
hoping we didn't have to do that but that's what the video is about so yeah
okay let's get into the case what am i looking at here this
obviously is going to mate somehow this is what looks like the motherboard
tray well clearly i need to read the instructions at this point so give me
one moment okay so i need to install the cooler first which i think is in this
box here that that looks for all the world like
uh like a water block almost except no it's not the heat pipes slide into this
thing so it's not like putting anything in here
like water or air or anything the heat pipes just kind of live here the lengths
to which people will go for a small pc am i right am i supposed
to be using thermal compound for this yes oh this is gonna be miserable yes
just came back from vacation and this is what i'm doing
all right let's get some thermal compound on that CPU and get this uh
copper shim on it apparently that's what we need to do there's not a lot of
thermal compound in one of these it's enough the CPU though but i already got
some of my fingers because of this application method
so i'm wasting a whole bunch of it do we have oh man i've got it all over me
already this is just one packet i need so many of these this here shim just
goes on like that i guess it just
lives there so how much do you think this case costs
uh i want to say 300 dollars
that's that's way high high would you believe me if i said it
was 125 us dollars really no i wouldn't
because you're getting the cooler and you're getting the case and it's like all these different parts
i mean it's miserable to build but like that's that's less than i thought it
would be oh i got a thermal compound everywhere now but as part of the
adventure we're gonna be here a while yep please
better instructions if you're going to save money on
assembly costs the bet the least you could do is
you know make it very clear what goes where and there's your cooler
presumably oh god how am i supposed to
do do you need assistance
this is oh
are you having fun yet Anthony have a blast
wait how am i supposed to i think you should only go till
this group protrudes through the net whatever i do it needs to be even
ish oh god the board is bending like real bad actually not bad oh
i'm like oh okay so we got these spring screws so they'll stop you know they'll
stop when they need to no instructions unclear motherboard taco
this is my favorite build ever i feel like i'm not making any progress on this
build just like everything i do is like just a drop in the bucket you know i'd
say you're solid like 65 of the way to
turning it on well you didn't have to crush my spirits like that would it help
if i said that you're more like 69 of the way there nice it's done i hope i
actually put that jumper to 19 volts let's give it a shot
yeah it's heating up 36 37 is it actually gonna boot though it
booted it booted isn't it amazing that we needed a
thermal camera just to know whether the computer was on or not
that's pretty great like you press the button and literally nothing happens
okay t die is
48 47 okay it's going down uh let's hit
it with uh what should we hit it with it doesn't like that
but the CPU temperatures still seem pretty good
the motherboard says that it's at 115 degrees i don't believe that for a
second that's a false reading GPU temperature says that it's
at 38. it looks like 10 FPS
uh it is seven but of course this is like
4k i could probably stress it a little harder if i went for the lower
resolution this is mostly stressing the memory at
the moment uh let's hit it with prime95 let's just
burn it GPU temperature is at 58 CPU temperature is currently at
61. yeah now it's thermal throttling what's going on
so the motherboard is currently thermal throttling us pretty hard look at that
all that work and here we are getting thermal
throttled obviously people aren't going to be running prime95 all day
but this is a little disappointing considering that the
chassis itself is fully capable like this is not even hitting anywhere close
to a high temperature it's in the 60s the chassis is more than capable of
taking this amount of heat and yet we're thermal throttle based on the
motherboard the vrms are just
burning up we went and grabbed an 80 millimeter Noctua fan to kind of point
into the case and uh see if that makes a difference and sure
enough it does so you can see the exact moment that we
put the fan on it it's like kind of like stopped thermal thermal throttling why
is the motherboard at over 100 degrees because the vrms have no cooler
that's what the problem is the vrms don't even have a passive heat
sink so they're not getting any cooling whatsoever there's no airflow inside the
case the only reason we're getting anything out of this is because we're putting air over the vrms
but the thing that gets me is that streetcom sent this board
they sent this specific board yes like it's possible that there's a an issue
with the sensor uh possible that talk going could have done
something that that is possible yeah i'm not above
saying that i broke it do you want to like break
contact street com and be like hey have you guys seen this happening
i can do that all right here's the situation the
asrock x300 tm itx motherboard we installed this guy right here gave us
some weird performance under synthetic loads the board was throttling far
before the case was even being pushed close to its limit so
we pulled it all apart slapped a knock to a u12s onto it and lo and behold yup
those vrm's are toasty over a hundred
130 degrees our goal is to test the case here and
with it throttling this way we were unable to do so
to rectify that we called our friends at ASUS and snagged well
one of these an ASUS pro h410t
and equipped it with an Intel core i5 10400. it's spec to the same TDP 65
watts and it doesn't cook the vrm's nearly as much as the asrock board let's
give it a go in blender so starting off cp temperature temperatures going up to
about 70. we'll see how high they go though
because this is entirely passive remember so there's there's nothing to kick in and once it
hits the thermal soak it's just going to keep getting hotter until it throttles
that's the idea anyway we're at 100 degrees on all the cores now
and it is in fact thermal throttling it's getting kind of toasty now
it actually it actually does feel warm warmer on this side than this side
though that's interesting all right let's see how toasty this thing is actually
getting so on this side that i said was a little bit cooler
it's about 39 maybe 40 degrees in the hot spot there
yeah roughly 40 degrees if you move around to the other side
yeah like 43 degrees how about that i was right what are we looking at right
now looks like we've dropped down to 3.6 gigahertz still at 100 degrees celsius
what's the power draw right now
57 so it's not looking good for the 65 watt
claims that streetcom made here we are looking at a 43 degree hotspot
back here so it's risen by three degrees at least
since the last time i looked at it oh wow the heat
i can feel the heat coming up off of it it's pretty amazing actually and like
here's my hand i don't know if i can yeah you can kind of see it it's kind of
glowing off my hand on the bottom there it's such a cool concept you know it's
just there needs to be a little bit more efficiency in the thermal conduit like
the contacts you know like you've got
heat pipes you're putting in with thermal compound like that's not going to be as good as a
soldered heat pipe into a aluminum block and unfortunately that seems to be what
we're seeing here like obviously this is heating up and it's transferring heat
pretty well but not well enough we went from 65
watts at peak i think to 53 52 watts towards the end of the
run there and now we're sitting at 4 watts idle so unfortunately i mean it
worked you could run it this way but i wouldn't recommend it it's 100
degrees the downside to running the CPU like this is that it's an Intel CPU with
an Intel igpu and the gaming performance is
frankly crap compared to the ryzen 7 5700g we saw about 55 FPS in rocket
league at 1080p with everything turned to performance settings if asrock pushes
the BIOS to fix the issue on this motherboard that would be perfect AMD's
igpu performance makes for a much better gaming experience but given that there
are no other em4 thin itx boards out there
and we don't even know if a BIOS update can fix this issue
we're hooped so where does that leave us
we're a bit disappointed that the AMD setup throttles so badly but it does
game well in a normal use case and a build like this isn't meant to be a
render farm if we were to temper our expectations around running full bore
then sure this is a cool little case but honestly the limited options for thin
itx compounded by the difficult assembly makes this build not something i can
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thanks for watching guys this thing isn't so amazing but if you want to check out
something else that's a little bit on the weirder side maybe check out the video we did on the streetcom d82 back
in the ultimate compact pc video we did in 2019
it's a lot more fun i assure you