WEBVTT

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crammed into this 5-liter chassis is a full-fat rtx 2070 making the ghost

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canyon nook9 extreme as far as we can tell the smallest mass-produced desktop

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gaming pc or that is mostly desktop Intel did take one

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shortcut here they used a core i9 9980

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hk mobile processor so then

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what is this thing is it a slim and trim

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desktop or a fat ass laptop

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if you take a couple steps back the ghost canyon nook actually looks really

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similar to the original nook just a lot

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larger and with more mesh than a european nightclub to accommodate the

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much more powerful internal components and the loads of airflow that they

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require unlike the original skull canyon neck there's no option to switch out the

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skulls but i don't think they're that offensive and i don't think most people

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will care the i o is one notch below perfect the lack of onboard two and a

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half gigabit Ethernet is a bit of a downer for me on a machine with no pci

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express expansion but in fairness there are cheap usb dongles to add it after

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the fact and having dual Thunderbolt 3

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ports means that if you've got the money you can plug basically anything you

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could want into this but how does it game tldr

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darn well we faced it off against a

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desktop equipped with a core i9 9900k

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and a chunky rtx 2070 and then we also

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put it up against an ASUS scar 3 gaming laptop armed with a mobile core i9 9980h

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and an rtx 2070 as well and

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the nook landed almost squarely between them it looks like the only thing

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holding it back from desktop grade performance is of course the mobile CPU

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our graphics card actually you can see it right there through the mesh stayed

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nice and cool only reaching 70 degrees under load and surprisingly actually

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even managed to outperform our desktop

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GPU in the GPU portion of 3dmark time spy i was never really concerned about

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performance though it was the cooling that worried me and impressively the

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nook managed to remain relatively quiet while gaming with the only minor

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acoustic annoyance being that sometimes the fans will quickly ramp up and down

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while doing little things like opening programs that should be fixable with a

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fan curve adjustment in a BIOS update though Intel outside of gaming CPU performance

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was initially honestly pretty disappointing the results in single

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threaded applications are as expected slightly better than the laptop worse

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than the desktop and then in multi-threaded workloads the nook not

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only got crushed by the desktop 9900k

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but it also managed to lose out to the ASUS strix scar 3 laptop with that said

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during the test the nook was much quieter and cooler than the strix

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and Intel was nice enough to provide some fun dials to twist in the BIOS so

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then what would happen if somebody went in there and cranked the numbers up a bit

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turns out that by simply changing the sustained package power to 90 watts the

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limits of this poor computer's thermal solution we were able to nearly match

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the i9 9900k with its 95 watt TDP so if

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you were to put some liquid metal in there not that i'm recommending that it can cause problems and give it a bit

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more juice you could probably beat a stock 9900 and fortunately getting

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inside the nook is surprisingly easy for a small form factor computer just like

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it's easy to buy comfy shirts at lttstore.com the journey inside begins

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by loosening these two captive screws at the back and removing the top cover

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which includes two 80 millimeter cooling fans powering the fans with plugless

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contacts like these isn't required but it does show the engineering that went

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into making this small machine reasonably user friendly to both take

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apart and put back together there were a few comments on my unboxing on our short

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circuit channel asking oh who's the poor sod who has to put it back together it

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was me and it only took me about 15-20 minutes the mesh side panels then come

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off to reveal some very weird internals

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on the bottom is a 500 watt flex atx power supply courtesy of fsp making this

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one of the only gaming systems this small to not rely on an external power brick

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then above that our review unit was equipped with a 197 millimeter long rtx

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2070 mini from ASUS that barely fit then four screws and a

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bracket reveal a second hidden eight pin pci express power connector meaning that

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theoretically you actually have the power leads available for an rtx 2080

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super or maybe even a 2080 ti if one

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small enough to fit in this thing was ever made behind the GPU though we find

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the real star of the show all of the core components of the nook 9

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extreme are on this motherboard of sorts that Intel calls

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the compute element to be clear it is

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still a motherboard like you're not able to plug a compute element into another

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motherboard and you know yo dog i heard you like motherboard so i put a

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motherboard in your you know you get the point because the pci express logic is

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on the CPU so those slots on the baseboard that it plugs into are are

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dumb in the sense that removing the compute element would render them

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completely useless now there is some logic on the baseboard though it can

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operate in two modes either delivering 16 pci express gen 3

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lanes directly to the GPU or cutting

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that down to eight lanes and splitting off four each for a four by pci express

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slot and an m.2 SSD slot Intel provided

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a large 110 millimeter optane boot drive for our review unit but i suspect that

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most people would actually end up using the other two m.2 slots that are on the

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compute element itself so that their graphics card will get its full

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bandwidth the main idea behind the compute element aside from making the

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system super small is to make upgrades basically plug and play now on the

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surface that looks like just more e-waste

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because then you're throwing away your motherboard every time you want to

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change your CPU but the thing is in many cases a

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meaningful CPU upgrade requires a motherboard swap anyway so as long as

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memory and storage aren't soldered so they can be carried forward which

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they're not it's basically the same thing i do find the ease of

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upgradability a bit more convincing on razer's tomahawk chassis though since

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access to the compute element doesn't require any tools like it does on this

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one with that said if you've ever worked on a laptop swapping storage and RAM on

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the nook is going to be a cakewalk now that we're in here we've got a good

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look at the cooler which is basically a little aluminum fin stack attached to a

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vapor chamber it's really impressive that this tiny heat sink allows our CPU

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to hit 5 gigahertz turbo if this was a desktop chip i don't think it would have

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a chance but the ghost canyon nook has two big

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things going for it first of all mobile cpus are generally binned more

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selectively for power efficiency than their desktop counterparts that's

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because increasing the power consumption of a laptop by even 5 watts could be

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catastrophic whereas on a desktop it probably doesn't matter second the nook

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CPU cooler is in direct contact with the

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CPU die because it's a mobile chip so that lack of an integrated heat spreader

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helps bring temps down it does require higher precision during manufacturing of

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the cooler itself though so as good as all of that is

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thing is high binned chips and precision manufacturing both come at a cost and

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that cost has certainly been passed right along to the consumer

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let's discuss the inconvenient truths

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if you were to build a similarly small form-factor gaming pc for instance in a

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doctor's xaver sentry n case or Dan case

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or something like that that is assuming you can find any of them in stock the

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total is going to be about eighteen hundred dollars with the ghost canyon

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nook with the i9 9988k version you're looking at

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eighteen hundred dollars one small problem that's for the bare bones kit after

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adding some nice to haves like RAM storage and a graphics card the total

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for our configuration comes to twenty seven hundred dollars woof i mean sure

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you're always going to have to pay a premium for a small form factor machine

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but the thing is even compared to a similarly spec'd

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laptop this is a not insignificant premium the Gigabyte aors 15g that we

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looked at a little while ago performs as well as the nook in games thanks to its

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2070 super GPU while costing 500 less and like

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it's got a screen attached to it guys unfortunately the value proposition

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doesn't improve much if you move down to an i5 or an i7 configuration because

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it's even harder to recommend shelling out for a premium machine like this if

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you aren't equipping it with the very best components as for the easy upgrade

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bit well there are two problems with that

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one is that if history is anything to go on initiatives like this rarely survive

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longer than a generation or two am i really going to get a 12th gen upgrade

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module down the line how much is that going to cost and second the

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well you were going to have to upgrade and throw away everything anyway argument might be more defensible in a

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world where only Intel exists but the thing is AMD has done an excellent job

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of enabling multiple generations of CPU upgrades across existing motherboards

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over the last couple of years all of this leaves me in quite an

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awkward position here then i think that the ghost canyon nook is

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one of the coolest computers to come out in a very long time and unlike some of

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the boutique diy small form factor stuff like the actually it's even smaller than

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this belka three case that we built a system in a little while back this is

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mass produced which has a cost and like

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i want Intel to keep building really cool stuff like this

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so people out there are gonna need to buy it but on the other hand i really

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can't recommend in good conscience that someone go out and buy a 5 liter chassis

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gaming machine when they could settle for building one themselves in

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like a you know an eight nine or 10 liter chassis and save anywhere from 900

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to a thousand dollars

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speaking of saving a thousand dollars that's not what we're about to do this

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video is brought to you by the MSI GeForce rtx 2070 super gaming x it's got

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eight gigs of 256-bit gddr6 memory it boosts up to 1695 megahertz it's got

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three displayport ports so you can get that triple gaming high refresh rate if

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you're into that sort of thing and of course it's got RGB dual fans and their

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dynamic backplate with speed holes check it out now at the link in the video

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description if you guys enjoyed this video maybe check out our build in the velcase velka

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3. it's actually smaller than this and i did see someone build with a 2070 in it

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at one point but it's so cramped that i

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don't know that i would necessarily recommend going that route it is a very

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cool case though definitely not as elegant as this it's a

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little bit easier to use