oh hi i didn't see you there today we're going to be doing a build
log that's going to be a little different from anything else that we've ever done
before i will be doing the ultimate
space-saving pc by not just building a computer into a tiny case but having no
case at all building a computer into the bottom of a desk
it's going to be awesome
so i bought pretty much all the hardware that i'm using on mcmaster car those
guys have almost everything under the sun you can get l
brackets and all kinds of different shapes and sizes um
see i've got all kinds of different kinds that i that i measured out in
terms of what i needed
you can get screws in pretty much any length and thread so i had to gather up
a bunch of the different kinds of screws as well as these cool housings i'll show
you how i'm going to use those later there was one thing that i was not able
to get on mcmaster car though and it was this this is motherboard standoffs now i
could have just salvaged these from a case we had lying around but i wanted
this build log to be to reflect how you
guys would go through the process and you might not have those lying around so i got those on amazon we've got our ASUS
GeForce gtx 980 ti strix that they sent over for this video this will give us
some gaming capability even though this is like a stealth type of build well not just some
gaming capability i mean pretty much as good as it gets the motherboard we'll be
using the stylish sabretooth z97 mark s
from ASUS this is for a couple of reasons uh number one i've used this
board before and it's fine which is good number two is i actually really like the
idea of having this protective shield over top of the top of my motherboard in
this case because on the bottom of the desk it could happen that i could
accidentally touch it somehow and the motherboard
would be the worst thing in the system pretty much to shore it out so their
thermal armor comes in handy once
for the RAM we went with some matching kingston hyperx fury RAM
this is a two stick kit a total of 16
gigs mostly we just went with the white RAM because we got the white board and
what the hey why not and on the subject of what the hey why not i dug out our
white ax 860i power supply from Corsair
that i actually painted back when we did our sub zero build guide so to go with
that though as you guys may or may not have noticed this is not a standard case
and the power supply might not actually be able to reach all the components with
the standard cables so i reached out to our buddies over at cablemod who hooked
us up with some custom length white
individually sleeved cable mod cables
yeah these are gonna come in handy for a
build like this this is the Intel core i7
5775c this is a broadwell-based desktop
CPU and basically it's an upgrade for anyone
who's using a z97 platform already and
with one of the big improvements over the previous haswell-based chips being
that it has much better onboard graphics to cool it we'll be using an h100i gtx i
think we were actually planning to use a 110i gtx originally but uh whether it's
due to you know the 100i using 120 millimeter fans and therefore being
slightly lower profile or whether it's because Corsair forgot to ship us one of
those i'm not sure we're using this one now
and finally as much for show as it is for
performance we'll be using two Intel 7
30 series ssds in this case we've got a couple of 480 gigs that'll give us a
total of 960 gigabytes of raid 0 SSD
storage for this rig oh yeah we've got some Noctua fans for the uh cooler there
and here's our next component two lg ultra wide 34 inch monitors so these are
the 34 34uc87c the main difference between these and
the one that i've used in the past being that it has a height adjust sand not
that that matters because we'll be using a modified ergotron desk mount like
individual stand that's actually got a wide screen gaming forum edition upgrade
to it with like a bolt through on the desk so that's going to be pretty sick
step number one after setting up our workstation being all you know safe and
clutter free of course no actually all this is stuff that we're working on is
gonna be to actually redo my test fit
just to make sure that when we start drilling because we will be drilling for
this build log everything is in exactly
the right place for components like the power supply graphics card and motherboard
we're gonna need to be extra careful that we're leaving enough room for io
because depending on what type of table you have you might have some kind of a
reinforcing lip around the outside that
if you position your i o ports too close to might make it
impossible to plug in any usb connectors
so definitely watch out for that another pro tip is when you're mounting
something like a power supply you're going to want to make sure that even if
normally you would go fan side down now you go fan side up because otherwise
you're not going to have any cooling for that particular component this is well
actually it's a pair of pci express
extenders and these are one of the very
common tools in the toolbox for people who do wall mounted pcs or other sort of
unusual form factor pcs you can usually get away with up to about 30 centimeters
of extension from a pci express 16x slot
without seeing any degradation in performance as long as they're of
sufficient quality so we'll be using these in order to mount our graphics
card there we go flat against the table just
like that fan positioning is going to be kind of personal choice you'll have to
decide do you want the slightly warm breeze blowing towards your legs or
do you want it blowing away from it neither is going to offer any tangible
benefit or disadvantage in terms of cooling so you can go whatever route you
want i'm going to go with blowing the air away from my legs just in case
they're feeling a little chilly now before i finalize where all of the
components are going to go
i need to go ahead and put my custom cables on and make sure that
both i sent cablemod the right measurements and they made the cables to
my exact specifications because you might have to make some slight
adjustments to where we're positioning things otherwise
here's our 8-pin CPU connector look at this thing
now just because the cables are going to be hidden away under a desk doesn't mean
that's any excuse to have crappy cable management so the way that i've planned
out the build is to have one mass of individually
sleeved cables come out of the power supply and then work its way up
this edge of the desk splitting out as needed to the different parts of the
motherboard and the rest of the components so the pci express connectors
for example will come out along over in a straight line and then
down and the way that i plan to achieve these nice straight lines is using these
bay stage cable ties this episode not brought to you by
baystate cable ties but basically these are just anchors that can have uh zip
ties go through them two different ways and that can screw down
into the tabletop surface so that i have a really strong anchor point and i can
really get those cables nice and tight and straight so for me the only thing
that's really important back there in terms of spacing is making sure i have
enough room for a normal standard usb
cable now that i've traced the outline is actually going to be
to trace the positions of the mounting holes so
the next step involves our drill and these little puppies right here we're
going to be using these in order to be able to install our standoffs well into
the bottom of a table surface
ow i'm gonna hit my head on that a lot of
times
easy as pie
look at that we have a rock solid mount for our
motherboard to the bottom of the table here
very very nice
lower the cover lower the ARM and then go put your
socket cover in a safe place if you ever need to rma your motherboard you'll need
to find that now even though it means the radiator
might get in my way a little bit later i'm going to go ahead and mount the CPU
block now this way i can ensure that my radiator position is going to be correct
when i install it and that i'm not going to be putting too much strain on the
tubing dennis i don't want to jinx it
but i'm amazed at how well this is going so
far okay so one slightly tricky thing with
getting our video card mounted towards the the back of the table so that we're
less likely to accidentally bump it is that there's not a whole lot of room for
our displayport cable to go into the
back of our graphics card before we screw down the graphics card
we're going to pre-install the bulky displayport cables these are pretty much
the largest cables that we'll have to plug into the back of our motherboard
the last hole we need to drill for the graphics card is actually going to be in
the plastic of the shroud now this is not a mounting technique that you're
going to find in any kind of proper guide but basically we'll be drilling a
hole that's slightly smaller than the threading of our screw and we'll be
using just a normal screw as a self-tapping screw because the material
it's going into is so soft i spoke too early there is still actually one
thing we need to drill on the graphics card and this one's a little bit scary
we have to drill a hole in the bottom of the pci bracket to go
with that one that we have in the top so
for the next step i actually need something i forgot to mention before these are 632 nuts
so we're going to put some thread locker
onto the screws that we're putting into them
because i forgot washers washers would be another
another option here
now something we could do to get a firmer mount with our radiator is
install another couple brackets on the other side but frankly it's so far out
of the way that i'm really not that worried about it it's just the kind of
thing that you could do if you wanted more peace of mind so for mounting the
ssds i'm using these ones with the hole
on the one side and the slot on the other and then i'm actually going to
overlap two of them just like that
for the middle and then put additional ones on the
outsides of the ssds this was more luck than anything else but with our
configuration the included SATA cables actually ended up working out perfectly
not just with the color scheme black and white
and sometimes red but also in terms of length so we're just going to run these
puppies through our existing cable management
uh loops that we've run and plug them into the board
this switch that i pulled off of an old case some time ago so i'm just gonna
mount that up uh under the
you know bottom of the table not not really anything special and all that's
left now is basically just a few finishing touches so we're going to
install our memory and then plug our fan
cables into the leads off of the Corsair
all in one liquid cooler plug that into the motherboard
and we're pretty much ready to flip this puppy over and start working on the
other side of the desk there are some more finishing touches here i'm going to
start cinching tight all of the cable management giving it a bit of a a
cleaner cleaner overall look once we're
done
not bad not bad at all i mean this actually went
really well
okay so all that's left now is to flip it over and uh
you have got to be kidding
me the whole thing is backwards
the chair slides in this way the DisplayPort cables are going to
come up right under the keyboard
dennis i don't want to jinx it but
i'm amazed at how well this is going so
what are we gonna far
you know what we might be able to take the whole leg
assembly off and put it on the other way
i think it's symmetrical
okay no we have a plan
all right let's try it
thank you modular ikea furniture
all right so all that's really left now is to flip her over
and uh find out if she works i actually forgot the other really awesome thing
about this model compared to the one that i reviewed
the vase amount is now included thank
you instead of having to use a weird janky
accessory for it awesome
basically all we do is screw the thing into the thing
put this thing on top of this thing do a test mount with our monitors to
ensure that the height is correct mount them permanently by screwing
those vase amounts that are included with the ergotek slash widescreen gaming
forum stand here in and then clipping them over these
rails and locking them into place once they're there you can actually make fine
adjustments to them uh by using the
let's see yeah there they are the knobs that are on the bottom
but it's recommended that you try and get things as close as you can before
that
and then start plugging in all the connectors for the back of the
motherboard as well which as you can see
are able to just barely plug in which is exactly how we
intended it okay here it is
our mouse is charging
here we go
moment of truth didn't go so well it looks like my white saber tooth may not
have survived the uh
sub-zero experiment
and yeah so we're going to take another
crack at things with our black saber-tooth z97 the mark one
and see if it goes a little better this is something to consider if you are
thinking about building a desk pc though and that's that uh
maintenance is not going to be quite as easy as it used to be actually i guess i
could have flipped the desk over
you've got to be kidding me
moment of truth it's so quiet is it even on
hey oh
okay so i think it's time to do a recap then
for y'all because we ended up having to change a couple things so number one
thing that we changed was our pci express power connectors it
looks like we got a couple of bunk ones these kinds of things happen at least it
wasn't the eight pin because and this was serendipitous the other thing that
didn't work was two of these pci express extensions at the same time
maybe the ones we got were not actually shielded or whatever else was the issue
but one of them is working fine but that meant i had to turn my graphics card
around so being able to use shorter cable mod cables that i already had
lying around ended up working just fine
and i was able to use some of the extra brackets that i bought to remount the
graphics card with about an inch of space between it and the table which is
actually not that bad and better in some ways because now at least you can't
accidentally put your knee or or a finger into the fan on the bottom of the
card so that is it my friends
it worked thank you for watching the uh desk pc
build log here if you disliked this video then i think you know where that
button is and you guys all know where that button is if you liked it though do
click like do get subscribed and do consider supporting us maybe by buying a
cool t-shirt actually this is a long sleeve shirt because i'm baller like that uh by buying a shirt like this one
by uh changing your amazon bookmarks one with our affiliate code instructions are
up there or by the other thing right directly contributing contributing
contributing contributing through the forum you get a cool little contributor
badge and all that good stuff so without further ado um
thanks again for watching and i will see you guys again next time