The ULTIMATE Powerhouse Sleeper PC
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2019-05-06
·
2,707 words · ~13 min read
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for our last sleeper gaming pc the goal was to build the most powerful compact
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desktop rig that we could but this time our objective is a little different this
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video is brought to you by sea sonic and the rig's going to be powered by their
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prime platinum 1300 watt and it is gonna have everything you see here
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everything you see here and
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everything you see back there
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yeah most of that really didn't work out but
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sleeper number three margaret well she's a taskmaster
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she's the biggest baddest hardest
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sleeper pc that we've ever built and
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did i mention that she's beautiful
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floppy bigger floppy jazz floppy dvd
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rewriter dvd rom what like what is this is this a zip zip disc or is it just a
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cooling fan like what the hell is this um hard drive hot swappable card reader
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Windows 2000 professional one to two CPU this is going to be a lot of work
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yeah you know what makes it a lot harder
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the chiller the chiller
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and the carbon fiber tubing what why are we doing carbon fiber tubing are you
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nuts the first thing we needed to do was figure out if our water chiller would
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even fit inside the case we salvaged from our friends at free geek vancouver
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like sure the case is massive but there's still plenty of room for error
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in something like this we disassembled the chiller to find out
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what was inside and then removed all the pc components in our case to make space
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this is a situation yes it turns out that eyeballing things
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is not quite a substitute for measuring them
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well it can all fit
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we can get it in but we might ruin the condenser because we have to bend these
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copper tubes oh yeah that's going to be a super bad time
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or we could just be like
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hey kapow i'm sorry this project won't be as
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advertised i think that is exactly what we're gonna do we're gonna go
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overkill water cooling with the carbon fiber tubing is that not cool enough
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yeah are you not entertained and then we're gonna have to i mean i
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still want to revisit this yeah i think it's just a matter of finding the right
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chassis like if we find an old server chassis or something
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there is no reason we couldn't do that
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i think the best way is to just start by building a computer in here that's air
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cooled and then locating everything where we think it'll work
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are you pumped oh yeah
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oh those good sponsor dollars
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for this build we're looking to have not just insane gaming power but also crazy
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workstation power with that in mind our CPU selection was
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easy the threadripper 2990x is a 32 core
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64 thread beast and it gives up some gaming performance
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but it utterly embarrasses even Intel's
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top-end hddt chip in multi-threaded workloads
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for the GPU we're going with NVIDIA's
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GeForce rtx 2080 ti
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i'd like to say that there's a good reason for it but it's just the best GPU
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for gaming will it be enough i i think so i guess
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that we could have gone for two but i don't know i wasn't really in the mood
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given what we've been hearing about these it's extra important that we make
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sure that everything's working before we bother water cooling it power is being
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taken care of by a sea sonic prime platinum 1300 watt which admittedly is a
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bit overkill for this system but on the plus side it's going to operate
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in silent mode basically the entire time and like come on if seasonic offers you
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a 1300 watt power supply for the project they're sponsoring
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you take it so for this build i'm going to be using a dim.2
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it's no real reason to use it besides just
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i've had drives fail when they're down below there before and water cooling
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builds and man that's a horrible time with everything installed it was time to
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make sure that all our components were in working
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it order pretty easy that wasn't too bad yeah i know a0
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detect memory oh damn it
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just a tiny bit of thermal paste i wonder if that's what was causing our
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issues
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okay so the the motherboard that we had before it's
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just dead um so that's why we're having so many issues
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and it's like it's like a week and a half since i've
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been working on this because it's
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bad things were happening but hopefully we're gonna
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get back here and in the next day or so this will be a fully functioning pc but
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i guess we'll find out in the future
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all right goodbye
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all right new zenith extreme
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this one does not have any bent pins so
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with any luck it will work just fine
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code ad detect memory this is very bad dennis
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our CPU might be dead we're we're gonna have to go with
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something else here all right so she's working now um i
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talked to it nicely like i haven't recommended and you just call it an edge
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okay it's not an it's a she thank you margaret okay
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i'm i'm sorry baby okay we need to put a water cooling loop in here
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here's what i think why don't you use a vertical adapter bracket for the card
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and have the card vertical that will give you space in behind
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here to put the pump and the tubing to go up
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with the loop planned out the components were removed and it was time to drill
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out the rivets to make space for our water cooling
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and the idea is that this right here will be the new the new power supply
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holder and also will allow for us to have cable management in the back this
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if it works we'll be made out of aluminum on the cnc router but
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we will see in a couple seconds that it's gonna be a good time
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do you have any guesses
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three out of five a good one
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are you talking to me yeah
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now given that this is our first time cutting aluminum on our cnc
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one hand will be on the emergency stop the whole time
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our first piece didn't turn out perfectly but
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it gave us all of the critical dimensions that we needed and let us try
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out the new vice break we got from princess auto for like 60 bucks in
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theory this should bend our aluminum to a nice clean 90 degrees and give
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margaret a really solid chassis it's not quite as easy as a massive brake but it
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does seem to be working oh
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sounded good
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well it did mark it up a bit but
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given that that thing was like 60 bucks
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i can't really complain the prototype here is a solid proof of concept
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now there's just a bit of fine tuning and then we're good to make a final
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version really 60 bucks for a break that manage those those uh bends yeah dang
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this is problem hour with alex so you're about to watch a couple cnc
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router fails and they're a lot more off camera
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we tried a bunch of different things going faster going slower new bits and
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it turns out it was just a double-sided tape that we got
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it was not up for the task so
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we're going to be switching to the most accurate tool of all
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the angle grinder
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we'll need to make room for the radiator reservoir and cable management this will
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function just fine but gives up a lot of rigidity compared to the much thicker
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piece that we were going to see and see
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next the front of the case got chopped up to give the radiator more airflow and
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everything was filed down so that no hands would be cut while working in
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margaret with some radiator mounting holes added it was time to put the case
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back together riveting is a very simple way to get two pieces of sheet metal to
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stay together in a mostly permanent fashion
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not quite it's not in quite right select the correct size head for the
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rivet you're working with insert the rivet from the front line up the pieces
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you're about to rivet and squeeze your rivet gun until it pops
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repeat until your case is complete
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now it's time for some painting then we can finally get on to water
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cooling all right so the first coat of paint's on there
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and what i'm hoping we will do today is get everything
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pretty much mounted and water cooled then we'll take it all out put a second
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coat of paint on now that we know that everything's in the right spot
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and tomorrow we'll be done oh yeah
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for the water cooling hardware alphacool hooked us up with some primo stuff to
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make sure that margaret can shred or rip
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all the threads that we throw at her for our CPU we're using an ice block with a
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threadripper adapter then our rtx 2080 ti got an acetal water
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block for that sexy stealthy
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all blackened chromed look we swapped
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out the connection point to make vertical mounting easier
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so far so good but with the CPU and GPU in we realized that
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things didn't quite line up this is gonna be really freaking
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difficult it's starting to look kind of sexy though
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are you turned on by computers dennis
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huh now the key to getting a hard-line water
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cooling loop to work its best is to have as many things line up perfectly as
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possible this will make your runs a lot easier to complete with fewer fittings
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that means fewer points of failure now normally even for hardline bending
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the tubing is an option not with carbon fiber with that all in
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mind we created a bracket then to mount our pump with some room for adjustments
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after the fact there's just lots of mounting so everything's straight yeah no this is
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great well this isn't straight this isn't straight either
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i mean this can probably come yeah it can all be moved down a little yeah cool
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yeah i think it's gonna look really cool we're not using this color cables are we
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no that's just a stand-in hours are in the mail cool
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so for the tubing on this build we're going with carbon fiber it's gonna be a
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real big pain in the butt so carbon fiber if you like get the little
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bits that come off of it on you it'll make you all itchy if you get it in your
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mouth it's a really bad time if it goes into the air
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also like you get in your mouth your eyes really bad ppe aside carbon fiber tubing
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is pretty much like any other hardline tubing basically measure
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measure again cut
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sand and insert
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with that completed it was time to leak test i don't have a whole lot of
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confidence that this will not leak but
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oh well there's our first leak and our second
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leak and our third leak so we're having a couple of problems
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there the main one being that there are two o-rings in a fitting and we were
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only getting through the first one the second one the carbon fiber was just a
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bit too sharp even after being sanded so it either just hit it or when it went
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through it would just slice the o-ring to pieces and it wouldn't seal at all so
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to combat that we had to replace every single inner o-ring and lubricate it
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well for a nice clean insertion
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with the computer leak free it was time to take everything we'd done
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completely undo it take the whole thing apart and then put everything back in
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permanently now one of the biggest problems with
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this design is that there are a lot of things about our build that simply
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cannot be accessed once it's complete without disassembling the entire water
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cooling loop so it's important that we not forget anything at this stage
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like this laser cut acrylic cable hiding panel it's going to look really nice but
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once that's in those cables cannot come out
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other cosmetic things were done at this stage too like the drive bays which were
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unscrewed then epoxied into the front of the case to complete our vintage look
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now with everything slapped in and the loop topped off all that's left is the
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moment of truth error code 92 post error
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so just so i'm clear what you've been doing for the last two days is reseating
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the CPU yeah it didn't boot and then
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everything that's here had to come out in order to get the CPU i just took it
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out put it back in everything worked
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and also like we thought that it was other issues at first oh my god
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but hey the CPU is at 22 degrees now yep and it's cabled also wow you can
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really feel that airflow over the vents down here they are
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they are quite small for all the trials and tribulations that
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have come along with this i think this may be your finest sleeper
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yet
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no
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but margaret isn't just a pretty face
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she's a powerhouse that can compute circles around her sleeper siblings in
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certain workloads with zero tweaking she
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got a cinebench score of 5 5001
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and under full synthetic load on all 32
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cores even with the sub-optimal ventilation from the front our CPU
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reached a maximum temperature of 48 degrees after some tweaking we got a 4.1
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gigahertz overclock on all 32 cores
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netting us 6 000 points in cinebench and
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a blender bmw test time of just one minute 22 seconds
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to put that in context that is over four and a half times faster than a core i9
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macbook pro and then even with the overclock in
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longer tests margaret still didn't get any higher than 75 degrees on the CPU
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and as for gaming well margaret's rtx 2080 ti means that she can absolutely
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destroy games like you could fully expect to max out any aaa game at 1440p
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on a 144hz monitor so that's it big thanks to alex for
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sticking with this project it was an absolute nightmare because of some of
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the issues with uh well how large threadripper is and
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how you can kind of get inconsistent mounts in the socket sometimes and a big
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thanks to seasonic for sponsoring our efforts here even if you don't need the
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1300 watt beast of a unit that we put in our
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system you can be confident if you choose sea sonic that your power supply
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will last i tried to think of a bunch of other stuff to say about power supplies
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but like isn't that the bottom line and they've got a 12-year warranty to back
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it up so guys if you dislike this video you can hit that button but if you liked it
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