Ultimate Compact Titan XP Gaming PC 3
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2018-05-06
·
1,307 words · ~6 min read
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so
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ah yeah collector's edition graphics card scrolling text intro whatever you
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guys get it so anyway the Dan case's a4
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sfx was a great if imperfect step in the
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direction of ultimate compact gaming it
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allowed a full-size GPU which is great but it forced you to compromise on CPU
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cooling meaning that our xeon e5 2699 v4
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last time around wasn't able to reach quite its full potential
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well stay tuned because with the a4 sfx v2
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we were able to one-up every small
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form-factor pc we've ever built again
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speaking of 1upping today's video is brought to you by mac weldon one up your
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style with their smart design premium fabrics and simple shopping use offer
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code tech tips and get 20 off your next order at the link below
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okay so step one was to outfit our build with the fastest
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and sweetest gaming card on the market the jedi order star wars collector's
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edition titan xp step two then was to actually trade some
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cores from our xeon last time around for
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the much higher clocks on an Intel core
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i9 7980xe this thing runs at up to 800
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megahertz higher so we already know from our
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review that the core i9 7900x outperforms the 2699v4
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in many workloads so the 7980xc
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we're expecting that to totally smoke it
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there's one small problem though
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the area for the CPU cooler on this case it's right here it is literally
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small and that CPU is a
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165 watt part putting it at roughly 12
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to 13 percent higher thermal output compared to our last ultimate compact
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build and if you guys recall the all copper dynatron vapor chamber
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cooler that we used previously hit around 80 degrees under load so
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we're gonna get to the real solution in a minute here but first let's walk
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through the process we started by breaking out the dare
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bauer x299 d-litting tool popping the ihs and applying some
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thermal grizzly conduct-a-knot we're going to need every advantage we can get
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here so yes my friends you've been begging us to do it and here it is
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a liquid metal infused 7980xe
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but what to put on it ah how about an
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nhl 12. this this looks pretty good right
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just put that on there and uh oh temps are good too
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but that's outside the case and uh
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it's also nowhere even close to fitting and it can't be cut to
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fit so back to the drawing board well
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we had some success with our dynatron cooler last time so how about we just
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grab the square ilm version of what is
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essentially the same cooler so you can just see it has a different screw layout
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and success
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sort of see while we were able to get reasonable
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temperatures with this thing we also had to use a knock to a 120 millimeter
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industrial fan in order to get them which wouldn't be so much of a problem
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if we didn't also need this 92 millimeter adapter to ensure proper air
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flow over the CPU heatsink and around the socket and that whole arrangement
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just won't fit and our low profile fans didn't cut it
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so by this point we had completely exhausted our stock of compatible
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coolers before finally coming to a realization the a4sfx v2 has a mount for
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a 92 millimeter radiator so that's why
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this video ended up delayed there are very few aios out there this size none
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of which we had on hand so after a trip to asatech's website and another week of
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waiting our 545 lc arrived
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this thing is not much to look at honestly and we weren't really expecting
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it to perform much better than our dynatron cooler did but when we fired it
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up for a dry run not bad
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after two and a half hours at stock voltage under full synthetic load our 18
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core 7980xe hit a maximum of 68 degrees
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celsius on any one core
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d litting man what a drug
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on a 92 millimeter cooler
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anyway next order of business then is to get it
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all together and this is no small task
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the asrock x299e itx ac motherboard with
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its 64 gigs of g-skill ripjaws memory
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and Corsair NVMe ssds in raid 0 are easy
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enough as is the GPU but the cooler required us to remove the
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front usb 3 port the lower drive tray and the side panel clips at the front of
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the case in order to get it mounted properly and to make matters worse
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even with the 14 millimeter variant of the Noctua a9 fan
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getting an sfx power supply in there
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is an absolute nightmare
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with some determination though and a healthy serving of elbow grease
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we got it all in so we just need one final check to make
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sure that everything is bolted in correctly and nothing's obstructed and
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our fan spins moment of truth time
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oh damn it did we leave the power supply switch off
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oh oh crap yep
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yay all right moment of truth time
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i wonder what that is no i don't have time for this
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so this is not bad like it is not
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elegant to get the cooler in there at
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all and uh like you could even potentially
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damage stuff trying to cram all of that in there but the results we can't really
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criticize running a CPU and GPU synthetic load
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it's topping out at just over 90 degrees celsius on the hottest core like that's
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hot but it's also not thermal throttling
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now let's look at some GPU specific tests so we've had the unigen
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superposition stress test running for almost 10 minutes now
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i'm wearing my microphone here so you can hear it's actually pretty quiet
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and check this out we're seeing turbo speeds up around
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15 80 16 20 16 30 megahertz
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not freaking bad and as for the rest of the benchmarks both synthetic and real
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world this thing has absolutely chewed
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through them we are really seeing the hardware not just work but actually flex
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its muscle so in the end then
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the success that we saw here goes to show you just how much power you can
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pack into a tiny space like the a4 sfx
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v2 without making any compromises on
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performance i mean halfway through this project we flat out didn't expect it to
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work but we're really glad that it did this
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video is brought to you by the arctic freezer esports one it's part of their
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freezer series with other products including the freezer esports edition
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with two fans and freezer esports tr for
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Threadripper it comes in four different color variations red white yellow and
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green and it's a tower CPU cooler with a push-pull fan configuration their new
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bionx fans are optimized for very low vibration and they have a promotion
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going on right now where you can pick it up for just 29.99 usd and their mx4
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thermal compound is also a great accompanying item for it check it out at
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the link in the video description so thanks for watching guys if this
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video sucked you know what to do but if it was awesome get subscribed hit that
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like button or check out the link to where to buy the stuff we featured in
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the video description also link down there is our merch store which has cool
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shirts like this one and our community forum which you should totally join