- This is the Azza Cast.
And like every other PC,
it's been sitting on a shelf for months
waiting for a GPU.
Thankfully, we finally get to build in it,
and I think this one's gonna be a lot of fun
since this case is crazy unconventional.
Look at this.
(case clunks)
There's no thumbscrews back here
because there's no side panels to remove.
Well, okay, there is one side panel,
but you don't remove it.
What you do remove is my segue to our sponsor from my mouth.
This video is brought to you by Build Redux.
Build Redux creates PCs for gamers who want to win
and who want high frame rates without breaking the bank.
It's backed by a two-year parts and labor warranty,
so you're covered and you can click the link
in the description to start creating your PC today.
(upbeat music)
The most obvious thing about the Cast
is the DeLorean-isque hinged lid.
And novelty aside, I actually really like
how much access you get to the case with this thing.
The only thing that I think would be better
is if they offered a clear version, so you could have
like a little kind of PC greenhouse in there.
In terms of front IO, we've got USB-C, USB Type A
along with audio here in the front,
and the top panel isn't the only trick
that the Cast brings to the table.
The basement actually unfolds as well,
but clearly we can't do that with it standing up.
So, we gotta put it down like this.
Wow.
I mean, you could just do all the things.
That is super cool, right?
There it goes.
That's even better.
You have complete 360 degree access
to the entire internals of the case
and hilariously as I figured,
you know what?
Not enough access.
Watch this.
You remove these five screws
that are marked with little gray areas and watch this.
That way (chuckles)
The whole frame just comes out of the outer shell,
which you can then put away.
Oh, thank you for that.
And now you can build it completely open.
And then the whole thing will just clip back into place.
That way you can put stuff like a hard drive
here on the back of the motherboard tray
and do all your cable management.
Look at these awesome cable management loops.
I am liking this thing.
Can I say Asus?
One of those companies that I just had always been
kind of dismissive of because a lot of their earlier stuff
was not very good.
Uh-oh, I found a QC error.
Jeffrey from QC tried to fix that up for us.
Actually that looks like it probably happened
during the painting or powder coating process.
Now, seeing as we're working with a white case,
we opted for a mostly white build for that aesthetic,
but something that we noticed
while we were getting everything ready
is that the case isn't really that white.
See?
If you look at it next to almost any other white thing,
it looks kinda pink.
You guys see that?
For our motherboard we've gone with the premium,
but not outrageous model from Gigabyte.
This is their X570S Aero G
and it's a more creator-centric board,
which usually just means it looks stylish.
But in this case, it actually has at least one feature
that might be more creator-centric.
So, I'm not used to seeing a display port input
on the back of a monitor unless it's got Thunderbolt,
because what you would wanna do is you'd wanna take
your powerful, dedicated graphics card,
run a little loop back cable into the motherboard,
and then inject that high performance display port signal
into your Thunderbolt port if you wanted to connect
to a dock that was 50 meters away or something like that.
In this case, it appears to be injecting
into one of the regular USB 3.2 Type Cs.
So in a nutshell, if you had a supported monitor or dock,
it would allow you to have both USB-C
and full-fat display port functionality
with the performance of your onboard GPU
from that single connector.
So, it's kind of like poor man's Thunderbolt.
You could think of it that way.
It's got two and a half gigabit LAN,
as well as four M.2 two slots and I think that's about it
for creator-centric features. - [Colin] 10 USB ports.
- I guess yeah, it's got a lot of USB.
For our CPU, we've gone with the Ryzen 7 5800X.
It's got eight cores, 16 threads, nearly the same
gaming performance as its higher-end brethren,
but just half as many cores as the top tier Ryzen 5000.
And honestly, it's a great choice
if you don't absolutely need a ton of threads
for your particular workload.
And we're humming along with this access.
32GB of G-Skill 3600 mega transfer per second C14 memory.
Doesn't quite match the color scheme of the build,
but from a performance standpoint,
this is exactly where you wanna be with Ryzen 5000.
For storage, I'm not sure quite when or how this happened,
but M.2 drives have gotten so affordable
that you can actually take a two-tiered approach
to your storage setup with all NVME devices.
So, we're gonna be using a P5 Plus Gen 4 SSD
for our boot drive.
So, go ahead and throw that in the top slot,
which is using lanes directly connected to the CPU.
Full Gen four speeds.
Then, we're gonna throw a P2 2-terabyte drive
in one of our other three freaking NVME slots
on this motherboard.
Under this M.2 heat sink, looks like we're pulling
all of them off at this point.
Check this out, Brandon.
I've just got a socketed wifi slot.
So, you actually put another SSD over top of that
if you want and that's ooh, that's cool too.
You can put up to four 110 millimeter SSDs in this board.
What's interesting about that from a creator standpoint,
is that the highest capacity
and in some cases, highest performance drives
can end up being 110 millimeters long
like you saw with Intel's Optane M.2s.
For our power supply, we went with a pretty obvious choice
for a white themed build.
This is the Prime Snow Silent Titanium from SeaSonic.
Crazy efficient, super quiet and white.
(chuckles) You know, what do you want me to say?
750 watts which should be enough for our system
since we're not gonna be using a 30 Series GPU.
Talk a little bit more about that later.
Let's get this installed.
Oh, okay, so here's how it goes in.
Everything about this case is super unconventional.
I could take this basement shroud off
or I could put it in here?
Is that?
Yup?
Can I do that? No, I can't do that.
Okay, look like I could do that.
Look, I think that can be forgiven
for thinking that I could do that.
Let's pull this off.
Whoa.
- [Colin] So make sure you have the fan pointing up.
You have it upside down.
- I have to have it pointing up?
- [Colin] Yup.
- Oh. - [Colin] That's what
the instructions say.
- The instructions say fan pointed up.
Well, I mean, this is one of those situations where normally
I prefer not to have the power supply fan pointed up
because it means that it's sucking in hot recirculated air
in particular around the GPU.
But in this case,
I mean, it's so open.
I guess it doesn't really matter.
(case thunks)
Oops.
I sincerely regret that this thing ships with black cables,
but that's on SeaSonic, that's not on me.
And man, is it ever easy to cable manage this thing?
Got our 24 pin here.
Got our pre-run cables for the graphics card here.
Got our eight pin up here.
And check this out.
They've got these giant Velcro tie or zip tie loops
back here that just make it super, super easy
to get everything strapped down into place.
So, I'm thinking we'll do it kind of like that.
And now it's time to mess it up with all the RGB crap
that's gonna be on our cooler.
This is the H150i Elite Capellix.
Its got super nice RGB, and more importantly than that,
it uses Corsairs maglev ML Series fans.
Triple radiators,
so we'll be able to keep that 5800 X nice and cool.
And we're gonna go ahead and install it in this orientation.
This case can accommodate either a 280 or a 360 mil rad,
at least in theory it can.
(gasps audibly) Uh-oh.
As I might've just committed a water cooling sin here.
There's not enough room for the tank.
We can get away with this if we put the fans here
and use them as intakes in order to improve the clearance.
I really don't like doing that
because it's worse for maintenance,
but for a show build, I guess we can do that
and I would like to see the revised version of this case
with just this much more clearance,
especially cause it's the kind of thing
that you could probably fix with a drill on 10 minutes.
Also, unfortunately,
this appears to be one of the older style coolers
that comes with the clip style mount for AMD.
I mean, they're not terrible,
they're just more finicky than the newer mechanisms.
The thing that's kinda baffling to me
is the design of this fan.
The case is quite open air
to the point where it could easily be sort of, you know,
pulling air from even outside of the case kind of around it.
So even though it's open,
there are some serious question marks for me
in terms of actual real-world performance.
You know what I really would have liked to do in this case
is one of my classic tricks.
Okay.
So, what I used to do back when cable management sucked
and most cases didn't have any holes up here
or anything like that is I used to take this fan
and I'd run it right under the motherboard.
I just kinda pin it under the motherboard at the back
and then I'd bring it out to the side
or the top or the bottom or wherever it needed to go.
And seeing this here.
I really, really wish I had done that.
Now I know this doesn't look very nicely cable managed,
but this is a bit of a different strategy
than I would usually have.
What I'm focused on here
is hiding everything from this side.
So, I'm trying to get everything wrapped up
as tightly as possible (grunts) so that we don't catch it
sort of running across these open gaps in the chassis.
All right.
Yeah, we finally got the GPU.
I wish I could tell you it's something cooler than it is.
This is actually a 2080Ti.
And the reason that we're using a last gen GPU
is because there's even here at the office,
a bit of a shortage of modern high-end GPUs
especially white ones.
So,
this was it.
All of our 30 Series stuff of this class
is in our editing stations or tied up in other projects.
So, that's what we're using.
- [Colin] Linus, please move the graphics card in a bit.
- No, no, it's fine there.
This is safe.
All right, now there's a little support bracket doodad here
that I'm kind of trying to figure out right now.
What is this boy doing?
Oh, is it a vertical mount?
- [Colin] Yes.
- Oh, cool. It's a vertical mount.
Oh, I like it.
Okay.
Sold.
Let's do a vertical mount.
Oh, do we have a PCIe riser?
Oh, we'll just go grab one.
Oh yeah.
That's freaking awesome.
Okay, we've got a bit of an interference issue
with our USB Type-C over there.
Okay. Yep, this is great.
So, here's where it goes in right,
oh well, there apparently.
Okay, now hold on a second.
Wait, how the devil are you supposed to, oh, interesting.
You have to do this.
The GPU slides into the case, the sequel.
You can't put this in from this way
and you can't screw it in unless the GPU is already on it.
So, you have to slide it in from the back.
We just did a video called, "The GPU Slides Into This Case."
And so, now we've done it again.
This is great.
I was worried that we'd be able to see
my mess of cables back here through these gaps,
but actually, the GPU's gonna cover all of it.
Oh, and I didn't even put the power supply shroud on yet.
Oh, there's, oh it's, right, it's a cable cover shroud
Okay, all the cable management concerns I had
were totally invalid.
100%.
'Cause there's a freaking basement cover.
So clean.
Enough to forgive the pink hue.
It's really noticeable when there's shadows cast on it.
Can you see that?
Like how pink it is?
- [Colin] Not quite beanie pink.
- (grunts) No, it's not as pink as that.
Oh, right.
I was about to do an lttstore.com for the tube
but you can't actually buy that.
So, you've gotta pick up the gamer hoodie.
Available in aqua or gray.
Let's just see if my cable management is gonna survive.
I've got a big thing right where it needs to go.
You know what? Maybe I can get it in.
(equipment clunks)
Oh.
Is that it?
Oh yeah, I think we got it.
One door closed.
Two doors closed.
That's pretty cool.
Or you could go with just like the half
kind of cocked open look.
This is where a lot of my cooling questions come in
'cause you got just this little tiny gap along the side
for these 320 millimeter fans to bring in air.
Great mechanism for attaching to the front,
but that is mhm.
- [Colin] You can get a mesh front.
- There's a mesh front.
Okay.
Well, that would almost definitely be an improvement.
Still, it might get enough to deal with just the CPU.
And if this GPU is just grabbing fresh air
directly from freaking outside, I mean, it might be okay.
Now I know you guys wanna see the thermal results,
but before I do that,
I wanna take a moment to appreciate
that couple of RGB configuration issues aside,
this thing looks freaking awesome.
Like, if you want the open frame experience,
but with the aesthetics of a closed case
and the cable management of a closed case?
This is basically the bee's freaking knees,
which isn't to say that it's without problem.
First and foremost,
I gotta point out that it is extremely susceptible
to the temperature of the air around the system.
Even walking past it can generate a measurable change
in the temperature of your GPU,
but that's actually good news
because GPU temps were freaking awesome.
And our theory, that it would mostly pull fresh air
from this giant gap in the side of the case did hold up.
Obviously, this is going to have some negative impact
on the (clears throat) dustiness of your machine,
but from a performance standpoint, it's great.
Interestingly, one of our compatriots Gear Seekers,
who's on Floatplane by the way,
you guys can check them out there,
also tested this case with the GPU
in its horizontal configuration
and they too found a very small but measurable difference
between having it open versus having it closed.
I think this orientation ended up being a little bit better,
but it's also a little bit more work
and it's gonna cost you about $75 to $80
for a Gen 4 riser cable.
What's not great from a performance standpoint
is the fact that our CPU was up near 90 degrees
with a triple 120 millimeter AIO cooler.
I don't know what to say about that other than
you better get yourself (grunts) a mesh front panel
because I'm pretty sure we're gonna see
a marked difference almost immediately here.
Check this out, ladies and gentlemen.
We're at 90.4 degrees on a 5800 X.
Give it a sec.
You like to breathe?
How you liking breathing?
It's not going down.
Is that just how hot this particular chip runs?
90.5.
Okay. Well.
- [Colin] Well then.
- Neat case.
Neat sponsor.
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If you guys enjoyed this video,
maybe check out our weirdest PC parts we found on AliExpress
or maybe the actual pyramid PC
we built for an undisclosed client.
(mumbles) was D brand.
They're awful.
Brandon roll the camera again.
We dropped .4 degrees.
Ow.
All right, it's back up .1.