- [Narrator] The writing team is moving
to the lab which means
I've gotta set up my new office.
And while I've never been one for trophy hunting
and decorating, I have hunted down
such a rare species that I simply couldn't resist
the sign of my now defunct former employer, NCIX.
Now, diehard viewers of the channel will know I'm something
of an NCIX collector.
I bid on their YouTube play button.
I've been trying to get their old domain
and YouTube channel, and I even dug around
in the trash to fish out their old video host.
So what better way to demonstrate my love
of NCIX memorabilia than to make the inside
of my new office look like the outside
of a crappy shopping plaza?
I can think of one.
I mean this is Linus Tech Tips, and this is an NCIX sign.
How could I not put my PC in here?
But it's not going to be easy.
I have to get all of these components
in here with adequate cooling.
The sign obviously still has to light up.
It's gonna have to mount
on the wall cuz it's a sign, and it's only this thick,
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So here's the plan.
No, there is no plan.
Throw away the prompter.
We're off the rails from here on out.
Let's go.
Now as far as I can tell,
the N is the only letter that's really big enough
to fit even an ITX motherboard.
So the rough plan is to go, wait, no, that's not right.
Oh, motherboards gotta go in the X
for extreme.
That's not actually what it stood for.
It just didn't stand for anything,
Netlink Computer Incorporated.
I think our best bet is gonna be to just find
the biggest components and start with that.
Where could these things possibly fit?
The I's gotta be the radiator, but motherboard?
We could maybe go X.
Yeah, we could go X as long as we go
top or bottom mounted IO.
Already the lack of planning is showing.
I'm sitting here going, yeah
the X is probably best because that would be the one
that's closest to where my desk is.
Where is my desk going?
I don't remember even the shape of the office.
First, I need to figure out
where I'm putting my GPU,
and this one, it's gonna be a bit of a challenge.
Now I know what you're thinking,
"Linus, you don't need such a gigantic, powerful GPU
in an office PC."
And you're right, but come on.
What better choice for the defunct business sign PC
than a card from the defunct GPU division of EVGA?
Might have some new ideas.
I think you're gonna move.
Ooh, that could work.
That's fine.
You can just go over there, right?
I think the power supply is,
gonna be a real problem here.
Yep, that's not gonna fit at all.
Let's explore some other options.
Oh, right.
We're also moving logistics over to the lab.
There are no power supplies here.
Let's go on a little adventure, wee.
Okay, and we're here.
Okay.
500 watt, 500 watt.
Ooh, I see a Silverstone.
Do you see one right there?
Do we have Silverstone compatible long ca-?
- Yes.
- Okay.
It occurs to me I should come up here too and figure out
where the devil on the wall's gonna go.
It doesn't have walls?
Yeah, I don't even think this is like a real wall though.
This is like (pounding on wall)
just a modular like panel
(pounding on wall) thing.
Shoot Tanner?
- [Tanner] Yes.
- How did we not think of this?
There's no walls
- Because then we wouldn't be able
to think of it now.
- We're gonna make this one work.
We're gonna just cable manage network and power along here,
up this wall, and to the PC.
The desk will go here.
These will be perpetually down so I won't have to worry
about reflections, and I'm just gonna have to have
a small desk.
Is this even gonna fit?
We better get this cracked open.
Did you know this?
Is it too thick for SFX?
- Well, the idea was that we're gonna put a back on it just
to keep all of the letters together anyways.
So if we raised it in a little bit to actually allow us
to put some cables behind there
and not have them sticking out of every letter,
(drill whirring)
we might as well have a little bit of extra room
for the power supply as well.
- It feels like cheating though, doesn't it?
I think it's gotta fit in the sign.
- Well, the other option is the 12 volt power supplies
like what's currently in your desk.
- Oh, and I won't need my desk PC anymore.
Good job on the LED lighting.
Whoever made this got some VHB Tape.
Oh, it stinks. (host coughing)
- Yep, that's the smell of the rest of them.
- Oh, it's disgusting.
- Yeah, it's almost like it's been sitting outside
for long periods of time, possibly mounted to a building.
- All these LEDs are gonna have to go.
- [Tanner] Oh no.
- Crusty VHB Tape, twist is definitely the strat.
- [Tanner] There we go.
- We'll be putting our own lighting strips in here.
(spray bottle squirting) - Bleh.
(razor scraping)
- Cleanish.
Does it fit?
And the power supply doesn't fit.
(host pounding on letter)
That means we're basically going to have
to go DC to DC power supply.
These looked a lot bigger
from the outside than they are on the inside.
I was thinking radiator and fans, no problem.
Radiator, barely.
I know the plan was pump in the C,
but what did you have in mind for a reservoir?
- Oh, that is a good question.
- Fortunately, we have a plan to figure all of this out.
See this big piece of cardboard?
We're gonna take all these letters and we're gonna put them
on here and place all the parts:
motherboard, GPU,
somewhat aligned with the PCIe slot.
So the idea is we're gonna have a riser
that wraps around here and plugs into the GPU.
Ooh boy is that ever gonna be tight.
Oh yeah, 'cause you gotta get power cables in here.
How the hell did we think this was gonna work, Tanner?
- I don't know Linus.
How did we think this was gonna work?
When you pitched it and said we need to have something
in every letter.
- I did say that.
We go two RADs.
We have one as an intake and one as an exhaust in the end.
So there's a little bit of room for air to float.
Wait, no. Oh crap.
Yeah, we can't get fans in it.
Okay, we need skinnier RADs, maybe slim fans even.
- Okay. - Wait,
where's it even gonna take in air from?
Are we gonna have like posts or something,
like that that hold the backing off the wall?
And maybe we could count on the back for some airflow?
- Yeah, I was really hoping that we'd be able to
with the backing, have enough room to, I don't know,
mount of a couple small fans up top below.
I don't - - You're making this up
as you go.
- That's this entire project.
Yes. - The good news is
I think I found us a reservoir.
- Okay. - This classic
from SwiftTech (part banging)
- could be just perfect.
This is a bad situation.
We did find a power supply.
This is an 850 watt 1U power supply
from FSP that I was going to use for a rack mount gaming PC
at my house, but now is gonna live in here.
But the problem is
that it's not really designed to run an RTX 3090,
and it doesn't have enough PCI Express power connectors.
And I can't find any splitters or adapters
that are gonna get us there.
Wait, this has a PCIe pinout
but doesn't appear to actually plug into a PCIe connector.
What is up with this power supply?
Here's your eight pin UPS connector.
Okay. Here's your 6+2 PCIe.
Here's another 6+2 PCIe except it's split
into four and four.
Even though you can see the color coating is correct
on the wires, but it doesn't plug into this.
I think this is just a dumb ass manufacturing defect.
Okay.
- Yeah, let's see if they're all defective.
We have five of these.
Oh, come on.
They're all defective.
Oh. Oh no, this one...
Okay. Oh, we got it to stupid.
Yeah, these are dual 140.
- Yeah. - Well
that's not what we want. - Yeah, no.
Now what we've got right now is one of these.
I think we can, there might be another one
of those around if I were to really, really, really dig,
but I could not find a second one.
- I think today is a proof of concept day.
- Oh, absolutely.
- So let's go with this.
This one is fine.
We can put two RADs in the finished build.
We are about to have a classic do as I say
not as I do moment here.
We've got a daisy chained dual eight pin connector
coming off of our power supply.
I'm taking that first one, splitting it
into two eight pin connectors,
and then the second one and using that
for my third eight pin connector on this 3090.
This is a very temporary installation, okay?
Geez. This is gonna be
freaking tight in here.
Gonna have to mash this down or something.
This is pretty low profile actually.
This is gonna help save us some space.
We're just gonna do a slot in here,
and then we'll run this right through the back
of the I into the box at the back.
Oh yeah.
Perfect. It's notable
that even if these are gen four risers,
which I don't know maybe they are, maybe they aren't,
we wouldn't be daisy chaining them
and getting gen four speeds.
So we are gonna have to turn our motherboard down
to gen three speeds, which is fine for a 3090 anyway.
(parts clanging)
Obviously this riser is gonna have to come up inside the X.
So it's gonna have to sit kind of right there
and like come up here and kind of bend real tight here.
Wow, that's gonna be really challenging, Tanner.
Yeah, yeah, it can't be that bad, right?
Just kind of go like that.
Oh yeah. Oh yeah.
You're good. You're good.
Most of our cable extensions are missing
in the move right now, but we did find a couple
of short 24 pin extensions.
But nope.
Haha, but I have a second. (cutout snapping out)
I don't think I'm gonna get-
Oh nice.
No, it's gonna reach, yes!
Ooh, almost.
Yes. Good.
It doesn't look like it,
but we are actually getting dangerously close to test time.
I've just gotta put this Sabrent two terabyte drive in here.
At least that's what I thought I was gonna do.
I took off the heat spreader on this motherboard,
and there was already an SSD in it.
Ooh, some of the custom DDR9-9000 CL 69 memory
that Micron did up for me.
Next up, we've got the CPU water block.
I mean, come on, did you think I was gonna go air cooling?
This is using EK's, exact mount, and-
Oh crap, Tanner, I think we have another problem.
- [Tanner] What's our problem?
- We're gonna have tubes coming outta here.
I think it's gonna be too tall as well.
- [Tanner] Do we not have the ability
for right angle fittings?
- Ooh, there's a lot of things interfering
with this right now.
Maybe a measuring tape would be in order,
before we started.
We only have six centimeters to work with
which would put us like basically right here.
Pretty clear that this is not going to work.
- Tanner, did you factor in the height of the GPU block?
Let's get the GPU block out.
I don't know if any of this is gonna work, man.
I don't think the GPU is going to fit in the I.
- My thought with doing this was
that we could take off this front area here.
- That's fine, but the issue is
that we've got the PCIe connector over here
that's hanging off the edge of the I,
and we already don't have enough margin here
to slide the I on top.
- I have grossly miscalculated
- If we don't use the foam as a stabilizer
for the backing, it might just fit.
I think we're still in business.
We still need to figure out this.
We're not licked yet.
They have 1U water blocks and we're gonna run the tubes
like over here between the PCIe riser and the RAM.
So all we gotta figure out now is a pump.
And this is not gonna be be it.
This is a DDC XTOP from EK.
We actually need a bone stocked DDC
which has the inlet and the outlet on the side
and is much lower profile
because this is clearly not gonna fit.
Oh man, you know what?
Even if we can't get our hands on like a 1U block
or something that'll fit,
we could just adapt one of these old GPU blocks.
Boom, low profile done.
This will be a good enough placeholder for today.
The point is to just figure out if this is gonna work
and we can create custom mounting brackets and adapters
and all that kind of stuff over the next few weeks.
Man, you can tell we're in the middle of a move right now,
not because I showed you we're in the middle of a move
but because clearly this video is a little bit,
"Hi, here's how we're gonna do the res -."
Ooh, this thing is cracked.
If I could find something newer and skinny
that would definitely be good.
Here we go.
I just need this right angle-
Crap, even this one?
Really?
We're gonna have to find a lower profile fitting.
What about the fans at least?
These slim 120's should be enough to handle this
as long as we've got two
of these radiators in here.
So we're just gonna go ahead,
and do a little something like that.
Well, here's some additional fans to be placeholders
for where that other radiator's gonna go.
Oh, Tanner!
- Yes. The radiators
will just have holes and they'll punch
through into the box that the sign is gonna be mounted on.
So they'll just go straight into the back.
- Yes. - Easy.
They don't even need right angle fittings.
Nice.
Okay, this is what I was worried about
with the clearance for a PCIe extension.
Okay, that puts us about here.
And then the clearance we need
for the top of the block with the fittings,
there's no way we're gonna fit this EVGA 3090.
The most frustrating thing is there's so much empty space
on this PCP.
Did it really need to be this big EVGA?
You've literally got holes in it.
Fortunately, this pre water-cooled card
from Asus has no such problem.
If we run the fittings into the box that's gonna
be at the back.
I don't think there are any clearance issues here at all.
This is awesome.
And we're down
to just two eight pin power connectors,
meaning that we don't have to have
that really sketchy adapter.
I think we are getting dangerously close to test time.
Oh, you might have noticed we swapped out the reservoir.
The other one leaked, not where I showed you the cracks,
but in one of the other fittings.
For lighting, these strips from Elgato, not perfect,
but they're easy to control,
and they're definitely good enough for our test here.
And plug one, two.
Not bad.
I really don't know how well the RGB effect
is gonna shine through a blue, you know, thing,
but I guess we can find out.
Hmm, we are definitely gonna have to do something
to get more even lighting above where components are.
Like there's big dark spot where the motherboard is.
Some of the other letters might not be
as challenging though.
Like I think the I's gonna be okay.
You can't even really see it.
Ah, you can see it a bit.
Ugh. This might be about the best we can do
for the C for now.
Oy.
Yeah, oh yeah.
(claps hands) - Woo.
No one mocks up quite like LTT powered on.
X for extreme performance.
Oh, dang it.
That's the whole reason I took the X off
so I could put this in.
(letter clanging)
Oh, now I need to start the computer.
Okay, what are the odds this just fires up, hmm?
Hey, there we go.
This is great.
Okay, not great.
I know it doesn't look like much right now,
but this was an important exercise to figure out
all the little things that might have blindsided us
later when we do the final build.
And I think we've solved all of them.
Did this just reboot?
Not a great sign.
Ha, get it?
Hey, there we go.
I think to make our lives easier,
for lighting we should use white components
wherever possible.
- Yeah, no, that sounds like a good plan.
- If we can find white fans for these radiators,
for example, I think that'll really help
with light kind of bouncing around
and make it easier to light them up evenly.
Okay, apparently we're gonna run 4K nightmare.
If I'm being honest, ergonomics not great.
Performance on the other hand, outstanding.
GPU's at 52 degrees.
CPU's at 73 degrees.
I think with the box in the back and enough airflow
to the radiators, this is going to be freaking awesome.
Oh, and I died.
I died before I got a chance to tell you about our sponsor.
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Maybe you would also enjoy
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