- If you've only ever watched
our last couple of videos on the subject,
I'd forgive you for getting a bad impression
of small form factor computers.
You might think, oh man,
they look like an absolute nightmare to build.
And if I want to get
anywhere near decent cooling performance,
I'm gonna have to go water cooling.
But that is not actually the case.
Meet the JOAT.
Not to be confused with the goat.
It's not the greatest of all time,
it's just the- - Jack of all trades.
- Jack of all trades, yeah.
Ah, that's a good one, is that actually their intention?
- Yeah. - Oh, that's funny.
And it's got a lot of airflow.
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(electronic music)
For starters, a little bit of information about the JOAT.
It's made by a company called SpyLabs.
It's not that small, at about 14 liters,
and it arrives flat-pack with some assembly required.
But you guys probably figured that out by now.
A couple of other things that stand out about it
compared to other boutique small form factor cases
are its compatibility with extremely large CPU coolers,
like the NH-P1 Passive CPU Cooler
as well as its affordable price.
It can be configured for anywhere from around 125 to $150.
There's an instruction manual, let's see how good this is.
Neat.
This is going to take a minute.
Did I say it's gonna be easy? - Yes.
- Did I lie. - Maybe.
- Based on the fact that I'm 30 seconds in
and I've already needed two kinds of unusual tools,
I was going to criticize them for a user-friendliness
but they actually include the Allen keys that you need
so that's not too bad.
The only one is the socket to put the stand off in
and that would be true of almost any computer case,
it can be a little tough to get those in there.
You can also tighten them up
with a pair of needle nose pliers.
Not everyone's gonna appreciate this kind of aesthetic
with, you know, big socket head screws
hanging off of panels and stuff like that,
but personally I've always been partial to it
so I'm kinda like in the look of it so far.
In four minutes, we've gotten three panels together.
We've got the power button installed now,
so it's a simple, there you go,
vandal resistant switch right there.
A little, something like that,
and I've managed to find a defective screw.
Whoops.
Hopefully that doesn't screw us over.
What the hell is this?
Did they include this in the box?
Wait, what the?
Is this actually like AC main's power
that is just electrical taped.
Did we order this or did they,
is this a review unit or what?
- [Alex] Uh.
- Good Lord, is this they're actually shipping
to real customers, Alex?
- [Alex] I don't know.
- Why did they include the chopped off one?
This raises so many questions.
- [Alex] Yep.
- I mean, they're all shrink-wrapped.
But if you do not have familiarity with this kind of stuff,
that's a big, you could easily hurt yourself.
I mean, Steve from Gamer's Nexus
wanted NZXT to recall their case over the possibility
that they could have something almost this sketchy
if the user modified it.
This came out of the box.
- Just to clarify the sketchy cable,
you're supposed to get this one right here,
but of course it's 2021 and those are all sold out.
In the meantime, SpyLabs will send you a normal power cable,
which is why we have this guy right here,
and you can modify it yourself into the sketchy thing
that we had, which will allow you to fit a large air cooler.
It's not an ideal solution,
but it does mean when this case arrives to you
it's technically CSA approved.
- Marveling at that for a full minute
set us behind a little bit, but now I'm ready to put
the USB type-C front panel connector on, there you go.
Not gonna lie, Alex, I'm sketched out.
(Linus groaning)
Okay, I guess we're gonna have to settle
for it sticking off a little bit.
This one's not tapped properly either,
you can see the threads only go in halfway.
- Does it say what these are? - Yeah, they're M4.
- [Alex] M4, all right, I'll go get an M4 tap.
- Okay, all right, thanks.
This is kind of clever though,
they've got these little plastic spacers on the rubber feet,
so that on the two that have a screw right next to them,
there's no interference.
Our smallest metric tap is M6.
Alex, can we get an M4 tap on order, please?
- [Alex] Yep.
- Dammit.
My impressed level keeps shrinking here.
I don't think there were extra screws either,
so I'm gonna have to find a way
to drive in that defective one.
I swear the intention today was to do a nice,
easy, normal build without any random tools being required.
Here we go. (humming)
Oh shit, I think we just scratched it.
That's one of the dumbest things I've done today.
They glued the damn screw in for the GPU mount.
Look, they have thread locker on it.
There that's how the GPU Mount goes on, all right.
Why is there a rear IO type-C thing?
In case you don't want to put it on the front?
There were some challenges,
but the good news is that 32 minutes later
we're ready to build.
Oh, interesting.
I just noticed there's an alternate location
for the power button.
You can also put it here.
Now the keen eyed among you
will probably have noticed that we went what appears to be
completely with our power supply.
This is an 850 watt SFX power supply from Cooler Master.
But, there is a reason for it.
Small form factor power supplies
generally have much less capacitance than full-size models
and what that means is that if you have any components
with high transient loads,
like say for example, RTX graphics cards,
which is to say they'll suddenly pull
a very large amount of current and then kind of ease off.
You can end up blowing these things up
if you don't over spec them,
even though theoretically they should have been fine.
Okay, well how's the power supply bracket
figure into all this?
There's no instructions to install the power supply bracket.
This is the worst.
Wait, what the hell?
I just found another spot for the USB-C.
You can also put your USB C on the bottom.
Why?
Is this the top panel, did I do this wrong?
I don't get it.
I'm sure someone on Reddit was like, yeah, put it here.
And then they were like, oh yeah, sure
we can just put another hole in it.
That's legitimately probably how that story goes.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, here we go, I got this.
So this goes through the spacer
and then into the power supply unit.
- [Alex] Let's plug this in first.
- Oh, that's a good idea.
I mean, well, it's an idea.
I don't know if plugging this into anything is a good idea.
Look, they've got a space here for the cable to come out,
but then they give you a cable that goes this way, maybe.
Also these screws are rusting already.
The about page on their website says,
"At SpyLabs we are all about function over form".
I never thought elegance mattered that much to me
and then I got rusty, mismatched screws,
right on the top of my case and I changed my mind.
Well, the power supply's in, for better or for worse.
Let's put the motherboard in.
I mean, whatever.
I don't think there's any rules.
We've gone with any ASUS B550-I.
Yeah, it's not quite as balls to the wall
as the X-570 variant, but it's more affordable
and since we're not overclocking
it does everything we need it to do.
One key feature it has is USB bios flashback,
which for the CPU that we're using
is actually a critical feature
since it doesn't support it out of the box.
And that CPU we've gone with is the Ryzen 5 5600X.
The theme of the build today is jack of all trades, right?
And this will do it all for under $300.
It's got six cores, it turbos up high enough
that it is among the fastest gaming CPU's on the market,
And it consumes just 65 Watts
meaning this system is going to be nice and quiet
in spite of its small stature.
On the subject of cooling,
the order of operations here
is going to make our build either a lot easier
or a lot more difficult.
So we want to get our cooler prepared,
that is get the mounting hardware
installed on the motherboard.
We want to plug in our eight pin EPS connector.
Oop, little something like that.
Then we're gonna install the motherboard
and bolt on the cooler what's frustrating about this one
is that compared to the last couple of
nightmare, small form factor builds that I've done,
this one, all the challenges feel unnecessary.
When I know something's gonna be hard,
I'm mentally prepared for it.
When a screw just has the head filled in
and I can't get my screwdriver in it,
that's not a good time.
The reason we ended up with a SATA SSD
in our jack of all trades build is because,
well, simply put, we wanted two terabytes of capacity
so that we can put lots of games on our machine.
And it was substantially cheaper
than going with a two terabyte M.2,
which isn't to say we don't want to boot from M.2,
so we went with a separate 500 gig drive,
which cost us 80 bucks.
It's only PCI express gen three,
but Crucial's P5 is ample performance
for anything that we could want to do in a gaming rig,
outside of maybe us needing an upgrade to a gen four drive
when Microsoft direct storage shows up.
That is, if it makes a difference to performance.
For USB 3 there's not really enough slack
to do anything other than
plug it in like that, unfortunately.
And for RAM we went with 3,200 megahertz
CL16 Ballistix from Crucial
and we went 32 gigs because back to the theme of the system,
jack of all trades, yeah,
you can get away with 16 gigs for gaming,
but it's nice to be able to be a jack of all trades ass
and just leave all your chrome tabs open
and all your background tasks running while you're gaming
and for that, you can actually exceed 16 gigs these days.
So we were like, ah, we're lazy, we're putting in 32 gigs.
You don't have to though.
Love these relish, mustard, ketchup,
and then whatever you'd put on a hot dog that's blue,
colored cables here.
Well, if we're going to have funky colored cables,
I'm embracing it.
Let's go with a purple SATA cable.
This is not what was included with the motherboard,
I'm just having some fun now.
Now it's time for the chungus.
- [Alex] Wanna put the power in first?
- Oh, that power.
Yes, we should do that first.
Oh balls, this has to go in from the other side.
And it's fixed.
I could really like touch that
exposed main's power from here.
I do like fireworks.
The only thing Katy Perry and I have in common,
we're both a firework now that I have this case.
Alex, how sure are you that this thing is gonna close?
This looks extremely borderline.
Sure, go for it.
Oh my God, that's really, really there, okay, yeah, fine.
I've apparently gone with a Founder's Edition card.
The Founder's Edition cards
are a great choice for a build like this
because they take all of their air from the bottom
and push it all out the top,
and that's exactly how the natural convection
of this case is going to work, so.
We do have a problem though,
with the back plate we have an interference issue
with our ginormous cooler.
Okay, we did get a non-bank plated card in there.
See, that'll go in.
But the back of the card is actually touching the cooler,
which is terrible because that's gonna mean
that we're going to short circuit the back of the card,
definitely destroy it at some point.
we could jam some electrical tape in there,
just put it along the back of the card.
We could install it, but it wouldn't be ideal anyway because
once we put a larger card in here,
it's gonna cover most of the bottom part
of a passive convection based cooler,
which means that it's not gonna get
air flow that it's expecting and it's not gonna perform
like we would want it to, so we're gonna pull this out
and we're gonna swap it out for an NH-D15.
Thanks, Alex.
You know what, it's probably just as well the P-1 didn't fit
because for its price, it's really not that practical.
This is really tight.
Now I got to get this fan clip on.
Poor Noctua, I'm sure they're watching this going,
"Ah, what is he doing?"
Got that clip on, given that it is
right up against the top panel, that was really tricky.
But the cooler's on now which means
we are ready to put our originally planned 3060 Ti GPU.
So this was chosen because it, there we go,
it's a good card and it's fast.
But without being at a completely ridiculous price.
There's a little clippydoodle to hold it in the right spot.
These screws don't really fit through here.
I mean, this is not surprising to me at this point.
There we go.
This is crazy.
This bolt has a lock washer, a regular washer,
and then the nut that they're using is a lock nut
with like that plastic material, nyloc there you go, thanks.
They really do not want your GPU going anywhere.
I mean, given how much you must've paid for it these days,
I guess I get it.
There we go, we can, I don't know,
I mean, the cable management om this thing is a nightmare
regardless of what we do at this point so.
This is a pretty sick little machine though,
let's get it closed up.
Then we go like that.
Oh my god, this one's not threaded all the way in again.
Any screws a self tapper if you press hard enough.
Let's go ahead and fire this up.
You know, now that the pain is over.
It only really took an hour and a half to build.
I would like for it to turn on now.
Okay, I installed the front panel connectors
on a USB header.
Here's a little tech tip for you,
when it's really, really hard
to get at the front panel connectors
and you're not gonna be able
to put them all on individually,
You just put a little strip of tape across them.
There, now they're all one, better.
Okay, I think we've got it.
I feel like I shouldn't be putting this on yet,
but I'm gonna do it anyway.
The only things we really need to change in here
are to enable DOCP, so that's gonna put our memory
at it's like overclocked faster speed.
And if we were installing windows 11,
we're obviously gonna have to tweak our TPM
as well as our secure boot settings,
but we're not so we're not gonna worry about that.
You know, oh, you know what you said,
this Cooler Master power supply didn't have a silent mode?
It does, the fans off.
And then the GPU has a fanless mode, I believe.
It's not balanced right now though.
They're spinnign too, but boy are they ever quiet.
This is fricking awesome!
I do like the look.
Am I weird?
Is it weird that I think this looks cool?
I mean, obviously you're not gonna get a lot
of dust filtration going on.
- [Alex] Yeah, but you can also blow
compressed air straight through it.
- That's true, you wouldn't even have
to take off the side panel, just, fwoosh!
Of course, the real question is can it run "Crysis?"
I'm cheating a little, we're using DLSS,
but it's not really cheating, that's a feature of this GPU.
The total cost for this build is around $1,750,
which is not cheap by any stretch of the imagination.
But when you consider that this does basically everything
that a top of the line gaming machine would do,
is darn near silent.
We're running "Crysis Remastered" at 1440p.
Very high, at around 60 FPS.
Not much to complain about, is there?
I guess it makes sense
that if the GPU is given completely unrestricted access
to fresh air and it just goes right out of the case,
the fans don't have to ramp up as much.
It's kind of like running your system
as like an open air test bench.
Of course, we want to know the worst case scenario,
so I'm firing up eight threads of small FFTs
in Prime 95 here.
We're gonna hit that CPU and a little bit harder.
We're gonna get back into "Crysis,"
And we are monitoring our temps
with hardware info in the background.
We're also screen recording.
So this is, this is pretty brutal.
In fact, this is too brutal,
you can see that our GPU is only about 60% utilized
because we don't have enough CPU resources left.
Let's run a few fewer threats.
This poor GPU does not get the datas it needs
while we're running Prime 95 in the background.
So this is basically the worst case scenario
for what we could do with an actual game.
And this thing is
almost completely the silent
holding it up to my microphones.
That's incredible.
Our maximum temp on the CPU hit about 65 degrees.
Yeah, not too shabby.
And our GPU managed, yeah, 82.
But it's also turboing up pretty darn nice for us,
around two gigahertz on a 3060 Ti.
The build quality of the case
might've been a little bit poop, but overall, I like it.
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