- After months of trials and tribulations,
the next-gen desk PC
has finally gone from render to reality.
Now, our ambitious goal
of creating a water-cooled PC in a desk
that's no thicker than a regular desk,
all without compromising on either gaming performance
or silent operation,
has not been easy.
But by the time we're done in this video,
you guys are gonna see it all laid out and operational.
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(bleeping)
(upbeat music)
Why don't we kick it off with what went well?
Using the model, we marked our 3/4" sheet of birch wood,
then used a table saw to break it
into all the components we needed
to build the box that you're looking at.
The only slightly tricky part
was creating a little lip here on the side rail
so that the glass top will have a place to sit.
So once we've finalized the component placement,
it's as simple as throwing the bottom piece here
onto the router and going
(drill buzzes)
And cutting all the holes that we're gonna need
for final assembly.
But (clears throat) what about this?
Why don't you run me through this?
- Well these are our reses,
our attempts at them anyway.
It's gonna look great, whenever I can get it to work.
We tried so many different ways.
- So here's the thing.
Clear materials, like acrylic,
they're not forgiving like wood or aluminum.
One wrong move can cause it to crack or even shattered.
And, because it's clear,
well, you can see the damage from literally every angle.
- Yeah.
A lot of my experience is with metals
which are much more forgiving to work with.
On my shop laser, I just couldn't get the cut right.
I couldn't get the settings to not light itself on fire.
And it's something that I could have probably dialed in
but I decided to move on from v1 here.
Vaporized acrylic likes to get a little burn-y
and, given the 10 watt per millimeter rule of thumb,
130 watts of power for 18 millimeters of acrylic
is pushing the limit a little.
- So for the second go around our pals over at Metal Mart
gave it their best with their water jet.
And initially we had high hopes,
but the brittleness of the acrylic
reared its ugly head again
causing just these beautiful cuts around the LTT
but unsightly craters everywhere where the water jet
pierced the stock in an attempt to make the holes.
- So I pivoted from that to the router,
something I was really trying to avoid,
because these parts are really well suited
for 2D fabrication, and it went surprisingly well.
But I failed to brass off or dull the tip of the drill
and it pulled out a huge chunk of material
and scrapped this attempt as well.
- So close, yet so far.
Thankfully though, while we were busy, with Tech-Tember,
Trotec sent over this beauty right here
and it was time to give it another shot.
Because while the raw power of this unit
is actually about the same as Colin's laser, at 130 Watts,
as the name suggests, the speedy 400 flex
runs circles around pro-sumer tools,
moving literally 10 times faster,
which we can use to our advantage.
Now in the router version of the part
these slots all around it were designed to increase volume
and improve water flow.
But the thing is partial cuts like this
aren't something that a laser can typically do.
You see an edge pass
only removes a fraction of a millimeter of material.
But here's the thing,
with the speedy I can just run the same edge
over, and over, and over, and over again.
And this piece right here,
oh, there it is,
took a couple of hours.
But if you look the entire surface of the LTT is actually
a couple of millimeters lower than the outer rim.
That's almost as big brain
as buying all your clothes from lttstore.com.
(clicks)
Now small holes in thick material are another thing
that's pretty tricky with a laser,
mostly because a laser beam isn't actually cylindrical,
but rather conical.
And as you can imagine
a cone shape is not the ideal shape for a threaded hole.
- [Colin] So instead of drilling all the way through
I just made little holes
and then finish them afterwards on the drill press.
That way they're on location and to the correct size.
- Unfortunately, after solving this problem
it went together great.
And it even held water.
That doesn't really sound very unfortunate.
- Okay, okay.
I'm getting to that.
In the midst of disassembling it
I got distracted by the camera falling over
and I fat fingered the drills direction.
Lefty Lucy became righty tighty and I made a little crater.
(shouting) Oh no!
(annoyed shout)
- Oh, it's otherwise perfect.
- Yeah, she's dead, Jim.
- Okay, but even though this is just a cosmetic sample then,
we are confident now that we can build it
since, I mean, you did do it once.
- I did one.
It held water.
I was so close!
(both shouting over each other)
- What it means is we're confident,
confident. - Confident.
- That we can build it.
Which means we're not gonna have to resort
to some kind of commercial, off-the-shelf reservoir.
We know we can rely on having this
and we can do the final layout for the rest of the parts.
Right? - Yes.
- Confident? - Confidence.
- He's confident.
Look at this guy.
(Colin laughing)
These 1U radiators from Alphacool are super neat.
They're actually designed for servers
but they've got some cool features
that make them perfect for our use case as well.
They've got the inlet and outlet
on either side of the rad and then, check this out,
you can chain them together in serial
by using these end ports.
Or you can go in and out on this side.
So what we're gonna be doing is
we're going to be lining the right side of the table,
here we go, with these radiators.
We just made a small oopsie and we only ordered one of them
as part of our proof of concept.
So you'll have to imagine
that there's more of them over here.
The only question is
is that gonna be enough radiator surface area?
I think we're going to have about the equivalent
of a dual 120 millimeter rad.
And, with the way that we're positioning the fans,
we'll show you that in a minute,
it should be enough for our spec.
The idea here is massive positive pressure.
We're gonna have eight Noctua industrial PPC fans,
with filters, basically creating
this pressurized chamber in the case
that's gonna cause the air to kind of passively
whoosh over the components that need air cooling
like the motherboard and chip set, and VRMs, for example.
And then exhaust
through the only part of the table that's not sealed
which is gonna be the radiators.
So (whooshing) like that.
When it came time to choose a power supply,
while we did have a lot of options,
most of them were absolutely terrible,
because you can get 1U power supplies,
I mean even fancy redundant ones.
But the issue is they're designed for servers
which are not made to be quiet.
So we went with one of these.
This is an 800 watt
DC ATX power supply from HD Plex.
Super cool product, right?
Because we've got enough power for a Threadripper,
and RTX 3D series graphics card,
but passively cooled and super slim.
These get used for all kinds of projects
from computers, to AV, to, I mean, pretty much any situation
where you need a high power DC power supply.
These guys are super cool.
Of course the thing about AC- (blows lips)
The thing about DC power supplies,
that is ones with a 12 volt input
and then 3.3, 5 volt, and 12 volt outputs.
Is that they still need to do
the AC conversion from the wall.
So for that, we're employing
two of these 400 watt power bricks, also from HD Plex.
These puppies, because they're kinda messy looking,
and because we want them to have access to fresh air,
we're actually gonna put on the outside of the unit,
on the underside.
Now let's talk motherboard.
Because, um, okay,
I can't come up with a good reason for this.
Because AMD sent it to me, I'm using a Ryzen 3970x
on an ASUS Zenith 2 Extreme.
Is this the alpha or the non-alpha?
- [Colin] I think it's the alpha.
- It's the non alpha.
It's the non-alpha, which is fine because, realistically,
we are not going to be overclocking this thing anyway.
We had to make a couple of small modifications to the board.
It was so close to being too thick to fit in our case,
we actually had to remove the cover on the VRM fans here,
as well as the cover on the I/O.
So it'll look a little more industrial.
just like last time,
we're going to be setting the motherboard
and the graphics card back
probably about an inch or an inch and a half from the edge.
What this allows is,
because the I/O's on the rear this time,
some room for the cables to bend or have large connectors
before they just butt right up against the wall.
Now you might have noticed, if you're extremely keen eyed,
that this is a 3080.
That is not the graphics card
that we actually intend to use for the final project.
We're going to go with the 3070,
just to keep power consumption under control.
Oh God, we're going to need custom cables.
- [Colin] Yes.
Actually they're Silverstone compatible
so I can get custom cable-mod cables.
- Perfect.
So cable-mod just- - [Colin] Yup, easy-peasy.
- Fire that up for us. - [Colin] Check the box.
- While I may be on the record saying
that I think the Lang DDC pump is a piece of sick,
unfortunately, in a 1U enclosure,
we just don't have a choice.
So the next best thing to using a good pump,
like a D5, is using two DDCS.
So at least if one of them fails, you've got another one.
So I'm just putting these here as a placeholder for now.
We're gonna have to tweak this a little.
The last piece that I have to show you guys today
is our water block.
This is also from Alphacool and this thing is super neat.
So not only does it have a large enough cooling plate
for our Ryzen Threadripper processor,
it has a total of eight options
for inlet ports and outlets.
What that does is it allows us to put it onto the CPU socket
and then figure out, with our RAN, and our VRM cooling,
and all that stuff, how the heck
we're gonna be able to get tubes in and out of it.
I lied.
There is actually one more thing.
We've got four 2 terabyte Crucial SSDs
with the intention being to take up space,
as much as anything else,
but also that'll give eight terabytes of...
I mean, who cares?
We could chuck them in Raid zero.
- Yes. - Get that performance.
Eight terabytes of solid state storage,
in addition to an M.2 boot drive.
But, hear me out, I know you want this on the outside.
- I do.
- But could we put it here?
- We could, but I really don't want to.
- And this is just because of the distance
that this 12 volt run has to go?
- Well, we're putting a heat source next to the radiators.
You see, if we have these on the outside of the case,
then all this heat isn't input into the system,
and we're already pretty tight on airflow in here.
- That's fair.
So this is, I mean, assuming about 90% efficiency,
that's under full load.
That's like 80 watts that we can have--
- Yeah. - Outside.
- But under your realistic load
we're probably talking 40 watts.
But even that--
- Do you really think airflow's gonna be tight?
We got eight cooling fans.
- But we have a lot of pressure.
We don't have a lot of flow.
It just has such a small orifice to come out of.
- I think you're gonna be surprised.
- Probably.
But I wanna plan for less heat in the system.
That's why we went with a 3070.
- I wanted a 3080.
- But then where would those go, right?
I mean, we could move the rad down,
and then have them here,
and then they're close to the SATA ports.
- Yeah, and we're going to need tubing runs and stuff.
- This area is fine.
We're gonna use those little end connectors
that I used for the stacking radiators video.
So these will be tight, but--
- What we could do is, we could go pumps,
and then we could go drives here actually.
- [Colin] The outlet port for the water block is in here.
So there's no sense really having a pump out here.
- Well, I couldn't help noticing
that our reservoir still isn't actually manufactured.
- Fine, I can change that.
If I had done my job and made this right
then it would be set
and I wouldn't have to entertain these ideas.
- You like my ideas, come on.
Okay, so let's pull the cables off this for now.
- Yeah, no, it's a mess with them.
- This might seem crazy, but we're gonna be painting this
for the finished product anyway,
so drawing on it is not that stupid.
So here's what I'm thinking.
Right angle here, into the end cap here.
Then we go straight out of here.
Here we've got a height problem.
This is lower than this.
We go this way
and then into here.
We go out from here into the graphics card,
out of the graphics card,
and then out from here into reservoir.
Very suboptimal from a filling perspective.
It will take like an hour or two to fill this.
- [Colin] Yeah, I was kind of hoping to put ports
in the actual desk and have a fill and a drain area.
- I see.
That is interesting.
- We can also use these, 'cause they're just vertical,
so we can put the fill funnel up here and just fill it.
- Oh my God, you're a genius.
So we can fill the res and flood the pumps
so they don't run dry for the filling process?
- [Colin}Yup. - Okay.
- Build in the quality of life you want, right?
- I did not think of that.
- Well, you did.
- You know what?
Does teamwork make the dream work, or what?
Okay.
So can you get me my little valve?
- Technically, not the symbol for a valve,
but I'll allow it.
- Oh, sorry. You're right.
That's the incorrect symbol for a valve.
Let me fix it.
There, fixed it for you.
(ominous sound)
(laugh)
You know the reference, right?
This is sick, man.
This is going to be-- - It's gonna be fine.
I think it'll be, yeah, just not a nightmare
whenever you need to look at it again
- Oh, I'm so glad you used the word nightmare
because I have one for you.
- Oh, great.
- We've been having some issues
with the Aquantia nics and our new switches.
- Okay.
- And this is an onboard Aquantia nic.
- There's no way we're fitting a 10 Gig card
without another riser.
- What if it was here? (laughs nervously)
- Well how is that gonna fit, right?
- Ah...
- Why have you done this?
- Well, Jake found the problem.
- So Jake is my issue.
- Blame Jake. - I do.
- But I do need an add-in card.
- Where's it going to go?
- Well, if it was here, we would just have another cut out.
- It's a lot of cutouts.
'Cause we're going to have a cutout here, here, here.
And this is supporting that huge sheet of glass.
- We could do a couple of support pillars.
- Little bogeys, yeah. Yeah.
- I'm so excited right now.
Now hopefully I won't have to wait eight months
for the next part.
- No guarantees.
- One thing you never have to wait for though,
is my segues to our sponsors.
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If you guys enjoyed this video,
you'll probably enjoy part one of this video,
although you've kind of seen everything
that we covered in that one.
So maybe just check out the conclusion
to our last desk PC project
to demonstrate that yes, in fact,
we do eventually finish these projects.
Just takes some time.