I love my gaming PC, but it takes up way too much space and power.
If I run certain software, the giant graphics card
pulls too much power and my UPS starts screaming bloody murder.
I have this little rack under my desk and my Mac is already running in it.
I remember Linus racked up his PC a few years ago, so I thought I'd try too.
But I only have 2U of rack space. Linus had twice that much! He used a giant 4U case.
My power-hungry 3080 would barely fit in a 2U case and air-cooling it would be impossible.
I don't have a pool in my backyard for external water cooling,
and I could use server fans for cooling, but my wife nixed that
idea after she heard how loud the Petabyte Pi gets. [fans screaming]
But there aren't many 2U PC cases. I did find some from
PlinkUSA and there's also the Sliger Console which can be rack-mounted.
But after I built this rack-mount NAS last year,
MyElectronics said so many people asked about the case that they totally redesigned it.
And so they sent me this, a short-depth 2U mini-ITX case perfect for my rack.
So my goal? Build a quiet 1080p gaming PC in this tiny box.
But everything inside this PC is too big. The motherboard, the power supply,
and especially that 3080. None of them fit in this tiny case.
Wouldn't it be nice if I could get smaller replacements? Well,
I can thanks to today's sponsor:
Micro Center!
What better place to find all the parts for this build?
They have over 30,000 items in stock, from PC components,
to 3D printer filament, to podcasting gear, to my favorite section, the maker area.
And don't tell Linus, but they even have an Apple section up in the front.
You can use Micro Center's custom PC builder to find compatible parts for your next PC,
and you can even get same-day Pro Assembly for a small fee.
Now that's not what I'm going to do, but I do
want to ask one of the employees for suggestions for this build.
Before I do that, head down to the description and get a coupon for $25 off all processors for
new customers. Order online and you can pick it up in 18 minutes for any in-stock item.
[Jeff] Do you have any Raspberry Pi's in stock?
[Jon] Unfortunately not right now.
[Jeff] When was the last time that you guys had any Pi 4's?
[Jon] Pi 4's, I think we got a small amount of them in last week, but they went pretty quick.
[Jeff] Do you watch YouTube at all?
[Jon] Yes.
[Jeff] Who's your favorite YouTuber in the tech space?
[Jon] When I first started out, it was definitely JayzTwoCents.
[Jeff] Have you ever heard of Jeff Gerling?
[Jon] I have not. [disappointed Jeff sound]
[Jeff] So I have this case. The big problem is, I was looking in the graphics card aisle and
there's huge graphics cards, but they're not going to fit inside this thing.
It's short, depth, and it's small form factor. What do you have that would fit into here?
[Jon] We have some Quadro cards, which are nice for video editing and stuff
that isn't necessarily gaming, but they're still very powerful cards.
[Jeff] Could you play games on those cards still?
[Jon] To an extent, but it's definitely not their main purpose.
[Jeff] And then what about power supplies? Do you guys have... small form factor?
[Jon] Yeah, we have a handful of them, they range from like 750W all the way up to 1000W.
[Jeff] So mini ITX is a little more unique. With ATX, you have dozens of options, but ITX,
there's not as many options for motherboards.
And also cooling is a little bit of a concern,
so I can't just throw a 7950 in here, unless I did some elaborate external water cooling.
What is your opinion on AMD or Intel?
[Jon] So small form factor, I believe our Intel boards—we do have a few more
options rather than the AMD, where it's mostly just the high-end expensive boards.
But as far as processors go, they kind of trade off each generation,
and I think Intel's currently slightly better.
[Jeff] So with Intel, I know that one of the things that you can do with the latest ones
is get DDR4 or DDR5. Is there—what's your opinion? Should I go for the fastest DDR5,
or is there any advantage to sticking with DDR4?
[Jon] So DDR4 is going to be more cost-effective when it comes to just getting set up.
However, with the performance improvements and updates and all
that they've been putting out, the DDR5 has been pulling more and more ahead.
[Jeff] And so the main thing there would be the cost.
[Jon] Correct.
[Jeff] And for this, since I'm already kind of turning down the GPU, it might be nice to
have a little bit more speed in the memory, especially for productivity stuff that I do.
[Jon] Yes.
[Jeff] I also grabbed a few 80mm case fans and headed home.
Alright, so we have all the parts. Let's see if I can get all of this to fit into this little guy.
One of the first things that I had suggested to
MyElectronics after that old case was removing some of the screws.
They used to have, I think, five screws on the top
and two or three on the sides. It just took forever to get the thing apart.
So now, their new design just has three screws.
And they use these little clips to kind of keep the case together, which is a lot easier.
Alright, there's the inside of the case. This particular case takes a Mini-ITX motherboard.
It takes an SFF power supply, two 80mm case fans,
and then one exhaust fan in the back that's also 80mm.
It has a space for two half-height PCI Express slots, and then it also has these slots over here.
You can put up to five 2.5-inch drives, or I think one 3.5-inch drive,
and it also has a power button on the front and then these keystone jacks.
So I'm going to put this aside for now because we need to get the motherboard together here.
We went with a Z790M-ITX. The main reason is this is in stock at Micro Center.
There were, I think, four different ITX motherboards that you could get
with this generation of Intel processors.
So I'm going to get the processor out of here.
So this is a Core i5-13400. Hardware Unboxed actually did a video on this particular processor,
and they said it's not good for gaming.
Not that it's not good, it's just not a great value at $220.
I forget exactly what the price was we paid at Micro Center...
But it is a little expensive for the performance you get for gaming
in particular, but it does do pretty well for productivity.
And I use this PC for both gaming and productivity, so I'm happy with this processor.
I think it would be a better value for under $200.
So this CPU actually comes with its own cooler,
which—it's not a bad cooler, and it would work fine for this particular processor,
but Micro Center didn't stock this, so I had to go online and buy one.
It's the Noctua NH-L9i, which is a low-profile cooler that works okay for these processors.
This is a 65 [watt] TDP processor, so a cooler like this can only cool slower chips,
lower-end chips that won't be able to cool a 7970 or 7950 or something like that.
But it's good enough for me, and I'm not going to overclock this thing. I don't
need tons and tons of performance, I just want to run 1080p gaming.
That's interesting. On AMD it has a nice big arrow, but on here it's just tiny.
I presume that it's this way, but I don't see the little arrow on here.
Okay.
All right, then I'm going to put the RAM in before I put the CPU cooler.
[click goes the RAM sticks]
I'm going to use this KIOXIA XG8,
which I've used in a few videos before when I was building Raspberry Pi storage clusters.
But when they send these to me for those videos, they include these little stickers.
I'm going to take off the sticker,
and it's probably going to strip off the little product label too,
but that's okay because that's not the part that makes this work, it's the chips underneath.
Yes, this is the LTT screwdriver with the broken tab, otherwise besides that one broken tab it's
fully functional and I've had no issues with it, so check out my video on the LTT screwdriver.
If you haven't seen it already, I do think it's a great screwdriver, it's not the best value.
This [Williams] is the best value for a ratcheting screwdriver, but as you can hear,
the bits are loose inside here, so that's a little bit annoying.
Is it worth $40 to you? That's up to you.
Apparently somebody already bought this guy, it has a piece of scotch tape over the end of it.
I hope that all the parts are here, this was an Amazon purchase,
and usually Amazon's pretty good about giving new stock, but yeah, we'll see.
It looks like everything's here, so this is the cooler, it's nice,
it's almost like I'm used to server coolers that are this small, but they have bigger fans
that pull a lot more air over them to keep them cooler, but that is a really thin fan.
I guess it's an 80mm or 100mm fan, something like that.
I'm going to be daring and actually show how much thermal paste I use.
[comment below]
These are nice because they have a thumb grip on them, but I can also
tighten them down a little bit with this guy.
I'm also going to get these case fans ready.
For the front case fans, I actually need to take off this front faceplate on this box.
I will say that the LTT screwdriver or ratcheting screwdrivers in general
are really nice for parts like this where you do need a little bit of extra torque,
although the grips on these are both a little bit soft.
Other screwdrivers with the rubber grip give you a little bit more gripping power,
but it's a trade-off.
This case is not ideal if you wanted to use something like an AIO or water cooling.
[opens box] Thank you for your purchase.
The reason I got it [the PSU] is because it's modular,
meaning I don't have to have a bundle of cables sticking out in this tiny case.
I don't have much room for it, so it's nice to have a compact power supply so I can route
the cables around without messing up all of the air flow inside the case.
Power supply in, let's put this guy in, now I have all those fans connected with
a whole mess of cables, and I want to do a front panel USB, I might do that here.
MyElectronics actually sent me this connector, 6873 is the part number.
But it is a USB 2 single header.
You plug this into the USB 2 header on the motherboard and
it will give you USB 2, I'll take that out, and I'll put this one in.
Now I need to do some power connections here.
So we have motherboard, and one other good reason I picked this video card is the power
connection for this is all through the PCI Express slot, it doesn't have to come from
the power supply so we don't have to have another cable running through the case,
which is already getting a little clogged up even with how few things we have plugged in.
It's definitely not ideal that this blocks half of that fan, but
sacrifices must be made in the name of size.
Now this is where this build either comes together or fails—the A2000.
And you can tell it's not made for consumers because this box looks very
boring, and consumers obviously can't stand for boring boxes.
But I did want to note that this A2000 is the 12 GB version, it has 12 gigs of VRAM,
which is good for workstations and for more heavy duty applications.
If you wanted a better value, this one costs like $600 new,
which is a lot of money to spend on a graphics card that's not even as good as like a 3070.
But you can get a good deal on eBay if you buy the six gig version, which is still okay for
gaming—it's not amazing—but it's okay, and they're like $200-300 bucks on eBay used.
Wow, that is tiny.
That was smaller than I was expecting it to be,
and luckily it does look like it's going to just fit in this case.
[ratchet goes the LTT]
It's a lot heavier now.
We have our 2U rack mount gaming PC, and the fit and finish is great.
The one thing I did notice is after installing everything, it's a little bit off,
so that could just be the parts that I chose, the tolerances, something like that.
I could probably loosen a couple screws and fix that, but I'll get to that later.
Let's see if this actually boots.
I need to turn on the power supply.
Let's try this out.
We got a light, nope, we got POST!
No, that was the monitor, here we go, and it looks like it got
both of our sticks of RAM, it has our i5-13400 WiFi, CPU is not overheating.
So at least the fan is working on there, CPU fan is working.
I will be installing Linux on here, but for now I'm going to put
Windows 11 Pro, and that'll let me at least run the gaming benchmarks and
things to make sure that all the system is working as it should.
It's not going to perform incredibly well, but it should be acceptable for 1080p gaming.
So I did a bunch of testing off-camera, and I'll get to that,
but I wanted to run through a couple small gripes I had with this build.
This thing has a less traditional front panel, and I installed that USB 2.0 header,
but since then I also bought this audio jack, since I'll need a place to plug in my headphones.
MyElectronics has a bunch of other accessories, like these Ethernet plugs too,
but for all of them they want you to pass the cable through the back of the PC.
For Ethernet, that's fine, but for audio it would
be nice to plug straight into the motherboard's HD audio header.
I asked MyElectronics about it, and they said they'd consider making some new ones.
Even with that though, clearance is pretty tight. I actually had
to move the RAM out of the way while I installed this mini jack.
The only other gripe I had is that the exhaust fan over here isn't really doing much, since
I don't have any 2.5 inch drives installed.
In my NAS build, that thing's great, but I'd love to have more cooling over by the CPU.
The problem is, this graphics card splits the case in half,
so this side of the case gets a lot less airflow front to back,
especially since my power supplies fan doesn't even spin unless there's some load.
But that's only a problem if this thing doesn't perform.
When I started testing, the first thing I noticed is how quiet the system is.
I can only really hear it during long benchmarks,
like Cinebench. It's no Mac Studio, but it's definitely a lot quieter than my old PC.
And while the 13400 might not be the best value in the world,
it did beat my old CPU pretty soundly, scoring better in both Geekbench and Cinebench R23.
It even gave my Mac Studio a run for its money, but not in efficiency.
The Cinebench scores better, but the thing sucked down 150 watts to get almost 14,000.
My Mac Studio? It got a little over 12,000, just using 40 watts. The Mac's over twice as efficient.
So it doesn't take the crown,
but it is an improvement over what I had before. But that's just the CPU.
For gaming, I'm not too picky,
but I would like to get 60 frames per second on my old-fashioned 1080p monitor.
I wasn't sure the A2000 would hold up, but it did pretty well.
An older game like CSGO got over 300 frames per second,
and a newer game like Red Dead Redemption 2 got just under 60 frames per second maxed out.
But I could keep it above 60, just turning down the settings a little bit.
So it's no surprise the A2000 couldn't match the 3080 I had before.
And in Halo Infinite, I had to turn down settings even further,
but I still like playing it, even if nobody else does.
Just to round things out, I also ran the Heaven
benchmark and got around 200 frames per second. The old 3080 got 350.
Gaming performance is worse, sure, but that 3080 was massively overkill,
so it's not a problem for me.
If you're looking at a small form factor build like this one,
the one other card I see mentioned a lot is the 1660.
That or a used 6GB A2000 would be a little better value than the card I picked up.
But in the end, I'm happy.
This new build is quieter, the CPU is actually faster,
which I wasn't expecting, and it fits in this rack.
So what's next for my beefy old PC?
Well, I hate to say it especially since this part isn't sponsored, but Micro Center got me.
There was a combo deal that was too good to pass up,
and now I'm working on the most massively overpowered workshop PC with a 4090.
That'll be coming up soon, so subscribe!
Until next time, I'm Jeff Geerling.