- Okay, I'm just playing.
We may have mistaken it for an external hard drive
or maybe a Thunderbolt dock,
but no, this is actually a powerful PC,
given the size of course.
Now, most small form factor PCs,
are in sized to be built around a CPU cooler,
but Streacom said, screw it.
Let's just make the entire case the cooler.
That's right, this is a completely fan less case,
at this size.
Question is, did the fancy engineering
that they had to put into this puny passive powerhouse,
make it a complete nightmare to work with?
We've got our heat pipes
and we're going to find out.
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- The Streacom DB1 Max looks exactly like it's sister case,
the explicitly non Max DB1,
but there is one big difference.
The Max variant uses not one,
but both sides of the chassis as heat sinks for the CPU,
or really APU as there's no standalone graphics card here
nor space for one.
That increases the total heat dissipation
of the fan this design from 45 Watts up to 65,
but it creates an interesting problem.
Getting heat from the APU to the left panel slash heat sink
is a straightforward enough endeavor,
a couple of these U-shaped heat pipes,
a bunch of thermal compound and another heat sink
to spread the load.
But how do you do that for heat sink
that's located on the opposite side of the case?
You know, around the back of the motherboard.
Well, that's where some clever engineering comes in.
These U-shaped heat pipes bend around
to the back of the motherboard
and contact the right side plates as well.
Now, before we get to what is surely the most
finicky cooler install ever,
there are some concessions that need to be made
to get a fan less PC under six liters of volume
that promises some serious gaming jobs
and it starts with the motherboard.
ASRock's X300TM-ITX,
this isn't a run of the Mill IT export no,
this is thin mini ICX.
It's the same footprint as ITX,
but adds a 2.5 centimeter IO shield height restriction.
If you stare at it long enough,
you can start to see how the design differs.
There's no fitting desktop RAM in this thing.
So sodim laptop memory sticks are used instead,
we have a couple of these here.
And where is the usual ATX power input?
There isn't one.
This board is powered from 12-volt
via a little four pin up here,
or with a quick jumper swap like so.
You can feed it 19 volts via a power plug
on an external power supply.
Like we'll be doing here.
We have this boy here.
What makes this build actually work,
is the small wonder that is AMD's Ryzen 7 5700G APU.
The rate of TDP for this thing is 65 Watts,
which is actually precisely what this case is rated for too.
Even though TDP isn't really a useful number these days
as chips can boost for as long as they want,
as long as there's headroom.
It flaunts eight cores and 16 threads
that can boost up to 4.6 gigahertz.
And there's eight cores of radon GPU baked inside.
That should give us ample gaming performance.
But we'll see to that,
once we get this whole shebang together.
Let's go over what we have here.
So we've already talked about the CPU.
This is the motherboard itself.
We went over a little bit,
but let's take a look at the more
typical components of it.
Right here, we've got three USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A ports
and a Gen 1 Type-C port.
We've got audio in and out.
That's pretty standard, that's nothing special.
A serial port, it's kind of interesting.
I appreciate it, but yeah,
it's whatever.
We've got two HDMI 2.0 ports,
but only one of these is going to be accessible
because one of them is on the other side,
check that out.
I don't think I've seen that before
that's thin mini ITX for you.
I think I would have given up that serial port
for two HDMIs, but that's just me.
Let's see, two sodim imports.
These are gonna be used for our crucial DDR4 3200 kit.
These were about as fast as we can reasonably expect
that of sodims I think.
I took a quick look around
and I couldn't find anything faster.
Unfortunately, that's just kinda what you had to live with
on a low-profile system like this,
but you also get two M.2 slots.
One is a 2230 for your Wi-Fi
or a very small form factor M.2 SSD.
And you got a full size M.2 SSD port up here as well.
The SSD we're going to be popping in here
is a Crucial P5.
We're just going to be using Colin's bench drive
to speed things up.
You probably want to have something
a little bit bigger and or faster,
depending on what your use case is.
I think this is just a 512 gig.
This is all you get.
And yeah, that's all the components.
I guess, it's not going to be a very complicated build
or at least not as far as component density goes
that I guess leads us to the fun bit.
It's time to put it all together.
Installing the CPU is pretty easy,
but you're going to wanna pay attention
to the little golden triangle here
to tell you where to put it,
because this is a very weird orientation for this socket,
but if you orient just right,
it should slip right on down there.
And you're good to go.
Now, the RAM is a little different
than you might be used to.
I'm not sure how many of you
might've installed sodim before,
but basically you got to get it in underneath these clips.
Ah, because they're in the way, there we go.
Aligned up with the notch, slide it in,
then push it down until hear a click.
SSD is the same as any other SSD
you might install on an M.2 socket.
Now you just align the SSD with this notch here
and then screw in the screw.
You don't want it too tight,
you just want it to hold down.
These screws are very easy to shear off
if you tighten them too much.
- [Colin] Okay, and that's it for the build.
- Yeah, that's it, build's done.
You know, we could run them system like this actually,
it wouldn't run very well,
it might shut off,
but you know, we could do it.
- [Colin] Let's get in the case.
- I mean, I was kinda hoping we didn't have to do that,
but that's what the video is about, so.
- [Colin] Yeah.
- Okay, let's get into the case.
What am I looking at here?
This obviously is going to mate somehow.
This is what looks like the motherboard tray.
Well, clearly I need to read the instructions at this point.
So give me one moment.
Okay, so I need to install the cooler first,
which I think is in this box here,
that looks for all the world
like a water block almost,
except no, it's not.
The heat pipes slide into this thing.
So it's not like putting anything in here,
like water or air or anything.
The heat pipes just kinda live here.
The lengths to which people will go for a small PC.
Am I right?
Am I supposed to be using thermal compound for this?
- [Colin] Yes.
- Oh, this is going to be miserable.
- [Colin] Yes.
- Just came back from vacation
and this is what I'm doing, all right.
Let's get some thermal compound on that CPU
and get this copper shim on it.
Apparently that's what we need to do.
There is not a lot of thermal compound in one of these.
It's enough for the CPU though,
but I already got some on my fingers
cause of this application method.
So I'm wasting a whole bunch of it.
Do we have, oh man,
I've got it all over me already.
This is just one packet,
I need so many of these.
This here shim just goes on like that I guess.
It just lives there.
- [Colin] So how much do you think this case costs?
- Oh, I want to say $300.
- [Colin] That's way high.
- High?
- [Colin] Would you believe me
if I said it was 125 US dollars.
- Really?
No, I wouldn't,
because you're getting the cooler
and you're getting the case,
and it's like all these different parts.
I mean, it's miserable to build,
but like that's less than I thought it would be.
Oh, I got thermal compound everywhere now.
- [Colin] But it's part of the adventure.
- We're gonna be here a while.
- [Colin] Yup.
- Please, better instructions.
If you're gonna save money on assembly costs,
the better,
the least you can do is,
you know, make it very clear what goes where.
And there's your cooler, presumably.
Oh God, how am I supposed to?
- Do you need assistance?
- This is oh, oh, ah.
(Colin laughing)
- [Colin] Are you having fun yet Anthony?
- [Anthony] No, I'm having a blast.
Wait, how am I supposed to?
- [Colin] I think you should only go
till the screw protrudes through the nut.
- Whatever I do it needs to be evenish.
oh God, the board is bending like real bad actually.
- [Colin] How bad?
- Oh, I'm like, oh okay.
So we've got these spring screws.
So they'll stop.
You know, they'll stop when they need to.
- [Colin] No.
- Instructions unclear motherboard taco.
- [Brandon] You're having a lot of fun,
aren't you Anthony?
- This is my favorite build ever.
I feel like I'm not making any progress on this build.
Just like everything I do is like,
just a drop in the bucket, you know.
- [Colin] I'd say you're solid like 65% of the way
to turning it on.
- But you didn't have to crush my spirits like that.
- [Colin] Would it help if I said that you're more
like 69% of the way there.
- Nice, it's done.
And I hope I actually put that jumper to 19 volts.
Let's give it a shot.
Yeah, it's heating up 36, 37.
Is it actually gonna boot though?
It booted.
It booted!
Isn't it amazing that we needed a thermal camera,
just to know whether the computer was on or not?
That's pretty great.
Like you press the button and literally nothing happens.
Okay, Tdie is 48, 47.
Okay, it's going down.
Let's hit it with,
what should we hit it with?
It doesn't like that.
But the CPU temperatures still seem pretty good.
The motherboard says that it's at 115 degrees.
I don't believe that for a second.
That's a false reading.
GPU temperature says that it's at 38.
- [Colin] That looks like 10 FPS.
- It is seven, but of course this is like 4K.
I could probably stress it a little harder
if I went with a lower resolution.
This is mostly stressing the memory at the moment.
Let's hit it with Prime95,
let's just burn it.
GPU temperature is at 58,
CPU temperature is currently at 61.
Yeah, now it's thermal throttling.
What's going on?
So the motherboard is currently thermal throttling.
That's pretty hard, look at that.
All that work and here we are getting thermal throttled.
Obviously people aren't going to be running Prime95 all day,
but this is a little disappointing.
Considering that the chassis itself is fully capable.
Like this is not even hitting anywhere close
to a high temperature, it's in the 60s.
The chassis is more than capable
of taking this amount of heat.
And yet we're thermal throttled based on the motherboard,
the VRMs are just burning up.
We went and grabbed an 80 millimeter (indistinct) fan
to kinda point into the case,
and see if that makes a difference.
And sure enough, it does.
So you can see the exact moment that we put the fan on it.
It's like kinda like stopped thermal throttling.
- [Colin] Why is the motherboard at over 100 degrees?
- [Anthony] Cause the VRMs have no cooler.
That's what the problem is.
The VRM's don't even have a passive heat sink.
So they're not getting any cooling whatsoever.
There's no air flow inside the case.
The only reason we're getting anything out of this is
because we're putting air over the VRMs.
- [Colin] The thing that gets me is
that Streacom send to this board?
- They sent this specific board?
- [Colin] Yes.
- Like it's possible that there's an issue with a sensor?
- [Colin] It's possible that taco-ing it
could have done something.
- That, that is possible.
- [Colin] Yeah.
- I'm not above saying that I broke it.
Do you want to like break,
contact Streacom and be like,
hey, have you guys seen this happening?
- [Colin] I can do that.
- All right, here's the situation?
The ASRock X300TM-ITX motherboard we installed,
this guy right here,
gave us some weird performance under synthetic loads.
The board was throttling far
before the case was even being pushed close to its limit.
So we pulled it all apart,
slapped a knock to a U12S onto it.
And lo and behold, yep,
those VRMs are toasty.
- Toasty. - Over 130 degrees.
Our goal is to test the case here
and with it throttling this way,
we were unable to do so.
To rectify that we called our friends at Asus
and snagged,
well, one of these.
An Asus PRO H410T
and equipped it with an Intel Core i5-10400.
It's spec to the scene TDP, 65 Watts.
And it doesn't cook the VRMs
nearly as much as the ASRock board.
Let's give it a go in Blender.
So starting off CPU temperatures going up to about 70.
We'll see how high they go though,
cause this is entirely passive remember.
So there's nothing to kick in.
Once it hits the thermal soak,
it's just gonna keep getting hotter until it throttles.
That's the idea anyway.
We're at 100 degrees on all the cores now,
and it is in fact thermal throttling.
It's getting kinda toasty now.
It actually, it actually does feel warm,
warmer on this side than this side though.
That's interesting.
All right, let's see how toasty
this thing is actually getting.
So on this side that I said was a little bit cooler.
It's about 39, maybe 40 degrees in the hotspot there.
Yeah, roughly 40 degrees.
If we move around to the other side.
Yeah, like 43 degrees.
How about that?
I was right.
What are we looking at right now?
It looks like we've dropped down to 3.6 gigahertz still
at 100 degrees Celsius.
What's the power draw right now?
57.
So, it's not looking good for the 65 Watt claims
that Streacom made here.
We are looking at a 43 degree hotspot back here.
So it's risen by three degrees at least
since the last time I looked at it.
Oh, wow, the heat.
I can feel the heat coming up off of it.
It's pretty amazing actually.
Like here's my hand.
I don't know if I can,
yeah, you can kinda see it.
It's kinda glowing off my hand on the bottom there.
It's such a cool concept,
you know, I just think there needs to be
a little bit more efficiency in the thermal con,
like the contacts, you know,
like you've got heat pipes you're putting in
with thermal compound.
Like that's not gonna be as good as
a soldered heat pipe into aluminum block.
And unfortunately that seems to be what we're seeing here.
Like obviously this is heating up
and is transferring heat pretty well,
but not well enough.
We went from 65 Watts at peak I think
to 53, 52 Watts towards the end of the run there.
And now we're sitting at 4 Watts idle.
So unfortunately,
I mean, it worked,
you could run it this way,
but I wouldn't recommend it,
it's 100 degrees.
The downside to running the CPU like this
is that it's an Intel CPU with an Intel iGPU.
And the gaming performance is frankly crap
compared to the Ryzen 7 5700G.
We saw about 55 FPS in Rocket League at 10 ADP
with everything turned to performance settings.
If ASRock pushes a bios
to fix the issue on this motherboard,
then that would be perfect.
AMD's iGPU performance makes
for a much better gaming experience,
but you know, given that there are
no other AM4 thin ITX boards out there,
and we don't even know if a bios update can fix this issue,
we're hooped.
So where does that leave us?
We're a bit disappointed
that the AMD setup throttled so badly,
but it does game well in a normal use case
and a build like this isn't meant to be a render firm.
If we were to temporary our expectations
around running full bore,
then sure this is a cool little case.
But honestly,
the limited options for thin ITX
compounded by the difficult assembly,
makes this build not something I can suggest.
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- Thanks for watching guys.
This thing isn't so amazing,
but if you wanna check out something else,
that's a little bit on the weirder side,
maybe you check out the video we did on the Streacom DA2,
back in the ultimate compact PC video we did in 2019.
It's a lot more fun I assure you.