- Contrary to what you guys said,
the legs never fell off,
and my original Desk PC's performance has held up nicely
as my daily driver.
But there are a few quirks that never got addressed.
So we're going completely back to the drawing board
and building a brand new Desk PC from the ground up
with a challenge.
We're gonna cram a complete water-cooled gaming system
into the thickness of a regular desk.
Introducing the LTT D2.
It's got more D than we've ever had before.
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(upbeat music)
Let's start with what the original desk PC, the D1,
did well.
From the beginning, the liquid-cooled Core i7 Extreme 6950
performed as you'd expect,
great, even today, if we're being honest.
And the Nvidia GTX 1080 and 64 gigs of 3200 megahertz
dominator platinum RAM didn't leave much
to be desired either.
But things have changed,
and AMD is now the weapon of choice
for overkill PC builders.
Now, let's talk about those small issues
with the D1 that bother me on the daily.
The lack of front IO is something that I miss,
almost hourly actually, not just daily.
The vibrations from the fans and the hard disks transfer
up into the glass, causing a weird buzzing sound sometimes.
It's not particularly quiet other than that.
Fan and RGB control are two things
that have improved vastly in the last few years.
And the biggest one,
there is nothing more annoying and painful
than scooting my chair up to the front of my desk,
only to have the corner jam into my leg
and the armrest poke the power button.
(cries)
So I made the decision to rebuild.
With our new workshop and new talent,
we're well on our way to making a Desk PC
that is going to blow the old one away.
I've enlisted the king of builds that take too long,
Collin, to design the new Desk that fixes
all the existing problems
and fits a few more key requirements.
As I alluded to before,
number one is we're going one U,
packing everything into a one-U space,
that's the slimmest that you'll see
out of a commercial server,
is going to be a challenge.
But dang, is it ever gonna be slick.
1.75 inches of height is only a quarter
of the current one.
Number two, we're gonna hard line water cool everything
this time.
No easy route, putting all the tubing under the desk
and strapping it to the bottom.
Number three, we're gonna upgrade the performance
because we can.
We started by getting the main ideas down on paper.
And by paper, of course, I mean MSP.
What a masterpiece.
Then with the key deliverables roughed out,
Collin began pulling existing CAD designs
from online sources like GrabCAD
and from manufacturers' self-published files
to begin modeling up the Desk.
Spending time designing is where a penny in investment
really does equal a pound of result.
Because solving problems in CAD ahead of time
is much better than fixing them later.
For example, we originally had the exhaust going downward
through large, flat-mounted radiators.
This would have given us great cooling,
but because of the lack of space,
there was no way to get even 90-degree fittings
onto our rads.
Here's another fun one.
I had assumed that we would run tubing
over some of the components.
But as it turns out, there is just no room.
This forced us to make significant changes
to the layout to accommodate parallel runs system-wide.
As of writing, we're on roughly milestone seven here,
and realistically, we'll probably keep iterating.
But we're far enough along to give you guys a closer look
at it.
The overall size of the Desk hasn't changed much
from the onset at 60 inches by 32 inches.
That'll make it a smidge deeper
and about half a foot wider than the D1.
The D2 is also gonna forego the weird,
glued-on table legs that didn't fall off
and use the same standing desk base
from Vivo that I actually use at home.
Motorized desks have come both down in price
and up in capability
since they first hit the mainstream,
and the dual-lift motors on this unit
shouldn't have any trouble lifting our desktop
with its 275-pound rating.
The position of the mother board
and graphics card have been pretty much set
since the early revisions.
Side IO, like on the D1, is a bit easier
to reach around to than having all the ports in the rear.
But the only reason that we did it that way
in the first place was because we didn't have
any front ports built into the desk.
I also really like the idea
of having the mother board and graphics card
sitting front and center in front of me.
The position has been inset about an inch
from the back to give a little bit of space
for cable strain relief.
The static pressure-optimized fans have moved around a lot.
They were originally placed on either side of the desk,
drawing filtered air into the desk from the bottom
to be passively exhausted through the radiators
next to them.
The problem is that any of the non-watercooled components
wouldn't be getting enough airflow.
After mocking up some different layouts for aesthetics,
we settled on rads on the right
and fan banks on the left.
Our dual 480 millimeter Alphacool X-flow rads,
well, they're not our 480-millimeter rads
because we ended up getting id of them
because of the right angle fitting issue
that I alluded to before.
And we could have solved this
by kind of pocketing out the Desk in the bottom
to fit these parts,
but that was against the clean, sleek design philosophy
of the project.
Thankfully, Alphacool has an exhaustive list
of radiator options,
so we snagged some 3D models for 40-millimeter thick,
one U rads and then doubled the quantity
up to four rads to make up for the loss
of cooling capacity.
Pretty much every layout of these small rads
was considered.
Up and down, left and right, baffled, staggered,
exhausting out the back, exhausting out the bottom,
you name it.
In the end, we added two more,
bringing the total up to six
with three double-stacked banks around the perimeter
of the desk, passing warm out out the right side
and back.
Now, we're gonna know if this is gonna work
by the time fabrication starts
because we've already got our rad-stacking follow-up
in the works.
So make sure that you're subscribed
so you don't miss that.
Moving all the water around is gonna be handled
by dual DDC pumps metered
to Alphacool one U manifold blocks.
We're honestly not huge fans of these,
but they're one of the only options
for fitting into this slim height.
Now, they are technically marketed as reservoirs,
but a loop this size with all this tubing
could honestly take hours to fill
with a reservoir that small.
So we're gonna be making our own in the shape
of a one-foot diameter LTT logo with our GP, of course.
We then threw a little flow indicator
between the pumps for good measure.
Now, we didn't want to make any compromises
on the actual PC hardware,
so we're gonna be using an ASUS Zenith II Extreme,
a top-of-the-line TRX40 board,
for our thread ripper CPU
and then directly beside it is gonna be an RTX 2080 Ti,
both of them topped by sweet EK water blocks.
We've flung some hard drives in,
mostly to take up the empty space.
But, I mean, come on, if it's gonna be an ultimate
Desk PC design,
we might as well have 50-plus terabytes of storage
in it, right?
And last by not least, is power.
You might have noticed that there's no power supply.
The thing is one U power supplies are incredibly loud.
So including one was not an option to meet
our quiet design goal.
The intention right now is to use
external power bricks then.
We're pretty sure we're gonna need two of them.
And then a pair of HDPLEX DC-to-DC converters
mounted in the top left.
Cable runs will likely go under the table,
but the thing is that's not because we couldn't have kept
them all inside,
but rather for aesthetics reasons.
So that's the plan.
In our next episode,
you're gonna see us bringing all the parts together
and hopefully leak testing our custom reservoir.
I hope you're looking forward to it
as much as I am.
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If you guys are looking for something else to watch,
hey, it's been a while.
Maybe go check out the original Desk PC build.
It's kind of a fun series of videos.