Building (and testing) an EPIC Mini-ITX Gaming PC in the Tower 100!

what's up guys i am at last getting back to some actual pc builds i have a mini itx build for you guys today so i'm gonna be focusing on three things the build itself of course which i like to do uh second is gonna be this graphics card which is actually from colorful it's the igame vulcan variant of the nvidia rtx 3080 which i received back when the 3080 first launched but it was delayed a little bit in shipping so by the time i got it i didn't have time to do any coverage on it and it is pretty cool and unique take on the rtx 3080 because it's got a flip up led screen and a turbo button and a few other nice features i also have this the tower 100 case from thermaltake and this is a case that maybe receives some pretty harsh criticism over the summer by maybe a very critical tech reviewer on youtube who shall not be named but i wanted to find out now that it's actually launched and they did make some revisions to it does it actually suck or did thermaltake make enough changes to make it a viable case since for a mini itx case where there's lots of different form factors it actually manages to stand out and be fairly unique excellent today's video is brought to you by microcenter one of my favorite places to buy pc parts whether it's online or at one of their 25 retail stores in the us they have consistently competitive prices and an excellent selection of pc hardware and other tech goodies as well as the custom pc builder on the micro center website use it to spec out your rig and it will show you parts in stock at your nearest store while ensuring compatibility with your selections then you can pick up or have their pros assemble it for you so click the sponsor link in the description and don't forget to sign up for the free in-store gift so this is a high-end gaming pc build but i wanted to express right from the get-go here that i know that this isn't a system that you guys can just go out and plunk down your cash for and buy right now uh specific parts the graphics card and the cpu in particular are really impossible to find right now especially at retail and colorful cards in particular are a little bit harder to find in the us because they're not usually distributed here colorful is based in china so to that end i wanted to focus a little bit more on the testing today and so i've actually already done a little bit of testing i have set up an outside of the box build so that i could run some thermal tests uh specifically on the graphics card and the cpu with this 120 millimeter all-in-one liquid cooler so that i can find out once i actually put all this hardware into the case our temperature is going to go up once everything's installed everything's going to stay pretty much the same we'll hopefully be finding out soon but let's go over the rest of the parts for the build other than the the tower 100 and the rtx 3080. for our processor we have the amd ryzen 9 5900x which is the 12 core 24 thread variants of their latest cpu architecture 7 nanometer it's basically the best of the best for pc gaming right now you could maybe make an argument for testing out the 5950x here which is a 16 core but i find the 12 core is a little bit more in people's price range so i thought it would be a little bit more of a real world scenario for this type of build our motherboard is the asus rog strix b550i gaming a really solid mini itx motherboard a ton of features packed into a tiny little seven by seven inch square it includes dual m.2 slots all the power you need for overclocking including a direct fan for the vrms it doesn't always spin up it only spins up when the vrms actually get hot rgb hookups of course and just a really nice design overall for our memory we have a thermaltake tough ram rgb kit this is actually a ddr4 4000 kit although the castle nc is a little bit higher at that frequency i have it running with its xmp profile plugged in so ddr4 4000 which is 200 megahertz frequency for the ram just in case you're wondering the infinity fabric is running at 1800 megahertz after you plug in xmp for our cpu we are using an all-in-one liquid cooler and if that is one of the complaints about this case that is one of the complaints about this case the all-in-one liquid cooler or the radiator support for that is limited to 120 millimeter radiator with a fan that is something you should keep in mind if you're considering this case at all and especially if you wanted to do water cooling or just a beefier liquid cooler but for our purposes we have the th 120 argb sync which has been working great for me so far and the initial testing comes with 120 millimeter rgb fan as well as some nice rgb accents on the pump block itself and finally for our power supply as if we didn't have enough rgb already we have the thermaltake tough power gf2 argb this is an 850 watt unit which means it's more than enough for even the higher end nvidia 30 series graphics cards if the addressable rgb leds on the internal fan as well as on the side of the unit right here aren't enough of a bonus feature for you it also has a smart zero fan mode with a physical switch as well as a mode switch and a color switch on the back of the unit too which i think is nice for power supplies that have bonus features i don't often make use of them but i'm more likely to if they're physically exposed on the back of the computer as mentioned i already set the system up and did out of the box testing just here with no case or anything so i could get an idea of the thermal performance of the cpu cooler and the graphics card without any case involved then we're going to pop everything in then i'm going to see if temperatures go up or i guess i will see how much they go up once we install in the case when you install parts in a case you're trading a little bit of like security and you know dust filtration and that kind of thing for chances are a little bit higher temperatures because inside a case you're going to have more restricted airflow than outside a case and you're probably going to want plenty of airflow if you're going to be installing a graphics card like one of the higher end nvidia 30 series gpus you'll find that most of the graphics cards have really big beefy coolers like the colorful igame here which has a three slot cooler where you can look at it and say oh they're basically just trying to take up as much volume of space possible with heat absorbing copper fins and heat pipes and the fans of course to keep air moving over those to keep dissipating heat you can tell just picking this card up that it is well built it has a really nice solid full cover back plates as far as lighting goes uh well there is this fancy part here which is a flip up led screen and that will show a default vulcan animation if you just power the card on and then you have a couple extra plugs down here at the end one of them is interestingly enough a usb type-c port that goes over to a usb header on the motherboard an adapter that i've never seen before so cool colorful for exposing me to that i guess and then there's another plug here for rgb lighting so you can plug in the usb and then you can use the colorful utility to control what is being displayed on the lcd right here and then you can flip out and orient the lcd although i will say it's more situated to where if you're flipping it out it's going to face down so i guess position your system up above you if you want to flip this out and actually be able to look at it this certainly isn't the first graphics card i've seen an lcd screen on for some people it's just a bit of fluff that doesn't do much for them for other people it looks cool and it can be somewhat functional because you can display actual stats for like the graphics card frequency and temperature there there's a bit more lighting on the card in the form of a few accent leds that are across the shroud here as well as this logo on the back plate that light up they default to red but the other plug here on the back will also allow you to just connect that up to a standard rgb header on your motherboard so you can sync it up with the rest of your system and just use typical rgb control software another little bonus feature of the card would attach right here this is labeled vga holder mounting holes and this does come with one of those little vga stands so it's got a little foot that sits on the bottom of your case and a vertical pole with a connector that you can adjust and then you can screw it directly into the card so if you have a standard atx layout case where the card is sitting kind of like this you can attach that right down on the end and you can pretty much eliminate any gpu sag that you might be suffering from since again this is a beefy card with a big cooler triple uh pci express power connectors down there and lastly there is a turbo button on the back which again you might find useful or you might not basically this engages an overclock uh the default clock is going to be 1710 megahertz for the boost clock for this card if you push that button it will light up to indicate it's on and then you'll be running at an 1800 megahertz boost clock rather than 1710. part of the reason i chose this graphics card for this build is because i'm actually not 100 sure it will fit i'm pretty sure it will fit because this case can support graphics cards up to 330 millimeters long and this gpu is about 310 millimeters long it is however also a big three slot card and there should be enough space here but i'm also curious about how how it will align with the side panel here which is partially going to be covered up with glass and partially exposed to this dust filtration panel right here a couple more notes on the tar 100 before i start to build though it's a power style case it is mini itx and it is yes a little bit on the large size for an itx case although i will say its footprints on the desk where it's standing is just about the size of a micro atx motherboard so if you're okay with it taking up a little bit more space vertically and relatively less space on your desk then you'll probably also be happy with the fact that this case supports full-size atx power supplies power supplies are some of the other components that have been a little bit harder to find and sometimes overpriced right now sfx power supplies in particular are really difficult to find and to get something that can power something like an rtx 3080 you probably have to spend 175 or 200 whereas with atx power supplies there's a much wider range of options available so the fact that this fits that and the case itself costs 99 by the way means that you might not be burning up quite as much of your budget on case and power supply if you're looking for a little bit more of a niche build in a mini itx form factor beyond that the criticisms that i alluded to in the intro which were fired away by our good friend steve over at gamers nexus we're mostly about airflow in the case and it does seem like thermaltake has made some changes to perhaps alleviate that one key thing is the dust filter that's on the bottom for the power supply does actually have perforations now so air will flow through uh granted when the thermaltake showed this to gamers nexus at ces over the summer during 2020 they were working with an early version of the case but they made some other changes such as creating a little bit more space underneath so that you can't have a fan above the power supply that won't have its air cut off and overall they've added a lot more panels that have these oval cutouts with a bit of a mesh dust filter behind them which are pretty much everywhere on the case they've replaced some of the glass with that but i think i've talked about this build enough i need to get everything assembled because i'm really curious to see what the before and after performance comparisons are like let's get started [Music] you know all right i've just assembled this case and uh that's actually one of the things i kind of like about this case you can take all of the parts of it off which gives you a nice clear open access to the interior part where you're gonna actually build your system so i wanted to kind of go over all these pieces really quick first off included fans you get a 120 here that is mounted as an exhaust on the back that is that is the back panel there that will be around the back and there's another 120 there on the top and you can replace either of those with 140 millimeter fans in the same location if you want to you also have your i o right here which is a power reset mic and headphone a couple usb 3.0 and a usb 3.2 gen 2 type c which is very nice to have now wherever air might pass through it seems like they have put dust filters which i appreciate this is actually probably the weakest one because it's just magnets uh sort of slides there for the back that would be exhaust but i guess if you did flip that fan you'd want a dust filter there for the intake well you probably saw for disassembly after getting this rear panel off with the captive thumb screws around there from the bottom you access the thumb screws that holds these bottom panels on in their locations and those just pop off these panels have a nice pattern on them and one cool thing is these also have dust filters that are removable you can flip them over and these actually just kind of pop off like so and those also have some magnets on there that hold them in place these combo side panels that have tempered glass on one side also have removable dust filters like that again magnets that hold them on those are pretty easy the top one doesn't remove but that's forgivable because this whole part is really easy to remove itself just like that and this would be exhaust anyway so i guess you probably are going to want to remove it to get dust off the underside but but pretty easy to go over with a vacuum or something like that power supply area is down here in the bottom it can support power supplies up to 180 millimeters in length and to install there's just one of these removable panels right there with four screws so you'd remove the panel attach it to the power supply pop it in all the intake on this case is kind of operating in a passive mode by default so you'll be air should presumably be coming in from the bottom there and from these lower panels and i guess from the sides as well traveling up and then either out the back of the case there or out the top internally your motherboard is going to sit right here and that's why it supports also pretty tall air coolers up to 190 millimeters tall because there's plenty of space right there i actually feel like this is gonna be a popular more like budget-ish case for air-cooled builds because of that air cooler support and because this is where your graphics cart is gonna sit and there's a decent amount of space for it right there again graphics cards up to 330 millimeters in length and should fit my triple slot card i'll confirm that in just a minute this is that top panel that comes off with four actually five screws that hold it in place and once that's off you can remove the other three side panels those two combo ones and the one that's all glass so you can see up here this is where your motherboard io will be and this is where your graphics card i o will be and if you want to get an idea of the size of this case again from the top there's a micro atx motherboard and uh that's like pretty much the exact or maybe maybe ever so slightly smaller than the footprint of the case the top exhaust is also where your radiator would go for your 120 or i think just 120 millimeter for all-in-one liquid coolers 140s are a little bit too big but you can fit 140 millimeter fan there and then for 2.5 inch drive support you got a couple trays right here that you can mount 2.5 inch drives to this piece right here can actually be used in different ways there is a 2.5 inch drive mount that you can mount one too like right there in the center but also right here you can do 120 or 140 millimeter fan and you would probably be orienting that so that would be moving more air vertically up north towards the top of the case and then this panel right here is held on by a couple thumb screws yet again you can mount a couple 3.5 inch drives to it or a couple 2.5 inch drives and again this is another area where they added a bunch of perforations because that's right next to the exhaust fan at the back and this might not be the most ideal location for an exhaust fan since it is going to be sitting right behind the motherboard but there is a little bit of space back there and with those perforations it can pull some heat off of the back of the motherboard tray and it's also going to be an exhaust so it will help with sort of the negative pressure setup that you would want with this case in order to pull air in through all of the ventilated space down at the bottom one other thing i wanted to point out is the power supply is going to be right here and there is a little bit more of a gap here now than i think there was in the original version so a fan that's sitting here should not be blocked by a power supply directly below [Music] [Music] it [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] all right guys i've made a bunch of progress i've been wiring things up and stuff but i wanted to sort of uh give you guys some notes and sort of show you what i've been up to so i did add a 140 millimeter fan right here and uh i went with a fantex one because i wanted a 140 that rgb that just had a standard three pin plug and this was the first one i found so my all thermal take build has now a little bit of fantax in there too but i'm really appreciating the fact that once you get all the panels off of this you can pretty much access it from any side that's pretty key and that's if you've ever built a small form factor mini itx system before you might be a little bit jealous of this case's layout because again just accessibility to the little nooks and crannies where you need to be routing stuff is pretty important from the motherboard i have some plugs along this side and then i have some more plugs along the bottom and there is a grommeted pass-through down there so you can pass through stuff like the 24-pin power from the power supply basement down here even though there's a good amount of room over on this side this is where the graphics card is going to go i did do a test fit and it does look like it will fit in there but i'm trying to leave this open and not put the gpu in until later so i can get everything else wired up first but also to free up space over there i removed these two and a half inch drive mounts and i passed the cables back under there and then i was able to go up the back side in order to pass through for the 24 pin there and the eight pin that's up here there actually is maybe a little bit more cable management space in this case than you might expect and i really appreciate that thermaltake has put like tie down points really all around the top edge so you can route cables like this you've also got them down here i haven't snipped those off yet but that allowed me to take like all the front panel cables and route them pretty tightly down the side here i'm going to pass those through here and plug them in in just a second but that means this rear panel i can still remove which gives me access to like my m.2 slot there that's not currently in use but you know in a mini itx case if you want to add a m.2 nvme drive after the system is built and it's on the back of the motherboard you pretty much have to tear the whole system apart but with this setup you can actually still access it so i do appreciate that other than that i'm trying to wrap my rgb cabling all into the same area i'm probably going to tie it all up right down in here i did add some accessories like this is an addressable rgb led splitter just a one to three way splitter it was actually a non-addressable rgb led splitter and i just went and snipped off the third nub from each of those and now it's an addressable one cool it works i've already tested it but if you are focusing on rgb lighting a little splitter like this and they have three-way and five-way ones uh is a great addition and then i also have just a single to three-way fan splitter that i'm using to connect up this rear exhaust fan one of the fans on the top here and that 140 fan techs that i added there as well so i am just going to get the rest of this wiring done up and then i get to install the graphics card one last thing i wanted to point out is these two plastic panels i don't know if you guys saw them in the accessories but these are just some covers for the graphics card area if you're building in this case and you're not installing a discrete graphics card or i guess if you're just doing a really short one that's not going to take up all the vertical space down here i'm trapping a cable back there which is why this isn't snapping on as easily as it should but there okay so you can put one there and then you can also put this one right across here and that just gives you a cleaner look for the bottom so you can't see down into the power supply basement if you don't have a big tall graphics card right there [Music] so there it is guys the build is finally assembled and i was even able to get a reasonable rgb color scheme going and to control that in case you're wondering i'm using the new asus aura creator software which they've actually made some advances to it allows you to for example do a gradients option and choose your own colors so i set it up with a nice red to pink to blue gradient going on which i think is nice and actually matches well as well with the igame display on our colorful rtx 3080. i also dabbled briefly with that software and it's pretty decent as well it allows you to add things like cpu temperature gpu temperature and other things to cycle through on the display and it even lets you rotate it so i was able to get a vertical orientation going here which looks much nicer in the vertical orientation of this case now even though this rtx 380 costs a little bit more at least according to the retail price than some of the other ones at least in this system setup you're able to take advantage of that lcd display and have it displaying something useful you can also use the software to upload your own animated gifs or gifs or memes or anything like that but for some reason it's not getting a signal from the usb connector and i have completely run out of time for doing more for this video so i'm leaving it as is but that should hopefully give you guys a nice overview of at least the aesthetics of this case with the system actually assembled inside the assembly process i think was quite smooth overall it was different and i found that to be very interesting and engaging because i've built in lots of standard atx cases but with everything where it is in this case i just had to find some interesting solutions for routing cables and stuff so that was actually a lot of fun and as i've mentioned since you're able to remove pretty much every panel on this case that makes it a lot easier to finagle cables through those harder to reach areas but what about performance i promised you guys some testing numbers so here is how i set up my testing i tested the internal components of this build outside of the case and then inside of the case there's different ways to do testing with cases one really good way is to have a standard test setup that you can swap into different cases so you can get comparisons between cases i do not currently have that setup going on so we're looking at is the difference from no case to case and you have to bear in mind that when you add a case to the mix you're doing several different things you are adding a bit of sturdiness and the ability to lift up the whole system move it which is convenient you're adding maybe some dust filters that will capture the dust to make it easier to clean in the future you might be adding some sound dampening by having some solid panels where there weren't panels before so you can't hear the noise inside quite as bad but you're also going to be adding some restriction to the air flow so chances are with just about any case if you take those components and run them outside the case and then inside the case it's going to get a little bit warmer inside the case but we're testing how much warmer i also ran two tests back to back at first i did a real world gaming and obs test where i was gaming at 1080 playing civilization six using my super tricky method of holding down the right arrow key so it scrolls constantly the entire time that's to put a reasonable gaming load on the gpu and then also at the same time i'm using obs to do game capture at 1080 using the nv encoder in the gpu so that'll put a little bit more of a load on the cpu but i wanted to establish sort of a scenario that many people would actually be using while gaming and capturing or streaming i let that run for 30 minutes and then my second test is a stress test that i ran for 30 minutes right after that initial 30 minute test so the system was already a little bit warm and there i was running it 64 as well as the msi combustor gpu stress test at the same time for 10 minutes i ran through each of those tests a couple times in each configuration and here are the results as you can see the tower 100 results are on top and the no case test results are on the bottom and the upshot here is about six degrees warmer at least if you're looking at the cpu uh both with the gaming and obs test we went from 74.7 to 80.6 which is about 6 degrees warmer and in the stress test we went from 83.9 up to 89.1 again about 6 degrees meanwhile for our graphics card our colorful rtx 3080 which i think is doing a great job at cooling overall with its massive triple fan cooling solution i was a little concerned that with the side window being right up next to it there's still a little bit of space even with this big triple slot card and you do have ventilation offset a little bit to the left and then underneath the card however that configuration does appear to be feeding it enough fresh air to keep cool because we only went up about three to four degrees in the gaming and obs test and we only went up about one degree celsius in the stress test of course you can't just look at temperatures because the graphics card and the cpu are both going to regulate their frequencies depending on the temperature that they're running at so here are the clock speeds i was looking at i'm looking at the average clock speed across all cores on the cpu and i'm looking at just the gpu core clock for the graphics card so as expected when inside the case with higher temperatures our clock speeds and frequencies went down just a little bit but not too bad average gpu frequency went from 1958 to down to 1916 in the gaming and obs test and it dropped from 1918 down to 1841 in the stress test meanwhile our average cpu frequency dipped by about 150 megahertz in both configurations and here is an actual percentage difference looking from the no case tests to the tower case tests at most we lost about four percent in the gpu frequency category and uh that was lessened to 2.15 percent with the gaming and obs test meanwhile the cpu actually performed quite well only losing just shy of one percent in the gaming and obs tests and only about 1.2 percent in the stress test so let's sum up overall i would say i have a very good impression of the tower 100 because it is a unique design that i haven't seen before it accomplishes the goal of providing you a very nice aesthetic with a great look at all the internal components of your build i really appreciate the fact that you can fit an atx power supply in here that can literally save 80 to 100 off the cost of your overall build and it seems quite flexible in being able to support a wide array of even highest end hardware if there are some negatives about this case i would say it's in the radiator support you can only have a single 120 millimeter rad up in the top i have seen a couple videos where you can fit a really slim 120 in the rear exhaust as well but without buying specialty parts or doing modifications you're pretty much stuck with that 100 120 millimeter all-in-one solution and then just as gamersnexus pointed out in their initial critiques of this case it would be cool to see some more active air intake because while this case does have plenty of airflow it's all happening sort of in a passive way with fans that are positioned internally not necessarily up against the intakes or the exhaust which would be a little bit better for airflow overall but guys that is going to wrap it up for this video i'm really curious what you have to say about the case maybe about the graphics card as well maybe about this build overall for about 100 to 110 dollars i think the tower 100 is a great solution if you're looking to build a mini itx system that's a little bit more on the budget side and also if you're not planning to dive too heavily into water cooling or higher end aios because again that radiator support is a negative i'll put links to all the parts i used in this build down in the video's description so check that out while you're down there if you want to hit the like button if you enjoyed this video that's always appreciated and don't forget to check out my store at paul's hardware dot net you can buy shirts and mugs and pike glasses and bottle openers and lots of things with thumbscrew logos on them i really appreciate you guys taking the time to watch this video it took quite a bit longer than you might expect because i was trying some new testing methods and had some setbacks along the way as well so i really appreciate you guys watching thanks again and we'll see you in the next video

Channel: Paul's Hardware

Views: 427,849

Keywords: computer, PC, PC gaming, personal computer, computer hardware, paulshardware, gaming pc build, rtx 3080, ryzen 5900x, amd, nvidia, colorful igame rtx 3080 vulcan, colorful, rtx 3080 vulcan, thermaltake, the tower 100, tower 100 review, thermal, temperature, testing, benchmarks, asus, AMD Ryzen 9 5900X, mini itx, mitx, ASUS ROG STRIX B550-I Gaming, motherboard, Thermaltake TH120, best gaming pc, best mini itx case

Id: rD4Xa_bXu04

Length: 27min 3sec (1623 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 19 2021