Nine months ago, we designed the perfect rack-mounted gaming PC. It's got it all. It's a completely custom skinny 1U chassis. It offers up maximum performance while using custom water cooling to achieve dead silent operation. And it keeps all the heat out of the room for those hot summer gaming sessions. And now we're throwing all of it away. Why? The price. It was too darn high. Especially if I want systems for me, my wife, my kid, my other kid, and my other kid. And this isn't just me being a cheapskate dad. The quote I got back for the cases was $1,700 each. And I'm thinking to myself, there's got to be a cheaper way. A jankier way. A Linus Tech Tips way. And ladies and gentlemen, we found it. Meet the almost ideal 1U gaming case. Yeah. Awesome. Just like this awesome segue to our sponsor. Covalence. Set aside your unused flash sale discount dev courses. With untethered access to Covalence's comprehensive web development curriculum, you'll learn to build websites and applications as efficiently as possible. Check them out using the link below. It's toasty. Yeah, it's a big problem. All the heat generating electronics in the house are in this room, which is insulated with not even so much as a window to the outside. Fortunately, there's a plan for that. That's why these 1U gaming machines are designed with those external water cooling fittings. Because the idea is that they're going to be plumbed up to these pipes right here that are going to carry all the heat from the CPUs, GPUs, to the outside, where those lines actually run to the outer walls of my swimming pool. So all the heat from this room gets dumped into the pool, hopefully helping save on my gas bill. For now, we need to do a proof of concept build. And one of the challenges is that there's already not a ton of space left in my rack down here, and I really don't want to add a second rack. So that's why each of these systems is just one rack unit deep. That means we can do five for the entire LAN center in half the space that it would take if we did 2U systems, which would be a lot easier, but completely fill up my rack. As you can imagine, building a gaming PC into such a slim profile, just 4.4 centimeters, is a real challenge because everything from the usual power supplies to GPUs to even things like motherboards will typically exceed that profile. So what's a slim gaming PC enthusiast to do? Well, for starters, we ended up with this really cool motherboard from ASRock Rack. It takes a regular LGA 1700 processor. It's got four DIMM slots, PCIe by 16, M.2, actually dual M.2s for storage, onboard 10 gig networking, and all in a really weird form factor. This is what, ITX like wide edition? This doesn't have a 24 pin power connector. We can talk about that later. First, I want to talk about this case. Rather than custom fabricating something, Antoine from the labs team thought, I bet we could find something off the shelf that could be modified to meet all of our requirements. And he came up with this, which costs just a fraction of the custom solution at $200. Well, not quite. Inwin sent us the more expensive version of this case that comes with the power supply and it's about $700 to $800. That's not the budget that I approved. I mean Inwin sent it to us for free. Yeah, but I need four more. How much is it? It's $400 total. It's still $400. Why is it so expensive? Because it's a server, man. It's for businesses, not normal people. Okay, we're not using the power supply for the rest of the units. Then what else have we changed? Well, all of these drive mounts, they're gone. Yeah, they have no backplane that they're connected to. So see you later, buddies. Those are going to be replaced with your fiber optic USB extender. These are super cool. These docks from iCron allow you to plug a USB device in from functionally anywhere that you can run a fiber optic cable. So I guess that just goes into the front kind of here-ish. Yeah, and we also printed this custom front plate for it. Nice honeycomb pattern. The next modification we had to do was replace these super noisy server fans. So we got these 40 millimeter Noctua fans that squeeze right on in there. Are we worried that that's not going to be enough airflow? No, we're not. It's not your problem. Basically, but these fans have to move back from where they are. So this has been drilled out. Yes. It's just press fit in. That's literally the case. There's no screws for it. Maybe having engineers isn't as great as I thought. This is the final version of the stubby. By the way, knurling is now in place. We've got the tension of this fixed and this is the final molding for the handle. lttstore.com. This doesn't fit at all. Nope. Okay, we 3D printed the custom. Oh, no way. Oh, that's sick. Oh, yeah. And it's even got a fiber optic pass-through for the fiber optic USB. Thankfully, AlphaCool makes these awesome low-profile CPU water blocks. So theoretically, we shouldn't be giving up basically anything in terms of cooling. Wait, how the devil is this supposed to install? Long story short, our mounting hardware is missing. So we're going to move on from that for now. RAM. Hey, we're using the custom RAM that I built at Micron. That is almost too tall, but not quite. Nice. How much is this board? $669. The heck? I guess I have to give up on remote management and having the memory oriented correctly in favor of something much more affordable with only a single 10 gig network port. Thanks to this cool little M.2 to 10 gig adapter from InnoDisk. All right, we're going AMD baby. So I don't even know what CPU's in there. I don't know what CPU's in it either. Did you guys notice that this motherboard is bowed due to the back plate here? You realize this is becoming a pattern, right? No, what a mess. Yeah, don't know. What are you doing? These are all laid out. This is your 12 volt to 24 volt converter. Ah, this takes power off of our power supply. You can see it's modified with a molex connector here and then adapts it to. Oh, what used to be the barrel jack power supply for this iCron fiber optic USB talk thing. DC to DC conversion is much more efficient than going from AC to DC. So that's why this thing can be cooled passively rather than with a fan. We're just going to put it there. I am gravely worried. This bracket was supposed to go in when we had a smaller motherboard. I see. I mean, I am no longer gravely worried. Phew. What GPU are we using? Well, this is still the placeholder one. So it's a 3090. Okay. I mean, that's a little op. Do you have any idea of like what GPU you actually want in these systems? Eventually used 30 series might actually be the way to go right now. And I bet I could get cheap water blocks for them. Last-gen water blocks always discounted. One of your big complaints the last time we did this was that the GPU was upside down. You want the water block to be visible when it's in your rack. This is a platform to place the GPU on and also run the riser cable underneath so it can plug in here so that it shows up nicely when you open the case. Hey, that's pretty cool. My brain hurts. Antoine from the labs team just sent us this picture of the block and a back plate mounted to another of this board. His version of the block came with the right mounting hardware, but we've decided to move ahead with our cheaper board anyway due to cost, but we'll still show you some of the cool solutions we came up with for this one. Look at this. You can get right angle adapters for your internal USB header. Cool, right? We actually probably still need that. Cool. We don't need it. Are you sure that's it was a height issue for us? Yeah, should be fine. I don't know. I'm getting flashbacks to when you broke my motherboard. I did not. Yeah, you did. The port's all wonky now. Oh, oh my God, Linus. Did you break the USB 3? Everything's fine. You know what? This is better. I accept your solution. Where did this come from, though? Is this part of the case? The bracket's part of the case, but these were sent from AlphaCool. They're like the old-school pass-throughs to the PCIe slots for when you couldn't fit water cooling in your case. Wow, that is a really over-engineered solution for that when you can just drill a hole and run a tube through it. I just got all the front I.O. hooked up here. We are pretty close to powering this thing on, I think. Yeah, we just need our drives. Oh, or drive. Yeah, I only have room for one. Yeah, I wasn't sure which one you wanted if you wanted to go price-conscious or just... Price-conscious! Sweet. That's a 2 terabyte Sabrent Rocket. Cool. That's a very affordable drive these days, but still ripping fast. Where is this supposed to go to? Oh, I know. This just passes through anywhere at the back of our case, I guess, and then plugs into a USB 3 port on the motherboard, because this is how we get our USB signal to our fiber optic adapter. And then you've got DisplayPort, right? Yeah. This we actually have the proper pass-through for, because it's tied to our PCI pass-through bracket thing for the water cooling, I think. Nope, it's just under it. So we got this handy-dandy right-angle connector. Ooh, things are kind of coming together here. I think we just got to get the tubing runs done. Okay, let's do it. So I can just plumb this up however I want now? Yep. All right. I know guys, I said that this was going to be the final form the next time I did an update on this thing, and there's still a fair bit of jank here. But, come on. What were you expecting? This is pretty good for me. There is one more thing before we can try to actually deploy this. Will it close? Yeah. Oh, hey, look at that. Wow. That is a lot of gaming PC in a very, very thin enclosure. Oh, why is it wet? Oh, is this just dripping out from here? No, no, that's a lot of water. Oh, it's coming from inside, I think. Are these not even quick disconnects? Do they just drain? There's leaking water? Oh, well, that's good then. Awesome. That's actually great news though. Yeah, it's not in the system. It's under the power supply. But that could just be coming through the bottom. Power supply is sealed. I think it's probably fine. I mean, it's okay. You need to turn this off now. Okay. Well, that's where it was leaking. I'm just glad it all still runs. I don't know if there's any additional water. I think these collars are doing basically nothing though. They're just looking pretty. Wow. Yeah, that's why it leaked then because the tubing was stretched and the collar is not actually compressing the outer part of the tube against the inner barb. Let's just try again. I mean, what could go wrong? Since we're on our way, the goal is to replace this station first. This is my sun station or as I call it, the shrine to how a temporary solution is the most permanent solution. We've got the eGPU equipped laptop. We've got the power bar down there. It all is great. Got this dongle. No more. All right. Let's see if our DisplayPort pass-through works before we put it in the rack. I was going to just put it in the rack and hope for the best, but it hasn't been that kind of day. Fresh boot attempt. Here we go. And it's powered off. The issue right now is that the system does not stay on. Could be anything. Could be the flex of the board from when we screwed it down. Could be the water. It could be the PCIe extension that could be broken. Boys, I don't know if this system is powering on today. You know, in a way, I think the leak was a blessing in disguise because while the system probably doesn't look very different, we took the opportunity to use that time to clean up a few items that weren't really final form. The iCron dock at the front now, for example, is screwed into place from the top. The GPU is now screwed into place using the PCIe riser. So that's not going anywhere. We figured out the missing shark teeth on these fittings were why they weren't sealing. So we added a couple zip ties. Those shouldn't be coming loose. We 3D printed an I O shield for the new motherboard including proper pass through for our 10 gig as well as our fiber optic cable and replace these quick connect fittings at the back with ones that don't lose quite as much water when you unplug them. All of which means this should work perfectly this time with no hiccups whatsoever. Why would you say that? Oh, yeah, it's going. Hey, there we go. It's a Ryzen 7 3700 X. Oh, it's the third gen. Man, it's quiet. What is making all the noise in here these days anyway? Oh, right, old, old, old Wannock, which is not at my house. Let's get it in the rack. Whoo! Man, this makes mine and my wife's gaming machines look just downright inefficient. Okay, so maybe it's this one to go. Yes. Adam, we forgot a solution to remotely power it on. Oh, no, we didn't. Look at all of our wonderful options. Oh my. Oh my. Oh, wow. Which one are we using? We've got 2.4 gig. We've got Wi-Fi. We've got a Pi KVM. Ooh, Pi KVM is super cool. That sounds like a bigger project for another day, though. This is probably gonna be the easiest for today. You just use it like a little car starter. Oh, no way. This solution comes to us courtesy of Silverstone, maker of things you never thought you needed until the moment you need them. It plugs into a USB 2.0 header for power. It appears that this is so you can orient it any number of different ways, depending on your system layout, which is pretty clever. All right, and then this plugs into the hell. Oh my God. This is a 1U system, Adam. I don't know if this is going to work. This board plugs into your reset and your power switch, and then the ones on the front of your case plug into these male extensions. That way, both the remote starter and the original one from the case should work. Funny thing about USB headers. I've never done this on purpose, but technically nothing would prevent you from bending the pins. I'm doing a very bad thing right now. Should we try it? Okay. Yeah, let's try it. If it still works. Oh, oh, you want to power it on. Let's fob it. Hold on. Am I about to see something that I have literally never seen before in my life? Okay, watch this. All I'm going to do is turn it around. And then we get this weird behavior where it powers on right away. And then powers off because I think it's being held down if I do it in that orientation. And then I press it and it does nothing. Wow. I reverse it. I have never seen this before in all my years and it works. Normally learn something new every day. Now. Let's see if this powers it off. We did it. But can it power it on? Yes. Okay, let's go. It occurs to me. We haven't tested the range on this. Adam, you ready? Yeah, ready. Did it turn on? Nope. How about from in here? It did it? Yeah, it's on. Oh, okay. Well, that's not too far. Almost moment of truth time. All I got to do is patch the fiber optic connection from that USB dock into the fiber optics that are in my walls already. So just there we go. One of those plug my DisplayPort, which is already run through a fiber optic cable through the walls. It detected something. But did it detect enough? This wall plate is still using this big style adapter that I had intended to replace. Well, at any rate, the reason I was opening it up was to try plugging directly into the optical cable rather than through a pass-through plate. And the fact that we have the worst kind of pass-through plate here is well, it gives me hope. I think it doesn't like having an extension on the other side. I think it wants to be plugged straight into the source. So we got to move that GPU over. I might have done a thing. Wow. Wow. The kids have a lot of Minecraft worlds on here. Okay, fancy stuff to see here. Why don't we go with that one? Whoa, whoa. No. Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Squarespace. If you're looking at creating and sharing your own content online, give Squarespace a try. 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