My Insane $3K Velka 3 Build

today I'm building a high-end workstation that I'll be using to produce videos at computex a massive Tech trade show in Taiwan that I attend every year to simplify the task of hauling a desktop over 6,000 M across the Pacific Ocean this will also be the most portable PC with a discret GPU that I've ever built housed within the highly praised and Incredibly compact Vela 3 case I'm excited to kick off this build which I've affectionately named the Vela Pro before we continue this video is brought to you in part by cdkey offer.com so I have three desktop PCS that I regularly bounce between and all of them are running activated copies of Windows from keys that I got on CD key offer.com I've used many key sites in the past but CD key offer is the only one I've never had an issue with I've never had a bad key I've never had to call customer service I've never had to email customer support and I've never had to activate Windows over a phone which is super fun right now you can get a Windows 10 Pro OEM key for around 22 bucks but wait add it to your cart use the 25% discount code bw20 at checkout and the price drops to just $16.93 by grab thar's Hammer what a savings to use your new key just go to your purchased orders from the drop- down menu to view and copy the key once you get there and then paste that key into the Windows activation page voila you've got an activated OS that's also eligible for a free upgrade to Windows 11 alternatively you can skip the upgrade and buy Windows 11 Pro directly using the same code bw20 to snag the OS for around 23 bucks activate the key using the aention steps and get the full Windows Experience easily and affordable thanks again to cdkey offer.com now back to the main video now in choosing the case for this system it was very important for this build to be as Compact and backpack friendly as possible call me paranoid but I always make it a habit to toss my PC into a carry-on backpack when flying so I can keep it safely by my side at all times anyone who trusts an airline with their valuables is a fool now I could opt for a carry-on sized rolling suitcase to accommodate a larger build but that would mean risking the airline gate checking my bag on a crowded flight a scenar I've narrowly escaped many times so a backpack sized PC it is with its Stellar build quality diminutive size and by extension it support for smaller and lighter components the Vela 3 from velc case is the perfect chassis for my needs with merely a 4 L volume it makes other leading ITX cases like the A4 H2O and nr200p look and feel like Bricks by comparison once they're full of Hardware unfortunately the Vela 3's extreme portability also comes with some significant compromises including limited options for CPU cooling mandatory use of a flex ATX PSU and limited support for two slot ITX graphics cards less than 179 mm long despite giving these caveats a great deal of consideration in the end I felt there were enough workarounds to still make the build a worthwhile Endeavor while I've chosen to go small for our case we're going big on the CPU in order to chew through all the 4K h264 footage I'll be editing performance slowdowns are especially brutal at events when I'm dealing with a stack of time sensitive of uploads so I'll need a processor capable of handling all my tasks seamlessly and simultaneously as such I've elected the AMD ryzen9 7950 X 3D to be our compute King with 16 cores and 32 threads on team Red's latest zen4 architecture the chips sport some of the best multi-threaded performance outside of a high-end desktop skew I was briefly tempted by one of ack's Epic ready sff boards but upon realizing that its deep Mini ITX form factor would require a case 3 to four times larger than the Vela 3 I quickly ditched the idea maybe we'll save that for a different build and although Intel's Core i 94900 k spanks my ryzen 9 at editing h264 files thanks to a hefty Boost from quicksync it's just too inefficient and too hot for this build as confirmed by a number of folks on the sff PC subreddit with more firsthand experience on the matter than me the 7950 x3d is still a great chip for video editing and while not as fast as the 14900 k for our use case there's far less chance of it having a melt down with the modest cooling solution we'll be using our Mini ITX motherboard is the Asus R stricks b650 EI gaming Wi-Fi featuring 10 plus2 power stages support for PCI Gen 5 and dual Channel ddr5 memory without a lick of front IO ports on the Vela 3 the board's wealth of Rio including two USBC ports one of which delivers 20 gbits per second is a welcome feature for CPU cooling I opted for the noctua nhl9a the tried andrue lowprofile cooler is among the top performers that will fit inside the Vela 3 but its Max TDP of 95 Watts mean we need to undervolt the 7950 X 3D with its much larger 170 wat TDP to prevent thermal throttling that begs the question I'm most curious about today how much performance will be lost from such an undervolt as that will heavily determine whether my decision to use this chip was worthwhile or a big waste of sand we'll be utilizing the motherboard's maximum supported memory capacity with 96 gigs of gskill flare X DDR 55600 yeah this is definitely Overkill as 64 gigs would have been plenty for my 4K workflow but when the Bros at G skill offer you extra Ram so you don't have to download it yourself you accept storage may not be the sexiest part of a build but it's a critical component of this PC that shouldn't be overlooked hopefully 12 terabyt of nvme storage should do the trick we'll be booting off corsair's 4 tbte mp700 Pro with PCI 5 speeds that both sequential reads and writes of roughly 12,000 megab a second that'll run alongside their 8 tbte mp600 Pro lpx a Gen 4 drive while suited for the motherboard's Gen 4 m.2 slot on the back if my calculations serve me right this should be enough storage for computex 2024 through 2045 Lela 3 can be a tricky case to go PSU shopping for due to its exclusive Flex ATX compatibility and unique form factor fortunately velc case actually sells a 600 wat Flex ATX unit that fits their case like a glove the power supply is a semi-custom version of the EMP 7660b from enhanced electronics that features 92% efficiency at 50% % load and shorten cables for easier Cable Management as an added bonus owners of the PSU claim the fan is pretty darn quiet our graphics card is the palot RTX 460 TI stormx 8 gig and it's arguably the smallest elephant in the room to say the RTX 460 TI was a disappointment goes beyond beating a dead horse we're beating off a dead horse at this point but given the limitations and needs of our build this is actually the best option available currently there's no faster 40 series card that fits inside the Vela 3 without ious modifications one exception is the 16 gig 460 TI but ITX variants are extremely scarce and the ones available went to the tune of $600 and Beyond last I checked with the dir of ITX models from AMD the only feasible alternative would be the RTX 3060 TI in fact the fine team at Puget systems found the 3060 TI to outperform the 4060 TI by about 18% in GPU effects for Adobe premere Pro but when it came to h264 decoding the 460 TI scored 12% higher than its pressor although it's a smaller Victory h264 accelerated tasks like playback scrubbing and reverse playback are significantly more relevant to my personal workflow than GPU effects like Transitions and motion scaling this was a selling point that ultimately sealed my decision I'd also be lying if I said that the thought of having dss3 doesn't come to mind in case I have any downtime in the hotel room at just 17 cm long payet 4060 TI stormx fits the Vela 3 comfortably and seems to be a great choice for sub5 L builds like this one the RTX 4060 TI may not be the hero I deserve but in this case it's the hero I need the last piece to the puzzle is a PCI Gen 4 Riser cable I purchased on Amazon that works as intended velc sells one of their own with thin wires for easier installation that I would have picked up if it wasn't blue and ugly and looked like a homeless jockstrap for being a 4 L case this was a surprisingly easy build the velka 3 has you do most of the assembly outside of the case which certainly helps along with those shortened cables from their power supply which I highly recommend for this case although it's still a really tight fit the case's incredible build quality keeps the steel panels from any bulging whatsoever which is super impressive the end result makes for a tiny blacked out PC that looks adorably badass but since its Merit can't be judged on looks alone I ran some tests to see whether the Vela Pro is a worthy mobile workstation with our fully stock system an initial run in cinebench turned out a lofty multi-threaded score of 33,8 180 and a single thread score of 1845 unfortunately the 795x 3D Drew nearly 140 watts and hit just south of 90° celius and while no thermal throttling was reported the load temperatures left something to be desired I quickly took to the BIOS and undervolted our CPU by configuring the curb Optimizer with an all core negative offset of 20 the largest value I could reach while maintaining system stability with Precision boost overdrive I also set a PPT limit of 80 watts to tame power usage and hopefully drive down temperatures in that same cend bench run this dropped power consumption close to the desired 80 Watts with a Max load temp of 68c a whopping 22 degrees lower than stock I was pleased to see the new single thread score slightly outpa stock performance but seeing the multi-thread score suffer a 177% decrease versus stock had me eager to reconfigure our undervolt settings for better results however before jumping back into the BIOS I decided to conduct a render test that took me by surprise in Adobe Media encoder the system exported a 10-minute 4K video file a few seconds faster than it did its stock and did so with a Max temp that was 10° cooler I can't fully explain the disparity between the cnab bench and render test results but since I'll be using this system to render videos and not run cnab bench Cycles all day I'm keeping the undervolt settings as is the system crushes 4K video editing as well with stutter-free playback even at 16x speed partly thanks to our Gen 5 SSD as an editing rig the Vela Pro is currently outperforming every full-size desktop I own with the exception of chromus who be on his thread Ripper how is this possible I don't really know but it's pretty amazing what super small form factor systems are capable of these days and since curiosity got the best of me I fired up cyberpunk 2077 at 2560 x440 to see how the Vela pro games trying to run the low R tracing preset proved to be a choppy mess but enabling frame generation and setting dlss to Quality delivered 70 to 90 frames per second on average for a smooth and Visually arousing experience at 1920 x 1080 you can nearly max out the game with the ultra R tracing preset and Achieve 80 to 100 FPS with the same dlss settings I don't intend to use the Vela Pro for much gaming because it is a workstation PC but the fact that it can game this well gets me kind of bricked up suffice to say this little PC has far exceeded all of my expectations from performance to Aesthetics to portability and now it's finally ready to do lots of good work for me at computex 2024 so stay tuned for my coverage there and thank you so much for watching this video before you go guys please toss a like on the video If you enjoyed it get subscribed for more Tech content coming at you really soon click the notification Bell so you don't miss any new uploads and I will see y'all in the next video

Channel: Bitwit

Views: 88,455

Keywords: bitwit, bitwit kyle, how to build a pc, computer, gaming pc, velka 3, velka 3 review, velka 3 3.0, velka 3 build, velka 3 pc, sff velka 3, velka 3 unboxing, velka 3 gaming pc, mini itx velka 3, velkase velka 3, velka 7, velka pro, velka 7950x, velka 3 7950x3d

Id: WIBgVWk80o0

Length: 11min 7sec (667 seconds)

Published: Thu May 02 2024