Standoff Mods for the SSUPD Meshlicious

all right if you have been considering building in the meshlicious or you've built one up already you might have heard of these so-called standoff mods so today i'll show you what that is all about and how to do it and why you might want to consider it [Music] welcome to machines and more cable management that is one of the areas that many of you have identified as a pain point in this case and this standoff extension is a great solution for that so today we'll take a look at that and i'll also discuss how to space out the gpu riser cable as well as the thermal impact from that choice as well now earlier in the year we took a look at the meshlicious with a founder's edition rtx 3070 card and one of the things discussed was how to properly set up the case for cards with a significant flow-through section and we saw a meaningful benefit there i did recently do an all-mesh build guide with this case so i had a chance to do some additional a b testing also to to determine the thermal impact of the riser cable mod there alright so let's start off with the standoff mod on the motherboard side of the case normally messing around with standoffs on a case isn't a good idea because there's a defined location for the rear i o of the board it's cut out so changing that significantly may cause your motherboard to not fit anymore on the meshlicious there isn't an easy place to hide cables but if you ship the board up there is going to be a channel there to use for that purpose now to mitigate that motherboard cutout issue i described there's a removable cover here and the intent of this actually is typically for shifting the entire center divider over to accommodate a four slot gpu but one thing we can do without moving the entire tray is just to remove that cover shift it over and we'll be moving the entire motherboard 20 millimeters out which is the width of that slot and the pcie slot in general there are a few different versions of the standoffs that i've seen come with the case but all these are 632 standoffs so one thing folks have done is they go out and they get 20 mm or 632 standoffs and just thread those into the existing six millimeter ones now alternately i have an m3 standoff kit here so what i did was just replace the existing ones with an approximately 26 millimeter long assembly and i just used a screw and a standoff combo to make it work this way and if you use the right screw to attach to your motherboard m3 screw just get the standoffs there in tight and voila like it was meant to be there now there is a downside to doing this of course and as a result of this your cpu cooler is now restricted to being only about 52 millimeters in height or so now ram height is gonna also be affected but that's not as much of a problem i think you saw plenty of space here but because of the lower clearance air cooling is really limiting at this point so i wouldn't really go there but this will majorly impact folks that use an aio as well because it will limit your selection to name a few that do work though the ek aios are okay the fantax aios look to be fine most corsair units are okay but what's not okay actually is the original ml240 illusion i tested this case with and some of the nzxtx series those are pretty tall pump heads so just be aware of that limitation now the good news is it really cleans up cabling since now you have all this free space behind there to snake the psu cables in and out tuck things away zip tie things down so it's just a huge convenience and a functional benefit there for the gpu side of the house if you did this motherboard standoff mod you're gonna be limited to three slot cards at this point if you're already there there's less of a benefit to this next riser cable mod but if you have a two slot card like this evga xc3 and keep watching what you're going to do here is essentially space out the riser cable an extra amount also there is some flexibility here it doesn't need to be a full 20 millimeters for example if your cart is a little thicker than two slots you're not going to be able to go the full 20 since it might just hit the panel at that point so with this card i've gone an extra 16 millimeters here there aren't actually physical slots cut out at the bottom of the case so you're you kind of have infinite gradations there but you do have a limitation from those thumb screws so just be aware even though there's no cutouts at the bottom it's not like you have infinite adjustment available for that but i think you can get close enough to where you need to be uh so with this card i've gone an extra 16 millimeters or so here and i've just replaced the existing standoffs in order to space them out if you have 632 standouts you can just push them out a little bit too this puts the card right here directly at the mesh panel so if you do this mod for an aib side exhausting card like this one this is useful primarily to let the card bring in cooler air and that's great since the time and materials involved here don't amount to much but there is still a tangible benefit and what's that thermal impact we'll say this it definitely does a lot more for a specialized airflow card like the founders edition and pair cards and that's because the flow through part of the cooler is so vital to that card working well it's almost like half of the cooler right so it almost doesn't work well at all when it's constricted so let's just take a quick revisit uh for the previous benchmarks i'll compare a spaced out 30 70 fe to one that's right up against the back plate and we're looking at a six degree swing here in gaming thermals on the gpu and also because of how solid this chunk of a card is and how it impedes the intake path of an exhausting radiator there's also a significant benefit to the cpu temperature for gaming of course this is a little bit more pronounced since the rat is intaking a lot of gpu exhaust so any cooler air flow coming in is going to have a profound impact but even with the cpu only benchmark the more direct airflow pattern for these rad fans result in almost a three and a half degree swing and that is pretty impressive so if you are running a 3060 360 ti 3070 80 fe card than any of those two slot cards then this is definitely recommended so for the aib card we're going to see less of a boost here the 3080xe3 doesn't rely heavily on a flow through section so this really isn't a big deal for that to be impeded but getting the side intake fans close to the mesh side panel absolutely helpful and here there's about a two and a half a three degree gap between the two with the cpu it's not as big of a deal here the tested case here was a dual mesh panel version but the airflow through a side exhausting gpu just isn't as restrictive anyway as uh compared to the solid chunk that is the fe cards because there's gonna be more airflow with the side exhausting card for the cpu only test there's not a significant difference here now i'd call these functionally equal of course no news is good news here right because at least we know it doesn't hurt so if you did the motherboard mod 2 then as mentioned you can only do this with two slot cards now three slot cards otherwise would already be close right up against that side panel so it's fine if you can't do it but one thing if you have a three slot 3090 fe card you want to use in this case so the one way to make that work well is to shift the entire center divider over and the same new lower cpu cooler limitations apply here right but then you'd also shift the riser cable out the same way so essentially you're giving the card the center channel here at your cable management that will be a little more tight on the motherboard side but you know you got to pick and choose your battles so the downsides with this mod the display cables especially with that right angle hdmi cable it's going to be more tight but normally with something like that you just set it and forget it unless you move your case around a lot so personally i don't think it's a big trade-off and it can still fit in there just got to be a little more careful and deliberate about using the display cables so that pretty simple mods but i think very effective and i'd definitely be considering these if i were building in a mesh solution today so if you found that helpful please give a like and subscribe if you haven't already i'll leave my particular standoff kit link down below if you are interested thanks for watching today you

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Keywords: noctua u12s, amd ryzen, ryzen, mini-itx, small form factor, SFF, computer building, computer, custom build, noctua, amd 5700xt, radeon 5700xt, evga sfx gm, mitx case, chromax, noctua u12a, Ryzen 7, 3700x, ryzen 3700x, CM NR200P, NR200, CoolerMaster NR200, Coolermaster NR200P, NCASE M1, Cooler Master NR200, NR200P, AIO Cooling, Water Cooling, Noctua L12S, Air Cooling, Gaming PC, SFF case, Nvidia 3080, nvida 3080, nvdia 3080, 3070, nvidia 3090, 3090 GPU, 3080 gpu

Id: KRvEnUS7yrY

Length: 8min 43sec (523 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 23 2021