This video is sponsored by Squarespace. This one has been a long time coming. Today, we are going to do the everything
console Mach three. Or maybe I might just call it the
everything console mini. Because today
we are going to cram every game console up to and including the PlayStation
three, the Xbox 360 and the Nintendo switch into a box
that's about half or even a third of the size of the
everything console Mark two. That's right. Moore's Law isn't dead. Let's go. This right here is a menace for you in 69,
and it's a mini PC. But don't with the size fool you. This thing is a little powerhouse inside. We have a ryzen nine 6900 h x a radiant 680 m 16 gigabytes of ddr5 memory and one terabyte of lightning fast
nvme storage in its star configuration. It already runs
circles around the everything console too. So naturally we're just going to take this thing
and plug it in and use it as it is. Right. Well, today we are going to
launch the software on this thing. We're going to beef up the cooling. And of course, we're going to design
a completely new case for from the ground up.
When we're done with this thing. It's not just going to emulate games. It's going to eat them for breakfast. Let's head to the shop. All right. So here we are in the shop. We have most of what we need
to get started on this project. Honestly, though,
we don't have everything. So today we are going to be doing what
I like to call working at risk. We do, however, have the most important
part of this project. The mini PC. So let's crack this guy open
and we'll start taking some precise measurements of it and start
building the model for its new case. I've got to say, hats off to the engineers
and designers over at this forum because this thing
was really easy to take apart. And as you're about to see, the internals
are really well packaged, too. So now that we have it disassembled,
you can actually see our unpopulated MK2 slot as well as our two DDR five. So we didn't plot. So we will definitely be having some fun
with those later. But because we're just interested
in measurements now, we actually had to break this thing down
even further. One thing that you're going to notice on this build is that I'm not even going
to touch the stock Heatsink and that's because this forum installed it
using liquid metal. Anything I might replace it
with would probably just perform worse. So instead we're going to layer additional
cooling on top of what's already there. But more on that later. All this is kind of sketchy. So that's been the case
in order to get the PCB. Oh, there it goes. Hopefully that wasn't
the sound of something breaking. All right.
So there you go. On this side, you have the Heatsink
with APU, the GPU CPU combo underneath it. So now we can start taking some precision
measurements of this and figure out how we're going to carve out a walnut
to make a new case for it. It's typical. So if it weren't for the everything
console, Mach one, Mach two in my X-Box build, I don't think I ever would have
had the confidence to attempt this one. And I really do mean confidence
because taking measurements like this isn't particularly hard, and designing
the case itself is downright fun. But if you asked me a year ago
if I ever could have done this, I would have told you, no way. So it just goes to show
if there's ever a project that you feel like you want to do
but can't, there's no shame in starting with something simpler
and working your way up to it. Okay. I think that's it for all the precision
measurements. So let's run this thing
through this and see and see how it is. I love my CMC, but a 3D printer,
it is not. It does have some limitations
that I've had to find workarounds for, like on this build to compensate
for its lack of vertical reach. I had to carve this recessed area
for a fan and the sidewalls from one side and then I flipped it over and carved all these through holes
for ventilation from the other side. Look at that. Our curve is now done, our ventilation
holes. This is looking a little bit big. So let's machine this down
to a more reasonable size. Speaking of limitations of the CMC,
when it comes to making straight deep cuts along the outside
edges, don't even bother. It's just so much faster to do it
with conventional saw. And the same goes for bulk
material removal too. If you need a thin out a piece,
you are much better off using a planer. Ginger or in my case, a drum set.
All right. Now that we got the tops and bottoms done,
let me show you how I'm thinking about mounting this thing. Itself only clicky. This right here is a motherboard stand. And the nice thing about these is that you can actually kind of
stack them or screw them together. And we're going to use those to mount
the PCB to the bottom of the case. So we'll just lower this in here and put a little piece of tape over this
so that it doesn't move. Now, if you're at all squeamish, you might want to look away
for this next bit, because I'm going to use a little bit
of percussive force in order to mark where these holes go and see if that made some indentations
right where the standoffs go. Oh, yeah, it definitely did,
because the boards are stuck in the mud a little bit. Come on. There we go. Oh, that could work better. And just for anybody curious at home, port is still in one piece,
and everything's fine there. In order to secure the standoffs
to the bottom of the case, I drilled four holes that were just slightly smaller
than the threads on the standoffs. And then I just kind of
forced them down into the holes. The threads cut their own path
and everything screwed down nicely. All right. So now the next thing we need to do
is measure where all of our input and output ports are so
that we can cut them into our side panels. This is going to take a bit of the cracked
a beer and do some precision measuring. What could go wrong? Hmm. Truth be told, these were actually the most challenging
measurements of the entire build. Everything had to be. Mm. Accurate. Otherwise, I wouldn't be able to use
any of the ports on my mini PC. I also had use strategically locate a bunch of exhaust grilles
that will help to dissipate the extra heat that we're going to make
once we start overclocking this thing. And rather than trusting
all of my measurements to be 100% perfect, I kind of hedged my bets a little bit. That is enough measuring. So now let's do some cutting. I'm actually going to start
with this MDF hard board, which is going to act
as kind of a proxy material if you're trying to figure out
a complex shape or cut. It's often a good idea to substitute your intended material
with a cheap, easy to cut alternative. Not only will allow you to rapidly iterate
through your designs, but it won't break the bank when you
invariably screw up just like that. We have a cheap and easy to cut version of my front and rear IO plates. Let's go see how my measurements did. Oh. Oh. Ladies and
gents, I didn't do bad for a first try. So the only one that I think I really need
to move is this little lamport here. It could be up a little bit higher, but. And so that each time my eyes look good,
USB ports look good. Powerful. It looks good. Yeah, that's really, really, really good. Awesome. I don't know about you guys at home, but I am a sucker for seeing
the internal workings of machines. And that's true for computers. Something about being able to see all the chips makes me appreciate
their ludicrous level of complexity. So it seemed only right that I make
these side panels out of clear acrylic. So that was the rough pass. And now we're going to switch
to a finer bit to do a little detail work with this and see you trade
speed for detail because for details you need a small bit
and those are inherently fragile To help work around that you can use
larger bit to do the bulkier cutting and then switch to a smaller bit
to flush out all of your details. But no matter how you cut it, it's always going to take some time
to cut hundreds of little hexagons. So while we wait, why don't I tell you
what sponsor of today's video, Squarespace. Squarespace is an all in one website
hosting and creation service. I started my podcast off the cut. We needed to get a website up
and running for it quick. But between Instagram, TikTok, YouTube
and the podcast itself, I just didn't know what I was going
to find. The time to get it done. Thankfully, Squarespace had my back,
their website creation, who was so easy to use that I had our website up
and running in an afternoon. Their pre-made templates
gave me a fantastic jumping off point in terms of design. They've got e-commerce integration for
selling both physical and digital goods. And when I was ready to register
the actual domain off the podcast dot com, they made it as easy
as a simple button click. It's not normally that easy. Trust me, I've done it
the hard way before in the past. If you're looking to start a website
for your business passion project or just next creative endeavor,
I can highly recommend Squarespace. Check out Squarespace
dot com for a free trial. And then when you're ready to launch,
go to Squarespace dot com Staff Stock builds to save 10% off your first purchase
of a website or domain. All right. Let's get back to this
build back over in the shop. I cut some really aggressive champers on
both the top and the bottom of the case. Once this thing is done, it's going to
kind of look like a squared off hourglass or maybe kind of like a tie fight. You'll see. Cutting the walnut
revealed some pretty large cracks. Now, personally, I love how they look,
but I also wanted to stabilize them, so I made sure to fill them
with some brown glue. And unfortunately, because the fastest anybody could get me a set of new Y
antennas was three weeks. I cannibalized a pair from the everything
console mark two. And just like that,
the ever Wi-Fi antennas installed and I think our acrylic curved
just finished just to check that and yeah,
unfortunately that's not quite perfect. Despite my careful proxy work,
these still need another revision. So let's just
go ahead and carve those now. Oh, okay. And now,
thanks to a little bit of movie magic, we should now have to perfectly sized
IO plates. If I could just figure out which way
this goes. Yeah, something like that. Oh, yeah, that looks a lot better. Well,
I was waiting for that new piece to carve. I cut my old piece in two, and I tried gluing them together,
so the first thing I did was try this. Well, bond stuff. Apparently, this works on glass
and it dries crystal clear. However, on acrylic it either dried clear,
nor did it bond at all. So what I ended up with
was just using a little bit of good old fashioned seal glue,
and that actually worked quite well. Quick point, a correction here. I actually mixed up
weld on with Weld Bond. Weld on is actually supposed to work
really well on clear acrylic so I picked up a bottle that for an upcoming build
and we'll be testing it out real soon. Anyways. I basically treated the step
as if it were a jewelry box screw up. I taped all the corners together
to keep them aligned, then unfolded them, applied some glue re folded them
and then waited for the glue to dry, which thankfully in this case wasn't long
because well, siglo. That's
why I love so much about the igloos. You can just like hold it for 15 seconds
with your fingers. Then it's basically set up
that looks pretty damn good. I just have to be extremely careful
with this now because acrylic is kind of soft and it's easy to scratch,
so I had to put this somewhere safe. I would do the rest of the build. So let's talk about performance. Some of you no doubt have noticed these
two rather large Noctua fans. We are going to use these to cool the heat
generating components of this computer and therefore give us more thermal
headroom in order to overclock and squeeze every last little bit of performance
that we can see. The first one's going to actually be
incredibly easy to install. It's just going to slot right here
into the top of the case. You might get in there a little bit tight,
but it fits in there like that and it's going to blast cool
air down onto the RAM and the storage. The second fan, on the other hand,
isn't going to be quite so easy. It goes in the bottom half of the case. But because we have these brass standoffs
here, well, it doesn't really fit. So we had to modify it a little bit. Not to worry, though,
we will just trim our brand new Noctua fan over here on the miter saw. That's got to be a brand new, right? Nobody's ever said that before. I don't know why,
but this just felt so wrong to do. I know I'm just cutting plastic on
a lighter sore, but you feel it too, right now that we have both of our fans in the case,
how exactly are we going to power them? Well, it's a good question
and it's honestly one that I struggled with
for a while in this project. I explored a bunch of different ways
of getting power from the main computer to the fans, and honestly, they all kind
of turned out to be dead ends. But I did come up with a solution. It just happens to be a little bit janky,
although it does come with a few advantages. Let me explain. So if you take a look at this rear iReport
here, you'll see that I actually added a extra
IO port air up on the top that is for this,
which is a USB y splitter. So basically what you do is
plug this in here like so, and then I will be able to power the fans
through external. I mean, it'll look a little something
like this, just less for a Bercy. Is this the most elegant solution? No, it's not. But like I said,
there are some advantages. Well, I can maintain p.w n control by putting
a resistor in the extension cord too. I can actually operate
the computer in 2 to 4 modes. I can have a high power mode
by just plugging it in and increasing the cooling power
dramatically. And then I can have a low power mode for low end emulation where it runs
a little bit silent and free. I didn't have to hack up anything
inside the board. I don't have to worry about overloading any internal circuits
or anything like that. So yeah, you have a little thing poking out, but I
think this is actually the best solution. The tricky part about building
an extremely small form factor PC like this is that,
well, space is extremely limited. So in order to manage all my wires,
I grabbed some heat shrink tubing. Normally
you'd use this stuff to re insulate wires. However, it also works pretty well
for binding them together like this. Unfortunately for me, this particular step
turned out to be a huge waste of time. All right. So turns out
we got a little bit of a problem here. There's just too many damn wires
in this computer case. So what we're going to have to do
is shorten some of these and just cut out
some of the slack here in the system. If you want to get into making custom computers, it definitely pays
to be comfortable cutting and splicing wire by hardwiring the fans
directly to these USB plugs. I was able to cut out a bunch of access wire and I was able to bypass
a couple of really bulky adapters. Well, that was a little bit of a deviation
from my original plan. But now that we've got those shortened,
let's see if everything fits together a little bit better. Now. Yes. Success. Okay. Well, it was a little bit
hard to get in there, but hey, we got it. Once I knew that everything would fit,
I was on the home stretch, a little bit of sanding, rounded off all the hard edges
and gave the wood a nice, smooth feel. And then it was time to seal the wood
to keep my pieces nice and stable. I was really diligent about oiling
the entire piece all in one shot. You really want to avoid sealing one side of a piece
and leaving the other side open because that's just an invitation
for cupping and other types of warping. Finally,
it was time for the real assembly. I glu work to try to install the fans
inside of the base and then see glue did a great job
of bonding the acrylic to the wood inside of the recessed channels. Once I had everything buttoned up,
I was able to take a step back and admire the everything console. Mark three Just like that. I think we're done,
or at least the physical case is done. Now we get to take it home and see
just how much performance we can squeeze out of this with this
crazy, over-the-top cooling system. And also, we'll talk a little bit
about the software, too. Let's go to that. Now that we are back at home. Let's talk about some of the software
things that we're going to do to this in order
to squeeze some extra power out of it and how we're going to set it up
for emulation. So the first thing we're going to do
is boot the computer into the bios, which I've already done, and we are going
to raise its TDP from the factory. This thing is configured to serve anywhere
between 28 and 30 watts of power. We're going to crank that dial up to 11
and give it 54 watts of power, which my math checks out
should be approximately double. Next, thanks to our added cooling,
we are going to be able to overclock the memory from the factory. This thing comes configured
at 4800 mega transfers per second. I did a little bit of testing and we can safely crank
that up to 5600 mega transfers per second, which should theoretically
give us an increase in our memory bandwidth of 15%,
which will really help out the integrated graphics chip
on this computer. Now that we booted into Windows,
we have one last little tweak left to do and this one's a little bit heavy,
but try to stay with me. We are going to undervote the CPU. It's a bit counterintuitive,
but by decreasing the voltage supplied to the CPU,
we can actually make it more efficient, meaning it uses less wattage
for the same level of performance, which allows us to squeeze more
performance into our 54 watt power limit. So stock
This PC delivered a PC mark score of 6600 approximately, and a fire strike score
of approximately 5200. Now, after our modifications,
it delivered a PC mark score of 6844, which is not exactly
the biggest increase in the world. However, it delivered a fire
strike score of almost 6000. So not a bad uplift
in terms of 3D performance. Our day to day performance, you probably
wouldn't notice a huge difference. Next, let's talk about software emulation
for everything console Mercury. I wanted to have a much cleaner
UI experience, so I went online, I did a little bit of research
and I found this program called Lunchbox. Now, one box isn't an emulator
in and of itself. You can think of it more as an emulator
organizer or maybe aggregator. Basically what you do
is you take all of your ROM files, all of your emulators,
and you can link them together inside of Launch Box, and then it handles
all the configuration and launching. So as you can see,
I have my whole collection of retro games ordered up here, everything from the Xbox
and Xbox 360, which admittedly are not really that retro
and 60 for any Gamecube Nintendo Switch, which I was actually
really surprised by how well this ran. I mean everything down to the PlayStation
two, PlayStation three. The other nice thing about launch Box
is that it handles all the little details, like pulling down all the artwork
for your different ROM files. I didn't have to do any of this.
It just kind of configure it itself. And also it will handle little things
like configuring different emulators for different games. Basically, if they make an emulator
for it, this PC will run it. And that kind of brings me
to my next point. I was so impressed
by how well some of these emulators ran that I really wouldn't be surprised
if once we see a proper PS4 emulator release and a proper Xbox
series one, no X-Box, Xbox One, what do they call
the Xbox that came out for the Xbox 360? I think that this thing will be able
to run it, so I have a really good feeling about future proofing. And also because this is a PC,
at the end of the day, I can also run
all of my favorite PC games, which also handily get
pulled into lunch box. Now, one question people always ask me when I make these videos is what emulators
I'm using to run each system. So what I'll do is down in the video
description, I will hood a list of the system
and then right next to it, the name of the emulator
that I'm using to run it. You can Google it from there. It's a lot to cover, so I'm not going to
try and do it in the span of this video. Oh, and one of the little thing
that I don't think I got a chance to mention before is this new USB port
right here is actually a USB four port, meaning that I can get 4K 120 hertz
as well as HDR support out of this port. So basically the same standard
you would get in a ps5 or an Xbox series X or should I say Xbox series Z? Yeah, if you like this video,
you might want to check out that tip. So yeah, there you have it. This little PC is an absolute beast. It's less than half the size of the
everything console. Mark two. It plays all the games
I could ever want to play. And also I just happen to think
it looks really cool, like look at how small and compact it is. It's got the kind of tie
fighter design esthetic going on. So yeah, it turned out really well. And if you'll excuse me, I think we're basically done
with this video, so I would like to go play
with this thing. Thank you so much for watching. Big thank you to all my Patriots
supporters. I'll include links to all the stuff
I use down in the video description. And yeah, that's it for this video. Stay tuned for the next one
and I will see you guys there. Piece. I've been.
