Upgrading My Tiny PC w/ RTX 4070 Ti - Nero Mk.1

all right so this right here is my personal gaming editing system it's in the mini ITX form factor which I absolutely love I've had it for about two years now and although it served me very well I have been looking to do some upgrades for quite some time so today we're gonna do just that [Music] so with the continuation of launches from both Team Green and team red I've been on the fence for a little while about pulling the trigger on a new GPU in the mid to high end Market I was curious as to how the current offerings would stack up against previous gen so finally I decided on a new GPU as well as a few other upgrades that I'll be making to my system and I thought I'd share that experience with you guys so here we have an RTX 4070 TI this one is the X3 OC from no3d it's actually one of the more compact offerings as well to go with it a set of custom cables from cable mod to replace the set that's currently in there a couple of fans from both noctua and phantix namely the a12 by 25 chromax and the t30s and lastly some of msi's spadium m480 nbme drives that will be replacing all of my storage so yeah super excited to put this one together I do think it'll be quite interesting as well let's get into it [Music] [Music] and here it is my own PCA that I use for gaming editing Motion Graphics and all the production side things that I've spent so many hours on that's all done with this system right here now for those of you who have never seen a PC of this size and don't really know what you're looking at I will give you a quick brief rundown so the case is called the NCS M1 it's version 6.1 of this model and unfortunately saw the end of production towards late 2021 so the only way that I know of obtaining one is through the used Market but given its reputation and now scarcity for models 5.0 or newer you are looking at around 200 which is quite premium and it's actually what I paid for this one brand new inside of the M1 is the I9 10900k it's a 10 core 20 thread ship boosting up to around 5.3 gigahertz that'll actually be staying in there and I'll touch on why in a moment cooling that is a 240 mil liquid AO with a pair of a12 by 25 bands from noctua and that is all plugged into the MSI z490i unify Mini ITX motherboard along with 32 gigabytes of the 3600 megahertz cl14 memory from g-skill as for the GPU it's also from MSI it's the 2080 Duke OC model and all of that is powered by a corsair's 750 watt sf750 so the reason that I'm so excited to go from a 2080 to a 4070 TI and why it kind of took me a little while to make a decision in the first place is that my use cases like I said editing gaming Graphics all that stuff is heavily dependent on the GPU and that means that I don't really see a big benefit from upgrading the CPU this time around with a faster card I'll see significant improvements in My overall workflow as well as getting a bit more out of my 1440p monitor now I will admit that before putting this video together I did purchase an RTX 3080 Founders Edition a few months ago the reason why I haven't installed it and been using it is because render times is really what I'm after and I wasn't quite sure if I made the right decision I also wanted to share this whole experience with you guys so yeah a bit of a procrastination on my end but hopefully I did make the right decision as massive gpus seem to be the norm moving forward finding any of the new cars that'll fit inside the M1 is quite the challenge so the 4070 TI just kind of makes the most sense here it pulls about 285 Watts which is a 40 Watts more than the 2080 and about 35 Watts less than the 3080 and that gives me a bit more peace of mind when it comes to heat load and power efficiency as positioning two bottom intake fans underneath the GPU can really help with temperatures regardless of the results though the 3080 will still have many uses for me I can use it for future testing comparisons and even builds which I actually have some ideas in mind so I look forward to bringing that to you guys as for the cables the reason that they'll be replacing the existing stuff that I have in there already is because I wanted to introduce a little bit of color into the build seeing as this is the first iteration of upgrades I want to start a documentation of the evolution of my system with the code name neuro now before we go swapping out parts let's go ahead and give this thing a quick clean because I've honestly neglected the upkeep on this and yeah it's absolutely filthy so let's get that sorted out with that system teardown and then we'll get into the upgrades foreign [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] thank you [Music] [Music] thank you [Music] [Music] thank you [Music] [Music] thank you [Music] and finally the build is complete with a fresh set of sleeved cables some high airflow fans and most importantly a powerful new graphics card which all tie the build together and looks so so good but to say that the build went smooth would be a lie and just like with any Mini ITX build there were quite a few hiccups along the way firstly is somewhere along the way of tearing the build down it seems that I had bent a few pins one of them coming from one of the fan headers at the top of the motherboard as well as from the USB 3 header both of which I tried to bend back into place but unfortunately ended up snapping off one of them from the USB 3 header this doesn't really bother me all that much seeing as I don't really use front i o and instead of opted for the Mast cover on the M1 but instead use a USB hub that runs underneath my desk to the rear i o as for the 4-pin pwm fan header I was able to bend that one back into a usable position but it's still less than ideal attempting to perfect it any further I feel would result in the same conclusion as our USB 3 friend but by far the most challenging part of this whole build was with the custom cables particularly with the 16-pin GPU cable as we all know by now the design of this cable whether you're talking the included powered adapter or even some custom cables as in my case they all advise against bending the cable at the Port this isn't ideal for most users though as it effectively adds an extra 40 to 50 mils of height to the card which is super hard to work with so the first problem I had was trying to figure out how to route the cable without it interfering with the closure of the side panel the first idea that I had was to heat it up with a hair dryer and take the risk of bending the cable at the Port while running it over the top of the GPU this forced me to have to flip the power supply fan to inward to get it to reach but even still this wasn't ideal as the upward Bend would later conflict with the mounting of the liquid cooler that would also introduce two other problems seeing as the massive 24 pin has to bend and twist upward and over the power supply to meet the motherboard header it would effectively be blocking a good portion of the power supplies fan making it harder to dissipate any heat buildup in addition to that the T30 fans sitting right over the power supply from the liquid cooler they would be blowing warm air into what little Gap is available for airflow so heat buildup plus a restricted airflow path is not really a configuration on one to run in the slightest so delaying the completion of this build was the order of a new 16-pin cable from cable mod of course also I completely forgot that the CPU pump block also needs a SATA cable so of course I additionally ordered one of those this time it's a 350 millimeter 16 Pin cable which allows me to flip the power supply with the fan facing outward and then run the cable through the back under the GPU and finally along the front side of the port but honestly it's still not perfect I think of 400 millimeter cable would have given me just a little bit more slack to play with as you can see up at the front here there's a little bit of clumping due to the shortness of the cable still though a 350 millimeter cable I think I can get away with and it is at least nice to know that all the panels do go on without any issue something that was an issue though was the fact that my motherboard just completely bricked up after rebuilding the system with the new parts I just got absolutely no display out now of course I went through their standard troubleshooting procedure I tried different cables I tried a different motherboard I tried the integrated graphics on the CPU I even tried swapping back to the original cable mod set with the RTX 2080 and still nothing at this point I was pretty nervous and wasn't quite sure what was going wrong after spending significantly more time troubleshooting I found that the CP pu LED on the unit 5 was illuminated which is really odd because I didn't remove the CPU from the socket during the teardown so I was really confused how this would be the issue this left me with two root causes either the motherboard itself or the CPU now fortunately I had one other board that I could use to rule out either one of those and that is the gigabyte z590 Vision transplanting the existing parts to that board did result in a display out meaning that somewhere along the way the unified just stopped working now whether or not that's something that I did to it and unknowingly or if it was just on its way out already that's something I still can't answer the other question I had was if the motherboard is saying it's the cpu's fault is it actually the cpu's full or the motherboard to answer this I would need some new hardware so enter ASRock z490i Phantom gaming tb3 [Music] foreign [Music] one of the most stacked Mini ITX z490 Boards of its time we have a six plus three phase vrm setup with 90 and 60 amp power stages respectively along with some pretty tall actively cooled Hastings that are all joined together with the heat pipe running through them down to the chipset it even features this thing which is a sodium daughter board that additionally connects to your primary m.2 slot your HD audio and USB 2 header as well as two SATA ports now before rebuilding the system with this guy I decided to build a mock-up test bench to test everything outside of the case as a precaution of running into the same issue thankfully everything worked as it should the system was able to provide a display out for the Boost sequence but unfortunately wasn't able to access the existing Windows 10 on the drive long story short I had to reformat the drive and add a fresh install of Windows 11 only to be greeted with an incompatibility error at setup I then had to open up the registration editor and add a couple of bypass keys to actually get the OS installed at this point I could then finally commit to rebuilding the final system from the ground up but what about the unify well along with the abstract board I also ordered a cheap I3 10100f just to put the final nail in the coffin and yeah it turns out that even with a brand new CPU installed the board still resulted in no display out so yeah really unfortunate that the board died I have no idea what happened between the tear down and the rebuild I was also looking forward to using this in a future build but oh well sometimes things like that just happen and it is at least nice to have the final build all squared away and working the way it should now for the big question though and that is performance how does this thing run what are thermals like was it all worth it let's get it back over on the main desk and run some benchmarks and starting off with furmark after 30 minutes the 4070 TI settles into around 77 degrees which is kind of an average result if I'm being honest but keep in mind that this is on a very warm day with a room ambient of around 26 degrees Celsius rerunning these tests later on in the night with a cooler room temp of 21c resulted in temps in the low 70s peaking at around 72 degrees Celsius for a 40 watt increase over the 2080 that we had in there I'd say this is a decent enough Improvement considering that it is a two slot GPU larger models would see a few degree reduction but again we're quite limited on what cards can fit in the M1 here but if we run through some actual games instead of blasting for Mark all day we actually get some pretty solid results Apex for example saw temps in the low 60s and this is at 1440p high settings as for CPU benchmarks I ran a multi-core test in cinebench and on the first run it would appear that the ASRock board was holding back the 10900k to its default 125 watts of power resulting in a fairly cool result of just 63c after a quick bios update and rerunning the same test the I9 was able to consume well over 200 watts of power was shuttled into the mid 80s this is quite a bit more surprising as with the unified board I was getting around the mid 70s and the reason for the heat increase despite running more powerful fans is that the UniFi had the I9 only running at around 170 Watts or so still though pretty decent results all around considering that we are working with a 12 and a half liter case that's about one-fourth the size of your average ATX mid Tower so yeah ultimately very excited to be sick at some hours in the gaming and 3D rendering with this system I'll be sure to keep you guys up to date with any future changes as time goes on but that's going to do it for this video guys this is YouTube you know how to show your support thank you all so much for watching and I'll see you in the next video

Channel: TBar Systems

Views: 2,537

Keywords: Mini ITX, NCase M1, SFF PC, Tiny PC, RTX 4070Ti, 4070ti, inno3D, noctua, phanteks, phanteks t30, terra, liquid cooling

Id: 1siNfWA6EPk

Length: 17min 35sec (1055 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 21 2023