Gadgetory

what is going on YouTube J's two cents here and I have built myself a test bench be honest were the most challenging builds I've ever done with its improved radiator support and legendary noise optimization the new define r54 fractal design is a PC builders dream come true click the link in the description to learn more now probably the first thing you realize when taking a look at this guy is this is not a conventional looking test bed now case labs likes to take a unique approach to things and that's exactly what they've done here really they took an existing chassis and turned it into a test bed this is their mercury s8 typically it's a little bit taller it's got a top panel side panels and it looks like a complete rectangle a cube if you will well I guess cubes are equal lakes on the other side making it a square okay it's a rectangle whatever certainly not a sphere right so what they've done is they've shortened it a bit put no side panels no tops on it added these handles and called it a test bed and I think it actually works very very well because it allows me to fit a lot of things on here without making it super cluttered I have a radiator that's fully mounted without just hanging it off the side like you have to do with some or zip tying it to it which I think looks kind of silly you've also got over here another mount where I've got three fans on here these are the phobia noise blocker phobia nbe loops and B stands for a noise blocker they're a rebrand of that three 1000 rpm fans that are spinning about 500 rpms at all time keeping the motherboard nice and cool and the VRMs blowing air across the entire top of the whole enclosure here you've got a basement compartment down here where you can have your power supply and extra fans or hard drives or whatever you want in the bottom and then you've also got on the other side typically where the motherboard or the hard drives would go I've opted to turn this into a radiator station so it's pulling air in going through the bottom and then on the on the inside of the bottom I actually have a fan that's in there exhausting air out of that compartment so it doesn't get all heats out but it's actually a very very flexible test test bed if you will and this is actually one of their more affordable cases believe it or not before loading this thing out with the radiator mounts it's two hundred and fifty nine or two hundred and forty nine dollars and after I added the two radiator mounts which is really all I did it was three hundred dollars now I know that sounds like a whole bunch but compared to how much know the case labs SMA eight was coming in at seven hundred and forty nine dollars and compared to some other test beds which are already 250 or 300 dollars on the market it was a very very awesome solution to go with it gave me a ton of flexibility I could have even put a radiator in the front if I wanted but since I'm using a Bay res I ended up not being able to do that I could have put a 240 there as well but I could have done a 360 a 360 into 240 and if I wanted I could have even put another red on the other side to hung it off a top section had radiators going everywhere in this thing I mean the amount of room on this is just insane now let's go and talk about the hardware that is in this guy for a motherboard I'm running the Asus x99 deluxe that is obviously in x99 I have coupled it with an Intel 5820k hex core 12 thread processor now that was specifically because of requests from you guys asking that I do more of the Intel x99 stuff but you want to see some more affordable options like the 5820k and see how that stacks up so stay tuned for a review on that that is definitely going to be coming the RAM on this is the Kingston HyperX predator 2800 dims I've got 16 gigabytes of that and then the graphics card on here is the visiontek r9 290 cryo venom that's a pre-installed EK water block and I actually had the version that came with a 360 fully custom water loop from ek water block so all the water cooling you see here is as provided by visiontek which is not even the water cooling company came with the card the only thing I had to add to turn it into a complete loop was my CPU block which we'll be doing a review of as well that's the supremacy Evo full nickel water block it's actually a step up from what's in skunkworks right now I think it looks fantastic but all the fittings and everything with the exception of the 90s that you see here were actually provided with the graphics card so that's pretty freakin awesome now when it comes to the hard drives and stuff I've got one terabyte Western Digital black in here and I've also got a 256 gigabyte a data SSD in here our power supply and running the EVGA supernova g2 1000 this is a 1000 watt gold rated power supply and I'm running their red cable kit from EVGA so pretty much everything you see on here with the exception of the Intel CPU was provided for review so we've got a lot of individual reviews that we can be doing on this test bed and we will will be taking a look at the graphics card we take a look at the water loop the water block the CPU performance I mean all of it we're going to take a little of course the RAM we're going to look at every bit of that I want to go ahead and address some questions that people have been asking me on Instagram and Twitter where I've been putting up photos of this build as it was happening so make sure you guys are following on that social media if you don't want to miss out any behind the scenes stuff it tends to go on when I do these builds the most common question I was asked was Jay if it's a test bed why the hell are you putting a water-cooled graphics card in there and not using quick disconnects well guys it's actually a very valid question and glad you guys asked one of the cool things about this motherboard is it has multiple PCI Express 16x lanes so I can leave this graphics card plugged in i can grab another another graphics card plug it into the 16x slot right here and actually do full benchmarking on it without ever touching the water-cooled graphics card I don't even have to take it out I can just simply plug in the other card plug the power into it and the first graphics card will be ignored if there's no display hooked up to it so I don't have to worry about that now let's say I wanted to do a crossfire or SLI configuration test I can take this graphics card out the flexible tubing will allow me to kind of bend it out of the way stick it up top or support it with something and then put my other graphics cards in plug in power do my test when I'm done plug this back in I'm a big fan of this card in the way it looks in fact I was even doing some 4k gaming last night on this card it's going to be a fun review it's actually very very capable card and even though it's nothing new it's still worthwhile talking about especially with how cheap they are now in fact at the time of making this video vision Tech was selling this exact r9 290 with the pre install block for 299 dollars as part of the Black Friday sale now I know that that's going to be a little late for some people watching this video in the future but it was at least worth mentioning today because 299 dollars you get this graphics card and the block installed that's an insane deal I mean those guys are just in and now I have to say that this was one of the most challenging builds I have ever done and the reason for that is all three sides are exposed now I've built test benches before and in the past especially at work I just don't care about the way the wiring looks because it's not going on display but since I do videos in here I don't want some spaghetti monster in the background terrifying everybody in my videos I wanted something clean and presentable and that deserved as much as a tent as much attention as skunk works got because I'm a huge fan of the case labs cases so what I've ended up doing here was spending a ton of time finding how I was going to route my wires now the wires in this thing are already not the most flexible thus leaving that EVG is using on their individually sleeved cable kits is very very rigid and stiff that makes it actually very difficult to route and get bends without it wanting to twist and kind of kink and do its own thing but as you can see looking in the bottom here the only wires that are visible are the wires coming off the very back of the power supply and I have them all stuffed and tucked away where you can't really see them and I've got the water tubes running through here as well so it's actually very very open and not very cluttered I also have an exhaust fan in here for the radiator cubby pulling all the hot air out of the radiator space so everything on this just flows and works together very well it took quite a bit of time to figure out the best method of doing that now the other thing that's really cool about the way that this power supply is set up is that I can reach all of the modular plugs that having to remove any panels or any covers or anything so if I need to hook up more power for testing of you know maybe a graphics card that has to eight pins or three eight pins or something like that or plug in another SSD that I'm going to do a test on I can just plug in the wires do what I needed to do when I'm done unplug those stick those away and I don't have them hanging off anywhere once again making it look like a spaghetti monster but even these three fans right here and getting the wires tucked away back here and plugged into the PWM splitter it was a pain in the ass this was the hardest build I've ever done but I want extremely anal on this I mean I even received the power power or the pump power cables because they were just a jumble of colors there was green yellow white red and it was just very very ugly so I went ahead and recently those so it matched the build and here we are today with what I'm calling project bloodshed really that comes down to the fact that it just looks like blood circulating through the entire loop I know I've talked about red being a difficult color to remove but I don't really see myself doing a whole lot of removal on this anyway this is probably gonna stay together for a while so guys this has been project bloodshed tell me what you guys think what you guys think about this case and the way it's loaded out what would you have changed if this were your build because it's phased it that's one of the fun things about PC building is there is just an infinite amount of ways we can customize things and call them our own this is my own I'm calling it project bloodshed what would you do what would you build and if you've built out a test bench what are the specs on yours put it down the comments I do like reading all about your guys's computers send me pics to Facebook or Instagram J's $0.02 and as always guys I'm gonna go ahead and get on out of here I hope to see you guys in next