Gadgetory

one of the most unusual products that we have ever looked at this is the drone station high-performance DIY a IO that is do-it-yourself all-in-one PC the Corsair Flash Voyager go is the easy way to move photos music and videos between your Android device and your PC click now to learn more now given the weight of this thing the packaging quite frankly doesn't really inspire confidence it did arrive in one piece but with a full system built in it I'd be a little bit scared the exception here is the styrene like plate Armour piece that goes in front of the LCD panel that is attached via a reusable strap to the rest of the system the monitor would likely be fine even if every single other part of it died in the shipping process now even though this is an AI oh it's a product that really embraces the do-it-yourself spirit so the first thing to do with it is build a standard ATX computer inside it with the parts of my choice the handles are very robust and ergonomic so even though it's large and very heavy it's got those so you can lift it and move it around to a table where you can work the user manual which I've misplaced but don't worry about it it's good trust me is uncharacteristically really good I mean this is where I usually expect a lesser-known company like a IO to falter but the English and it is excellent is got guidelines for component selection some best practices and a pretty complete step-by-step build guide a plus right there for the manual taking the drone station apart reveals all the interior wiring that passes through from the inside computer to the front or rear of the outer shell Ethernet and a single power connector that handles both the monitor and the PC come out the back and then the front has two USB 2.0 ports two fan controllers monitor controls headphone and microphone jacks two USB 3.0 ports and then finally power and reset switches topped off with a couple of five and a quarter range Bay's that can be populated by actually screwing an optical drive or something else into the bottom of the chassis inside a one quick note about the fan controller is that you can run the fans on the left and the right side at either 1/3 2/3 or full speed and they are controlled independently with those two switches now the inside chassis once removed is a fairly bog standard PC case with a couple of modifications so there's no front plastic bezel because that would just take up unnecessary space inside there's some mesh over where the five and a quarter inch bays would be there's a hole cut in the back to interface with the outer shell and then a repositioned a toolless drive cage in the top for your three and a half inch bays and then finally a two and a half inch bake age that takes four drives in the bottom four SSDs now the drive cages are functional but I don't think I would trust them in shipping or even if someone who isn't as careful as me with my PC we're handling it they are not reinforced in any way which isn't a problem for the SSDs but four hard drives can be a major concern because they're actually quite heavy the PCI slots in the back really took me you know back to the good old days of PC building but unfortunately not really in a good way I had to pry them out something I've cut my hands doing enough times to be upset that I had to do it and their tool list design just isn't very good tooless PCI remains a bit of a holy grail of case design because most of them don't work and the drone station is no exception they didn't work with my dual slot graphics card but it gets worse because unlike most of the ones I've encountered in the past the tool is hold downs cannot be unscrewed and removed you would actually have to drill out the rivets so I had to force a screw into my graphics card from a weird angle in order to get it in there oh well the good news here is that the case easily accommodates a 7990 graphics card which is about as big as a consumer graphics card can get and so now all that remains is to find out if we can cool it the fans in the outer shell are controlled by those switches as I mentioned before but the included fans in the chassis so there's two in the top there need to be plugged into your mother bored fortunately they have such long leads that you could reach a suitable software-controlled header on almost any motherboard overall the build process was painless enough I didn't end up cutting myself which was nice and there's no real cable management to speak of but at least it has a CPU cutout for easier mounting and there wasn't really anything unexpected inside so we're not completely back to the Dark Ages or anything like that it was easy enough once the PC is assembled you'll hook up all the wires and slide it inside the the plastic outer shelf it fits in there pretty snugly and you can see now how the cooling strategy is supposed to work so there are removable dust filters in place and then the left side is intake and the right side is exhaust the top is also exhaust all in all looking at this strategy whether you're running on low or high on those fans it should be able to handle almost anything in there without overheating with the PC in place you close the very DIY you know bought these at the hardware store feeling butterfly latches and you're pretty much ready to go on inspection though the latches aren't the only homemade looking thing about the outside of the drone station the finish is quite imperfect in some places and the window on the back doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me even with the LED lighting and even if I took the off the side panel of the PC inside I mean it's there but it seems very very optional maybe they have another option coming in the future where it'll make more sense but yeah I don't want all of bad stuff though to take away from the strength in the key areas like the handles and the fact that once it's closed up it doesn't feel like it's going to come apart or anything so while the fit and finish might not be perfect it's solid enough that I'd be confident having my PC inside when I first fired up the actual PC I immediately noticed that even though I didn't get the 120 Hertz premium monitor option the screen has a surprising amount of color depth and very strong viewing angles for a TN panel I wish they'd offer an IPS option or even a VA option but if I'm going to be stuck with a TN monitor I'm glad it's at least a pretty strong one and all of this leads us to actually sitting in front of the thing using it in actual use the angle of the monitor which is slightly angled back is better in my estimation than the Krait computer high performance gaming AIO that we checked out recently but has the same disadvantage as the Krait in that it's not adjustable at all so you would need to actually angle or elevate your entire PC to change it the five and a quarter inch bays are a nice touch even though I'm unlikely to want an optical drive it gives a lot of expansion flexibility even if you're not sure if you're going to need it so you know you could put something like you know fan control I mean you've already got fan controller fan controllers or card readers stuff like that in there so I think that is a definite plus for it in practice I didn't find it very appealing to plug my keyboard and mouse into the very front of my PC and unfortunately the drone station doesn't have any side or rear ports at all other than that Ethernet port in the back and the power plug in the back but it does have one redeeming feature and that is if you don't mind routing the wires through a gap in the outer shell you can actually plug in stuff that you never want to remove internally to the back of the inner chassis and then leave those front ports open and then just have the wire snake out the only issue there is that if you ever need to pull that thing out for some reason you actually need to take the back off of your a i/o in order to do it and if you have a mouse like my old one that used to from time to time just need to be unplugged and plug back in that'll get real old real fast all right so I talked a lot about the cooling but I haven't talked temperatures yet now I intentionally loaded this thing up with a radio and HD 7990 one mother of a hot graphics card and I was actually very pleased with the results at about 45% fan speed max on that card we reached 80 degrees and we were bouncing between 950 and a thousand megahertz on the course in our stress testing staring into the fire in Far Cry 3 the core i5 CPU maxed out at around 80 degrees with an aftermarket cooler master cooler on it also in that gaming scenario so all in all there isn't too much me to say about the drone station it performed very well in the areas where I expected it to and that is cooling it performed well in areas where I didn't expect it to like the LCD on the front and I understand where they're going with all of this I mean it's an all-in-one that's fully upgradable easily capable of housing the latest gaming components and has you know rugged handles on it for easy transport but the overall product feels more like an interesting experiment rather than something that I would actually spend a thousand dollars on the inner chassis needs to be prop more properly integrated and more robustly built for that to happen you can see that putting the kind of pressure on the graphics card that might occur during transport flexes the motherboard tray and the rear panel of that case in a way that I found quite unsettling and the fit and finish of the outer shell needs to be better to command such a price tag for what is essentially a case and a monitor with nothing else really included I could be wrong though in all of this guys if you're looking at this going - totally doesn't get it I want to hear from you in the comments tell me what you'd use it for a PC was a 24 inch monitor integrated into it you can put basically any hardware you wanted to I mean please go ahead and argue your case I want it I want to know if you guys think I'm totally wrong about this anyway guys thank you for watching my a a drone station DRN stn I'm assuming it's pronounced on station review like and share this video if you liked it dislike it if you disliked it I promise that that won't hurt my feelings in any way in fact I love getting your feedback leave a comment on the video either here or in the Linus tech tips forum which is linked in the video description if you want to discuss this product or you have constructive criticism for me and my team if you have no constructive criticism and you thought the video was perfect then there's no pressure but the video description also has a support link with options to buy t-shirts give us a monthly contribution or even just give us a kickback when you buy random junk on Amazon so we'd love it if you did any of that stuff as well check it out if you enjoy our videos it helps us out a whole lot oh and as all please don't forget to subscribe - 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