Gadgetory

a while back we got a tweet from a viewer who suggested we take a look at the s4 mini by NFC a completely unheard of indie outfit run by this guy Josh sniffing well I'm not sure what he's been sniffing but it must be some pretty good stuff because basically out of his garage he is building what appears to be by far the smallest case for custom gaming PC Builders out there measuring just two and a half inches thick the diminutive s4 mini case pushes the definition of small form-factor cases to the absolute breaking point but will it break when we try to cram a ZOTAC GTX 1080 and a core i7 7700 K into a system that's even smaller than the PlayStation 4 there's only one way to find out we're hosting LTX 2017 on July 29th 2017 it's a meet-up Tech carnival thing and it's gonna be a lot of fun learn more at the link in the video description distilling a gaming PC down to this degree comes at a cost the s4 mini has no front io to speak of the CPU cooler and RAM module clearance is 40 millimeters and GPU options that don't require some creativity are pretty limited thankfully more powerful mini cards have come into fashion and our msi gtx 1060 OC v1 fit quite easily without even being so tight inside that we couldn't fit two two and a half inch drives which will take gladly but even that it's probably not enough so what other tricks did they use well unlike OMS like MSI and ZOTAC the s4 mini uses an off-the-shelf mini ITX motherboard and a desktop graphics card but like them they're relying on a main external power brick with a high efficiency DC to DC power supply mounted inside there are a handful of options including some lower-cost ones for more pedestrian system configs but to give ourselves some breathing room we are using a dell 330 watt brick with an HD plex 300 power supply inside now without any modifications we ended up with what we'd consider to be a pretty decent machine we've got a low voltage core i7 7700 t a gtx 1060 16 gigs of vengeance lpx memory and an MP 500 m2 SSD for speed and a little bit of space savings behind the video card and firing it all up we found ourselves greeted with actually pretty great thermal and acoustic performance it's right in the middle of the other competitors in our recent small form-factor case roundup impressive perhaps even most impressive but I wouldn't call it a Jedi that was another one of those stupid looks great but can't perform cases would I well good news my friends the limit here is not our power supply or our thermals thanks to the s4 minis perforated side panels just volume so let's see then how far we can push our luck I mean if we look at our CPU cooling results we've got a lot of headroom there so step one we go ahead and upgrade to a 7700 k as for the RAM well come on this stuff's clearly not cool enough for a rig like this but ah a stroke of luck Corsair contacted us and asked if we wanted a sample of their new Dominator Platinum special edition torque we took one look at that stuff and said yeah seriously orange fins and labeling heat-treated titanium styling on the top bar 32 gigs of this was definitely worth the $75 we paid to have Josh overnight ship us a custom hot rod style side panel to go with it moving on to the GPU while we were scratching our heads trying to figure out how to get something bigger than a 1060 in here I mean we're kind of coming to the point where we can almost fit a card like so taks GT X 1080 mini if only the case were a little bigger or the card were a little smaller so if we yes my friends I hope you saw this one coming because we went there after taking the plastic shroud off we carefully trimmed down the rear of the heatsinks fins as close to the heat pipe as we dared to no not that closed dang it Ivan so one quick call to ZOTAC and another overnight shipment later and it's time for round two now we're talking now we can get the card inside the s4 mini but the stock cooling is still an issue but if we can't fit an aqua F 12 maybe a silverstone slim 120 mil on this mount here will be enough fire up fur mark end crap okay let's go back to the Noctua and FF 12 I mean it's only a couple millimeters off so I think you can see where we're going with this we've shaved off just enough to make it fit in under the 120 mil fan mounts and make it fit we did I mean this is Linus tech tips we always fit it in there if you know what I mean as for temperatures though we're stable in the high 80s we made it work but it was a little loud due to the lack of clearance between the fan and the side panel at about 50% fan speed though we got to the point where our noise level was acceptable without giving up too much of our GPUs boost clock as for the CPU with some careful under volting and tweaking we got it to hold at 4.2 to 4.3 gigahertz boost under synthetic load staying comfortably at 4.5 gigahertz that is full turbo under lighter workloads like games our Dominator platinum torques didn't want to go past 20 400 megahertz but this is an X 99 kit on a z170 board with a 7th gen chip so we made up the difference by tightening up the timings as far down as they'd go and all of this taken together gives us this tiny gaming rig whose only outward indication of its potency is the baa Ram vent and maybe the massive external power brick so let's take a few moments then to put into perspective the sheer amount of raw power contained in this little box we only planned to run a couple of benchmarks you know just to make sure that it was working okay but we were so blown way that we had to run more to make sure we weren't dreaming our decked out as for mini runs with the best single GPU systems we've tested even beating out our KB Lake bench system with a Founders edition card thanks to the additional turbo enabled by an overclocked card and it comes in at the top of the pack for what we've ever seen in terms of performance per litre now at 195 US dollars not including the power supply and without a fancy paint job not to mention the fact that it's completely sold out of pre-orders the s4 mini slots in with the rest of our premium small form-factor cases it's compact reasonably lightweight features rugged aluminum construction is near impossible to actually buy and isn't the easiest thing to work in but so far this is the closest I think I've seen to the idea that I pitched to Coolermaster four years ago and to say I love it would be an understatement tunnel bear is the simple to use VPN app that literally takes this long to turn on boom the app loads up you go okay yet that's the country I want you click one button it BAM no DNS settings and ports forwarding or any of that kind of nonsense and once you turn tunnel bear on you get a couple of key benefits your connection gets encrypted keeping your traffic safe and private from your internet provider advertisers etc and you appear to the websites and online services you're using as though you are in a different country getting you around pesky geo restrictions so try it out with 500 megabytes of data for free and no credit card required and then if you choose to get a year of unlimited data save 10% by go on a tunnel bear comm slash ltte so thanks for watching guys that this video sucked you know what to do but if it was awesome get subscribed hit that like button and maybe check out - where to buy the stuff we featured in the video description okay maybe the parts inside also down there is a link to our merch store which has cool shirts like this one as well as our community forum which you should totally join