Gadgetory

we don't generally review hardware before mass production here for what I think are fairly obvious reasons so I'm going to begin this video with a warning that goes a little something like this understand the risks involved in backing crowdfunded or indie projects before pre-ordering a century because I can assure you that if you're a small form-factor enthusiast it's going to be pretty hard to resist the siren call of doctors neighbors creation over here let's get down to business mass drop is featuring the sunjack light stick with a maximum output of 350 lumens a 5200 milliamp hour internal battery as well as an ip68 water resistance rating check it out at the link in the video description alright so as disappointing as steamos ended up being the box that valve sent out to the press to demo it showed us that a console sized full-fat gaming rig could be done and served as the inspiration for the case that i have in front of me at 7 litres total volume the sentry is still considerably larger than the PlayStation 4 is four and a half litres but it is actually a little bit smaller than the original Xbox ones 7.22 litres making it truly a console sized PC chassis that punches way above its size class' and punch it does unlike other grassroots tiny case projects that we've checked out the dann case a for SFX an N case m1 come to mind which are both built in lee and lee's factory out of anodized aluminum the sentry is built out of one millimeter galvanized steel with structural powder coating in black or white giving it substantial weight considering its diminutive size as well as an industrial look that I can personally appreciate but that might be a turn-off for some at the front as a pair of USB 3 ports and a power button with a colored LED ring the top is vented the bottom is vented with a couple extra holes here to secure the regrettably non optional stand that allows the power supply and CPU heatsink to breathe when the Sentry is mounted vertically the left panel is vented over the graphics card and the right panel is similar with the openings over the power supply and CPU fan area around back is where folks not familiar with the size of the Xbox one will get their first real feel for how tiny this thing is that's your graphics card IO a pass-through power cable and your motherboard IO this case couldn't really be any smaller without sacrificing over height video card compatibility let's get it open it really is quite similar to the steam machine prototype the ITX motherboard goes here CPU heatsink height is restricted to 47 millimeters or 37 millimeters depending on the layout of your motherboard the video card mount using this clever pressure retention system for the PCIe slot extension that is both easy to align and user replaceable if you had another one that you liked better or you're stopped working very clever the power supply goes here you can choose s FX or s FX L depending on your two and a half inch drive appetite and you know what I could cover every scenario but the Sentry's hardware compatibility is much easier to represent with this awesome little configuration tool on their website that lets you try out your components ahead of time and see how well they will all fit together very cool the assembly instructions are surprisingly straightforward to follow and building in the century only took me about 15 minutes I do have some comments though the manual suggests flipping the grill on your power supply if it interferes with the side panel but I just removed mine outright just make sure to keep your fingers out of it after the fact or you could literally die it also suggests running cables after installing the power supply but if you're using a modular SFX L unit like I was you'll find that this is about as much fun as performing surgery with a butter knife and you'll risk damaging the wires connected to the front power button so I would suggest plugging in ahead of time and finally what is it with Europeans and hex screws why are we using hex screws particularly ones with such low steel content as to make them basically not magnetic I can live without Philips head but please at least fix the magnetism in the mass production units if possible anyway you can use the cables included with your power supply make sure they're long enough to route where needed and then bunch up the extra length near the end of the video card that worked pretty well but with that said I quickly swapped those out for custom length ones from cable which made my life and cable management a little bit easier something that's particularly important for cases like this one that have no built-in fans whatsoever I mean where would they even put them I actually wouldn't mind spacing of the vent holes on the right panel to allow me to squeeze a 40 millimeter fan in wherever I wanted like if they just change the spacing so that it kind of always lined up wherever you go that would be kind of cool but that's about it I can't find anywhere else and besides does it need them well to find out I loaded up the sentry with a 22 core 145 watt TDP Xeon CPU 64 gigs of ram a GTX Titan XP a 1 terabyte 850 Pro SSD and a 700 watt SF XL power supply this is about as fully loaded worst case scenario a configuration as you can possibly get and to be very clear will not be representative of what most people will be running though I do plan to follow this up with a more realistic configuration compared to some other small form-factor cases in the future but let's start with a baseline reading here for our torture configuration so with the chassis mounted vertically and the panels off to represent how this Hardware should behave on an open bench the CPU throttles already it was pretty hot that day but GPU boost clocks look pretty good with the panels on GPU clock speeds do fall and chassis temperatures are very toasty especially around back where the GPU exhaust is located bear in mind that this is all on auto with independent synthetic tests running on the CPU and GPU so under a more gaming like realistic load and with some tuning of the GPUs fan profile allowing it to ramp up higher than default I was actually able to generate these results pretty darn impressive if you can control CPU heat dump and you don't mind a little bit of noise it's actually not that bad the Sentry can handle pretty much whatever video card you can throw at it flipping the chassis horizontally does hamper its abilities somewhat making the GPU fail I'm work a little over 10% harder right off the bat and I would strongly recommend the vertical orientation with the stand with high-end hardware which is all fine and good for components that have fans but what about the system components that don't have their own active cooling well here the story gets a little bit less happy though not impossible to solve my SSD ran at 62 degrees on the surface of the drive mounted near the video card so I'd strongly recommend using the alternate mount that's next to the GPU intake that was pointed out to me by the dr. Xavier guys but more alarming than that my ram chips and motherboard chipset were well over 70 degrees each this isn't instant death territory but it's hotter than I think a lot of people would be comfortable with so bottom line I wouldn't recommend my configuration here but a more sensible config with a flower style CPU cooler like Intel's box cooler would absolutely rock in this baby because it would help the RAM and the motherboard stay quite a bit cooler I mean as long as you're not running multiple synthetic loads you may still be okay anyway even an open-air style ACX 2.0 cooler 980ti generated better gaming results surprisingly than a blower style reference card at the cost of CPU temps however and when not using the GPU and a 69 50 X 10 core managed to stator bowed up encoding video full-bore an Adobe Media encoder if I wasn't doing anything with the GPU I think they're going to sell a lot of these although it remains to be seen what exactly the small production run pricing is going to look like speaking of outlandish prices have you ever looked at your cell phone bill and gone I mean yeah there's a lot of stuff included with this but I'm paying a lot of money and I don't actually use half of it well if you have then maybe check out ting the mobile carrier that's focused on customer service and customer satisfaction first you will not speak to a robot if you call ting and the best part about it is that you pay only for what you use with the average ting bill coming in at only 23 bucks a month per device but don't take my word for it head over to linus dot ting dot-com and check out their savings calculator you enter your last couple of bills you enter how much you're paying and it spits out how much you would save by switching to ting and if you're stuck in a contract they'll actually cover 25% of your cancellation fee up to $75 and they've got new lower mobile data rates across the board with data at now only $10 per gigabyte beyond the first gig so try it out and if you sign up using our link you'll also get 25 bucks in service credit or towards a new device we've got that link in the video description all right 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 or check out the link to where to buy the stuff we featured in the video description also linked in the description is our merch store which has cool shirts like this one and our community forum which you should totally totally join now that you're done doing all that stuff you're probably wondering what to watch next so click that little button in the top right corner to check out our latest video over on channel super fun