Gadgetory

let's face it most small cases make some big compromises whether it's noise cooling or expandability and those tend to scare a lot of people off but not today it's like having a space heater the craziest thing to me about all of this you can't even hear it so streak on set out to build a case that uses a unique modular rail system to allow high-performance components to fit comfortably in a small form-factor and we're gonna find out just how comfortably that can be done thanks to see sonic who sponsored this third installment of our compact powerhouse build series your PSU is the heart of your system and see sonic is a leader in the category offering efficient power supplies with outstanding features and performance for your next build or upgrade check out see Sonic's products at the link in the video description starting on the outside the da2 is the perfect case for the minimalist Mac user who has a PC at home because gaming on Mac OS is a subpar experience at best in typical street comm fashion the entire case is beautifully finished in either black or silver brushed aluminum and in keeping with the minimalistic design there's no RGB anywhere honestly the things kind of a breath of fresh air in a market that's crowded with rainbow unicorn bonnet on the front the only i/o you get is a power button with an integrated power LED and a single USB 3.2 gen one five gigabit port now this is something I was a little torn on because I'm all for switching literally all the things over to USB type-c but the thing is most desktop peripherals still use type-a so not having at least one regular port and audio it might have been nice to is a significant compromise that is unless you've got an external USB sound card and a USB hub on your desk or built into your monitor which I do in which case I guess you probably won't care the stock side panels don't come with a window but rather are nicely perforated for airflow so if you're not much into cable management then that's a plus for you but if you do like to strut your stuff Street comm has you covered there as well with their tempered glass side panel kit with that said that side panel will limit your cooling options more on that later at the back the i/o situation is pretty solid with a 90 millimeter fan slot and full access to both the motherboard and GPUs i/o and the only shortcoming here is the positioning of the power supply pass-through it's right above the GPU which means it's basically impossible to cleanly route it in case you have the glass side panel it will probably get covered by your CPU cooler but your mileage may vary now removing the side panel is a bit unique it's actually just held on by the friction of these little rubber mounts which is both confusing at first and a blessing in the future because you'll probably be pleased but you don't to go find a screwdriver huh here's one to get inside and inside is where the da2 starts to get really interesting like don't get me wrong brushed aluminum definitely gets the juices flowing but modularity that would be my kryptonite and conveniently it's where the DA two shines so the inside of this case is essentially just a metal frame there's no motherboard tray no front panel and no power supply mount these features instead get screwed into the base chassis so in much the same way that a car company can build multiple different cars on the same basic frame you could technically build multiple different configurations in the same case so their first party accessories allow for a vertical GPU mount the tempered glass panels we mentioned earlier and even an inverted motherboard layout but if you're a bit handy the possibilities go even further than that so let's take a look at the rail system you pretty much just slide the mounting rails wherever you want to mount something and then screw them in you can use them for a pump hard drive fan maybe even a secret place to store that Nickelback CD that you don't want anyone knowing about it's okay we don't judge so to start with we wanted to see how the da2 would handle a pretty normal but clearly enthusiast level gaming rig overall the build process was fairly smooth thanks to the modularity of the case you can take off all the external panels allowing for 360 degree access making the usual ITX build headache a lot more manageable you can use a regular ATX size power supply in the da2 but you'll lose most of the space on the storage bracket as well as most of your GPU space so instead we went for a 650 watt SFX power supply from c sonic with all of that installed we've got to try out the rail system and it's actually super easy to use all of the components are nice and rigid just screw a rail onto each side of whatever you're mounting slide the rails onto the mounting screws and tighten we did notice that more premium all-in-ones like the course RH 100 Ivy to that we're using can be tricky to mount because of how thick and rigid the tubing is so we'd recommend something with thinner tubing if you plan to do this yourself so just button it all up and well BAM finished sexy rig so we've got Metro Exodus running RTX is enabled and this is at 1440p should be pushing our 20/80 pretty hard I guess we should check the temps right yeah I guess so you can definitely hear it yeah it's gonna say the the fans pretty apparent I mean I wouldn't describe it as loud but yeah from like a seated distance it's not too bad it's noticeable it's noticeable and especially when you consider that it's not that small yeah but it's also not that big and you know if you have a regular Founders card it seems to be kind of the noise level you're going to get I mean this obviously doesn't have the same level of sound deadening as like a and our six or something like that but I think it's it's good enough I mean every time you die it's just gonna screw it up a little bit you should probably just stay in this room for a couple minutes haryana stay in the room you know I'm not gonna die this time that's fine we just need to check what we're boosting to anyway okay yeah I'm we're boosting anywhere from around 1830 to 1860 and tubs not bad well stamps are gonna be 82 right because they are always there 80 excuse me yeah quite there but yes but they always are and CPU just over 50 okay so we're getting honestly about what we'd expect from a decent mid Tower yeah I'm not really surprised at all but I mean it's smaller probably half the size of a regular mid Tower it's not less all right let's pop this thing off so that doesn't mean there's not room for improvement though so the motherboard area actually does get a fair amount of cool air drawn over it and we could even improve that by throwing a 92 millimeter fan here at the back because we've got our a i/o drawing air from sort of the filters at the top and the bottom and then pushing it out the side but our GPU we actually found the ambient air just around it was quite hot and it's just kind of sitting in its own recycled exhaust I think if we put a fan of the front that maybe better but you can't really it's right completely flat you know I was thinking maybe if they had sort of to expand on the modularity a panel in the front that you could remove and if you didn't want a fan up front you could just put a flat piece or another option if you've got room for a dual rad then you've got room for two single Brad's what if we water-cooled the GPU what if we just custom water cooled the whole thing okay so confession time this is Linus tech tips and we never really intended for this to be just a regular case review because one of the first things that stood out to us about the da2 is that while it's not that small for a super compact case as long as you stick with the perforated side panel it supports a two hundred and eighty millimeter AIO liquid cooler and where you can fit in a i/o you can fit a custom loop if you're determined enough of course we weren't just gonna water cool the 9700 K and 2080 that wasn't gonna cut it rather we wanted to go with something a little more extreme Edition like the core I 999 ATX see it fits perfectly onto as rocks x2 9090 ITX motherboard which is pretty much the most badass ITX platform to ever exist and we slapped on a bits power mono block to keep the VRMs nice and cool then after mounting one of EJ's gorgeous blocks onto our Titan r-tx and installing it things started to get a bit tricky now we didn't intend to mount just one radiator rather we figured with a small amount of modification we could put a second ultra slim excess PC radiator under the GPU now that it was only a single slot with some slim scythe fans mounted to the bottom thanks to performance pcs for sending that over by the way we mounted that through the bottom filter and it wasn't all that difficult but it was becoming clear but even with the super small power supply and DD c-- pump there was no way we were fitting a reservoir in here that wasn't gonna stop us though even if we needed to use a vacuum pump to fill the darn loop thankfully using a tee fitting to fill combined with a bit of patience we were able to get it juiced up the last challenge then was Kayla management with the DA - I don't think they really put a ton of effort into this but you do have just enough room to tuck away all the excess cable from a stock SFX power supply with lots of mounting points coincidentally on the rail system if you had custom cables you'd be an even better shape so it's done I gotta say this is an absolutely incredible amount of raw power for the size like it's smooth yeah any move we might not get a better gaming experience than the previous set up because it's obviously not optimized for gaming you know an 18 core but what holy crap and the craziest thing to me about all of this you can't even hear it like I can feel it yeah yeah yeah like it's like having a space heater next to you like do you have do you have a stress test running in the background right now this is just the game oh wow like the metal of the case is like warm to the touch I left it for a couple hours earlier and it's like the whole case it's just like burning hot but these fans are barely running yeah the parts like the actual CPU and GPU it's themselves are at a very reasonable temperature silent yeah so there's two Noctua fans on here that are each running at a thousand rpm and then you got the slim scythe ones that they're not PDM controllable so I just put them to like 30% duty thank you you can't even see them at a normal angle either like it's absolutely crazy alright so for a final torture test I've gone ahead and fired up 32 threads of prime95 so that leaves 4 threads for our game still running good and we're still running Metro Exodus and at least to my eye this is too pretty turns I mean this is like 400 to 500 watts in a box this size so no guarantees it's actually still running particularly well and yeah if we check out afterburner our boost clock on our GPU is down to like 1600 megahertz and change that that's a little on the low side our CPU still looks good though around 60 70 degrees so yeah don't do stupid things like this but other than that this is a pretty freakin incredible machine thanks good job oh that was really rough so in conclusion for all its beauty the da2 does require a little bit of extra work to truly shine like you don't necessarily have to go as far as we did with full custom liquid cooling maybe you could make you could modify an a IO to run both your CPU and GPU or run to single 140 millimeters one for each or something like that it's just that without that it still does force you to compromise a little bit whether on cooling or on acoustics though in fairness I guess that does make sense it is just 17.5 litres and if you're willing to dial back your crazy specs or get creative it's got a lot else going for it it's incredibly modular with a stunning mentalistic design that would make even Jony ive proud I think the only thing really missing here is a rose gold color option it's making of options if you do end up buying a da2 for your next build or really any case you should pair it up with a power supply from see sonic they've got tons of options see how that's getting it for super efficient and high quality power supplies with excellent performance at all ranges of different price points and wattages they've got bottles that are perfect for small and compact builds like this one all the way up to full sized ATX power supplies for your epic battle station like in our gaming lounge pcs so check them out at the link in the video description for your next build so thanks for watching guys if this video sucked you know what to do but if you liked it hit like get subscribed or check out the link to where to buy the stuff we feed 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 join