Gadgetory

here at LTT we're all about pushing boundaries far beyond what anybody asks for like when we brought you the PC made of radiators cooling insane hardware with zero fans what ever since then we've wondered what would it look like if some actually smart people tried to achieve the same thing well today we get to find out because the good people over at Monster labo have done just that creating a case that supposedly is capable of cooling up to an intel eight core ninety nine hundred K and an RT X 27 T completely passively but don't pass by private Internet access private Internet access gives you a safe and protected IP and it's got loads of other features as well check it out at the link below with this being monster lavas first product actually it's even called the first we were naturally a little bit skeptical but now that we've built an entire system inside it there actually is some truth to their claims but more on that later starting on the outside the first has an understated look well I mean ours does have a custom paint job so it's visually a lot louder but normally it's painted in either black or white satin metal finish along with a metallic accent piece which kind of to me makes it look like a mini-fridge but I'm not mad because with everything else these days turning towards rainbow barf I personally appreciate this a more subdued look up top we get dual USB 3.0 audio and a British power button that frankly just loves to get stuck around back there is access to the psu and that's about it with the motherboard i/o relying on pass through cables limiting you to five ports max on this oddly unfinished backing piece it seems like this was kind of an afterthought especially since the included DisplayPort pass food doesn't have mounting holes and the HDMI pass-through didn't come with screws but enough of the boring stuff inside is where things get interesting after removing all three outer clamshells and their accompanying 14 screws we finally get to get a glimpse of the internals and right about now it also starts to become apparent that this case isn't for first-time builders or even pretty experienced ones since we ourselves were kind of lost at this point but okay we're humble why not just consult the manual because there is no magic no monster labo instead opted for a series of assembly videos which are way more annoying to scrub through than a regular print manual but nevertheless they did help us find a few more screws that were hiding behind this weird fabric tape that we quickly introduced to the trash bin once it is open up though man is it ever cool-looking I mean literally look at that heck and heat sink its massive and the heat pipes the head pipes oh he piped both the CPU and the GPU each get six of their own evenly spread throughout the heatsink now I'm starting to think their claims might actually have some merit alright so time to throw some hardware in it and boot it up right well because of the first totally non-standard mounting and form factor planning ahead is kind of a must thankfully monster lava has vetted a bunch of hardware already with compatible parts listed on their site including what motherboards and GPUs worked and what brackets or modifications are necessary in our case the triple found our TX 2070 we chose was supposedly a non-issue all we should have to do is remove the cooler and strap-on monster llamas provided BRM heatsink but it wasn't that easy the screws for the vrm cooler weren't long enough so we ended up having to use zip ties to hold it all together it is worth noting though that this accessory isn't yet available so hopefully they'll have all that ironed out by launch and then again maybe quirks like this are to be expected in this wacky realm of custom cooling as for our X 470 motherboard it to call for some minor modifications but thankfully both went to subscribe first it requires the use of their custom riser which is only included on the premium model so watch out for that and second the audio chipset had to be removed as on this board it's installed on a riser and would otherwise block the heat pipes this sucked so again plan ahead don't be like us we suck hopefully on Monster Lobos second case the heat pipes are positioned to better comedy boards like this as daughter boards aren't uncommon on ITX motherboards things did start to look up though when it finally came time to put all the pieces together that is until we went to mount the motherboard and found that there was no mention anywhere of which bracket to use for AMD's a.m. for socket fortunately though monster lavas customer service was pretty quick to respond and they informed us that a.m. for boards actually used two of the brackets in tandem which was easy enough after we figured it out once that was out of the way the rest of the assembly was pretty straightforward you might have to bend the heat pipe just a little bit and slide the motherboard and GPU mounts back and forth in order to make sure everything lines up properly but that's apparently pretty normal installing Coursera's SF 600 sfx power supply was a walk in the park and if fan doesn't even spin up at full load with this setup nice storage wise we opted for a Samsung m2 SSD for the first does advertised support for three two and a half inch drives along with one three and a half inch drive if that butters your biscuit just above the PSU is where the included 140 millimeter fan can be mounted or it can be removed to accommodate full ATX power supplies a nice touch but who cares about all that we want to know about performance and as you can imagine with a high-end set up like what we chose temperatures are simply not going to be as low as with a fan cooled setup but for something that's entirely passive this is pretty impressive we did notice when running without the fan the 2700 X loses some boost o'clock while hitting 84 degrees Celsius under an eye 264 CPU load but if you remove the top cover panel like they recommend it's really competent monster Lavo does mention that the actual passive TDP rating on the first is only 215 watts but you'd be hard-pressed to find an application that would actually load both parts to 100% power drop consistently hence why you could run a higher end config like we did once the fan is added into plate temps are a lot more comfortable we sat hours to run at 700 rpm which was inaudible even as close to a foot away from the case speaking of inaudible the coil wind from the GPU is not because of the way it's positioned the GPUs power distribution is right near the big fat opening on the top of the case and without the higher noise floor of a typical fan cooled build the video cards high-pitched whine is surprisingly irritating even from a sitting distance it sucks and I guess that's kind of where the concept of these passive cases starts to fall apart for me coil whine IMO is actually way more annoying than the low hum of a fan and frankly with a decent a i/o on your CPU and the gargantuan GPU coolers of today most regular rigs tend to be pretty inaudible anyway so if it were me I'd stick to the a prevention fan setup but if you're not an audio file or just hate hearing your PC you can find a GPU that doesn't suffer for much coil whine and if you don't mind your hardware running a little hotter than most this can be an awesome way to achieve a nearly silent PC as for the first itself for a $400 plus case it's kind of a hot mess but honestly I love it I just like it I don't know that I'd recommend it full-on clearly one or two corners were cut but it's just so freakin cool I kind of looks like a like a build-your-own horse or one so yeah I want it fresh books is the small business accounting software custom-built for how you want to work it's the simple way to be more productive organized and get paid quickly fresh books lets you create and send professional-looking invoices in less than 30 seconds set up online payments with just a couple of clicks so you can get paid up to four days faster and see when your client has viewed your invoice to put an end to the guessing games for your unrestricted 30-day free trial just go to fresh books comm slash tech tips and enter Linus tech tips in the how did you hear about us section so thanks for watching guys just like this video if you thought I sucked like it if you didn't and be sure to subscribe join our forum and visit our merch store where you can get cool shirts like this one that say Linus is name on them