 Ever since AMD released their massive many core Threadripper processors, enthusiasts have been chomping at the bit for an ITX small form factor solution where they could pack as many cores as possible into a tiny case like this one. And guess what, ladies and gentlemen? Today, we finally got it, sort of. Technically, this motherboard comes from ASRock Server Division, ASRock Rack, and is compatible with AMD EPYC CPUs, but that doesn't change the fact that we are going to build a sick freaking gaming rig with it with an RTX 3090 graphics card, 128GB of memory, and 64 processing cores. All in this tiny little thing right here. Is it going to overheat? Probably. Just like my sponsor segues are... hot. MSI's Vigor GK50 Elite Gaming Keyboard features Kailh Mechanical Switches, Perky RGB, an ergonomic high-low keycap design, and much more. Check it out today at the link below. To start with, the main advantage of Threadripper over EPYC, because they're both available in up to 64 core configurations, is that aside from the lower price, you'll actually tend to get better performance in desktop or workstation applications because AMD was more willing to go ham on the power consumption of a desktop slash enthusiast chip compared to, well, something that's supposed to be super power efficient for the data center. It's also overclocking capable. As for EPYC's advantages, well, they are several. This puppy has 128 lanes of PCI Express Gen 4 connectivity, up to octo-channel instead of just quad-channel memory, and it's got support for up to 4 terabytes of registered ECC memory. None of which we will be taking advantage of today, because this board only has four memory slots, so we'll be running quad-channel. It only has a single PCI Express 16x slot, so we won't be using all 128 lanes, and, well, you can't buy one terabyte memory modules yet, so... or ever. You could do 256. You could do a terabyte total. You could do a terabyte total, but we're not doing that. Of course, sometimes your choices are dictated by a lack of better options, and since there are no ITX motherboards for Threadripper, we are going EPYC today. Although it should be noted that this is not, strictly speaking, quite an ITX motherboard. See that? It does only have one PCI Express slot like an ITX motherboard in a standard ATX-style I.O., but it's actually a touch wider, so this is a completely non-standard... What do they call it? Deep ITX? Yeah, proprietary Deep ITX. Proprietary Deep ITX. The good news is that we did manage to find cases that happened to be compatible with it, sort of, after some modification. Even with the extra width, though, ASRock had to make a lot of stars align in order to make this happen. So first, one of the main reasons that Threadripper mini ITX boards don't exist is that Threadripper requires an external chipset on the motherboard for certain functionality, like, say, to RAID. EPYC, by contrast, just doesn't support it at all, so there's no need for an outside chipset. Another compromise they made was having very little I.O. So while we do have built-in dual 10 gigabit network ports, and that's freaking awesome, because we'd have nowhere to put a network card on this thing, other than that, we get VGA out, we get a... I believe this is a power button, we get a management network port and two USB 3 ports. We don't even have any additional USB 3 headers on the board. Here's another fun one. The board uses ATX 12-volt power only. Look at that. There's no 24-pin connector. There was no freaking space for it, which isn't to say that it doesn't still have some cool connectivity. All of these slimline ports over here, these four, are PCI Express Gen 4 8X, if we were to plug them into, say, for example, U.2 NVMe drives, although we can't use them for anything that requires power from the board, because we've only got this single 4-pin power input for them, and then these ones up here can actually run either PCI Express Gen 4 X 8 or SATA, if you want to hook up a bunch of SATA drives. This thing is so freaking cool. It's so dense, too. Even the back of the board is as covered with components as the front of a normal gaming board would be. I guess another more indirect advantage of Threadripper is that you can get much higher speed memory for it, because you can run unbuffered DIMMs. These 3200 MHz CL22 modules are about as fast as you can really go with Epic, and CL22? Yeah, that really ain't that great. For the best performance on Zen 2, I would want to be running more like 3200 CL15. But it's ECC, so of course you have error checking and correction, so that's good for reliability. That's funny, I went to install our 8TB, because this video is all about massive numbers here, 8TB Sabrent M.2 drive, and I realized this motherboard doesn't come with a screw for it, but it does come with some screwy accessories. So you got your standard I.O. shield, and then you got this trippy thing. Ah! Look at this. This is a 4-pin power connector to 6 SATA power, so that's that hard drive plug thing that I showed you guys before, and then it also has a 24-pin to 4-pin adapter for the 12-volt only power that goes into the motherboard. Crazy. Now that that's built up, we can turn our attention to our case. This is the SUGO 15 from Silverstone. It ain't cheap, but it's really cool. It's highly configurable, so you can either set it up for tons of storage, or for tons of air cooling, or for tons of water cooling. It all comes down to your personal preference. For us, we're going with a mixture. We don't really need any storage, but we need both a big air cooler on our CPU and a water cooling radiator for our GPU. One thing you might have noticed is that Jake did a little drill-out rivet thing here. So this used to be in here as like a support or something, and a 2.5-inch drive mount. Yeah, we don't have room for that, because we got to put a big old, what is it, deep ITX board in this thing. It's really nice that we're able to put a full-sized ATX power supply in here, because otherwise I don't know how we would handle the power spikes that come from our TX 3090 graphics. Here we go. Question for you, Jake. There it goes. There's a thing you have to remove. Oh, yeah, I was going to ask about that. There's a screw on the bottom. How does it come out? There's a screw on the bottom. Well, how do you get the screw on the bottom? Oh, wow, there's a removable bottom panel on this case. That is so cool. Just one screw, and then it slides out. All right. There's our GPU support out of the way. This thing can handle up to a triple-slot graphics card. It's pretty sweet. Where's the mounting hardware for this? Ah, now for our power supply. It's standard ATX in terms of like how it screws into the case. But what's special about it is its depth, or rather lack thereof. It's a 1200 watt power supply, 80 plus platinum efficiency. But this thing is like only as deep as a 120 millimeter fan pretty much. So that is what allows it to fit in here. Oh, hold on. It kind of hangs down from the top, you know what I'm saying? Actually, oh, you know what? There's pretty easy access to everything. I love this punch out on the bottom. I just realized that too. So you can reach your modular power supply interface. I was kind of worried about it, but... Super easy. Now we got to make a small configuration change to our case here. This rear 120 millimeter fan would be fine if we were doing something slightly less power hungry. But we want to turn it around to act as an intake so that our CPU is getting fresh air rather than the preheated air that's going to come from our radiator for the graphics card. So we're using a slim dual 120 millimeter radiator from XSPC. We just grabbed whatever was on the shelf and happened to be super Mondo slim. And then because we know that we don't have a ton of surface area, we're going with some pretty ballin' fans. Noctua Industrial PPC 3000 RPM fans. To be clear, I'm not expecting to run these at maximum speed all the time. It's just, hey, they have the potential to ramp up if we really need to. So we want it kind of right about kind of... Just put it on loosely and adjust it after. Right there. Man, this is a really tight fit. Wait! Not a very well designed bracket. I think it's not meant to have the fans on that side, but whatever. Yeah. We're bringing sexy back. You know, Jake, I do wish we had shorter cables for this. Yeah. That's all you're getting. In fairness to him, I think I assigned this project to him yesterday. So let's plug in the Wonko adapter now. That goes there. It feels unnatural to me that this is it. These four wires are motherboard powered. It's also kind of ugly. Jake? Hi. Did you check if the 24-pin fits? I'm up against one of those mini PCIe's. Okay, I'm going to flex it. Oh! Is it in? It's in. Doesn't get much closer than that. It's tight. It is right against the motherboard. It is putting pressure on the motherboard. Just don't screw the motherboard in. We don't even need it now. What the? Does there enough space to like bend it though? These cables are pretty flexible. I think we're good. I mean, there's only like two things left to put in, so. You'll have to pardon the construction noises. They basically told me, look, do you want it done fast or do you want it done quiet? And I was like, fast. So that's what we're dealing with. What the heck is going on here? No problem. This is not the best cable management that I have ever done. Now I kind of wish that the GPU was a bit longer actually. No, that's where the pump's going to go. Oh, yeah, that's right. Oh, yeah, that's right. Oh crap. How are we going to get that in there? I didn't really want to get the drill out, but maybe we could get the drill out maybe. We're just going to kind of ram it in like this. Drill four holes in the bottom and boom, it's attached. Oh man, this like window thing in the bottom here, so you can access the bottom of the power supply is amazing. Looks pretty dope. Next up, we're going to put in one of my favorite coolers. This is the NH-U12S TR4 SP3 and it's one of the only coolers on the market that was specifically engineered for Threadripper and by extension, Epic. Just anything with a lot of CCX is spread out over an incredibly large area. And what's so cool about this one is it's got this feature that allows you to offset the mount. So you can see we've moved it. What is it like six millimeters or something like that? Just a little bit. Now it's intended to help with PCI Express slot clearance. What we're using it to help with is clearance for our tubing to run over here to the graphics card. So you can see, like that. That is how our tubes are going to come through. Now it's time for some Epic thermal paste application here. I just do dots all over. There we go. Oh, so tidy. Good job Linus. Wait, no, I don't want this in just yet. I want to run my tubing first. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, dang it. Now I've got thermal goop all in the way. Looks like we're going to have just enough clearance to tighten these collars down. That is really close. So this will just chill here. There we go. Oh, no problem. Everything is so tight. It's a good thing we're using like a nice robust tubing because otherwise sharp fins on it over time. I wouldn't be too happy about. Literally touching the fins once I have this screwed in. Oh man. Let's throw the GPU in for me. Oh, I didn't run power for the GPU. This is a sweet RTX 3090. So it's actually using not like the founders board, but the reference board. So it's like freaking tiny. Watercooled by EK water blocks. This is a product Asus actually sells like pre watercooled with an EK block on it. And you only need two standard eight pin power connectors. And it's like single slot at the back, which is sick because a lot of the time even if you get a single slot water block on your graphics card, you're still stuck taking up two slots at the back because the I.O. is on the other side. So here you got three display ports, single HDMI, backplate. There's thermal paste on the back of it. I'll use my shirt to clean it. LTTstore.com. So this puppy is going to go. Oh man. There's a plate in the way. Look at the I.O. shield. I know there's nothing on it. Wait, that's where the thermal paste is coming from. It's coming from my hand. It's on everything. Ah, RGB. Just get just get there. Yeah. You remember what I said? Now I kind of wish that the GPU was a bit longer. Yeah, not a problem. There we go. Yeah. Why? It's tubing time, so this goes right there. It's going to be a little tough to screw in, but actually not that bad. Like the loop itself is pretty well thought out. Good work, Jake. Yeah, I can't even get you a view of this, Andy. This is just too tight. That's what she said. Ha ha ha ha. Oh, yeah. Did you get it in? Oh, yeah, it's in. Look at that. That is... Is this fan spin? Oh, yes. Oh, good. Okay. Is it fit? Oh, yeah. Isn't this a great layout? Easy. Easy. Last run. I mean, that's the thing about only water cooling one component in this system is you're only running like four tubes. Now what I could have... Wait, why did you make that tube so big? I was about to explain why I made this so long. Well, hold on. There's a reason for it, Jake. It leaves room if we wanted to do that whole cool idea with the expansion off the slimline things for us to have lots of room to work to add PCI Express cards and stuff like that. But we're not going to do that. Well, but now we could. So let's fill it. Holy crap balls. That is freaking tight. Look at this thing. This funnel's worked here longer than you, Jake. Well, okay, the pump works. Neat. Wow. It didn't take a lot of water. Slim rad. Put the cap on and do it a tilt? Yeah, for sure. Oh, the other way. I don't think it's gonna make a difference, Jake. That water's moving. Look. All right. Should we plug a monitor in? Yeah, we should find out if it actually works. Right? Did we swap the SSD? Did you swap the SSD? No. But in the bottom panel on here's hoping we haven't accidentally interfered with any of these little nubbins that need to go into the. Oh my God. Do they still do this? What? Freaking Silverstone. I've seen this. I've seen $700 cases from them that are like sharpied from the factory. Oh, because they like scratched it. Eww. Silverstone. I mean, it's like the inside of the bottom. Yeah. It doesn't technically matter, but like Silverstone. Should we fire it up with no side panels first? Yeah. Also it might boot VGA first. So who knows? I don't know. I've got no num lock, Jake. Not a good sign. While we were troubleshooting trying to get the system on, which turns out it is fine, I booted up the IPMI and on some server boards, you have these really weird interfaces with like these weird graphs and crap that even with dicking around with it for 10 minutes, I wasn't really able to understand. On this one, you can just put it in manual mode and set the fan duty cycle to like a static 0 to 100%. So I figured out which one is our radiator fans. I think maybe we'll try 50% duty cycle. Yeah, that would probably be. That's better. Still a good amount of air. It's really quiet. Okay, here we go. Holy bananas. That is a lot of cores and hardware info. 33.4 degrees and 50 degrees on the die. Let's fire up that task manager. There it is. Boom. Also memory ran at 3200 megahertz right out of the gate. Here we go. Cinebench R23. Sitting at about 92 degrees on the CPU. Did you put thermal paste on? I did. 52,000 freaking points. See you later, Threadripper. 32 core. Now we need to know if this thing can actually hold up in terms of thermal. So I have gone ahead and started a 30 minute stress test and we're going to see where it ends up. Should I also hit it with Furmark? Oh, I heard the fans ramp a little bit there. After about 15 minutes, we've settled in with GPU temps of about 70 degrees Celsius. That's what the fans running at half speed and CPU temps that are 66 degrees and sort of the traditional way of measuring them and 91.7 in the like on die way of measuring them. So that is well within tolerance for both of those. It's a lot of heat though. Like I can feel it from like way out here. It's crazy, but it's stable. Crazy stable. So let's go ahead and shut down our stress tests. And I mean we went and put a 3090 in it. We got to play some video games, right? I'm going for Doom Eternal. Doom is so easy to run. Stop using Doom. I don't want to. I like it. It's so easy to run. Stop. I better not be in the middle of a stupid like unskippable mission cut scene again. This is an epic gamer moment. If I've ever had one we're running at 55, 60 FPS. I actually have no idea what settings we're even at though. Turn that RTX on. It's basically cranked. It's cranked. We got ray tracing on. We're like all high like practically everything. Ray tracing on ultra. Turn motion blur off. Ew. Follow the objective dude. Oh, okay. Are these bad guys? They seem bad. Get in the limo. Press X. Press X. Press X. Oh, so I'm not supposed to fight them. X to what? To not die? It heals. It heals. This would be a sick video editing machine. This is a sick anything machine. I mean, I don't know what anyone would actually build or use something like this for, but it really does seem like the kind of thing that somebody would want, right? Maybe with a quadro. Like someone. Yeah. Yeah. You throw a quadro here. This thing's freaking incredible. So quiet too. It's only like mostly expensive. It's only got like a $10,000 CPU. Yeah. Yeah. Don't worry about that. Just like don't worry that I wouldn't tell you about our sponsor. Thank you Dollar Shave Club for sponsoring today's video. Is it time to shave that beard or at least clean it up a bit? Dollar Shave Club has you covered for all your grooming needs. They've got shower supplies, deodorant, and of course, they've got you covered for shaving. They sent us their ultimate shave starter set, which includes their executive handle with six blades and spares, a one ounce tube, each of their Dr. Carver's prep scrub, shave butter, and post shave dew. 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