 Contrary to what you guys said the legs never fell off and my original desk PC's performance has held up nicely as my daily driver But there are a few quirks that never got addressed So we're going completely back to the drawing board and building a brand new desk PC from the ground up With a challenge. We're gonna cram a complete water-cooled gaming system into the thickness of a regular desk Introducing the LTT D2. It's got more D than we've ever had before Elgato's new wave one and wave three USB broadcast microphones are here use their wavelength app to control your wave mic and up to Seven other audio sources and create independent mixes. We're gonna have them linked below Let's start with what the original desk PC the D1 did well from the beginning the liquid-cooled core i7 extreme 6950 Performed as you'd expect great even today if we're being honest and the Nvidia GTX 1080 and 64 gigs of 3200 megahertz Dominator Platinum RAM didn't leave much to be desired either, but things have changed The D1 is a great machine for a desktop PC It's got a great Special careful Other than that, fan and RGB control are two things that have improved vastly in the last few years. And the biggest one, there is nothing more annoying and painful than scooting my chair up to the front of my desk only to have the corner jam into my leg and the armrest poke the power button. So I made the decision to rebuild. With our new workshop and new talent, we're well on our way to making a desk PC that is gonna blow the old one away. I've enlisted the king of builds that take too long, Colin, to design the new desk that fixes all the existing problems and fits a few more key requirements. As I alluded to before, number one is we're going 1U. Packing everything into a 1U space, that's the slimmest that you'll see out of a commercial server, is going to be a challenge. But dang, is it ever gonna be slick. 1.75 inches of height is only a quarter of the current one. Number two, we're gonna hard line, water cool everything this time. No easy route, putting all the tubing under the desk and strapping it to the bottom. Number three, we're gonna upgrade the performance because we can. We started by getting the main ideas down on paper. And by paper, of course, I mean, MS Paint. What a masterpiece. Then with the key deliverables roughed out, Colin began pulling existing CAD designs from online sources like GrabCAD and from manufacturer self-published files to begin modeling up the desk. Spending time designing is where a penny of investment really does equal a pound of result because solving problems in CAD ahead of time is much better than fixing them later. For example, we originally had the exhaust going downward through large flat mounted radiators. This would have given us great cooling, but because of the lack of space, there was no way to get even 90 degree fittings onto our rads. Here's another fun one. I had assumed that we would run tubing over some of the components, but as it turns out, there is just no room. This forced us to make significant changes to the layout to accommodate parallel runs system-wide. As of writing, we're on roughly milestone seven here, and realistically, we'll probably keep iterating, but we're far enough along to give you guys a closer look at it. The overall size of the desk hasn't changed much from the onset at 60 inches by 32 inches. That'll make it a smidge deeper and about half a foot wider than the D1. The D2 is also gonna forego the weird glued on table legs that didn't fall off and use the same standing desk base from Vivo that I actually use at home. Motorized desks have come both down in price and up in capabilities since they first hit the mainstream, and the dual lift motors on this unit shouldn't have any trouble lifting our desktop with its 275 pound rating. The position of the motherboard and graphics card have been pretty much set since the early revisions. Side I.O., like on the D1, is a bit easier to reach around to than having all the ports in the rear, but the only reason that we did it that way in the first place was because we didn't have any front ports built into the desk. I also really liked the idea of having the motherboard and graphics card sitting front and center in front of me. The position has been inset about an inch from the back to give a little bit of space for cable strain relief. The static pressure optimized fans have moved around a lot. They were originally placed on either side of the desk, drawing filtered air into the desk from the bottom to be passively exhausted through the radiators next to them. The problem is that any of the non-water-cooled components wouldn't be getting enough airflow. After mocking up some different layouts for aesthetics, we settled on rads on the right and fan banks on the left. Our dual 480 millimeter Alpha Cool X-Flow rads, well, they're not our 480 millimeter rads because we ended up getting rid of them because of the right angle fitting issue that I alluded to before. And we could have solved this by kind of pocketing out the desk in the bottom to fit these parts, but that was against the clean, sleek design philosophy of the project. Thankfully, Alpha Cool has an exhaustive list of radiator options, so we snagged some 3D models for 40 millimeter thick, one new rads, and then doubled the quantity up to four rads to make up for the loss of cooling capacity. Pretty much every layout of these small rads was considered. Up and down, left and right, baffled, staggered, exhausting out the back, exhausting out the bottom, you name it. In the end, we added two more, bringing the total up to six, with three double stacked banks around the perimeter of the desk, passing warm air out the right side and back. Now we're gonna know if this is gonna work by the time fabrication starts because we've already got our rad stacking follow-up in the works, so make sure that you're subscribed so you don't miss that. Moving all the water around is gonna be handled by dual DDC pumps mated to Alpha Cool one new manifold blocks. We're honestly not huge fans of these, but they're one of the only options for fitting into this slim height. Now they are technically marketed as reservoirs, but a loop this size with all this tubing could honestly take hours to fill with a reservoir that small. So we're gonna be making our own in the shape of a one foot diameter LTT logo, with RGB of course. We then threw a little flow indicator between the pumps for good measure. Now we didn't wanna make any compromises on the actual PC hardware, so we're gonna be using an ASUS Zenith 2 Extreme, a top of the line TRX 40 board for our Threadripper CPU, and then directly beside it is gonna be an RTX 2080 Ti, both of them topped by sweet EK water blocks. We plunked some hard drives in, mostly to take up empty space, but I mean, come on, if it's gonna be an ultimate desk PC design, we might as well have 50 plus terabytes of storage in it, right? And last but not least is power. You might've noticed that there's no power supply. Thing is, one new power supplies are incredibly loud, so including one was not an option to meet our quiet design goal. The intention right now is to use external power bricks then. We're pretty sure we're gonna need two of them, and then a pair of HD Plex DC to DC converters mounted in the top left. Cable runs will likely go under the table, but the thing is, that's not because we couldn't have kept them all inside, but rather for aesthetics reasons. So that's the plan. In our next episode, you're gonna see us bringing all the parts together, and hopefully leak testing our custom reservoir. I hope you're looking forward to it as much as I am. Private internet access won't protect your credit cards or your passwords or your identity. It's just one tool that should be part of your online security toolkit. It masks your IP and encrypts traffic to and from your devices. And when combined with other safe private browsing best practices, it can make even savvy websites think that you are some anonymous person from somewhere else. PIA offers reliable service with over 3000 servers in more than 30 countries with no bandwidth caps, and they've got configurable encryption and internet kill switch that prevents data from leaking if you're involuntarily disconnected, and their MACE feature, which blocks requests to known malware and tracking domains altogether. Try it out risk-free with their 30 day money back guarantee. They've got clients for Windows, Mac OS, Android, iOS, and Linux, and look at that, I've got updated talking points. Apparently you can connect up to 10 devices at once. Check it out now at the link below. If you guys are looking for something else to watch, hey, it's been a while. Maybe go check out the original desk PC build. It's kind of a fun series of videos.