 Buy an unlocked Intel 4th Gen Core i7 or Core i5 processor and get a free copy of Rome 2 Total War. Click now to learn more. This is the first time we've ever done a system review on Linus Tech Tips and frankly I wasn't 100% sure where to start. While you might be thinking to yourself, well Linus, you could start by showing us the system rather than a monitor. I would reply to that. I am showing you the system. This is heavy and it's the Crate Computer from Crate Computers and it is one heck of a unique high performance gaming system. So let's kick things off with an overview of who exactly this is built for. I mean I see this as the ultimate LAN machine or the all-in-one PC for people who think being limited in terms of performance and upgrades the way a traditional all-in-one would be is for chumps. Okay, but the next question you might ask me is, well why would I even want an all-in-one? And you know what? I don't have a solid answer because personally I'm good with my full tower. I've got a whole house with three whole people living in it, one of whom is a baby and I never ever move my computer. But for the folks that are interested in all-in-ones, I'd love to hear from you in the comments section. Tell me what is appealing about the all-in-one form factor where you've got the PC and the monitor and they take up basically the same footprint as just a monitor. I mean the way that I see it is I'm putting words in your mouth, but this is for folks that want the flexibility to be able to pick up and move it wherever they need to go and the space savings to have their entire high performance gaming rig take up as much space as a monitor. I mean I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that if that's what you're trying to achieve, the Crate computer has a higher performance to footprint ratio than pretty much anything else on the market. The system arrives extremely well packed. The box, both the outer one and the accessory one, has a spray painted logo on it and the inside of the packaging uses those, oh yeah you get a t-shirt, well kind of like a nice polo, and then the inside uses those bags that expand and fill in the gaps as the chemicals inside mix. I'm really glad to see Crate be smart and use these. They are really, really expensive, but they're the only real option for small companies who are serious about their computers arriving in one piece and are not shipping high enough volume to justify fully custom packaging. So next up is a tour of the outside. The front is a monitor. That's sort of a durr moment there. It's an all in one, so it stands to reason. You can actually pick your monitor on the website. This particular one is a ViewSonic 1080p 27 inch LED backlit one, but they have a 24 inch. There's also a 3D capable gaming monitor from ASUS, and what's cool is that if you ever decide down the line to switch to something else, the attachment system used here between the system and the monitor is a standard VESA mount, so you'll have the option to change to something else if you want. That's a nice touch from a DIYer's perspective. The monitor stand is where things start to get interesting. It's one of the heaviest, most robust feeling hunks of solid metal that I've ever encountered on a computer. I guess given that it's designed to hold a 27 inch screen and a full gaming computer means that that sort of makes sense, but I was still in awe of it when I pulled it out of the box with much difficulty. Unfortunately, it replaces the stock stand, so you lose any tilt, swivel, height adjust, or any other adjustments that you would normally be able to make to the monitor. You'll pretty much put it down on your desk and short of an aftermarket riser to put it on top of something or something like that, that is pretty much how you will use it. On the top, we don't find a whole lot. There are a couple of decorative fasteners, so hopefully you guys can see that okay. Then on the right side, we find these stickers that matter, including the Windows Koa and a Core i5 sticker as well as a single lone power switch. The left side is full of ventilation holes, but there are no fans installed. WTF? Ah yes, here on the back, we find out that cooling is handled by four 120mm fans, all of them configured by default as intake, which I'll touch on more later. At the bottom, we find a nice little short DVI cable that's already hooked up running between the monitor and the PC, I.O. courtesy of an EVGA stinger, mini ITX motherboard, and two power inputs, since this is kind of a DIY all-in-one and you'll have to run two separate power cords in order to get her fired up. Opening up the system is actually quite simple. Just remove the eight-neural thumb screws on the back and you can pop it right off. The first thing I noticed is that those fans that we saw from the outside, those 120mm fans, are actually Cougar fans. The second thing I noticed is that the back has a nice decorative Crate Computer logo on it, but that's actually protective as well as being stylish, so it separates the intakes of the fans from any obstructions that might be behind the computer by a little bit, just so that no matter what, there will be enough of a gap for you to get some airflow in there. The third thing I noticed, unfortunately, was the use of a stock Intel cooler. Ouch. Inside a small case like this, I would have to at least initially question the wisdom of that, but I will let the performance tests tell the whole story. The system is compatible with 2.5-inch drives only, but you can use any thickness. So while this one is configured with a single 500GB Neutron SSD from Corsair and Crate Computers offers up to a 1TB hard drive as an additional option, because it's not light-restricted, you could even go aftermarket and pick up a WD 15mm thick 2TB 2.5-inch drive to go with your boot SSD for great performance and tons of storage. Wiring inside is handled very tidily with all the cable management done behind the motherboard tray, although I've gotta question the use of a very industrial-looking power supply. It's a 600W 80-plus bronze unit, so that's all good so far, but that tiny little fan, actually two fans, seemed like they would get unreasonably loud. The manufacturer went with Patriot Viper Series RAM, actually 16GB in there, and I'm not really particular about memory, so as long as it runs well on this board, I have no quarrels with that choice. What else did we also find? Ah yes, here we go, finally an EVGA GTX 780 with an ACX style cooler on a PCI Express extension. Their PCI Express extension solution is actually one of the most interesting things about the case design. It positions the card right next to the external vents on that left-hand side, which is definitely a plus, given that the card uses an open-air design cooler, and it would be dumping heat all around it. And it also seems to utilize some kind of, like, shock mount system that appears to have some flex to it, rather than being firmly bolted in place. This may seem like a pretty questionable thing to the casual observer, but in my estimation, this should actually give the card a better chance of making it to your door by acting as a bit of a shock absorber during shipping. It did manage to arrive here in Canada in one piece at least, and while that is a small sample size, it's at least proof that it's not guaranteed to cause problems. The centerpiece internally is of course the EVGA Z87 mini-ITX motherboard that makes this whole creative, unique, and very interesting system possible. Now, moving on to performance. The number one concern I have about any compact gaming machine is thermals. We saw this with the ASRock M8, which is actually a similar size, although it doesn't strap to the back of a monitor, but that one uses 60mm cooling fans, which in their stock configuration will actually cause a GPU of this caliber to throttle, even at stock frequencies. So I wanted to put the crate to the test. The unreasonable, unrealistic test, that is. Wahaha. My opening salvo was good old fur mark. It rose to 80 degrees on the GPU, which is perfectly normal, but what was impressive was the fact that it was still running at over 900MHz boost clock, which is the advertised average boost clock of a reference GTX 780. So either EVGA's ACX cooler or the cooling in the chassis itself is doing its thing pretty effectively, and fur mark ran just fine without any tweaks. This is a very solid result, and it means that heat is not an immediately limiting factor, like it would be on many cases this size, such as the aforementioned ASRock M8. I mean, most cases this size won't even fit a GTX 780 in them, never mind cooling it adequately. My next test was for the CPU only, so I ran Prime95 with 4 threads on the 4670K, which is enough to pretty much fully load it, and we got a result of around 75 degrees. That's okay, that's great, that's fine, but it wasn't until I loaded up fur mark at the same time with an open air cooler on the GTX 780 in this tiny little case that I got really impressed, because that is a ton of heat to deal with in a very small space, and the CPU only got to 83 degrees on the hottest core. I mean, fan noise didn't even get unreasonable. Even that whiny looking power supply fan was surprisingly well behaved and didn't have any discernible whiny motor noise, and of course due to the use of those high quality Cougar fans on the side panel, the overall system sounds like air whooshing as opposed to motors whining, so that is a very strong result cooling wise. Now the crate uses a strong positive pressure concept to control airflow and keep it intaking in the back and then exhausting only out the left, and then of course a little bit goes out from that active fan on the power supply. And this system works with everything running full blast this vent right here on the side in spite of the fact that it doesn't have its own fans feels like a space heater. There's like air coming out of it like that. I mean, I suspect that by reorienting the fans on the side panel, you might be able to achieve slightly better temperatures on one component or another, but I don't think it would have the same overall effect that Crate Computers is going for of dispensing the heat from the GPU with getting rid of it immediately and pushing it out the side panel rather than allowing it to affect the other components. In fact, I believe that that's a big part of why the CPU temperatures only went up about 8 degrees from turning on FurMark at the same time as Prime95, so great thinking on their part there. So I've talked up their cooling approach a fair bit here, but you know, that's is that really enough torture? Let's torture it some more. This time I want to go with a more realistic use case scenario, actual gaming, but to bring on the pain, I'm going to be overclocking the graphics card. So I fired up EVGA precision and dialed in a quick and dirty overclock of plus 200 megahertz on the core and plus 250 megahertz on the video RAM. I then cranked the maximum voltage and cranked the power limit and thermal limit to their absolute maximums and fired up Batman Arkham Origins. Color me impressed. With the game maxed out, it was playable, which is great, 1080p, but this isn't exactly news to anyone who's ever seen GTX 780 benchmarks before. More importantly, the GPU never went over 80 degrees, even in this scenario, and sat between 1160 megahertz and 1200 megahertz, a very healthy real world frequency for an air cool GTX 780 at the best of times. Never mind when it's in a tiny little enclosure like this one. Alright Linus, so we get it. Performance is a strong point, but what about the bad stuff? Well, I don't know guys. I mean the stock cooler on the CPU didn't impress me that much, although I plan to, because it's very modular and you can tinker around with it if you want, I plan to experiment with removing the necessary side panel fans to allow me enough clearance to put a non-reference cooler on the CPU. I think other than that, the system is pretty much ideal, but I mean being able to achieve slightly better overall performance by throwing a few more gigahertz on the core couldn't be a bad thing. Ergonomics could probably use some improvement in a generation 2 product. The base is solid and feels really good and in my opinion actually has a rugged industrial beauty to it, but not everyone will feel the same way about not having tilt, height adjust, etc. on their monitor. And not to mention, accessing the I.O. on the bottom of the system is not the easiest thing in the world. Another thing I'd like to see added to a generation 2 product would be some front USB 3 on the side or maybe monitor selections that include a USB 3 hub so that we have easy access to that. And then with a nice little cable like they've done with the DVI one, pre-connected, that would be a great way to deal with that. I guess the last thing I'd like to see a better implementation of out of the box is dynamic fan control for the case fans. The system is not unreasonably loud, especially under load where it's very reasonable, but at idle it could easily be quieter with just one small tweak. So EVGA's BIOS has a really cool smart fan option that lets you set up a custom curve for your CPU fan that is controlled via PWM. Swift Tech has a PWM splitter that would be a low cost way to have all four case fans powered off the power supply yet controlled by that one PWM signal. So that would be a great way to handle them that. Other than that, it's a cool, innovative product and I'm really excited to see more. It's basically a clean, non-bloatware infected, customizable and upgradable boutique system that is small enough to fit on your desk in the same space as just a monitor. So you can check out Crate Computers' configurator in the link below the video and I would definitely recommend that you do. They're not the cheapest systems in the world and they're not perfect, but if you are looking for the answer to what is the smallest footprint into which I can fit a full powered gaming rig on my desk, this is the best answer that I have yet encountered. Thanks for watching guys. Like the video if you liked it. Dislike it if you disliked it. Leave a comment and let me know. I think I asked for a comment earlier in the video. It was something to do with, let me know what you think about who would need an all-in-one. And as always, don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings, reviews and other computer videos.