 After months of trials and tribulations, the next gen desk PC has finally gone from render to reality. Now our ambitious goal of creating a water-cooled PC and a desk that's no thicker than a regular desk, all without compromising on either gaming performance or silent operation has not been easy. But by the time we're done this video, you guys are gonna see it all laid out and operational. And I'm a layout for you, the benefits of our sponsor, Ridge Wallet. Ridge Wallet wants to redefine the wallet with its compact frame and RFID blocking plates. Check out how they can keep your wallet bulged down and use offer code Linus to save 10% and get free worldwide shipping. Why don't we kick it off with what went well. Using the model, we marked our three quarter inch sheet of birch wood, then used a table saw to break it into all the components we needed to build the box that you're looking at. The only slightly tricky part was creating a little lip here on the side rail so that the glass top will have a place to sit. So once we finalized the component placement, it's as simple as throwing the bottom piece here onto the router and going, and cutting all the holes that we're gonna need for final assembly. But what about this? Why don't you run me through this? Well, these are our ress or attempts at them anyway. It's gonna look great whenever I can get it to work. We tried so many different ways. So here's the thing. Clear materials like acrylic, they're not forgiving like wood or aluminum. One wrong move can cause it to crack or even shatter. And because it's clear, you can see the damage from literally every angle. Yeah. A lot of my experience is with metals, which are much more forgiving to work with. On my shop laser, I just couldn't get the cut right. I couldn't get the settings to not light itself on fire. It's something that I could have probably dialed in, but I decided to move on from V1 here. Vaporized acrylic likes to get a little burny. And given the 10 watt per millimeter rule of thumb, 130 watts of power for 18 millimeters of acrylic is pushing the limit a little. So for the second go around, our pals over at Metal Mart gave it their best with their water jet. And initially we had high hopes, but the brittleness of the acrylic reared its ugly head again, causing just these beautiful cuts around the LTT, but unsightly craters everywhere where the water jet pierced the stock in an attempt to make the holes. So I pivoted from that to the router, something I was really trying to avoid because these parts are really well suited for 2D fabrication. And it went surprisingly well, but I failed to brass off or dull the tip of the drill and it pulled out a huge chunk of material and scrapped this attempt as well. So close yet so far. Thankfully though, while we were busy with Tectember, Trotec sent over this beauty right here. And it was time to give it another shot. Because while the raw power of this unit is actually about the same as Columns laser at 130 watts, as the name suggests, the speedy 400 flex runs circles around prosumer tools, moving literally 10 times faster, which we can use to our advantage. Now in the router version of the part, these slots all around it were designed to increase volume and improve water flow. But the thing is, partial cuts like this aren't something that a laser can typically do. You see, an etch pass only removes a fraction of a millimeter of material. But here's the thing, with the speedy, I can just run the same etch over and over and over and over again and this piece right here, oh, there it is, took a couple of hours. But if you look, the entire surface of the LTT is actually a couple of millimeters lower than the outer rim. That's almost as big brain as buying all your clothes from lttstore.com. Now, small holes in thick material are another thing that's pretty tricky with a laser. Mostly because a laser beam isn't actually cylindrical, but rather conical. And as you can imagine, a cone shape is not the ideal shape for a threaded hole. So instead of drilling all the way through, I just made little holes and then finished them afterwards on the drill press. That way they're on location and to the correct size. Unfortunately, after solving this problem, it went together great and it even held water. That doesn't really sound very unfortunate. Okay, okay, I'm getting to that. In the midst of disassembling it, I got distracted by the camera falling over and I fat fingered the drill's direction, lefty loosey became righty tighty and I made a little crater. Oh no! Oh, it's otherwise perfect. Yeah, she's dead, Jim. Okay, but even though this is just a cosmetic sample then, we are confident now that we can build it since, I mean, you did do it once. I did what? It held water. You just had to crumple your head. I was so close. You just had to crumple your head. What it means is we're confident, confident, confident, that we can build it, which means we're not gonna have to resort to some kind of commercial off the shelf reservoir. We know we can rely on having this and we can do the final layout for the rest of the parts. Right? Yes. Confident. Confident. He's confident. Look at this guy. These OneU radiators from Alphacool are super neat. They're actually designed for servers, but they've got some cool features that make them perfect for our use case as well. They've got the inlet and outlet on either side of the rad. And then check this out. You can chain them together in serial by using these end ports, or you can go in and out on this side. So what we're gonna be doing is we're gonna be lining the right side of the table. Ah, here we go. With these radiators. We just made a small oopsie and we only ordered one of them as part of our proof of concept. So you'll have to imagine that there's more of them over here. The only question is, is that gonna be enough radiator surface area? I think we're gonna have about the equivalent of a dual 120 millimeter rad. And with the way that we're positioning the fans, we'll show you that in a minute, it should be enough for our spec. The idea here is massive positive pressure. We're gonna have eight Noctua industrial PPC fans with filters, basically creating this pressurized chamber in the case that's gonna cause the air to kind of passively whoosh over the components that need air cooling, like the motherboard and chipset and VRMs for example. And then exhaust through the only part of the table that's not sealed, which is gonna be the radiators. So like that. When it came time to choose a power supply, while we did have a lot of options, most of them were absolutely terrible because you can get one new power supplies. I mean, even fancy redundant ones. But the issue is they're designed for servers, which are not made to be quiet. So we went with one of these. This is an 800 watt DC ATX power supply from HD Plex. Super cool product, right? Because we've got enough power for a thread ripper and RTX 30 series graphics card, but passively cooled and super slim. These get used for all kinds of projects from computers to AV to, I mean, pretty much any situation where you need a high power DC power supply, these guys are super cool. Of course, the thing about AC, the thing about DC power supplies, that is ones with a 12 volt input and then 3.3, five volt and 12 volt outputs, is that they still need to do the AC conversion from the wall. So for that, we're employing two of these 400 watt power bricks, also from HD Plex. These puppies, because they're kind of messy looking and because we want them to have access to fresh air, we're actually gonna put on the outside of the unit, on the underside. Now let's talk motherboard. Because, okay, I can't come up with a good reason for this. Because AMD sent it to me, I'm using a Ryzen 3970X on an Asus Zenith 2 Extreme. Is this the alpha or the non-alpha? I think it's the alpha. Non-alpha. It's the non-alpha, which is fine because realistically we are not going to be overclocking this thing anyway. We had to make a couple of small modifications to the board. It was so close to being too thick to fit in our case. We actually had to remove the cover on the VRM fans here, as well as the cover on the IO. So it'll look a little more industrial. Just like last time, we're gonna be setting the motherboard and the graphics card back, probably about an inch or an inch and a half from the edge. What this allows is because the IO is on the rear this time, some room for the cables to bend or have large connectors before they just butt right up against the wall. Now you might've noticed if you're extremely keen-eyed that this is a 3080. That is not the graphics card that we actually intend to use for the final project. We're gonna go with a 3070 just to keep power consumption under control. Oh God, we're gonna need custom cables. Yes, actually they're Silverstone compatible. So I can get custom cable mod cables. Perfect, so cable mod just- Yep, easy peasy. Fire that up for us. Check the box. While I may be on the record saying that I think the Lang DDC pump is a piece of shit, unfortunately, in a 1U enclosure, we just don't have a choice. So the next best thing to using a good pump, like a D5, is using two DDCs, so at least if one of them fails, you've got another one. So I'm just putting these here as a placeholder for now. We're gonna have to tweak this a little. The last piece that I have to show you guys today is our water block. This is also from Alpha Cool, and this thing is super neat. So not only does it have a large enough cooling plate for our Ryzen Threadripper processor, it has a total of eight options for inlet ports and outlets. What that does is it allows us to put it onto the CPU socket and then figure out with our RAM and our VRM cooling and all that stuff, how the heck we're gonna be able to get tubes in and out of it. I lied, there is actually one more thing. We've got four two terabyte crucial SSDs with the intention being kind of to take up space as much as anything else, but also that'll give eight terabytes of, I mean, who cares? We could chuck them in RAID 0. Yes. Get that performance eight terabytes of solid state storage in addition to an M.2 boot drive. But hear me out. I know you want this on the outside. I do. But could we put it here? We could, but I really don't want to. And this is just because of the distance that this 12 volt run has to go? Well, we're putting a heat source next to the radiators. You see, like if we have these on the outside of the case, then all this heat isn't input into the system. And we're already pretty tight on airflow in here. That's fair. So this is, I mean, assuming about 90% efficiency, that's like under full load, that's like 80 watts that we can have outside. But under your realistic load, we're probably talking 40 watts. But even that. Do you really think airflow is going to be tight? We got eight cooling fans. But we have a lot of pressure. We don't have a lot of flow. It just has such a small orifice to come out of. I think you're going to be surprised. Probably, but I want to plan for less heat in the system. That's why we went with a 3070. I wanted a 3080. But like, then where would those go? Right? I mean, we could move the RAID down and then like have them here and then they're close to the SATA ports. Yeah, and we're going to need tubing runs and stuff like this. This area is fine. We're going to use those little end connectors that I used for the stacking radiators video. So these will be tight. But what we could do is we could go pumps and then we could go drives here, actually. The outlet port for the water block is in here. So there's no sense really having a pump out here. Well, I couldn't help noticing that our reservoir still isn't actually manufactured. Fine. I can change that. See, if I had done my job and made this right, then it would be set and I wouldn't have to entertain these ideas. You like my ideas. Come on. Okay. So let's pull the cables off this for now. Yeah, yeah, no, it's a mess with them. This might seem crazy, but we're going to be painting this for the finished product anyway. So drawing on it is not that stupid. So here's what I'm thinking. Right angle here into the end cap here. Then we go straight out of here. Here, we've got a height problem. This is lower than this. We go this way and then into here. We go out from here into the graphics card, out of the graphics card, and then out from here into reservoir. Very suboptimal from a filling perspective. It will take like an hour or two to fill this. Yeah, I was kind of hoping to put ports in the actual desk and have a fill and a drain area. I see. That is interesting. We can also use these because they're just vertical. So we can put the fill funnel up here and just fill it. Oh my God. You're a genius. So we can fill the res and flood the pumps so they don't run dry for the filling process. Yeah. Okay. Fill them the quality of life you want, right? I did not think of that. Well, you did. You know what? Does teamwork make the dream work or what? Okay. So can you get me my little valve? Technically not the symbol for a valve, but it'll allow it. Oh, sorry, you're right. That's the incorrect signal symbol for a valve. Let me fix it. There, fixed it for you. You know the reference, right? This is sick. Man, this is gonna be- It's gonna be fine. I think it'll be, yeah, just not a nightmare and whenever you need to look at it again. Oh, I'm so glad you used the word nightmare because I have one for you. Oh, great. We've been having some issues with the Aquantia NICs and our new switches. Okay. And this is an onboard Aquantia NIC. There's no way we're fitting a 10 gig card without another riser. What if it was here? Well, how's that gonna fit, right? Why have you done this? Well, Jake found the problem. So Jake is my issue. Blame Jake. I do. But I do need an add-in card. Where's it gonna go? Well, if it was here, we would just have another cutout. There's a lot of cutouts. Cause we're gonna have a cutout here, here, here, like, and this is supporting that huge sheet of glass. We could do like a couple of support pillars. Little bogeys, yeah. Yeah. I'm so excited right now. Now, hopefully I won't have to wait eight months for the next part. No guarantees. One thing you never have to wait for though, is my segues to our sponsors. Drop.com is featuring the Sennheiser HD 8XX headphones. They're made in Sennheiser's German HQ slash factory, which we've actually toured before and it is amazing. And they're based on the HD 800 S, which is also amazing. But with some tweaks. It features a new blue colorway with added low end extension and adjusted driver damping for superior audio balance. These adjustments were based on feedback from the audiophile community. If you're not familiar with the HD 800 series, it's an open back design headphones. So it's got a really natural sound. And this version has a detachable 10 foot cable with one quarter inch plug. You can preorder yours today at the link down in the video description. If you guys enjoyed this video, you'll probably enjoy part one of this video. Although you've kind of seen everything that we covered in that one. So maybe just check out the conclusion to our last desk PC project to demonstrate that yes, in fact, we do eventually finish these projects. Just take some time.