 I'm sick and tired of building giant PCs. They're too big and stupid. Just kidding. I love all PCs. But sometimes you need to shake things up. And that is exactly what we're doing today. The X32 from XWorks is a spine style case that promises unique aesthetics, strong GPU compatibility, and a solution to the problems associated with large cases. Need to reach your rear IO? No problem. Wanna bring your PC to visit a friend? Easy. Wanna hear about our sponsor? With SmartDeploy, IT can deploy Windows, apps, BIOS updates, and security patches to any device, anywhere from the cloud. Get your exclusive free software worth over $570 at smartdeploy.com slash Linus. At just 3.2 liters, At just 3.2 liters, this is the smallest chassis that we have ever looked at, but it's also not really directly comparable to our previous record holder, the Velcase Velca 3. Because the X32 doesn't feel constrained by proved conventions like side panels. Just lets it all hang out, if you know what I mean. Let's get this thing out of the box. Wow, there is really not a lot to it, is there? Oh, oh, hold on, there's another piece. I've got my instructions right here, but honestly, there doesn't seem to be a whole lot to it. We've got panel A, which is the motherboard tray right here. Then we've got panel B, they call these side panels. Ha ha, it's technically there on the side. This holds our GPU and power supply, PCI Express riser, got a power supply shroud. Oh, speaking of the power supply, check this thing out. This is a flex size power supply made by Delta. And despite its tiny size, it can output 500 freaking watts. At what sort of efficiency? Look how cute it is. There's also the bag of very important hardware, including our power button for the front of the case, or for wherever it goes on the case. Standoffs and screws, some little rubber feet. And these are actually going to be our very first installation step. Okay, well that doesn't stand on its own. What could go wrong, Brandon? Man, now that that's so perfect, I feel so much pressure putting on the other feet. All right, now we can install the front switch. So it's got a nice little silicone O-ring here. And hopefully this is long enough to reach wherever it needs to go. Oh, this is really nice. Everything is lettered so that you can't screw up. Which one you use? Oh, balls. Oh, non-ferrous screws, bad. I know it's premium, but I hate it. Okay, install four B motherboard standoffs secured with four J screws. I think I did it right. I sure like picking up screws with my hand like a chimp. Oh my God. Honestly, I'm a little confused by this step. They don't show where you're supposed to route the PCI express ribbon cable for the riser. So I'm doing my best with it here. I think it's supposed to go on like this though. It's not clear how the whole thing goes together yet. And then it immediately becomes apparent that I did not do it right. Oh, I wish I'd done the SSD first, but now we know. The next step says attach cables to the power supply if modular and our power supply is in fact modular. These are trippy cables. You guys probably can't tell from there, but they're like super flexible. Okay, so they're silicone sleeving. It's all floppy doodling. The 24 pin comes down to only 14 pins because you know what, I guess you only live once. The eight pin comes down to four pins. The other more different eight pin for PCI express gets only six pins on the power supply. And then we get a single peripheral connector or rather a single peripheral cable with two SATA connectors. The whole thing goes into our shroud. Sorry. Cool, man, that thing's tiny. One criticism of the power supply, which is part of the kit, is that these included cable combs appear to be sized for regular sleeving or sheathing. And these silicone ones come out really easily. So maybe we can try and use these later, but I'm not gonna try and put them on right now. I noticed that I've got socketed screws for the power supply that are Imperial sized. And then this appears to be a metric head hex screw. You need too many tools to assemble this case. Oh crap, it looks like it is supposed, what? Yep, it's not cable managed right. It's supposed to go in here. Is that even fit? Oh my God. Why don't we just undo everything we've done then? It's all could have been prevented by having the instructions be clear. So now we're looking at this side. Oh, cool, okay. Our modular cables go through here. Get in there. Man, everything about this is just not a millimeter to spare. Storage and power, just like that. And when I saw this thing, I was like, oh, that looks so cool. And now that I'm hands on with it, I'm like, oh, this is so cool. We definitely have to add to our list of things to evaluate how loud it is. Because the thing about flex power supplies is, 40 millimeter fans, not the greatest in terms of quiet operation. Okay, awesome. This is it. This is final assembly of the case. This clearly cannot go there. I see why they wanted you to cable manage down your PCI express power connector earlier, because once you close these up together, you no longer have access to any of this. Okay, crazy. This is the kind of thing I wouldn't recommend for a first time builder, just because you have to kind of have some understanding of where all the parts are likely to end up so that you can envision what you're trying to work towards here. This is all screwed together. This comes out for the GPU, right? See that? Okay, then over here, this is gonna have to kind of squeeze out under the motherboard. Eh, kind of like that. And I don't know, this one will end up somewhere. This whole thing is so out of order. The next thing that we're gonna install is the GPU. We ended up going with an EVGA RTX 3060. This is one of their XC cards. Got a nice back plate, dual fan cooler. Our main reason for choosing this is that we wanted this thing to be high performance, but not ridiculous. And we also have to fit within the constraints of our 500 watt power supply. So this is as powerful as you'd be able to go on a build like this without sort of violating the spirit of building a super tiny machine, right? It overhangs the volume of the case a little bit, but not that much, you know? Before we actually put it on for real though, we've got to put on the GPU bracket mount, which is what's gonna allow us to screw in the PCI slot cover thing. This is one of those like, eh, what way does it go on? Kinds of things. If you were like, man, I don't want my PC to look like everyone else's PC. Fishin' mucking accomplished. This thing is so cool though. Now that we've basically assembled the whole computer, why don't we talk about what we're going to put in it? Starting with the motherboard. We had wanted to go 12th gen, but unfortunately we haven't been able to get access to any 12th gen ITX boards yet. So we've gone with an RG Strix Z590i gaming. Now I understand that we went a little overboard. Get it? This is by far the highest end piece of kit in our build, but let me explain. Because this is a tiny machine that gives us relatively little in terms of expansion options, a board like this gives us as much as possible. So whether you want a couple of M.2 ports on a neat little riser card, or whether you want Thunderbolt 4 for expanded IO, that'll definitely be nice to have once you've used up all of the six USBs on the back, this is going to have you covered. Then in terms of our CPU, we've gone with a Core i5-11600K. It's not exactly the world's fastest, most power hungry chip, but we wanted to show the most capable machine in this form factor. On the subject of the CPU, we actually chose this one for a balance of decent performance, six cores, 12 threads, max turbo 4.9 gigahertz, and reasonable heat output. Because while we could hang a gigantic tower cooler off of a case like this, in fact, that is one of their advertised use cases. There's no limit whatsoever to the size of the cooler you can put on it. I think that would be violating the spirit of trying to build our smallest computer ever if we had a dual tower cooler that hangs this far off the side of the case. So instead, we've gone with a Noctua L9i. It's not the most performant cooler in the world, but at least it would fit if the case had side panels. And Noctua does say that as long as you have adequate ventilation, this should be able to handle the 11600K. For storage, we're using a combination of the SATA SSDs that we installed before. Those are more for bulk storage and also just to show the capabilities of the machine. And this Crucial P5 Plus. So this is a Gen 4 NVMe SSD that we're gonna install in the topmost of our M.2 sandwich slots here. Now, normally I would take off, see the little peel on the thermal pad down here, but in these circumstances, I'm not going to because this particular SSD doesn't have any chips on the bottom. So there's not really anything for us to cool down there. We are concerned with the top one here though. So let's go ahead and pull that off. There we go. That leaves only memory. So we've got two eight gig sticks of 3600C16 memory from Crucial. We could put anything we wanted in here, obviously, because we're not limited by the height, but we went with these. And that's it. Again, I really wish we could have gone 12th gen. Make sure you're subscribed because we'll definitely do something like that in the future. TDR5, small form factor, but not today. We're gonna plug in our eight pin CPU power connector, 24 pin motherboard power connector. We're gonna do our PCI express connector here, and then lower the whole thing into place. Okay, these silicone wires, very cool. Not necessarily easier to work with. We've got a recess down here. We've got to get a screw in there, and it's almost definitely gonna fall off because it's non-ferrous. Ferrous screw or stay off. Oh, no. I hate you. It's pretty funny. Yeah, but no. And that's it. The whole freaking computer. That is pretty cool. How transportable is this thing? Extra, like six cores, nearly five gigahertz. I mean, you could put up to 64 gigs of RAM in it if you really wanted to. 3060, we have five terabytes of storage on here right now, and you could go even higher than that if you really wanted to. It's nuts. Let's fire it up and see if it actually runs properly. Oh, man. My teammate got in the way of my bullets. He wanted to eat them all. Oh, man. I was kind of hoping to be alive at the beginning of this shot, but I guess it doesn't really matter. Check this out. We're getting anywhere between around 200 to 300 frames per second in CSGO, all cranked, 1440p, and like, look at this thing. This is our little banana plushie, LTT store for scale here. Got a little apple for scale. It's freaking tiny. With that said, it's not that quiet. One of the things that your side panels do is reflect noise from your fans back into your case and kind of muffle them. You will get no such functionality out of this. The other thing that contributes to this is that while the GPU and CPU fan are both near silent, this 40 millimeter fan on the power supply, yeah, it's not. This is cool. We're not even getting any thermal throttling. Our CPU is sitting up at around 90 degrees with our GPU at a chilly 60 degrees because all of the heat that is being kicked off the GPU is just able to dissipate into the surrounding air. However, CSGO, not exactly the world's most CPU intensive application. And if we were to run something that is a little bit heavier, like say for example, Cinebench, are we thermal throttling? Bummer. Yeah, that's the answer. If you happen to have, ironically, choosing such a high-end motherboard actually hurt our ability to cool the CPU with this particular style of cooler because it packs so many SSDs and big IO shield, aesthetic things around the CPU socket that there's no room for the air to come out of the fins and be dissipated into the surrounding air. So with this motherboard, we'd have to go with something a little bit higher profile or we'd have to go with a motherboard that's a little more sparse. But even if we did upgrade the CPU cooler, addressing any of the performance concerns I might have about this machine, that doesn't mean I would necessarily recommend building your daily driver in the X32. It's certainly cool, but it comes with some trade-offs. Remember how I said it was super transportable? I mean, that's true, it is. Look at this fricking thing. But you're gonna run the risk as you transport it of accidentally knocking the memory slot out of your motherboard or accidentally scuffing your GPU. The other thing is airflow. Yes, it has effectively unlimited case ventilation, but there's nothing standing in the way of all the dust and hair that's floating around in the air, which is why cases with filters are often the best way to maintain your hardware. The last concern is price, especially considering it's steel powder-coated construction. 180 US dollars is not exactly affordable. Yes, it's a very low volume product, and they can't use the same cost saving measures that a large scale manufacturer might. But in terms of bang for the buck, other than the uniqueness as a conversation piece, I don't know, I kind of struggle with it. It's definitely cool though. Just like my segues to our sponsors. Extra Smart Wallets are high-end trackable wallets crafted to keep your valuables safe, slim, and stylish. 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