 A few short years ago, the average enthusiast would have told you that you were crazy if you said you wanted to put top-of-the-line hardware, especially graphics cards, in a tiny little box like this one. Now, the GPU makers are practically begging for it by designing little tiny flagship class graphics cards, so the only question that remains then is this. AMD or Nvidia for your elite flagship class small form factor gaming PC. Vote for turnip. It's a shirt. I don't have one, so we're gonna do our best to demo what it looks like. And this is not what the real shirt looks like. It looks a little more like this, but we didn't have a sample to show you guys, so this had to do. You can stay tuned after the outro for bonus footage of the creation of this masterpiece if you're into that sort of thing. Now today's video will focus on thermals, form factors, and the compromises that we need to make when deciding between the GTX 980 Ti and the Radeon R9 Fury X. But as you all know, there's actually more to the story than just degrees Celsius and FPS these days with FreeSync and G-Sync technology having a huge impact on the gaming experience. So drop a like under the video if you'd like to see us put these two techs head-to-head very soon to see which one delivers the most responsive lag-free gaming experience. For now though, I'll introduce the test bench. Inside a Silverstone SG13 case, the same one from this video where we put an 18 core CPU and a Titan X inside it, we'll be cramming not necessarily the highest-end hardware, but rather what I would consider to be a very reasonable yet premium gaming PC. So we've got a 4670k CPU, not overclocked, 16 gigs of Corsair Vengeance RAM, the rather unique SX500, 500 watts SFX-L power supply from Silverstone, and Nasus Maximus 6 Impact. Then we'll be testing that config in two different ways. For the first test, we've got a reference GTX 980 Ti, actually the same one we reviewed back here. So this isn't a water-cooled graphics card, which means we can use the radiator mounting point in the front of the case for our CPU. In our case, of course, our H80i. Then for our second configuration, I swapped out the video card, which actually was a surprisingly complicated ordeal that involved removing the power supply, removing the graphics card, removing the CPU cooler, removing the motherboard to install an air cooler on the CPU since we no longer have room for our CPU all-in-one liquid cooler, and reassembling everything to replace our 980 Ti with the Fury X, whose form factor I wasn't really sure about until, well, now that I've actually used it. I mean, I still don't know how much sense it makes for some cases, but in the SG13 anyway, it feels like the PCB space that AMD saved with their on-package HBM memory was exactly enough to compensate for the extra space consumed by the water cooling tubing sticking out the back of the card and the radiator that needs to be in the front of the case now. So let's run through which of these setups performed better. Please note that I consider this testing to be pretty much a worst-case scenario for all hardware involved since the ambient temperatures are significantly over 30 degrees Celsius in here. First up is CPU temps. I used Ida64 CPU tests to load up our 4670K, and the GTX 980 Ti rig, thanks to its CPU liquid cooling, is the clear winner here, with the CPU topping out at a frosty 64 degrees. By contrast, our small form factor heat pipe cooler had the CPU at a still not technically dangerous, but much less impressive 87 degrees Celsius, and that is without the GPU under load. Next up is a result that I actually didn't expect. Motherboard temperatures are an often overlooked yet super important part of maintaining a stable PC, and while gaming our 980 Ti configuration actually ran away with this one. But I also wouldn't read too much into it because both are well within safety margins and depending on the position of the motherboard's thermal sensor, sometimes just a hotter running CPU can result in a much higher reading for the motherboard, even if airflow around the socket from the CPU heatsink is more than adequate. Which leads us to idle noise impressions. None of the whining that I've heard tales of online is present in either our old Dead Fury X or our new Fury X samples, but since both configurations were equipped with cheap pumps, and I mean I'm not saying that to be mean to all-in-one liquid coolers or anything, it's just that you're getting what you pay for when you spend a hundred dollars on a D5, they both had a little bit of, you know, pump noise, but both were satisfactorily quiet in my opinion. But what about load while gaming? Well, the Fury X and 980 Ti configs were actually not noticeably more or less annoying to my ears than each other. They're both cooled by a grade A fan on their radiators in each configuration, a gentle typhoon or an NFF-12 that handles most of the airflow through the case, and neither card exhibited any bothersome coil whine for more than the first couple seconds of gameplay in Crisis 3 on the Fury X. But this, my friends, is where things get really interesting. The 980 Ti did its usual cap at 83 degrees thing, while the Fury X stayed at a very cool 67 degrees. Nothing unexpected here. I mean it is water-cooled, of course it was gonna win that. But the interesting thing here is that the Fury X actually managed to score 5% higher in our Crisis 3 benchmark at 2560 by 1440 with very high textures and system spec with anti-aliasing disabled and motion blur disabled as well. What? Our 980 Ti, and this is why I specifically pointed out that it's the... Well that was interesting. We actually have some new information now, but in the meantime I'm just gonna get through the rest of what I wrote there. So our 980 Ti, and this is why I specifically pointed out that it's the same one we reviewed, turbo's like an absolute beast, almost matching our Titan X and has no problems beating the Fury X on an open test bench. But when you confine both of them to the same test bench, the 980 Ti is a little bit more reliable than the Fury X. So we're not beating the Fury X on an open test bench, but when you confine both of them to a small form factor case, the story changes somewhat more than we knew, which leads us to the conclusion. I came into this video thinking that the Fury X's shorter length and overkill cooler was a solution to a problem we no longer have, thanks to awesome modern case designs like this one that can keep a long power-hungry graphics card cool. But while I still think an AIO liquid cooler is a kind of a kludgy, enthusiasts-only-need-to-apply solution with a ton of issues, thanks to the Fury X's small form factor, machines with this card have the ability to focus their cooling power on the one component that makes the biggest difference to gaming performance. So thanks to that, the Fury X is able to turbo to 1050 MHz, its max, while the 980 Ti is stuck at a mere 1037. Well within its spec, I mean it's not underperforming, but not the best it can do in a more ideal situation. And another consideration is that while the Fury X machine's air-cooled CPU obviously ran much hotter than it would have with a liquid cooler, a typical gamer is only very rarely going to put a load on all four cores of a quad-core chip. While putting a full load on a graphics card is basically a daily occurrence. Another argument for focusing your cooling on the GPU. So I'm giving the nod to AMD today. In this edge case, the Fury X actually comes out looking like the winner, but with an important consideration, if you guys install your radiator with the fan as an intake drawing air through the rad, you will notice that your inside case temperatures rise as much as 20 plus degrees. Meaning that if your CPU was on the border, once you start gaming, it no longer will be. So I would highly recommend doing what we've done now off-camera and turning that fan around to blow out of the case. That way your CPU will not overheat like you saw happen when the screen turned off in the middle of this video. But that's the kind of show this is, guys. The kind where anything can happen. So these things! What on earth are those? They're either the world's most magnificent dildos or their, ah yes, headphone stands. But I had actually said in a dedicated video about these not that long ago that the thing I don't like about them is that they sit on the desk and therefore take up desk space. And I called on the community to design a wall-mounted headphone stand that could be either 3D printed or one design would be sent to Silverstone to actually manufacture the designer of which would get a gold-colored anodized version of whatever their design was and that contest is actually closed. But the reason that I'm bringing it up is that all the designs, all eight freaking hundred of them, I can't believe how many of you submitted some pretty amazing designs, are up for voting for which ones are going to be the top ten on myminifactory.com. So check out that link in the video description and vote for your favorite wall-mounted headphone stands. The final decision will ultimately be down to me and Silverstone, but the more votes that something has the more closely we will be looking at it. So check that out now. Thanks for watching. If the video sucked then you know what to do. But if it was awesome, get subscribed, hit that like button or even consider supporting us directly by using our affiliate code to shop at Amazon buying a cool t-shirt like this one or through a direct monthly contribution in the community forum. Now that you're done doing all that stuff, you're probably wondering what to watch next. So click that little button in the top right corner to check out the video where Luke takes a 3D scanner and presumably scan some 3D objects. I don't know. I haven't watched it yet. This is going to be a long free roll. Whoa, is it? Whoa! Oh! Why does that stink so bad? Oh, oh yeah. Is there a chunky in there? I don't think this is mixed at all. No, I think you have to mix this with like a stick. There's a lot of chunky in here. Look at this, look. Here we go. Vote for turnip t-shirt. Something that was not in your job description. Oh, no. Oh, I'm smelling it. Oh! Okay, it's really drippy. I'm going to run out of space. It does drip like crazy. So like... It kind of tickles. There's the second turnip. I'm really surprised anyone volunteered. I thought I was going to have to pick someone to do this. I did not know what I was getting myself into. At all. I did. The bottom of the turnip. It was my idea. What are you drawing? That's the turnip. They have a root system. There's the root start at the bottom. It's white. We don't have white. So, um... That's the design. There's really nothing else to it. Are you covering his entire... I'm drawing the shirt. Okay, you want me to do the other shoulder? Sure, do it in some other color. You know, I thought I was comfortable in my skin. I'm with you guys. This is some next level sh** right here. Okay, so I have that side. I'm doing that. There's open space. Yeah... Are we good? I think so.