 When Crucial reached out to sponsor a build, they didn't just want another gaming PC. They wanted something speedy, subtle, and stealthy. We said, sure, but like, don't you guys just make memory and SSDs? Got anything else you can use? And boy, did they ever deliver. It turns out Crucial has a case, or at least they used to. Yes, my friends, this is the ultimate stealthy sleeper PC, and I managed to break it already. Damn it, Linus. Okay, yes, technically this is a Micron case. Yes, they made cases way back in the before 4 time, and this little piece of history was one of a handful of designs that Micron put out in the mid-90s. So seeing as Micron is the parent company of Crucial, it seemed fitting to use one of their old cases for our ultimate stealth sleeper build. It features not one, but two Zip drives, a CD drive, and just a single fan. That's right, just one fan in the entire chassis for cooling. Like, man, they really didn't need a lot of cooling back then, did they? That's in spite of the rest of the case having almost no gaps in it for airflow, and the CPU cooler in the original system being passive. This appears to be the original hardware from the system. What the hell is this? Well, it's AGP, and it's got two, I don't know, phone jacks on the back, I guess, modem? That's definitely not AGP. This predates AGP by a significant margin, but those are definitely phone jacks. This is a modem. Why would you shape your modem like this? You need like a more streamlined internet. Yeah, it's for faster speeds. S3 Verge DX on board. Okay, so there's our graphics card. This puppy got a nice little upgrade with that USB universal serial bus, and then it's also got, oh, look at that. Like, why does this not have a back? Did you take the back plates off these? Yes. That's a weird thing to do. All right, thanks, Colin. I got probably 10 hundred LAN right there, maybe just 10 megabit. This thing is so weird. So you got your EDO memory up in here. You got what appears to be some kind of slotted in motherboard VRM. Why would you slot that in after the fact? And then- They're probably unreliable. Wow, this is before IDE even had the like things around it. This is old. You know, it's an old motherboard when every trace on it is like easily trackable to where it goes and looks like it could be repaired with a steady hand and a magnifying glass. That's some fine attention to detail, 90s Micron. Got your logo right side up on your cooler. Lots of companies still can't handle that. What the f*** is this thing? I don't know. Oh, wait, it's an AUTH32 UPG. So it seems to be an upgrade module for a sound card. Man, they really did made old keyboards, right? You know, the oldest keyboard is the goodest keyboard. See, that's why Crucial doesn't make gaming keyboards because they know they could never surpass the excellence they had already achieved. They already peaked. In the mid 90s. RAM though, RAM has gotten faster. So our second focus with this machine after Stealth was speed. So Crucial hooked us up with some of their Ballistix Max RAM. This stuff is rated... Oh, don't... No, come on, man. I worked so hard on this. Stand over there. This stuff is rated at up to 5100 MHz. It's so fast. You're more likely to hit hardware limits with other components in your system, like the memory controller on the CPU before you hit the max speed on these DIMMs. And the reason Crucial is able to get this RAM so darn fast is hopefully pretty obvious. When you account for over a quarter of the global manufacturing output for memory, you have both the expertise and the volume to both tune the chips and then handpick them from an enormous pool of memory chips. There's just no other way to do it. Furthermore, Crucial being under the Micron umbrella is able to go beyond binning. After the cream of the crop is determined, Crucial puts their chips through a secondary process that physically unlocks the voltage regulation, taking what was already an outstanding candidate and opening it up to the bleeding edge of performance. That's why their Ballistix RAM can hit those extreme frequencies. It's literally designed and then tuned to be gaming RAM. Now, when it came to transforming this beast from a clunker to a sleeper, it wasn't a task for the faint of heart. After gently removing all the old hardware and putting it to bed one last time, sweet bedtime story by the way guys, lttstore.com, Colin started figuring out exactly how to fit our array of modern parts into the case. Now, it is ATX. So this case was made right around that transition. So on paper, the whole transition was supposed to be pretty simple. We chose an AMD Ryzen 3900X 12-core CPU with an Asus Strix B550F gaming. This is a great balance of performance, features, and cost, giving us all the expansion we need today and PCI Express Gen 4 capabilities for future SSD and, who knows, maybe graphics card upgrades? Then for our SSD, we chose the Crucial P5. It uses their TLC 3D NAND with a dynamically sized SLC cache, along with a gig per terabyte of DRAM to maintain performance under heavy loads. It comes with a five-year warranty, uses Micron's own controller, supports all the usual encryption standards, and is available in up to two terabyte capacities. We actually put two on there, I think. Yep. Yes, we did. Now, unfortunately, the motherboard and all the stuff attached to it was where the ease of use ended. While the holes for our power supply did in fact line up, for whatever reason, 90s Micron saw fit to include this weird support bar that interferes with the power switch on our new Seasonic 850 watt 80 plus titanium unit, which we definitely needed because while our old one was in fact ATX, it used... Oh, I just stabbed myself. It used the old 20-pin connector rather than 24-pin connector, not to mention that it was rated for what, 200 watts? 270, somewhere around there. That would get us maybe our RAM and CPU. So we went with this particular unit for its super high efficiency, which means less waste heat in the AC to DC conversion process. The cross brace problem was solved with a little bit of percussive maintenance, and now the switch here works as intended. Note, though, that we actually turned off the hybrid mode switch. That's because the airflow is so stifled in this case that we are kind of counting on our power supply to help push some of the hot air from the inside out the back of the system. Now, with the heart and brains figured out, what about the muscle? Well, we weren't the only ones who got kind of bonenated by Nvidia's sudden announcement of a graphics card that's, hey, actually faster than the old one. Gotcha. So the machine as it is right now was actually built with an ROG Strix 2080 Ti, which barely squeezes in there, leaving what I would call the absolute minimum amount of space for some semblance of airflow. Like, look at this. Come check this out, Andy. These power cables are actually squished against the side panel. It's that friction that makes it so hard to get the panel off. Now, to try to cool it, we wanted to take advantage of the natural tendency of warm air to rise. So our goal was take in cool air from the front and bottom and exhaust warm air from the back, where this Noctua PWM fan replaced the old three-pin unit. And hopefully, like I said before, we're gonna get some help from the power supply. So that's fine. But the case didn't come with any intake holes. Fair warning, guys. This is gonna get graphic. With a bit of Dremel massaging, the front panel was trimmed open for more airflow and to allow a single 120 millimeter all-in-one liquid cooler to be mounted. That way, at least our poor CPU gets nice fresh air. And we used a hole saw to add a second Noctua 80 millimeter fan. Now, I know that it's not quite factory, but we did allow ourselves to add a couple of 3D printed elevating feet so that the new fan can actually draw in air. And then hopefully, that's the ventilation sorted. So it's definitely stealthy, but is it enough? Did it work? I have to confess, Colin, I'm a little skeptical. It really does not look like enough cooling. Oh my God, I love this vintage Pentium with MMX designed for Windows 95 stuff we got going on here. See, when Alex builds a sleeper PC, he usually water cools it. That sounds like work. That's true. He does seem to do a lot of unnecessary work, doesn't he? I love that guy. All right, we firing up. What are we doing? We firing up some Red Dead Redemption here? Yeah, whatever you want to do. All right. I think I got Tomb Raider on there as well. Wow, look at that snow fall off that branch there. We're gonna go stand by the fire there. Okay, but seriously, why is this not loud yet? You're breaking the rules here, Colin. Put your hand by the fan, though. You took all the PCI plates out of the back, too. Of course. That's where you got some more ventilation from. Pulled out all the stops, man. Sneaky guy. Yeah. You want to know what else is sneaky? It's toasty. All right, what else is sneaky? There's a little sneaky trick up here. You know, when you're hungry and you're gaming, there's Werther's. You know, the old man candy. Got Werther's originals. How much time did you spend on this? Too much. The craziest part is that this isn't just, you know, a three-minute test here. Colin actually stress tested this thing in 3DMark over an extended period without running into thermal throttling issues, right? Yep. Are you sure? Yeah, I ran the CAN stress test, ran all the way through and passed with 98%. So. Wow. Okay, then. But can it run in RTX 3080? Now, I saw you brought down the 3090, but surely you weren't hoping to actually put this in there. It was optimistic, like, like, yeah. Yeah, by the time we have the 12 pin plugged into the top of it, there's no way. Now, let's see if this boy will fit. Do you want to grab that 12 pin adapter? Yep, it's right here. Oh, you got it. Okay, we are going to run. Same thing I ran on the 2080 Ti. So the Time Spy, the long stress test. So this will take, I think it's 10 or 15 minutes, and it's going to get real hot and we'll be able to see it. I'm actually expecting this to be better because the new cards are more efficient and the exhaust that's going to be coming out of the back of it will hopefully help me. I think it was around 65, 70. So we're pulling over 107 right now. You hear the fans ramping up. The amount of heat this thing is throwing out the back is kind of astonishing. We passed. And if we look at the actual data, our CPU hit a peak of 70 degrees and our GPU rode 74 degrees the whole way there. There's the odd blip, but like 97.5%. I'll call good. No way, I can't believe that worked. Like it's significantly more power than the 2080 Ti, but that goes to show you the strength of Nvidia's new like flow through cooler, right? Because that's exactly how they designed it, right? To have cool air coming in from the bottom front. I mean, that's the ATX standard, obviously, but like to assist that natural convection. And like, this is the same thing we saw in our review where even though it draws more power, it actually managed better overall system cooling. I'm absolutely freaking loving it. Just like I'm loving telling you one more time, thanks to Crucial for sponsoring this video. Go check out their high speed memory and storage products at the link in the video description. And if you guys enjoyed this video and you're looking for one of our other sleeper machines, hey, we've got a whole playlist, absolutely chock full of them. So don't miss it.