 Linus Tech Tips coverage of Computex 2013 is powered by Western Digital. Our trusted gaming gear partner is Corsair Vengeance, and our trusted retail partner is NCIX.com. Alright guys, I'm here at the Silverstone booth with Tony, and we're here to check out some of their home theater systems. So this is our HTPC section. Earlier this year at CES we showed off this very nice and compact ML05 mini ITX HTPC case. So for Computex we're showing the brother of it, it's called the ML06. It shares the same basic internal structure as the ML05, except its front panel is now aluminum instead of acrylic and plastic. So moving on, we have a brand new case that we're unveiling for Computex this year. This is our Raven prototype mini case. The reason we put it here in the home theater section is that we think this will be a really nice compliment for people to put in their living room, even though this is designed for a gaming PC. So inside, if I open this up, you'll see that it has a lot of features that will help you build a really powerful PC out of this. So first of all, to make it small, the case utilizes a mini ITX motherboard, an SFX power supply up front, and here on the right side, this bracket if I remove it, you'll see it will hold a graphics card, a really long one too, so you can build a really powerful system with this. And on the bottom of the chassis, you can actually fit a thin dual 120mm radiator underneath. That's awesome. Now with stuff like Steam Big Picture, I brought this up a few times here at Computex already, but with stuff like Steam Big Picture, these kind of computers are being such a big deal because everyone wants to have Steam Big Picture in their home theater. They want to use controllers, sit on their couch, but play PC games, because PC games are what's up. So now if you can build an awesome system in a case like this that looks really sharp, maybe not quite as professional and amazing looking as an aluminum front cover, but if you can make a sharp, good looking gaming system to run Steam Big Picture, that's great. So in this case, it's very cool. We're going to move on and cover some more Silverstone stuff. Alright, we're still here at the Silverstone booth. We've got something really cool to check out, which are SATA power extensions and splitters. This is their previous one, and I'm just going to go right to you. So last year we introduced a 1-4 power SATA connector. So it's got two capacitors built in, which we took a long time to actually develop because you have to get the right number of capacitors and the right size for them to provide stable enough power for all four connections to your SATA drives. One of the things that people really like about this is that they can use it on cases with hard drive cages that have multiple drives. On some of the really smaller cages, users actually have to find that they have to bend this cable rather stiffly, like this. So what you end up with is that you're putting a lot of stress on your SATA drives. So this year we're introducing these two new cables. One is for two connections, and one is for four, just like before. If you can see, we changed the material of the cable to be very, very soft and flexible. So I can bend it like this, and it'll still keep a very straight, actually stress-free connector to your SATA drives. It's actually really cool because I personally, I haven't broken that much hardware, but I've broken a hard drive before by having so much stress from the power connector on it. So now what I have to do is I have to actually have the cable pulled down by a zap strap so that the hard drive can actually be read from. So having more malleable cables like this where you can move it around and torque it a little bit and have no actual issues is very cool. Now we're going to move away from cables and go right over to liquid coolers because these are awesome. My favorite part, I'm going to give it to him pretty soon, but my favorite part is that they're all metal here. It's very sharp and shows true performance. I don't really like plastic in my system at all. I like full metal cases. I like full metal everywhere. So that's awesome. What do you have to say about this? Okay. So we developed this in-house. So, okay, let's take a look at this. This one's a little beat up, but you can see just from the radiator design, it's different from any other water cooling radiator on the market. These use the same type of a heat sink fin array like the high-end, very high-end air coolers that you see on the market. They're very tough. It's very hard to bend them. If you've ever seen or used other radiators, you'll know that if you put a lot of pressure on them by hand, you'll actually bend the fins. Because these are designed more like air coolers, they're not. And also they have much greater surface contact with the water piping going through the radiator than traditional radiator designs. And the second thing that, of course, is a water block is all metal. So the bottom is copper. This main body here is unibody aluminum. This is actually an older version. Let's show the newer version. Okay. So this is nickel plated. So it looks very nice. And even the bracket here is aluminum. So it's very, very strong. It doesn't flex like the other metal brackets on the market. And this is soldered on, the copper base soldered onto the unibody as opposed to screwed on like the other units on the market. You're not wasting any space with screws. It looks super sharp, very, very high quality build. That's awesome. So when we first came by this computer, I had already seen their previous coolers, and he said, guess what? This cooler doesn't have a pump. At first I thought he was kind of crazy, maybe misinformed, maybe a lunatic, I'm not really sure. But then I noticed that, okay, I can see the water flowing. It's not actually rushing, rushing, rushing as fast as it normally is where you can't actually see the water flowing. So I started to believe him a little bit, and then he explained exactly how it doesn't have a pump, and I'm going to let him do that now. Okay. So we're using a liquid with the lower evaporation point than normal. So that means the heat from your CPU actually evaporates this liquid, causing this flow to go up and condenses back down after it gets cooled by the radiator on top. So what we can do now is maybe turn off the computer so we can show how much it changes. So it's going to turn off the computer. There's still going to be residual heat on the CPU, so it's going to take a little while for it to slow down. But you can probably already tell that the rate at which the water is flowing is slowing down. It's still being heated by the CPU. The fan has already stopped, as you can see here. So the computer is off. But you can still, it's still going, not super fast, but still going. That's very cool. It's the same style of technology that is in air coolers and systems already. The heat pipes that you have actually have a liquid in them, and it's evaporating and then coming back down. That's how it's moving heat into the fins. But I haven't seen this yet on an actual liquid cooler, so that's very, very cool. Thank you for showing us this cooler. We're going to move on to some more things. All right, guys, coming back at you from the Silverstone booth. We came over here. They have a digital power power supply. So this is in their Zeus series. It's a 1200 watt, which is beast. It's a platinum, which is beast. Something that's a little bit more interesting about this is that it's digital. So if you can explain the UI we see here on the screen and explain just how you can change from single to quad, which is personally my favorite part. OK, so it's a digital controlled power supply. So that means we could do everything through the software interface here. This power supply has the ability to change from single rail. So I have to just click here, and it becomes a single rail power supply. If I click on quad, you can see again all four rails show up on 12 volt. And because it's digital control, that means you could actually fine tune each individual rail like the 3.3 volts. I could lower it or increase it and hit OK to apply the setting. I can do this for all of the rails on the power supply. Also on the fan control, we have this very simple to understand interface. You could choose any fan speed points in which you want to choose for your different power loading levels. So I can choose to have a very strong fan speed when the power is loading higher, or I could go really low on some of these power settings. Power supplies have been that interesting beast in your computer because for so long you've been able to change kind of whatever you want about your computer except for the power supply. It's just kind of sat down there and done its job, which is good, but not exactly what most people want. We're hot routers. We want to be able to do whatever we want. So it's very cool to see these digital power supplies coming out where you can change anything on the fly. That's awesome. We're going to move on. All right, so NUC has been around for a little while, our next unit of computing, but they've been not super interesting, at least in my opinion, until someone like Silverstone has decided to come around and just flip the whole thing on its head. Now it's actually quite interesting. You can get a lot of different options and we'll let you go through it, but these two are the ones I'm mainly interested so far. Okay, so this is the PT14, our first NUC case. So this is designed with fanless operation in mind. You can see already from the heatsink fan look like, top cover. There's also a fan option on the bottom where you can install as a safety. So if you're placing this NUC case in somewhere that you can touch, then obviously you won't have this fan running to avoid CPU running. I mean, CPU running at 60 or 70 degrees Celsius is actually okay for the CPU itself, but not for your skin. So if you want to put this somewhere next to you, you probably want to have that fan running. But if you're putting this away, maybe somewhere behind a monitor like that over there, then it's probably okay for you to run fanless. Right, because you can mount these on the back of monitors, you can mount them on the back of digital signage and storage, you can mount them on the back of anything. So that's pretty awesome. And for those of you that are not interested in using a fanless case, we also have a very beautiful looking NUC case that can utilize the regular Intel blower, cooler, under NUC. And this is really nice looking. It's also aluminum. That aluminum front panel is just absolutely awesome. Aluminum on anything just looks absolutely great. And now this guy is an interesting beast. So let's go through this one. So this is a PT16. We're also showing it for the first time here at Computex. It has a built-in car reader slot. And if I press it on the side here, I can slit a hot swap of two and a half inch drive bay for a bit of drive expansion or external storage. That's cool because sometimes if it's a huge file, it's not really that viable to move it over the network very quickly. So if you can just pop a drive out and throw it in this thing, that's awesome. That's very, very cool functionality. Now this guy is interesting. This guy isn't actually in the Intel series of NUC computers. This is AMD. So yeah. OK. So AMD has been, of course, looking at the development of NUC. So we believe that it is, like they say, next-gen NUC computer. So AMD decided to also join. And we're really happy to also help out and popularize the NUC. Yeah, that's very cool. So AMD's spreading out. Intel's spreading into something crazy. This is all crazy. Hey, guys. We're here at our last stop of the Silverstone booth. I wanted to cover this. It's not ready yet. It doesn't have a name. We can't test it out yet. But it's pretty crazy. So I wanted to make sure you guys could see it. Can we take off the front here real quick? Sure. We're going to take off the front and reveal what's actually going on here. We can take off the top. And then the front comes out. Very, very nice-looking case. So basically, if you haven't noticed yet, there's no real motherboard in there. There's a control panel, but it's not a motherboard. So basically, what you can do with this is put a tiny little power supply in there, put a graphics card in there, and then connect through Thunderbolt to, say, a laptop. If you have a business-grade laptop that's just amazingly good-looking, sharp laptop that doesn't have a graphics card, and you want to be a gamer and you don't necessarily want to buy a huge PC, you can just Thunderbolt this to your laptop once it's ready and be able to play games on that business-class notebook or laptop, the thin Ultrabook, whatever you want. As long as it has a Thunderbolt cable, you can add tons of power to it. Desktop graphics will always crush laptop graphics because you just have all that service area to put big, big, big chips and whatever else you want. So this is a very, very cool product. Thank you for walking us through everything. Service Zone booth has been great. Make sure you subscribe to the Line of Sectives to see all of our Computex content.