 For our last sleeper gaming PC, the goal was to build the most powerful, compact desktop rig that we could. But this time, our objective is a little different. This video is brought to you by Seasonic, and the rig's gonna be powered by their Prime Platinum 1300 watt, and it is gonna have everything you see here, everything you see here, and everything you see back there. Yeah, most of that really didn't work out. But sleeper number three, Margaret, well, she's a taskmaster. She's the biggest, baddest, hardest sleeper PC that we have ever built, and, did I mention that she's beautiful? So, floppy, bigger floppy, jazz floppy, DVD rewriter, DVD rom, what is this? Is this a zip disk, or is it just a cooling fan? What the hell is this thing? Hard drive, hot swappable. Card reader. Windows 2000 Professional, one to two CPU. This is going to be a lot of work. Yeah, you know what makes it a lot harder? The chiller. The chiller. And the carbon fiber tubing. What, why are we doing carbon fiber tubing? Are you nuts? The first thing we needed to do was figure out if our water chiller would even fit inside the case we salvaged from our friends at Free Geek Vancouver. Like, sure, the case is massive, but there's still plenty of room for error in something like this. We disassembled the chiller to find out what was inside and then removed all the PC components in our case to make space. This is a situation. Yeah. It turns out that eyeballing things is not quite a substitute for measuring them. Well, it can all fit. We can get it in, but we might ruin the condenser because we have to bend these copper tubes. Oh yeah, that's going to be a super bad time. Or, you could just be like, hey, kapow. I'm sorry this project won't be as advertised. I think that is exactly what we're going to do. We're going to go overkill water cooling with the carbon fiber tubing. Is that not cool enough? Yeah. Are you not entertained? And then we're going to have to, I mean, I still want to revisit this. Yeah. I think it's just a matter of finding the right chassis. Like if we find an old server chassis or something, there is no reason we couldn't do that. I think that the best way is to just start by building a computer in here that's air cooled and then locating everything where we think it'll work. Are you pumped? Oh yeah. Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, those good sponsor dollars. For this build, we're looking to have not just insane gaming power, but also crazy workstation power. With that in mind, our CPU selection was easy. The Threadripper 2990X is a 32 core, 64 thread beast. And it gives up some gaming performance, but it utterly embarrasses even Intel's top end HDDT chip in multi-threaded workloads. For the GPU, we're going with Nvidia's GeForce RTX 2080 Ti. I'd like to say that there's a good reason for it, but it's just the best GPU for gaming. Will it be enough? I think so. I guess that we could have gone for two, but I don't know. I wasn't really in the mood. Given what we've been hearing about these, it's extra important that we make sure that everything's working before we bother water cooling it. Power is being taken care of by a Seasonic Prime Platinum 1300 watt, which admittedly is a bit overkill for this system. But on the plus side, it's going to operate in silent mode, basically the entire time and like, come on. If Seasonic offers you a 1300 watt power supply for the project they're sponsoring, you take it. So for this build, I'm going to be using a DimDot 2. There's no real reason to use it besides just I've had drives fail when they're down below there before and water cooling builds and man, that's a horrible time. With everything installed, it was time to make sure that all our components were in working order. That was pretty easy. That wasn't too bad. Yeah, I know. A zero detect memory. Oh, damn it. Just a tiny bit of thermal paste. I wonder if that's what was causing our issues. Okay, so the motherboard that we had before, it's just dead. So that's why we're having so many issues. And it's like a week and a half since I've been working on this because it's bad things were happening. But hopefully we're gonna get back here and in the next day or so, this will be a fully functioning PC, but I guess we'll find out in the future. All right. Goodbye. All right, new Zenith Xtreme. This one does not have any bent pins. So with any luck, it will work just fine. Oh. Code AD detect memory. This is very bad, Dennis. Our CPU might be dead. We're gonna have to go with something else here. All right, so she's working now. I talked to it nicely like I haven't recommended. You just call it an it, okay? It's not an it, it's a she. Thank you, Margaret. It's not really Margaret yet. I'm sorry, baby, okay? So we need to put a water cooling loop in here. Here's what I think. Why don't you use a vertical adapter bracket for the card and have the card vertical that will give you space in behind here to put the pump and the tubing to go up. With the loop planned out, the components were removed and it was time to drill out the rivets to make space for our water cooling. And the idea is that this right here will be the new, the new power supply holder and also will allow for us to have cable management in the back. This, if it works, will be made out of aluminum on the CNC router, but we will see in a couple seconds that it's gonna be a good time. Do you have any guesses? Three out of five, a good one. Are you talking to me? Yeah. Now, given that this is our first time cutting aluminum on our CNC, one hand will be on the emergency stop the whole time. Our first piece didn't turn out perfectly, but it gave us all of the critical dimensions that we needed and let us try out the new vice brake we got from Princess Auto for like 60 bucks. In theory, this should bend our aluminum to a nice clean 90 degrees and give Margaret a really solid chassis. It's not quite as easy as a massive break, but it does seem to be working. Sounded good. Oh, what's that? Well, it did mar it up a bit, but given that that thing was like 60 bucks, I can't really complain. The prototype here is a solid proof of concept. Now there's just a bit of fine tuning and then we're good to make a final version. Really 60 bucks for a break that managed those bends? Yeah. Dang. This is Problem Hour with Alex. So you're about to watch a couple CNC router fails and they're a lot more off camera. We tried a bunch of different things, going faster, going slower, new bits, and it turns out it was just a double-sided tape that we got. It was not up for the task. So we're going to be switching to the most accurate tool of all, the angle grinder. We'll need to make room for the radiator, reservoir and cable management. This will function just fine, but gives up a lot of rigidity compared to the much thicker piece that we were going to CNC. Next, the front of the case got chopped up to give the radiator more airflow and everything was filed down so that no hands would be cut while working in Margaret. With some radiator mounting holes added, it was time to put the case back together. Riveting is a very simple way to get two pieces of sheet metal to stay together in a mostly permanent fashion. Not quite, it's not in quite right. Select the correct size head for the rivet you're working with, insert the rivet from the front, line up the pieces you're about to rivet and squeeze your rivet gun until it pops. Repeat until your case is complete. Now it's time for some painting. Then we can finally get on to water cooling. All right, so the first coat of paint's on there. And what I'm hoping we will do today is get everything pretty much mounted and water cooled. Then we'll take it all out, put a second coat of paint on now that we know that everything's in the right spot. And tomorrow we'll be done. For the water cooling hardware, Alpha Cool hooked us up with some primo stuff to make sure that Margaret can shred or rip all the threads that we throw at her. For our CPU, we're using an ice block with a thread ripper adapter. Then our RTX 2080 Ti got an acetal water block for that sexy, stealthy, all black and chromed look. We swapped out the connection point to make vertical mounting easier. So far so good. But with the CPU and GPU in, we realized that things didn't quite line up. This is gonna be really freaking difficult. Starting to look kind of sexy though. Are you turned on by computers, Dennis? Huh? Now the key to getting a hard line water cooling loop to work its best is to have as many things line up perfectly as possible. This will make your runs a lot easier to complete with fewer fittings. That means fewer points of failure. Now, normally even for hard line, bending the tubing is an option, not with carbon fiber. With that all in mind, we created a bracket then to mount our pump with some room for adjustments after the fact. There's just lots of mounting so everything's straight. Yeah, no, this is great. Well, this isn't straight. This isn't straight either. I mean, this can probably come- Yeah, it can all be moved very slightly. Yeah, cool. Yeah, I think it's gonna look really cool. We're not using this color cables, are we? No, that's just a stand in. Ours are in the mail. Cool. So for the tubing on this build, we're going with carbon fiber. It's gonna be a real big pain in the butt. So carbon fiber, if you like get the little bits that come off of it on you, it'll make you all itchy. If you get it in your mouth, it's a really bad time. If it goes into the air, also like you get it in your mouth, your eyes, really bad. PPE aside, carbon fiber tubing is pretty much like any other hard line tubing. Basically measure, measure again, cut, sand, and insert. With that completed, it was time to leak test. I don't have a whole lot of confidence that this will not leak, but, well, well, there's our first leak and our second leak and our third leak. So we're having a couple of problems there. The main one being that there are two O-rings in a fitting and we were only getting through the first one. The second one, the carbon fiber was just a bit too sharp, even after being sanded. So it either just hit it or when it went through, it would just slice the O-ring to pieces and it wouldn't seal at all. So to combat that, we had to replace every single inner O-ring and lubricate it well for a nice clean insertion. With the computer leak free, it was time to take everything we'd done, completely undo it, take the whole thing apart, and then put everything back in permanently. Now, one of the biggest problems with this design is that there are a lot of things about our build that simply cannot be accessed once it's complete without disassembling the entire water cooling loop. So it's important that we not forget anything at this stage. Like this laser cut acrylic cable hiding panel. It's gonna look really nice, but once that's in, those cables cannot come out. Other cosmetic things were done at this stage too, like the drive bays, which were unscrewed, then epoxied into the front of the case to complete our vintage look. Now, with everything slapped in and the loop topped off, all that's left is the moment of truth. Error code 92, post-error. So just so I'm clear, what you've been doing for the last two days is reseating the CPU. Yeah, it didn't boot, and then everything that's here had to come out in order to get the CPU. I just took it out, put it back in, everything worked. And also like we thought that it was other issues at first. Oh my God. But hey, the CPU is at 22 degrees now. Yep, and it's cabled also. Wow, you can really feel that airflow over the vents down here. They are quite small. For all the trials and tribulations that have come along with this, I think this may be your finest sleeper yet. Los Angeles. But Margaret isn't just a pretty face. She's a powerhouse that can compute circles around her sleeper siblings in certain workloads. With zero tweaking, she got a Cinebench score of 5001, and under full synthetic load on all 32 cores, even with the suboptimal ventilation from the front, our CPU reached a maximum temperature of 48 degrees. After some tweaking, we got a 4.1 gigahertz overclock on all 32 cores, netting us 6,000 points in Cinebench and a Blender BMW test time of just 1 minute 22 seconds. To put that in context, that is over four and a half times faster than a Core i9 MacBook Pro. And then even with the overclock in longer tests, Margaret still didn't get any higher than 75 degrees on the CPU. And as for gaming, well, Margaret's RTX 2080 Ti means that she can absolutely destroy games. Like you could fully expect to max out any AAA game at 1440p on a 144 hertz monitor. So that's it. Big thanks to Alex for sticking with this project. It was an absolute nightmare because of some of the issues with how large Threadripper is and how you can kind of get inconsistent mounts in the socket sometimes. And a big thanks to Seasonic for sponsoring our efforts here. Even if you don't need the 1300 watt beast of a unit that we put in our system, you can be confident if you choose Seasonic that your power supply will last. I tried to think of a bunch of other stuff to say about power supplies, but like, isn't that the bottom line? And they've got a 12 year warranty to back it up. So guys, if you disliked this video, you can hit that button, but if you liked it, hit like, get subscribed, or maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured at the link below. 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