 Deedee deedee deedee dee. It's okay. We won't be needing these where we're going. The Beast from Monster Labo isn't the only fanless PC on the market, but it is unlike anything we have ever seen. These two heat sinks, one for the CPU and one for the graphics card, make this chonker absolutely wild. They claim it can handle top tier CPUs like the Ryzen 9 5900X and Core i9-11900K and an RTX 3080 GPU on top of that completely passively. That means that combined with a passive power supply like this one, it should be able to run the latest AAA games at 4K 120 FPS with no moving parts. No moving parts. But are even these giant heat sinks enough to tame the Beast? Will I even be able to build this wacky thing to find out? What even is this? Who is our sponsor? Pulseway is an all-in-one platform management tool that can help protect your business from things like phishing and ransomware. Try it out for free today at the link in the video description. You know, oftentimes you can tell when a case was designed by engineers, but I think it looks fantastic. Monster Labo has definitely done something very different here. So upfront, we've got a good selection of IOs, so four USB type A's, two of which are USB 3, USB type C, separate front panel audio ports, that's nice. And then when we flip around to the back, we've got something. Where does the back of the motherboard go? Yes. Conveniently running and managing cables is my idea of a relaxing Saturday afternoon, but it's still worth explaining why we need to do this. So look at this. Instead of using the usual, you know, screws into a back plate mount, the motherboard actually just goes onto these four threaded holes here, like by the CPU socket, and then just hangs here. And the same is true of the graphics card, except that it goes on the other side. That way, as much of the internal space as possible can be dedicated to cooling. Then, well, the IO, since it's not attached to the outside of the case in any way, has to use all of these extensions. So they just go into the back here, a little something like this, and then you screw them in on either side. Now that's all fair enough. We've seen cases before that have used extensions to enable unique form factors or unique functionality. And one thing I really like about this one is unlike something like the Corsair One, for example, Monster Labo has made these plates kind of modular. So there's just four screws that go in. And in the future, if you ever decided, oh, well, look, there's a new display cable standard, or I want four network ports, you could actually pop this out, cut or 3D print a new one, and pop it back in and you'd be good to go. Now, if you've ever built a fanless PC before, then you'll already know that the beast is gonna be a heavy mama. But at a back straining 18.2 kilos, that's over 40 freedom pounds, without any hardware installed, you are gonna wanna build this thing where you plan to use it, or at the very least, at least remove the tempered glass side panels while you and your friend transport it. Of course, that assumes that you and your friend actually trust the manufacturer enough to order one of these. If you haven't heard of Monster Labo before, I'm not surprised. They've only been around since 2018, and they were born from the fiery aftermath of the Calios NSG S0 case ordeal. That saga was one that was personally disappointing to me for a couple of reasons. One was that I just really wanted to see the product come to life, it was so cool. But the second was that I feel terrible that so many people backed that Kickstarter project based on my positive coverage of it, only to end up swindled out of their money when the parent company Calios wiped the project from their website and took down their official Twitter, which was hilariously subsequently re-registered by a pissed off backer and turned into this masterpiece. And there's similar sentiment on our forum as well. So with that stench lingering over them, why would we even look at this case? The answer is because Monster Labo isn't Calios. The team did come from there, but the beast is actually available and has shipped out to dozens of happy customers. So it seems that the team members that left did so because they actually wanna get cases to people, not because they're a bunch of con artists looking for their next grift. Let's build it then. We wanted to really push this thing to its limits. So naturally we went with the Intel Core i9-11900K. That's eight cores, 16 threads, running it up to 5.3 gigahertz. But more importantly, while it might be rated at just 125 watts of heat output, it's a big fat liar. This puppy can reach up to over 300 watts, which means we'll probably have to tame it a little to stay within the 150 watts that the Monster Labo rates their CPU heat sink to handle in passive mode. Then with our graphics card, we're gonna be pushing way past the 250 watts that our integrated cooler is rated for with a Zotac RTX 3080 Trinity that's expected to output 320 watts. So it's likely we're gonna need to do a little bit of tuning to get consistent performance out of it. Now, the first step would be to install the two optional 140 millimeter fans in the top here using these included 3D printed brackets. One of them would go here and one of them would go here. But our goal is to go for a fully fanless silent setup. So we're just gonna be putting the top panel back on and moving straight to power supply. Meet the Silverstone Nightjar NJ700, a 700 watt 80 plus titanium rated power supply that is both extremely heavy and fan free. Monster Labo provides all the mounting holes that you'll need so you can mount your power supply either with the fan side, fan side, fan side this way or the other way. And then we just need our four included screws. Next up are any hard drives or two and a half inch SSDs you might be installing. And I would definitely lean towards SSDs for a build like this because as soon as you remove all the fan noise, all of a sudden that of hard drives is gonna be particularly noticeable. So the way they mount is you just screw them onto these brackets on one side, which sounds kind of sketchy because you'd think it can kind of go like this. But because the bracket goes in the front of the case, a little something like that, all the weight of the drive sits, there you go, vertically on the bracket and it's perfectly well supported, which isn't to say that it is perfectly manufactured. I think this is somewhere where Monster Labo could stand to improve. You can actually see that not one, but all four of these thumb screws for the hard drive sleds are kind of cockeyed. Like they go in at an angle like this. It's a little bit easier to notice if I take the bracket out. It's a little thing, but just something that Monster Labo could do better considering the price of the products. Anyway, we won't be needing this bracket because we've opted for a crucial P5 M.2 SSD, which is gonna give us both the best performance and of course complete silence since it has no moving parts. Then it's time to install as much as we can on the motherboard ahead of time, because once it's installed in the case, the back of the board is gonna be to the outside, right? So we're not really gonna have much access to it. That means plugging in our 3600 megahertz crucial ballistics memory, as well as both our 24 pin and eight pin CPU power connectors. So this is the whole assembly that is gonna turn around and go right on there. Thankfully, DDR4 memory doesn't need any kind of active cooling, but that story might change with DDR5. So make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss all the juicy details. Now, because we're not screwing the CPU cooler in from the front, right? We have no access to it. The way it installs is a little bit unconventional. So we put this bracket on here with the gap over here for the heat pipes. You can only see five of them, but there's actually 10 heat pipes on each of the copper bases. Now that our thermal compounds applied, we throw these black washer. Next, we throw these black washers onto the standoffs and those do not do anything. Just hang there loose. I don't know what's up with that. Monster Labo, you've already got the spacer kind of built into the thing, the washers. They do nothing. They specifically tell you, use a clamp if needed. And I'm pretty sure they mean wrench by that. Okay, no, that just killed it. Oh no. There's one extra. Oh, thank goodness. I can take off this stripped one. Oh wow. What they lost in Brownie points for their CPU cooler mount, they definitely got back for this PCI express Gen 4 riser cable. This is great because it means that when we have a GPU installed on the other side of it here, we are not going to have to go into the BIOS and manually set the link speed to Gen 3 in order for the system to post, which is what you have to do on a lot of these types of cases. There's a couple more things that we should probably plug in before we go any farther, like the front IO. This feels so weird, plugging in all the front IO before we actually put the motherboard in the case. Like what is life right now? I can't even understand it. Yep, I can see why Monster Labo recommends laying the case down before you do this. But don't worry, I got this. I'm a Persephone. Tolerances are a little... It like sanded, like ground off part of the PCB jamming this in here. Don't worry, it's all good. It's all good. Okay, so we're gonna use these white clear nylon spacers. We're gonna put four springs, four of our five springs on. Look, everyone just calm down. Holy bananas, that's a lot of mounting pressure. Don't worry, no, no, we got this, we got this, we got this. I think it's all the way in. Now the video plan calls for me to install the GPU next, but I wanted to take a moment here and just kind of give you guys some thoughts on this motherboard mounting mechanism. It's way more solid than I thought it was gonna be. I mean, the heat sinks that it's mounted to, they're extremely rigid, but this kind of install is not for first time builders. I think it's very clear at this point that this is not a novice case because you can't see what you're doing. And even for me, if I flip this thing around, you can see this PCIe riser. It's really easy for this to get jammed on these heat sinks or even any of these cables that are running across the motherboard. It would be simple for them to get caught on each other or stuck on something that has a limited amount of clearance like the memory, for example, and break. So even though I am an experienced builder, I actually almost ripped off this USB 3.0 connector when I was trying to hide this cable here. It's just a really tight space to work in. To make this next step a little bit simpler, we pre-moved the cooler. That is to say we pre-removed it. If you're not sure what the steps are for that, this is an older guide for how it's done, but the basic rules are the same. Start taking out screws and don't stop till everything comes off. And I mean everything because we even had to take off the IO plate. So you just got your display port and HDMI ports just hanging off the edge of the bear card. Now, obviously we're gonna need to attach a cooler to this, but it's not as simple as just taking this and bolting it onto the cooler like we did with the motherboard because there's more than just the GPU itself that needs cooling. We've got to deal with the memory. We've got to deal with the power delivery, which is actually on both sides of the GPU on this card. And that is where this comes in. This little jobby is the TR30X0 from EK. You can see it's got all the contact points that we need. We're gonna cover those in thermal pads. And then the mounting procedure is a little unusual here. Our heat spreader thing needs to go on here. Oh, and this is hilarious. The screws that were included weren't the right length. So we had to order some different ones from McMaster car and something, something, they all have to be different lengths, something, something, et cetera. It doesn't matter. The point is this goes in here. I mean, why assemble your GPU and its cooler before you install it in the case when you can just install it as part of the process, right? This all makes perfect sense. I got so distracted with this unorthodox installation method that I forgot the basics. And we're going liquid metal. I want to give it its best shot, okay? It's got one shot, one opportunity to impress the pants off me here. If I'm wearing pants at the end of this video, they failed. But I will be wearing these from lttstore.com. If I remove those, I'm pretty sure it's some kind of workplace violation. There you go. Cards installed. Now you screw it into the heat spreader. If our GPU had a spring mounted back plate, then we would use that. But otherwise it appears as though we are actually supposed to use just these little black screws with little plastic washers and hard mount the GPU to the cooler. That is not the best way to mount a GPU. Monster Labo also recommends using a back plate. So we're using a Vector XC3. This is hilarious. A fraction of the mounting holes actually line up with anything useful with this installation. Now that it's in, it looks pretty clean. You don't look too closely at all the missing screws. Now something to note is that you can install the GPU without using like a monolithic heat spreader, like the one that we used from EK. You could just put little AliExpress special heat sinks on. Just make sure if you do that, you put as big of ones on as you can and use a high quality thermal epoxy like this one from Tech Ingredients. I got you a burrito. Oh, there it is. Thanks, James. We're back and it's way better than I expected. Okay, A, with the glass panels on, how freaking sick does this thing look? B, we actually nailed the component selection for this build because even if you don't have any fans, you can often end up with like whiny electrical noise coming from the power delivery on either your motherboard, graphics card, or in many cases, your power supply. But here we are. So I got my mic right here. Nothing coming out of the power supply despite the fact that we are running a blender render on our Core i9-11900K. Now we've tried it a couple different ways already. First, we tried without multi-core enhancement enabled and it ended up settling in around four gigahertz all core and in the high 70 degrees. Very respectable, but the 11900K can do more. So we're going at it again, this time with multi-core enhancement enabled and we're able to manage somewhere in the neighborhood of 4.3 gigahertz sustained on a completely passive cooler. Remember guys, this is a raging inferno of a chip and it'll spike at over the 150 watts that this cooler is rated for. I'm actually really surprised, given that the 140 millimeter fans are not installed, how much air, the natural convection in this case, manages to move. You can't really see air movement with the thermal camera, but we probably still see some interesting stuff. Oh, hi, woo, hi, oh, hey, there you go. And conveniently, the heat sink is painted black so we can actually get a reading off of it. You can see it's running at about just shy of 60 degrees. Meanwhile, the GPU heat sink is hardly doing anything. We can fix that. Time for some FurMark. Hit it with that furry Taurus. That furry mark. You can already see that. See the heat pipes are heating up, they're orange now, but the fins themselves are still kind of purple. That's super cool. This was the product that I wanted Calios to release, but only sort of, because in some ways it's not as good. Like it doesn't have that same convection-based pumpless loop technology that Calios was working on, but it's also way more practical. It doesn't weigh nearly as much and it's not nearly as big. Like this is something you might actually want in your house. Holy bananas, it's at 100% power limit. It's at 71 degrees. Okay, without liquid metal, I sincerely doubt we would get those same kinds of results. That's gotta be worth a solid, like probably five degrees. But still, we got a game on it then. Now, one thing to note is we got an email actually while we were filming this informing us that this was the very first case off the line. So some of the problems that we observed are ones that they're aware of and ones that should be fixed. And one of them is that the ethernet cable, here, Colin, can I spin this for a sec here? That wasn't me. Nailed it. The ethernet extension doesn't reach to the side where the ethernet sized hole in the back is. So there's some little things that were not quite right on this sample, but I have faith, okay? They were technically preemptive. They told us about it before we told them. So that's always a good sign when the manufacturer knows. Yeah, let's go with Cyberpunk. I mean, sure, not a particularly popular game, but certainly a heavy one to run. Seriously though, credit to ASUS, ZOTAC, and Silverstone because silent electronics is not that easy to do. And I can't guarantee that any other combination of some of these parts would have the same result because sometimes it can actually be the interaction between a particular power supply and GPU that can cause one or both of them to whine. Hmm, now that's interesting. Yeah, this doesn't seem right. GPU hotspot temperature is too high. How hot? 105. So I think that might be down to that hard mount. So let's have a look and let's see what kind of contact it's making. We might need a little bit more thermal interface material. And this is why we benchmark. See here, we did not have enough liquid metal on here. You can see it's just, it's not even, yeah, not even close. It also just may not be in the cards for us to go liquid metal because of the tight tolerances here. Like these thermal pads might be interfering with the graphics card pressing up against it enough. It's worth a shot. It's worth a shot. I'll try one more time. And if we end up with kind of weird behavior like that again, then we're gonna go to a more conventional thermal compound. We have removed the EK back plate. It just did not have enough screws in it. We've put the stock back plate back on. It just required a little bit of creative snipping. And we've got our result. The result is Monster Labo knows their product because they rated the GPU cooler at around 250 Watts. And that's all it'll do. So if you wanna get into Afterburner and really fine tune your voltage frequency curve, you can probably get better results than if you just leave the card at stock. But if you do leave the card at stock, you're going to have to turn your power limit down to about 70%, which is gonna put you around one gigahertz, which is really not the full potential of an RTX 3080. So we compromised. We put a Noctua fan running at about 800, 850 RPM on the GPU side. And now we're able to hit around 1100 to 1200 megahertz. Let's see if Cyberpunk runs a little better. Should we go all the way to Ray Tracing Ultra? We're doing it. We're doing it. We're going to Ray Tracing Ultra. We got an RTX 3080. This is more like the gaming experience that I was expecting from this. We're managing right in the neighborhood of 60, 55 FPS average. And then our lows are right in the 50 FPS range, which on a G-Sync display is going to be perfectly smooth. That's a really good gaming experience for a more sightseeing oriented game like this one. It's not what I would want for a Twitch shooter, but considering that this thing is still, hold on, let me get up on here. Get my microphone right next to the exhaust. How you doing, buddy? Still extremely quiet, nearly silent. I'm pretty happy right now. Oh, temps are around 80 degrees actually. You know, we could probably even turn down that fan a little bit. That's awesome. GPU power is 312 Watts. The fan is worth it, especially if you go for a super over-spec build like with an RTX 3080. And that's kind of the best conclusion for this case, isn't it? It's not what I wanted. What I wanted was for it to be fanless. No, what I really wanted was for Calios to not screw over the PC building community. But at the end of the day, at least I can still be happy with what I ended up with. This is an utterly unique product and there's just no other way to get this kind of silent gaming experience. 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