 If you've only ever watched our last couple of videos on the subject, I'd forgive you for getting a bad impression of small form factor computers. You might think, oh man, they look like an absolute nightmare to build. And if I want to get anywhere near decent cooling performance, I'm going to have to go water cooling. But that is not actually the case. Meet the Jote. Not to be confused with the GOAT. It's not the greatest of all time. It's just the Jack of all trades. Yeah. Oh, that's a good one. Is that actually their intention? Oh, that's funny. And it's got a lot of airflow. This video is brought to you by Ridge Wallet. Ridge Wallet has redefined the wallet with its compact frame and RFID blocking plates. Use offer code LINUS to keep your wallet bulge down, and you can save 10% and get free worldwide shipping. For starters, a little bit of information about the Jote. It's made by a company called Spy Labs. It's not that small, about 14 liters, and it arrives flat packed with some assembly required. But you guys probably figured that out by now. A couple of other things that stand out about it compared to other boutiques, small form factor cases are its compatibility with extremely large CPU coolers, like the NH-P1 passive CPU cooler, as well as its affordable price. It can be configured for anywhere from around $125 to $150. There's an instruction manual. Let's see how good this is. Neat. This is going to take a minute. Did I say it's going to be easy? Yes. Did I lie? Maybe. Maybe. Based on the fact that I'm 30 seconds in, and I've already needed two kind of unusual tools, I was going to criticize them for user friendliness, but they actually include the Allen keys that you need. So that's not too bad. The only one is the socket to put the standoff in, and that would be true of almost any computer case. It can be a little tough to get those in there. You can also tighten them up with a pair of needle nose pliers. Not everyone's going to appreciate this kind of aesthetic with, you know, big socket head screws hanging off of panels and stuff like that. But personally, I've always been partial to it. So I'm kind of liking the look of it so far. In four minutes, we've gotten three panels together. We've got the power button installed now. So it's a simple, there you go, vandal resistant switch right there. A little something like that. And I've managed to find a defective screw. Whoops. Hopefully that doesn't screw us over. What the hell is this? Did they include this in the box? Wait, what the? Is this actually like AC mains power that is just electrical taped? Did we order this or is this a review unit or what? Good Lord. Is this something they're actually shipping to real customers? Alex? I don't know. Why did they include the chopped off one? This raises so many questions. Yeah. I mean, they're all shrink-wrapped. But if you do not have familiarity with this kind of stuff, that's a big, that's like, you could easily hurt yourself. I mean, Steve from Gamers Nexus wanted NZXT to recall their case over the possibility that they could have something almost this sketchy, if the user modified it. This came out of the box. But just to clarify the sketchy cable, you're supposed to get this one right here, but of course it's 2021 and those are all sold out. In the meantime, Spy Labs will send you a normal power cable, which is why we have this guy right here. And you can modify it yourself into the sketchy thing that we had, which will allow you to fit a large air cooler. It's not an ideal solution, but it does mean when this case arrives to you, it's not a good solution. When this case arrives to you, it's technically CSA approved. Marveling at that for a full minute set us behind a little bit, but now I'm ready to put the USB Type-C front panel connector on. There you go. I'm not gonna lie, Alex, I'm sketched out. Okay, I guess we're gonna have to settle for it sticking off a little bit. This one's not tapped properly either. You can see the threads only go in halfway. Does it say what these are? Yeah, they're M4. M4? All right, I'll go get an M4 tap. Okay, all right, thanks. This is kind of clever though. They've got these little plastic spacers on the rubber feet, so that on the two that have a screw right next to them, there's no interference. Our smallest metric tap is M6. Alex, can we get an M4 tap on order, please? Yep. Damn it. My impress level keeps shrinking here. I don't think there were extra screws either, so I'm gonna have to find a way to drive in that defective one. I swear, the intention today was to do a nice, easy, normal build without any random tools being required. Here we go. Oh, shit, I think we just scratched it. It's one of the dumbest things I've done today. They glued the damn screw in for the GPU mount. Look, they have thread locker on it. Look, there, that's how the GPU mount goes on, all right? Why is there a rear I.O. type C thing? In case you don't want to put it on the front? There were some challenges, but the good news is that 32 minutes later, we're ready to build. Oh, interesting. I just noticed there's an alternate location for the power button. You can also put it here. Now, the keen-eyed among you will probably have noticed that we went what appears to be completely overboard with our power supply. This is an 850-watt SFX power supply from Cooler Master, but there is a reason for it. Small form factor power supplies generally have much less capacitance than full-size models, and what that means is that if you have any components with high transient loads, like, say, for example, RTX graphics cards, which is to say they'll suddenly pull a very large amount of current and then kind of ease off, you can end up blowing these things up if you don't over-spec them, even though theoretically they should have been fine. Okay, well, how's the power supply bracket figure into all this? There's no instructions to install the power supply bracket. This is the worst. Wait, what the hell? I just found another spot for the USB-C. You can also put your USB-C on the bottom. Why? Is this the top panel? Did I do this wrong? I don't get it. I'm sure someone on Reddit was like, yeah, I'm like, we'll put it here. And then they were like, oh, yeah, sure. We can just put another hole in it. That's legitimately probably how that story goes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Here we go. I got this. So this goes through the spacer and then into the power supply unit. Oh, that's a good idea. I mean, well, it's an idea. I don't know if plugging this into anything is a good idea. Look, they've got a space here for the cable to come out, but then they give you a cable that goes this way. Maybe also these screws are rusting already. The about page on their website says, at Spy Labs, we are all about function over form. Never thought elegance mattered that much to me. And then I got rusty mismatched screws right on the top of my case. And I changed my mind. While the power supply is in, for better or for worse, let's put the motherboard in. I mean, whatever. I don't think there's any rules. We've gone with an Asus B550i. Yeah, it's not quite as balls to the wall as the X570 variant, but it's more affordable. And since we're not overclocking, it does everything we need it to do. One key feature it has is USB BIOS flashback, which for the CPU that we're using, is actually a critical feature since it doesn't support it out of the box. And that CPU we've gone with is the Ryzen 5 5600X. The theme of the build today is jack of all trades, right? And this will do it all for under $300. It's got six cores. It turbos up high enough that it is among the fastest gaming CPUs on the market. And it consumes just 65 watts, meaning the system is going to be nice and quiet in spite of its small stature. On the subject of cooling, the order of operations here is going to make our build either a lot easier or a lot more difficult. So we wanna get our cooler prepared, that is get the mounting hardware installed on the motherboard. We want to plug in our 8-pin EPS connector. Little something like that. Then we're gonna install the motherboard and bolt on the cooler. What's frustrating about this one is that compared to the last couple of nightmare small form factor builds that I've done, this one, all the challenges feel unnecessary. When I know something's gonna be hard, I'm mentally prepared for it. When a screw just has the head filled in and I can't get my screwdriver in it, that's not a good time. The reason we ended up with a SATA SSD in our jack of all trades build is because, well, simply put, we wanted two terabytes of capacity so that we can put lots of games on our machine. And it was substantially cheaper than going with a two terabyte M.2, which isn't to say we don't want to boot from M.2. So we went with a separate 500 gig drive, which cost us 80 bucks. It's only PCI Express Gen 3, but Crucial's P5 has ample performance for anything that we could want to do in a gaming rig outside of maybe us needing an upgrade to a Gen 4 drive when Microsoft Direct Storage shows up. That is, if it makes a difference to performance. For USB 3, there's not really enough slack to do anything other than plug it in like that, unfortunately. And for RAM, we went with 3200 megahertz CL16 ballistics from Crucial. And we went 32 gigs because, back to the theme of the system, jack of all trades, yeah, you can get away with 16 gigs for gaming, but it's nice to be able to be a jack of all trades ass and just leave all your Chrome tabs open and all your background tasks running while you're gaming. And for that, you can actually exceed 16 gigs these days. So we were like, ah, we're lazy. We're putting in 32 gigs. You don't have to though. Love these, love these relish mustard ketchup and then whatever you'd put on a hot dog that's blue colored cables here. Well, if we're gonna have funky colored cables, I'm embracing it. Let's go with a purple SATA cable. This is not what was included with the motherboard. I'm just having some fun now. Now it's time for the Chungus. You want to put the power in first? Oh, that power. Yes, we should do that first. Oh, balls. This has to go in from the other side. And it's fixed. I could really like touch that mains, exposed mains power from here. I do like fireworks. The only thing Katy Perry and I have in common, we're both a firework now that I have this case. Alex, how sure are you that this thing is gonna close? This looks extremely borderline. Sure, go for it. Oh my God, that's really, really near. Okay, yeah, fine. I've apparently gone with a Founder's Edition card. The Founder's Edition cards are a great choice for a build like this because they take all the power from the bottom and push it all out the top. And that's exactly how the natural convection of this case is going to work. So we do have a problem though with the back plate. We have an interference issue with our ginormous cooler. Oh, okay. We did get a non-back plated card in there. See, that'll go in. But the pack of the card is actually touching the cooler, which is terrible because it's not gonna work. It's touching the cooler, which is terrible because that's gonna mean that we're gonna short circuit the back of the card, definitely destroy it at some point. We could jam some electrical tape in there, just put it along the back of the card. We could install it, but it wouldn't be ideal anyway because once we put a larger card in here, it's gonna cover most of the bottom part of a passive convection-based cooler, which means that it's not gonna get airflow that it's expecting and it's not gonna perform like we would want it to. We're gonna pull this out and we're gonna swap it out for an HD 15. Thanks, Alex. You know what? It's probably just as well the P1 didn't fit because for its price, it's really not that practical. This is really tight. Now I gotta get this fan clip on. Poor Anacta, I'm sure they're watching this going, oh, what is he doing? Got that clip on, given that it is right up against the top panel. That was really tricky, but the cooler's on now, which means we are ready to put our originally planned 3060 Ti GPU. So this was chosen because, there we go, it's a good card and it's fast, but without being a completely ridiculous price. There's a little clippy doodle to hold it in the right spot. These screws don't really fit through here. I mean, this is not surprising to me at this point. There we go. This is crazy. This bolt has a lock washer, a regular washer, and then the nut that they're using is a lock nut with like that plastic material, nylock. There you go, thanks. They really do not want your GPU going anywhere. I mean, given how much you must've paid for it these days, I guess I get it. There we go. We can, I don't know, I mean, the cable management of this thing is a nightmare regardless of what we do at this point, so that's a pretty sick little machine though. Let's get it closed up. I'm gonna go like that. Oh my God, this one's not threaded all the way in again. Any screws will solve tapper if you press hard enough. Let's go ahead and fire this up. You know, now that the pain is over, it only really took an hour and a half to build. I would like for it to turn on though. Okay, I installed the front panel connectors on a USB header. Here's a little tech tip for you. When it's really, really hard to get out the front panel connectors, and you're not gonna be able to put them all on individually, you just put a little strip of tape across them. There. Now they're all one header. Okay, I think we got it. Feel like I shouldn't be putting this on yet, but I'm gonna do it anyway. The only things we really need to change in here are to enable DOCP, so that's gonna put our memory at its like overclocked faster speed. And if we were installing Windows 11, we're obviously gonna have to tweak our TPM as well as our secure boot settings, but we're not, so we're not gonna worry about that. You know, oh, you know what? You said this Cooler Master power supply didn't have a silent mode. It does, the fan's off. And then the GPU has a fanless mode, I believe. It's not fanless right now though. They're spinning too, but boy are they ever quiet. This is freaking awesome. I do like the look. Am I weird? Is it weird that I think this looks cool? I mean, obviously you're not gonna get a lot of dust filtration going on. Yeah, I think you'll just blow the crap air straight through it. That's true. You don't even have to take off the side panel. Just, of course, the real question is, can it run crisis? I'm cheating a little, we're using DLSS, but that's not really cheating. That's a feature of this GPU. The total cost for this build is around $1,750, which is not cheap by any stretch of the imagination. But when you consider that this does basically everything that a top of the line gaming machine would do is darn near silent. We're running crisis remastered at 1440p, very high, at around 60 FPS. Not much to complain about, is there? I guess it makes sense that if the GPU is given completely unrestricted access to fresh air and it just goes right out of the case, the fans don't have to ramp up as much. It's kind of like running your system as like an open air test bench. Of course, we wanna know the worst case scenario. So I'm firing up eight threads of small FFTs in Prime 95 here. We're gonna hit that CPU a little bit harder. We're gonna get back into crisis and we are monitoring our temps with hardware info in the background. We're also screen recording. So this is pretty brutal. In fact, this is too brutal. You can see that our GPU is only about 60% utilized because we don't have enough CPU resources left. Let's run a few fewer threats. Yeah, this poor GPU does not get the data it needs while we're running Prime 95 in the background. So this is basically the worst case scenario for what we could do with an actual game. And this thing is almost completely silent, holding it up to my microphones. That's incredible. Our maximum temp on the CPU hit about 65 degrees. Yeah, not too shabby. And our GPU managed, yeah, 82. But it's also turboing up pretty darn nice for us around two gigahertz on a 3060 Ti. The build quality of the case might've been a little bit poop, but overall I like it. Just like I like our sponsor. Thanks to Drop for sponsoring this video. In celebration of the first Avenger, Drop's Captain America custom key cap set is styled in true blue and dark red with silver and red legends to complete Cap's iconic look. 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