 A while back we got a tweet from a viewer who suggested we take a look at the S4 Mini by NFC. A completely unheard of indie outfit run by this guy, Josh Sniffin'. Well I'm not sure what he's been sniffin', but it must be some pretty good stuff. Because basically out of his garage, he is building what appears to be by far the smallest case for custom gaming PC builders out there. Measuring just 2 and a half inches thick, the diminutive S4 Mini case pushes the definition of small form factor cases to the absolute breaking point. But will it break when we try to cram a Zotac GTX 1080 and a Core i7 7700K into a system that's even smaller than the PlayStation 4? There's only one way to find out. We're hosting LTX 2017 on July 29th, 2017. It's a meetup tech, carnival thing and it's gonna be a lot of fun. Learn more at the link in the video description. Distilling a gaming PC down to this degree comes at a cost. The S4 Mini has no front I.O. to speak of, the CPU cooler and RAM module clearance is 40mm, and GPU options that don't require some creativity are pretty limited. Thankfully, more powerful mini cards have come into fashion and our MSI GTX 1060 OCV1 fit quite easily without even being so tight inside that we couldn't fit two 2 and a half inch drives, which will take gladly. But even that is probably not enough. So what other tricks did they use? Well, unlike OEMs like MSI and Zotac, the S4 Mini uses an off-the-shelf mini ITX motherboard and a desktop graphics card. But like them, they're relying on a main external power brick with a high efficiency DC to DC power supply mounted inside. There are a handful of options, including some lower cost ones for more pedestrian system configs, but to give ourselves some breathing room, we are using a Dell 330W brick with an HD Plex 300 power supply inside. Now without any modifications, we ended up with what we'd consider to be a pretty decent machine. We've got a low voltage Core i7-7700T, a GTX 1060, 16 gigs of Vengeance LPX memory, and an MP500 M.2 SSD for speed and a little bit of space savings behind the video card. And firing it all up, we found ourselves greeted with actually pretty great thermal and acoustic performance. It's right in the middle of the other competitors in our recent small form factor case roundup. Impressive, perhaps even most impressive, but I wouldn't call it a Jedi if it was another one of those stupid, looks great, but can't perform cases, would I? Well good news my friends, the limit here is not our power supply or our thermals, thanks to the S4 Mini's perforated side panels, just volume. So let's see then, how far we can push our luck, I mean, if we look at our CPU cooling results, we've got a lot of headroom there. So, step one, we go ahead and upgrade to a 7700K. As for the RAM, well come on, this stuff's clearly not cool enough for a rig like this, but ahhh, a stroke of luck. Corsair contacted us and asked if we wanted a sample of their new Dominator Platinum Special Edition Torque. We took one look at that stuff and said, f*** yeah! Seriously, orange fins and labeling, heat treated titanium styling on the top bar, 32 gigs of this was definitely worth the $75 we paid to have Josh overnight ship us a custom hot rod style side panel to go with it. Moving on to the GPU, well we were scratching our heads trying to figure out how to get something bigger than a 1060 in here, I mean, we're kinda coming to the point where we can almost fit a card like Zotac's GTX 1080 Mini, if only the case were a little bigger, or the card were a little smaller. So if we, hehehe, hahahaha, yes my friends, I hope you saw this one coming, because we went there. After taking the plastic shroud off, we, carefully, trimmed down the rear of the heatsink's fins as close to the heat pipe as we dared to, no, not that close, dang it, Ivan. So one quick call to Zotac and another overnight shipment later, and it's time for round two. Now we're talking. Now we can get the card inside the S4 Mini, but the stock cooling is still an issue. But if we can't fit a Noctua F12, maybe a Silverstone Slim 120mm on this mount here will be enough. Fire up Furmark and... crap. Okay, let's go back to the Noctua and FF12. I mean, it's only a couple millimeters off, so I think you can see where we're going with this. We shaved off just enough to make it fit in under the 120mm fan mounts, and make it fit we did, I mean, this is Linus Tech Tips, we always fit it in there, if you know what I mean. As for temperatures, though, we're stable in the high 80s. We made it work, but it was a little loud due to the lack of clearance between the fan and the side panel. At about 50% fan speed, though, we got to the point where our noise level was acceptable without giving up too much of our GPU's boost clock. As for the CPU, with some careful undervolting and tweaking, we got it to hold at 4.2 to 4.3 GHz boost under synthetic load, staying comfortably at 4.5 GHz, that is full turbo under lighter workloads like games. Our Dominator Platinum Torx didn't want to go past 2400 MHz, but this is an X99 kit on a Z170 board with a 7th gen chip, so we made up the difference by tightening up the timings as far down as they'd go. And all of this taken together gives us this tiny gaming rig whose only outward indication of its potency is the BA RAM vent, and maybe the massive external power brick. So let's take a few moments then to put into perspective the sheer amount of raw power contained in this little box. We only planned to run a couple of benchmarks, you know, just to make sure that it was working okay, but we were so blown away that we had to run more to make sure we weren't dreaming. Our decked out S4 Mini runs with the best single GPU systems we've tested, even beating out our Kaby Lake Bench System with a Founders Edition card thanks to the additional turbo enabled by an overclocked card. And it comes in at the top of the pack for what we've ever seen in terms of performance per liter. Now at $195 US dollars, not including the power supply and without a fancy paint job, not to mention the fact that it's completely sold out of pre-orders, the S4 Mini slots in with the rest of our premium small form factor cases. It's compact, reasonably lightweight, features rugged aluminum construction, is near impossible to actually buy, and isn't the easiest thing to work in, but so far this is the closest I think I've seen to the idea that I pitched to Cooler Master four years ago, and to say I love it would be an understatement. TunnelBear is the simple to use VPN app that literally takes this long to turn on. Boom. The app loads up, you go, okay, yep, that's the country I want, you click one button and BAM! No DNS settings and port forwarding or any of that kind of nonsense. And once you turn TunnelBear on, you get a couple of key benefits. Your connection gets encrypted, keeping your traffic safe and private from your internet provider, advertisers, etc. And you appear to the websites and online services you're using as though you were in a different country, getting you around pesky geo-restrictions. So try it out with 500 megabytes of data for free and no credit card required, and then if you choose to get a year of unlimited data, save 10% by going to tunnelbear.com slash LTT. So thanks for watching guys, if this video sucked, you know what to do. But if it was awesome, get subscribed, hit that like button, and maybe check out the link to where to buy the stuff we featured in the video description. Hmm, okay, maybe the parts inside. Also down there is a link to our merch store which has cool shirts like this one, as well as our community forum, which you should totally join.