 Ever seen anything like it? What is the cable? There's no cables! What the f***? 24-pin, 8-pin, GPU power connectors, they're f***ing gone. And yet, it's working. That's amazing. It is amazing. And to find out how it came to be, we're gonna have to go back in time. In time. In time. Wow! Project Stealth PC DIY Kit. What are you? You look like so much fun. I can't wait to play with you. Ridge. Ridge wallet can hold up to 12 cards, comes with a cash trap or money clip, and makes a great gift for Father's Day. From May 20th to June 8th, 2022, you can get 15% off your order at ridge.com slash minus. Top to bottom, back to front, I'm expecting every aspect of the Project Stealth Kit from Gigabyte to be an interesting one. Starting, of course, with the PC DIY kit right here. Unlike a normal barebones, it only includes a case and a motherboard pre-installed in the box, no cooler and no power supply, and also unlike a normal barebones, it includes one of the components that most gamers really prefer to choose for themselves rather than being locked into one option. A GPU. That means you can have any GPU you want as long as it's this RTX 3070 that's included in the box. But what's special about it? This right here. The 8-pin and 6-pin PCI Express power connectors are actually on the bottom of the card where the PCIe slot is. Now under normal circumstances, these would be impossible to get at, but in this particular chassis, which is specifically designed with this GPU in mind, there's actually a cutout here to plug in the power. Which raises another question. Where the devil are all the other power connectors on here? There they are. Not only are our power connectors on the back of the board, but even our front USB, our fans, our front like power switch and reset switch and all that stuff, everything is actually on the back of this motherboard. It's such a cool and honestly obvious idea that it raises the question, why didn't anybody do this before? You see, Mangear actually patented this concept and pitched it to multiple PC component manufacturers back in 2011, including Gigabyte. So when they saw Gigabyte release... Look. Ask you how you are and you just have to say that you're fine. So when they saw the Project Stealth Kit announced with them conveniently cut out of the equation, they were understandably miffed. Thankfully, it seems as though the two have patched up their differences since the kit is available either standalone from Gigabyte or as a pre-built from Mangear. And I'm really stoked on that because it means hopefully we can see more of this kind of innovation. I mean, who doesn't like tidier builds with better airflow? I think the people want to see the board. While I'm pulling this out, I realized I don't actually have to speculate about what happened between Gigabyte and Mangear. Joe Wallace, how you doing? I got my hands on a Project Stealth and it seems to me that you guys kind of like patented this concept. Do you have any comments on that at all? There's a lot of challenges in building a motherboard whenever the connectors on the opposite side like that. Yeah. But they figured it out and I'm just really happy that we're able to bring the completion back. Basically, everything's good? It's all good, man. All right. Well, I'm glad to hear that. There was some conversations that took place a couple months ago, but we're excited to be working with them on it. Well, there you have it. Gigabyte licensed the patent and everything is good to go. Glad to hear it. I thought I was going to build a computer, but actually I'm going to take apart a computer today. Oh, yeah. There we go. Wow. This just makes my brain hurt. I mean, it's good that they went and they moved everything to the back, you know, even Cemos clear jumper and the battery here. So you don't need to access the front of the board after you built the computer, which is kind of crazy, but it must have involved some pretty unique PCB layout changes. One question with respect to development is did they build this board from scratch or did they kind of repurpose an existing design? The closest clue found in a couple of minutes was the Z690 Aorus Elite AX. There are some differences. This is only a DDR4 board and this one's DDR5, which is our next kind of funny and interesting story here. Gigabyte sent over all the parts for us to do this build and they included some DDR4 memories. So we're going to be swapping that out for something else. Now I kind of want to pull off the shield and just see what's under it. It's like a Twilight Zone thing or something, you know, or I guess the more up-to-date reference would be like Stranger Things. There you have it. Everything's just through holes, but they go the opposite way. Man, from that, I mean, I guess they already do rear-mounted some stuff. You'll see rear-mounted M.2 slots, for example, so they wouldn't have had to completely retool a manufacturing line in order to run it through one way and then run it through the other way, but I'd still imagine it took some kidjiggering to do this. It's possible this is totally normal and I'm only noticing because I'm looking so closely at the construction of this board, but the two PCIe Gen 4 slots down here are using through holes for soldering and the Gen 5 slot is actually surface mounted. For now, I want to take a closer look at this chassis because as cool as Project Stealth is, if it locked you into these components, that would be a huge hit against its repairability and its upgradability. So I want to make sure that we're also compatible with standard components. And just from a quick glance, it looks like we are because other than these extra cutouts down here, which realistically could just be used as cable management under other circumstances, there's nothing about this that would prevent you from putting a completely standard motherboard and standard graphics card in it. Kudos Gigabyte there. In fact, they've even got an upright PCIe GPU mount. If you wanted to use a riser and like do that thing, which you obviously wouldn't for projects, Delve, unless... Do they have another hole that corresponds to... They do not. That's a missed opportunity, Gigabyte. So have a cutout right here, then you can have your PCIe cables go up and you can do like a vertical mount as well. Jake's in charge of making sure I reach our production quota this week. He's not telling any stories about paint, is he? Not yet. So far, I've managed to disassemble it. Da da da da da da da da daaaaaaaa! Alright, goodbye. Let me just get this thing back to its original state here. As I was looking at the front panel connectors, I got to thinking, in an industry where you can't even get everybody to agree how much spacing there should be between the positive and negative connectors for the front power LED. It's very unlikely we're going to get all the major motherboard and case manufacturers to come together on that CPU fans should go here and the 24-pin connector should go kind of somewhere in here. So even though the case might be able to be brought forward to a new system, I think if you want to take advantage of this stealthy feature that you presumably paid extra for, I actually don't know how much the bare bones costs, you could end up vendor locked, which I'm never a huge fan of. I'd rather see standards, and this is almost certainly a non-standard motherboard. ATX, in addition to, you know, where all the holes go into it and stuff, has a maximum depth. I'm pretty sure that this has got to be exceeding it, having all this stuff hanging off the back. The labels, actually, on all these headers are super clear, which really goes to show how much easier building or repairing a computer could be if you had the major players cooperating. Anyway, Ploof wanted to talk about this internal HDMI cable. Are they just reusing a chassis that used to have this as a feature, and then they just didn't want to pay to retool this plastic bezel? Because I don't even think it's long enough to go out the back of the case. On the surface, it appears that this GPU uses a super special layout like the motherboard with these power connectors on the bottom. But what's actually going on here is that it's a short PCB card. See, the card actually ends here. And then there's a couple of little pigtails, a couple little leads, coming from these flat PCIe connectors that we first encountered on a Gigabyte RTX 3090 on that Camino system recently. And then they come out to standard connectors that are just mounted to the backplate. So you see these little cables there. Totally standard PCB, other than that it's got that weird flat connector. What is the deal with that? We figured out the HDMI cable issue, but it seems to be part of a deeper problem. It's that Gigabyte mostly just repurposed their C300 chassis, which was not actually designed in the first place for this project. Case in point, we've got a three-pin fan connector here that you can either plug into the CPU fan header, which is not optimal, or you can run down the front of your board, completely defeating the purpose of project stealth. Oh, wow. This cutout is not actually quite big enough. It puts a bunch of strain on the plastic. And that's not because this fan header is not a CPU fan header. It's just because it's just really tight. Finally time to build. We've gone with a 12700 DDR5 memory, 32 gigs, 5600 megatransfers per second. Aorus sent over their Gen 4 7000. Is that a model or is that a read speed? Oh no, it has a big heat sink on it. I can make it fit, ploof. You ready? Watch this. Oh yeah. That brings us perfectly to the most exciting part of our build. Gigabyte had a scandal recently with power supplies blowing up. This one probably won't, but... Dang it. Why am I taking these screws out by hand? I'm gonna have a trusty LTTstore.com screwdriver. You're gonna end up with really long cables for how short these runs are. I could see people definitely going for something like a cable mod kit and getting shorter cables for a build like this. I mean, it's not that you will actually see the extra cable lengths, but because this chassis wasn't really designed with project stealth in mind, there is not a ton of cable management space on the back of the motherboard tray. Could be a bit of a challenge. I'd like to see Manegear's take on a chassis for this. Does this case actually fit a 360 millimeter radiator? Wait, where's the air come from? It just has no airflow? Dang it Gigabyte. What's the point of a fan filter with no airflow? What the hell? So you can't even get COVID through it. What the hell? No, no. How are you gonna cool the damn GPU? There's a fan here doing nothing. Is this why they said don't use a 12900K? What an utter disappointment. You can air cool it. With what air ploof? Where's the air? What the heck? I'm mounting it in the front and if Gigabyte doesn't like it, then they can design a better case. Imagine designing a whole product around getting all the cables out of the way of the airflow and then not having any air flow. So avoidable. You know what I'm reminded of? The Antec Dark Fleet 85. And I mean that as the scathing insult that it is. It was like they never actually bothered to build a computer in the case before productizing it. That's what this is. You have to actually try your product before you release it. What is this thing? 200 watts? Thanks. Thanks for all the fans to move around my hot air. Let's run it with the side panel off. Yeah, because I can't get enough of looking at my gorgeous complete lack of cables. I love how Gigabyte's design is just an Asetek cooler and then they just put like a giant tumor on top of it. Wait, is this even gonna go in there? I don't think I can reef on this hard enough to get this in here. Oh, it goes. All right. Okay. It doesn't sit like... How the hell is that supposed to work? Oh, wow. They stamped the front so the fans kind of come forward a little bit. And what that means here is that you can't even get the cables through to the front because of the tank. Brandon, can you see this? These cables are mushed. No, no, no. No, I don't like putting the fans the other way. I know you don't. It's bad for maintenance. You're gonna be doing so much maintenance on this PC. So much maintenance. Got another clearance issue here. 5-volt addressable RGB header. Doesn't seem to have enough room around it to get this plug into it. Yeah. Oh, wow. This is not even close to being able to fit. Didn't expect to take up Whitland today. I was having so much fun with this. I was sitting here thinking, wow, this is gonna be so easy to build. And instead, it's the not best. The GPU is actually kind of the coolest part of all of this. The GPU connector is the one that really looks awful. That's pretty cool. Maybe I'm back to being excited again, Ploof. It's just so clean. Okay, are all these cables through enough that I can actually close it? Yes, thank you. It's clean as hell. Wait, this OS was not set up by you? No, I did a Windows 11 install. It hooks into all the AORUS software and that auto downloads a bunch of like Norton and stuff like that. I don't want layered protection. I want to uninstall. This is an uninstall wizard. And if you have a window without an X, you're doing it wrong. Oh my God. This is really bad. And I don't even have SSDs in here and an SSD here. Okay, come take a side, dude. We got it? Yeah, screw it down. Like if I went to the gym and I had a bulge like that, it was freaking gigabyte last time too. A freaking solid front panel freaking gaming. Okay, have you learned nothing? We're up to 80 degrees already. You can see we've been running our benchmark for just over one minute. We've touched 92 degrees now after just four minutes. Package just hit 96 maximum. Remember too, the GPU is just running my OBS screen recording right now. Here it is. Package ring thermal throttling and core thermal throttling took place. Time six and a half minutes with a triple water cooling radiator. Ask you how you are. You just have to say that you're fine when you're not really fine. Okay, so Cinebench is still running and we are now down to 86 degrees on the CPU package. It's also still quiet. Man, now I really do wish I'd gone like a like a three quarters of an inch higher and we just had like a nice tidy, tidy holes here. Just put some water's mesh on there and boom done. That's all we had to do to fix it. Great concept. Core execution. Unlike my execution of this segue to our sponsor Pulseway. Imagine having the power to remotely manage all the devices on your network with just your voice. With Pulseway, you can do just that. 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