 Da da da da da da da da da Is it RGB enough? Sup guys. I'm in Denver, Colorado at Micro Center. And this time around, the concept for our sponsored video sounded simple enough. Linus, all you gotta do is build a PC. I've got what, six and a half hours till you guys close? And you picked out all the parts for me, so I don't even have to like go shopping like last time? What kind of a system could take more than six hours to... You have got to be kidding me. What even is this? Multiple NVMe drives, dual graphics cards, hardline water cooling. Why are we putting an NvS 810 graphics card in this? What am I even looking at here? This is no simple gaming rig. This is supposed to be the showcase build for AMD's unreleased Threadripper 64 core 3990x processor, and I've got only six hours to build it. Wait, what are you doing? There's no time for that. This is a speed build now. But first, here are the parts we'll be using. Come on, we got to get this thing ripped open, get the motherboard, get the Zenith 2 Extreme Alpha. What, you're just going to stand there and hold the camera, David? Expect you to pitch in today. No, I'm just kidding. I'm kidding. We actually do need to make a video about it. Step one, let's get the CPU out of the nondescript brown box that it shipped here in with the tamper evident tape. Oh, we tampering, boys. It costs a pretty penny, don't it? Look at that. It's $10 cheaper than $4,000. I mean, it's outlandish. But when you talk in terms of the performance and price of anything comparable, it's right in there. Nothing comparable. Oh, that was close. Oh, it even smells fresh. The craziest thing about the CPU to me is just how utterly unnecessary it is. They already won. This is just like grinding your opponent into the ground for no reason. Use my Der Bauer Edition case as a chair. Sup, Roman. I'd be curious if one of you just showed up and was like, yeah, I really just want to buy that and take it out of the store right now, what they would do. How many freaking M.2 slots are there on this thing? So it's got a Dim.2 module up here, which will hold two. It's got two more in here. And then they snuck another one on the back. Freaking love it. I mean, I guess if you've got, what is it, like 88 PCI Express Gen 4 lanes or something stupid like that coming out the CPU, you got to find some way to use them. We're using PCIe Gen 3 drives in this system. For desktop use anyway, the performance won't make much of a difference, especially if it's a good Gen 3 drive like these. It's funny to me to think about, you know, what the head space of someone building something like this would be like. You'd have to basically be, I'm not the kind of person that has to ask how much things cost, so just build it, right? Wow. It needs like almost this entire tube of the included ectotherm. All thermal compound applications look the same once you put the block down and mash it on there, okay? Deluxe white mini valve with black handle. These fittings appear to be to link the GPUs together, but I don't see any GPU blocks. Was there a rhyme or reason to the fittings that were selected? Does anyone know? Like were these fittings picked for a specific reason or? No. Oh, was the goal to water cool the GPUs? So we are just liquid cooling the CPU with 720 millimeters worth of radiator. I don't know what's more crazy, the fact that we've got a $550 power supply or the fact that we've got a system that might actually justify it. $4,000 CPU? Three grand worth of GPU? Even when we're done, we will be nowhere near the price of like a Mac Pro. Front panel connectors. These look like drive cages. That's nice. And then these rear accessible drive cages, that's pretty sweet. They could also be power supply mounts. Let's throw the power supply in first. Let's do that. I don't know how to get it out. Maybe I don't have to. And we definitely need to remove it. So I think you have to remove the drive cages and then put that in there. Wait, you just take off these screws. These ones stay on. Why would they do it like this? I'm getting very frustrated with this case. Feels less like installing a power supply, more like installing a power plant. Poor hard drives. I remember when they used to have some sex appeal and now it's just like, oh, right, I guess I probably need a hard drive for like the games that I'll play that often. Pro tip, by the way, guys, for when you're doing your next build based on this exact spec, the Xenith 2 Extreme Alpha has a missing mounting hole here because it's too covered in VRMs. So I had to remove that standoff. Just one more little thing to go wrong during this build. I got to give some thought to the loop layout here. I feel like I'm going to end up putting this one towards the front just because it's going to interfere with my GPU if I have the water coming out right over here. You know what? I think six screws is plenty to hold in a radiator. I wonder how much this thing is. 200 bucks. Man, these things are sick though. Where does it go? I thought it went in the front, but I don't see anywhere to mount that. No, it doesn't look like it goes there. Well, if you're advanced enough to buy this thing, you should just know where it goes, idiot. So you throw it in here, screw it in from the back, and the only problem is that it's really designed for you to have graphics cards connected to it. And if you'll recall, we didn't have blocks for our graphics cards. Fortunately, we went and got different graphics cards. These are supposedly using reference PCBs, so we could just use some standard EK Vector RTX 2080 Ti RGB blocks, and we should be pretty much good to go. What even is all this? Oh, cool. So they include their own fan power hub and a separate fan RGB hub that I just about snapped the connector off of, and it's bent back. Cool. If the objective is lots of RGB and airflow, this seems like a good way to achieve it. Feel like I'm using some primozerg tactics here. You know, you just got to get the creep everywhere and you worry about building later. Time to install the top rad. Oh, please fit. Okay. I'm sure glad I took the time to put all these fans on here before checking to see if it actually fit in there. Do you guys have a thin triple rad? While we sort out the radiator situation, I'm going to go ahead and do some more of the wiring that I need to get done, like our front USB 3. Man, these USB 3 connectors are bulky. Front audio. There it is. Wow, that's a long front audio cable. Wait, don't look at that side, David. It's uncomfortable. You're making everyone uncomfortable right now. How will I manage all these cables? I am going full raw dog cable management back here. I am so sorry, everyone. I feel like as long as I keep making an excuse and saying, oh, I'm going to have to do that this time, the people who don't watch the videos regularly might think that usually I do a good job. Oh my goodness. There's so much SATA power back here. I want one with less than four SATA connectors on it. Where the heck am I going to put this RGB controller? No, no, no. Nothing is on fire. Don't say that. No, no. How ridiculous is that? How could I? Really? This one's getting four screws. I don't give a shit. We've got a lot of tubing to bend, but I'm not going to cable manage it until I actually see this thing turn on, which we can't do obviously until we plumb it up. Theoretically, it should be relatively straightforward. Oh, my O-ring just went in the garbage. I give up. Holy crap. David, we might be screwed. It looks like just to clear the RAM, we already need one of these extenders. And then to clear the extender, we're going to need like double Gigantor extenders. This feels a little ridiculous. Would you say that's too tall? It's a line of special. We need to start putting the graphics cards in or we're not going to have any idea where the fittings are going to line up with our distribution block. So well, that's a little tighter than I might have hoped. Why? Why? Right here. Boom. Does that line up? Oh, not quite. That is going to be a bit of a tough shot. That's a shame. Natasha here from Micro Center has generously offered to help us out. I think she felt bad for us. She does things kind of by the book though, so I'm just going to be like bending stuff by hand. So can anyone cover the phones for Natasha? 15 mil. What is this tubing? It's 16. I don't know if we do have 15 mil tubing. I mean, if we do, I've never needed to go find it. Okay. So I have no idea what fittings are actually installed on anything because apparently I somehow ended up with a mix of 15 and 16 millimeter fittings. We even managed to get this thing to post. I will be Lord. No, heavens no. You should do that before. Yeah, you should. It's a free tech tip for me. So that would be a 15 mil. Wonderful. Whoever Micro Center's water cooling product manager is, let me give you a tip. Just two sizes, small and compensating for something. Just get rid of stuff that doesn't work with each other because there's enough variants of like colors and extenders and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Your life is difficult enough as it is. If they wanted it built properly, they would have had you do it. I still think it's sideways. Oh man, I'm so triggered right now. You look at it and you just feel bad. All right, fine. This is the OCD triggering build officially. Wow. Since we're committed to this concept now, we've decided we're going to take it to a whole other level. They actually got a shipment of soft tubing fittings in, but Natasha over here isn't going to stop hard line tubing either. So if it's not going to look great, it might as well be horrible. What do you think David? If we're going to go soft tubing, should we go soft tubing? I think it's not wild enough. I think it's well, remember I got one more. Okay. All right. All right. I'm into it. We're doing it. A wise woman once told me every PC has to have a theme. The theme of this one is, oh, it's eight o'clock and we've got an hour left to finish. Do we need to be more wild? More wild. Cause I could do that. Oh no, I kind of want it to go up the other way. What do you think of that? That's it. Is that it? That's it. Okay. Nailed it. Okay. How's it feel to be taking directions from a monkey? I like the 87 degree bend you've given me to work with here by the way. We have a theme. You got to go all out. Someone I corporate is going to be so mad. It's fine. What are they going to do? Take their business elsewhere? You've been double checking my loop order, right? No. Why would you not do that? You think I'm going to get it right? I could have easily moved that fitting. Oh, is that so? That is so. Sorry. You want me to sign the case? I can do that, but I do have a condition and that is that you guys don't fix it when I'm done. It's a conversation piece. It is. It's a piece of art for you. Accidents are soft. Art's intentional. While my plan to have the water come in at the top of the reservoir is a good one, we have these two openings here that were supposed to be for the radiators. So we decided we're just going to run an empty tube there. $40 worth of fittings to carry nothing. How's it look? It's more crooked than the other side, so it's even worse. I'm sorry. It's definitely a piece of something. All right. Should we fill it? Ah, there's a swivel fitting in here that is very annoying. That's a big loop. New plan. Anywhere it leaks, we're going to replace the hard line with soft. All right. This is going to take a lot of water, ladies and gentlemen. Here we go. All right. Is it RGB enough? Please tell me there's water flowing through every component, David. Nope. What? Not funny. It's kind of cool. What the? I actually really like this. I'm a monster. Should we see if it actually posts? That'd be nice. Unfortunately, we got eight minutes. So I'm just grabbing a test drive. I'm going to throw on our RTX NVLink, whatever they call it these days. No, you've got to be kidding me. EVGA's stupid thing overhangs the thing. Come on. By the way, does anyone have any idea why this is here? Should we throw it in? We could put it along the bottom. No, don't do it. Give it a minute. It can do it. Uh-oh. Watch pot never boils. Watch pot never boils. Please stop doing memory tests. Please. Please. Does this board have an MOK button? We didn't make sure that we have the latest BIOS supporting this chip on the board. I told you you should have post-tested. So that is as far as we are going to get. By the time you guys drop by the Micro Center in Denver, Colorado, this will be up on display. Natasha will have used their USB BIOS flashback feature to throw the latest BIOS on there. It's not a conventional build, but in my opinion, that's kind of the spirit of DIY, isn't it? For better or for worse, what you built is with your own two hands. So you kind of got no choice but to love it. Neat, huh? All right, I'm back at the office with an update for y'all. Natasha from Micro Center was able to update the BIOS for me, and it's working great. So you can go check it out. If you're not in the Denver area though, Natasha did screen cap some crazy pants benchmark runs on it that we've got loaded up here for you. Now as we talked about in our review, the 399EX isn't really a CPU for typical gamers, but if you've got a creative workload that needs this kind of horsepower, it crams more CPU cores in a single socket than the competition is putting in two sockets in the workstation space. So in summary, always allow more time than you think you need for an advanced build like this. So thanks for watching this video. Massive shout out to Micro Center for sponsoring it, and we will see you guys at the next one. If you're looking for something to watch right now, maybe check out the last build we did at Micro Center. That was also a one-day build, but I didn't try to full custom loop water cool it, so it was a little bit easier.