 Now it's pretty common for a product to come into our studio that is so spectacularly pointless that we can't imagine why anyone would buy it. But what's far less common is for one of those seemingly pointless products to be such an incredible piece of engineering that I simply cannot help but make a video about it. Well, that's what happened today. This is the ASRock Rack EPC621D4i-2M, a mini ITX motherboard with a CPU socket that's almost the size of the board. That's right, my friends. I today am going to be using this motherboard to build a 28-core computer in a small form factor chassis with a gaming graphics card because at this point it just can't get much dumber, can it? Speaking of dumb, you'd be dumb if you don't check out our sponsor for today's video. Honey is a free web browser extension that will find you the best promo codes on popular shopping websites like Amazon, eBay, and more. Get it today at joinhoney.com slash LTT. Did I mention it's free? Okay, before we go any further, I feel like I owe you guys an explanation for what makes this dumb because there's nothing inherently dumb about a motherboard. It's as good as the components that you can plug into it. And this one, well, you can plug some pretty amazing components into it. It's got four memory slots here. So these support SODIMM memory as well as ECC memory. If you're into that maximum stability, it's got an LGA 3647 socket with support for up to an 8180 platinum 28-core Xeon processor. It's got a PCI Express 16x slot here. It's got one of those handy-dandy powered SATA ports for those little tiny drives as well as a breakout to four additional SATA ports right here. And finally, it's got a pair of M.2 NVMe SSD slots on the back which on a different version of this board, you can actually see the connector pads here can actually be equipped with memory instead of NVMe SSD modules. But it's not any of the stuff that we can connect to it that makes it dumb. It's more the fact that it ends up being kind of a solution looking for a problem. So if we're after an ITX board, presumably we're trying to build something compact. So if we wanted like not a crazy core count, but let's say 10 cores or 12 or 18, we could go with Intel's LGA 2066 socket which has both Core i9 processors and even their Xeon Ws with support for ECC memory if we're after that stability. It's a much smaller socket and has all the features that we could possibly use on a board of this form factor. Then let's say that we did want some kind of, you know, madness 28 core system or something like that. Well, the thing is that in the server space, there are far better solutions that allow you to build a more compact overall system even if the motherboards are in some cases a little bit bigger. So typically what you would do is you would use what's called blade servers where you have like this larger rack that has multiple modules each of which might have a couple CPU sockets like this with this kind of inline airflow cooling solution with the power supply at the back and everything tightly integrated. If you're using a standard mini ITX motherboard with like your standard ATX power connectors, you're probably using a commodity off-the-shelf server case in which case you're gonna end up with kind of a big server considering how small your motherboard is. The final thing that makes it kind of dumb is that some of the key capabilities of this processor including its 48 PCI Express lanes and its support for up to six channel memory are physically not capable of being utilized here because the board is physically too small to put a whole bunch of PCI Express expansion on and even six memory slots to fully take advantage of that. I mean, not to mention that the space constraints also give us a total of five ports. VGA output, two gigabit ethernet, one of which is shared with the management interface and two USB 3 ports. That's it. Naturally, I don't give a hoot about any of that though and my goal is to use this thing to build the banginist, small form factor, quiet workstation gaming. I don't know what it is, but it's a super powerful system and it starts with getting our cooler installed. So this is one of Noctua's NH-U12S coolers with a pretty spectacular mounting mechanism on it. So this is designed specifically for the LGA3647 socket and this should be, we hope, enough to tame our 28 core beast. This is actually the CPU that I dropped. So what I'm kind of hoping is that the dead memory channel on it is one of the ones we're not using and then maybe it has a permanent home. Maybe ASRock built this board just for me. Now we put on some thermal interface material and the usual rules about a grain of rice, yeah, those get thrown out the window with these guys. You want a lot of thermal goop on here. That may not even be enough. It is a big chip. We can actually do a quick sanity check here once it's on a little bit. The CPU is so stuck to the bottom of the heat sink that I cannot get it off without applying a little bit more force than I'm happy to apply right now. So we're going to assume there's enough thermal goop on it. Look at that, the cooler's bigger than the motherboard. Now it's time to load the rest of this thing up. So we're going with four of these 16 gig ECC DDR4 2133 modules. These aren't the fastest thing around, but they were all that was sitting in the warehouse. And man, I got to say, there is something to be said for working with miniature sized hardware. Because like handling this thing is super easy. I'm going to throw some drives on the bottom or whatever, like, schwippity, schwappity, there they go. Pretty much no hassle at all. So now that our engine, so to speak, is complete, let's have a look at what we're using for the chassis. This is the LD03 from Silverstone. And this is one of those cases where they asked us if we wanted to review it. And we said, no, we don't really review cases anymore. But wow, that looks really cool. I'm sure I can find something to do with it at some point. So it's got these smoked glass tempered glass panels here. It's got a really unique form factor. Should be great for cooling, especially with that heatsink that we've got on there. And it gives us a real good look at our graphics card. Once we get that installed, let's go ahead and strip it down here. Whoop! Should even be pretty easy to build in. Now one compromise is apparent already. While the case has support for USB 3 on the front panel, the motherboard does not. In fact, I don't even know if it has front USB 2. What the jazz? No, it has a couple of things that look like USB 2, like this one, which is a COM port, a serial port. And this one, which is the front panel connectors for power and reset and all that stuff. That's fairly disappointing. All right, so I'm going to do the power supply first. This is another piece of Silverstone small form factor fun. This is their SFXL 800 watt power supply. So we're not going to be power supply limited, no matter what kind of CPU and graphics card we throw in here. So it's screwed in now, but you guys can see this is one of those cases where the power supply is actually mounted on the inside of the case with no direct external access. So we got to make sure that we've actually got it switched on. And then we run this extender here up to, here you go, up at the top of the case. And that's where we're actually going to plug it into the wall. All right, so our next challenge is our front panel connectors. Power and reset and all that stuff. We're going to have to check the manual, find out how that goes in. But these ones are really interesting. So not only do we not have front USB 3, we don't even have front audio on this thing. So we're going to be relying on our graphics cards built in audio if we want to get any sound output from this system whatsoever. I mean, alternately, we could use a USB sound card, but USB ports are kind of in short supply too. Okay, this is hilarious, guys. I was looking up the pinout for the front panel connectors, and I found out there is, in fact, a USB 2 header on this thing. Unfortunately, I didn't recognize it and I can't use it because it's a miniature one. So here's a normal USB front panel plug, and that's the size of the header. So that doesn't, I don't know. I've never seen this before. It's like mini USB 2. So this is kind of the magic moment where we install our motherboard. This case is too small? Well, there's only one way to find out. So this panel comes off. Ooh. Hey. Well played, Silverstone. Okay, so I'm in there getting the motherboard screws, and like this is kind of a mature highbrow channel, but okay, this is in the case mounting hardware. Does this remind you of anything? Really, Silverstone, grow up. Okay, well, this isn't perfect, but it's also not nearly as bad as it looks right now. See, we've got enough room for our VRM heatsink to breathe in there, and most of that cable mess is going to be covered by our secret ingredient, our RTX 2080 Ti, complete with hydro dipping cooler. Power connectors in. Not bad. Okay, wow, that actually went a lot faster than I could have possibly hoped. So we are pretty much ready to see if this monster boots up. That's it. Super compact, air-cooled, and theoretically super quiet too. Well, I've got an update for you. Try as I might, I can't get two of these memory channels to recognize, which is new, before it was one. So CPU is going to come out and our known good, Platinum 8180 is going in. Glued together CPU is out, known good CPU is in. Let's find out if it's the board or the processor. The fact that there were two dead channels makes me think that there might be something wrong with the board. Hey, not bad. So there it is, 64 gigs of RAM. Okay, now another thing I couldn't figure out was how on earth to configure my NVMe drives in RAID. I set everything in here that I could possibly find to RAID. The manual says you just press control I when you're booting and you can configure RAID, but that doesn't come up. So nothing in here about any RAID option, ROM, something, something. So I'm just kind of at a bit of a loss. We're going to settle for just one NVMe drive, I guess. All right, ladies and gentlemen, we are super close now. I went and got a USB hub. So this is a super elegant solution to not having any USB ports. Hey, it's working. The one thing I'm having trouble with though is the fan speed. This is supposed to be a quiet build, but check this out guys. It's one of the fans on the graphics card. Now I've got my drivers installed, but even then like that shouldn't be doing that. So now I'm installing Afterburner and I'm just going to see if maybe it's something that I can fix by adjusting the fan speed manually or something. What the crap? See the tachometer is at 4,700 RPM. You can see the dip where I put my finger on it. So right now there's two possibilities really. One is that this PCI Express lot was not really designed to have a graphics card in it and therefore never really tested with a graphics card in it and is bugged in some way that is interfering with the GPU's ability to regulate its fan speed. That's a possibility. Possibility number two is that this was the hydro dipped one. Maybe we didn't put it together quite right. There is a little PCB in here that I think has something to do with fan control that maybe wasn't hooked up correctly. So I got my hands on another RTX 2080 Ti and we're going to try this one and hopefully this works. Oh boy. Looks like this needs some fixing. So it's probably something to do with this. Now that is more like what we were expecting. So all 64 gigs of memory are detected here. CPU, LOL, 28 cores, 56 threads. Let's fire up some Cinebench, shall we? Now first let's grab a reference score so we know what we're expecting. Score over 9300. All right. That's what we're expecting. Wish us luck. What are we turboing to right now? Ooh, 3 GHz. Wait, 4158, that's it? Ah, he was running two of them. So actually that's exactly right. Huh. So in spite of the fact that we're running an ITX motherboard, we were still able to pull off about what we'd expect on Cinebench. Now the next thing we want to see is if we can maintain those kinds of turbo speeds even under a sustained load. So this is Blender Classroom and what I want to see is if after a couple of minutes it starts to throttle down. We're sitting at around 55 to 60 degrees across all of our cores here. Not too shabby considering that we've got it pegged at 100% usage and we're just shy of 3 GHz on 28 cores. Now people might ask what anyone could possibly need 28 cores for and that's a fair question, but check this out. This system with the CPU pegged at 100% is still responsive enough that you can be just like using your computer and opening other applications and it just works fine. That's going to affect our benchmark score, but remember guys, that's not what we're after. I just wanted to see if the turbo was going to drop. Damn it. Okay. We didn't test it, but we finished the entire test and actually did not turbo down at all. So that's pretty darn impressive actually. I wasn't really expecting that. I mean this board, it does have the Xeon Platinum 8180 28 core on its supported list, but I don't know. I just, I didn't think ASRock even thought anyone was actually going to put it on there. All right. So now we've got some Anno 1800 going and what I get a kick out of here is that the game at peak there was using about 7% of the CPU. It's running really smoothly considering the detail level that I'm running at here. Looking pretty darn good. All right. Here we go. Quick alt tab, 7.4%. Woo! That's what happens when you got 56 threads, right? You can only use so many of them in a game. So now I want to see if our system stays quiet when we stress the GPU. It's running real smooth. We're getting about 120, 130 frames per second in Doom. Feels good. Yeah, this is super smooth. I could get used to playing on a $10,000 processor. The glass actually helps to mask a lot of the noise that would otherwise come out toward the user. And most of the ventilation is actually down here up from the bottom and then out the top. So when you're sitting where you normally would be, it's really impressive considering there's real-time ray tracing power in there and 28 CPU cores. So just checking in, this is about a worst case scenario for our graphics card. We're sitting at around 95% usage, 84 degrees, which is where it'll start to throttle down, and it's hovering right around the 1620, yeah, about 1620 megahertz. Not too bad at all for an RTX 2080 Ti Founders Edition. Not being held back by the case at that point. Oh, that's funny. You know how I was saying it was like super responsive, Brendan? I accidentally had Anno open in the background sucking up 2% of the CPU. So that's it, guys. This may not be the most conventional system that I've ever built, and this motherboard may be super stupid, but man, is that ever a lot of performance in a very, very small space and still running reasonably quietly. So shout out to ASRock for building a pretty freaking cool board, and I hope you guys enjoyed our little adventure building with it. The Massdrop XCOS PortaPro X headphones are based on the original 1984 COS on-ear portable design, but updated to make them more modern and durable. They can be folded up in different configurations for easy storage, they use oxygen-free copper voice coils that provide a wide frequency response, and they feature warm and smooth audio. A single button control lets you skip tracks, make calls, and activate voice commands, and they've got a lifetime warranty from COS along with a noise-canceling mic. So join the drop today at the link in the video description. So thanks for watching guys, if you disliked this video hit that button, but if you liked it, like it, subscribe, and maybe consider checking out where to buy this stuff if you feature to the link in the video description. 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