 Welcome to the Build Log of the Compensator 2. It's been a little bit over a year since the original Compensator video was released, and there have been improvements across the board in terms of CPU cores, graphics card performance, memory speed, tons of different stuff, and we have it all here. The idea of the Compensator is that there are no compromises in terms of any of our components, as long as you can just buy them on a shelf and throw them in your computer. This video isn't as crazy as it used to be, because now it's fairly commonplace for us to have like 30 or 70 or even more thousand dollar computers. But, Compensator 2. Let's go. Thanks to G.Skill for helping make Compensator 2 possible. Check out their gaming mouse and keyboard down in the video description. I do need like gloves of some sort. Do we have gloves? That moment when you need gloves because even your RAM has brushed aluminum on it. That moment when they also don't fit. 128 gigs of G.Skill Trident Zed or Z or whatever you want to call it. 3200 MHz. So on our last build, we had the Leon Li PC-08. This is the Leon Li PC-09. So I guess we'll see how different it is. While the PC-08 says that it's compatible with triple RADs, it's only like kinda. And I have the same cooler again, so hopefully it goes better this time. Oh, look at those feet. It smells new. Seriously, friend, it smells. Wadaaa! There's no air intakes on this side of the case. So the Kelvin will go up here, I guess. Or right here. This looks pretty cool. So just like last time, they have some included LED strips for the dials on the back. First, I'm gonna remove these fans so I can try to line up the cooler at all, and then we'll go from there. Now I want to thank Fractal Josh, I guess, real quick. Sorta didn't realize the fact that we didn't have a Kelvin S36 yesterday. So I contacted Josh and was like, hey man, I need one of those literally tomorrow. And I mean, it came through, it's here. Now I don't know if this is gonna work. Gonna run this back this way. Now Brandon, does that look cool? With fan. Without fan. Next up, I'm gonna remove this big drive cage, which I don't really need at least yet. And then I'm gonna try to figure out how you're supposed to pipe this water block. If I cut a line down from that, no one would ever know. I was thinking of cutting a line right here so that I could bring this up, feed the tubes up through the line so they can get up in here, hold this up vertically, and then install the motherboard. Because yeah, what it looks like is that they're like, there's no way anyone's gonna use an AIO in this f***ing case. Yeah. But then I did immediately. You cut me through that? Yeah. Okay. So we're gonna solve our little radiator problem by cutting through our extremely expensive brand new case. So my nerves are through the roof. Come along with me. Not too bad, actually. With some minor filing work, I can maybe make that look pretty okay. Okay, that actually looks pretty good. Not to like, toot my horn too much or anything. Watch the tubes not fit through it. Didn't really think about that part. Okay, we're actually good. So this will fit up here and then look something like that just in reverse because it's me on the other side of the case. And that'll work maybe, sorta, a little bit. So now I'm just installing the fans because I really want to make sure that this all actually does fit really well before I keep on going with the build. I was going to install the power supply next, but I think I'm gonna install the motherboard next just because I really want to get that water block mounted and see how I'm gonna have to deal with that thing that I cut out. Is this PS2? Okay. That's cool. Even though it's like a really high-end X99A Seuss board, it's still got PS2 on it. I actually love that. Now please tell me this reaches. Oh no. Oh no. Oh, that's pretty taut, isn't it? This would be the worst. If that doesn't fit, I will be so upset. Because then I would have cut that hole for no reason. I knew it was close, but I thought it made it. That socket is so low. Oh no. I don't think it makes it. F***. I have a plan. It's not necessarily completely ideal, but the logo will now be vertical. I thought I had to do it the other way. The logo on G-Skill, Strix, and the logo on SupremeFX are all also vertical. So this is just a vertical logo build. It was just totally the plan from the beginning. Right, guys? That's looking all right. What do you think? Next up, we have to install the AX1500i and all of our custom cable mod cables. Oh, tall loses on that are really close. There's also going to be like a cap there. That doesn't look very good, but I actually can't even install it the other way around, or else this big extra large socket interferes with things on the case. So this is just how it has to go. I screwed up. So this is the Rampage 5 Edition 10. It's a motherboard that can support four graphics cards. This is the X99 Strix Edition, the one that's supposed to go in my personal rig update that we're filming later, not the one that's supposed to go in Compensator. I thought it was like a funny coincidence. After all of that, I have to take all the RAM off. I have to take that CPU cooler off after that crazy installation. I have to take the CPU out, throw it all on here, throw it back in, and then we're good. Man, this is kind of a fun I.O. shield. The good looking part of the I.O. shield is actually on the board already. So it just kind of slots there. And this board is slightly extended. That means that I have to install the power supply first. Got these green and black cables from Cable Mod. They, I believe, completely match the original cables that we had for the very first Compensator. This will be the bottom graphics card. So one nice thing about custom cables like this is I can really easily splice off the extra wires. So I only need the 6 and the 6 plus 2. I don't have to use the extra plus 2 that runs all along with it. Now I'm going to try to have some foresight here and install this cable too. I'm also going to try to pre-run all the SATA cables. Tuck all this stuff away. Okay, so motherboard install attempt number 3? 2? 3? Somewhere around there? I don't know. Losing track. Oh, please tell me this is going to work. We're fine, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, we're good. We're good. It's tight. It's very tight, but it's fine. Nobody's freaking out. The problem was getting the actual header block through. That was an issue. Whoa! From here, we've got to install some graphics cards and a couple other things, and we're good to go. I can't install that here. So I'm going to unplug the fans. All right, now you go in there. I really hate these openings. I think they look terrible. One nice thing about the graphics card coming right in here is it'll cover up this cable mess down at the bottom. Okay, so let's put in our first Titan. It looks so weird with just one card at the bottom. Compensator. What's up? This looks great, right? So you go to add another one. All right, okay, I'm going to plug this in. I'm going to plug in a little extension cable, and then everything looks terrible. I hate it. I hate it so much. Don't order the stupid ones that have the Looptie Doop on them if you don't have to. Just run another one. Look at how nice. So much better. No. Say no to Looptie Doop cables. So I'm just going to install the glass panels just before I do the SSDs and the fans. If it really needs lighting, I want to figure out where those go before I start finalizing the cable management and add a ton of cables by doing the SSDs. Before I do this, we should see if the computer turns on at all. Okay, let's get our ginormous cable. Do we see? Whoa, what? I didn't know it did that. Like, I knew, okay, I knew the board lit up. I didn't know, like, before it was even turned on that it did some cool stuff. That's pretty sweet. Okay, so especially with the tinted tempered glass on, it looks pretty dark. So I'm probably going to try to add some ambient lighting if I can. I need it tighter. There. Okay, can you ignore my arm? How does that look? Can you see these? Does it look cool? So I'm just removing some of the Leon Lee fans, putting in some of my Noctua fans. Does it matter? Not really. So Leon Lee has a 2.5 inch spot down here and up here, and then six 3.5 inch spots in the middle of the cage that do not naturally convert to 2.5. If you have trays for your SSDs, you could convert them, but someone's, like, thrown ours away or something, so I don't actually have proper places for the SSDs to go, so I'm just going to end up, like, dumping them in here. This can power my NZME drive. I'm going to try to make it stay right about here if I can. But for the SSDs, I think I'm just going to end up going with, like, a stack. Eh, too many power cables. And another one. Okay, so all the SSDs have been fed power, but I need to get the data installed. So there's our SSD spread, all plugged in, data and power. It doesn't look that great, does it? Maybe these go down here. I don't know if I can pull that off, but I can try. The tower of data. Okay, that's pretty all right. Cool. Spin. Okay, so the power's in, the lights are all configured. I only have one more panel to put on. What? Okay, hold up, hold up, hold up. I can solve this. Did someone unplug me? No? Oh, okay. This power supply, the power symbol is off and the one is on. It's not... All right, it is the next day and it is benchmarking time. Everything's up and running. The system is wicked fast due to the RAID array and the NVMe drives and whatnot. We got a bunch of benchmarks installed, we're going to redo some from last time and do some new ones. Okay, so we got 17,408. Ah, yes, better than 99% of all results. Frame rate, not great. 130.3. Those cards get so loud. How hot are they getting? 88 degrees on GPU one. So this is my attempt to load Far Cry 4, which just isn't working at all. Control, delete, fail, alt-f4, fail, try tab. Nothing. We're going to try loading this game. Computer just doesn't like four cards. Go horsey, go horsey, go. This is running so bad. Doom is not that hard to run. Okay, so benchmarking complete. At idle, all of our cards ran at around 50 degrees, give or take a few depending on which one it was in the order. So just like with Compensator 1, we could have obviously benefited from water cooling the GPU. Stacking 4 isn't really a great idea without water cooling because they can't breathe and ran at about 88 degrees all the time when under load, resulting in some pretty serious throttling. Just like last time, we crushed in 3DMark Fire Strike and again got in the top 1% of systems, which luckily is not based off of price per performance. Although we did have some pretty serious troubles with it, but was able to fight through it through some configuration stuff. Last time with the four original Titan X cards, all the games worked, but they just chopped and glitched around and had some tearing and all that kind of stuff. This time wasn't like that at all. Performance was pretty terrible, really, considering the cost. And a couple games just refused to work at all. What I expected to happen was that the system would just completely ignore the third and fourth cards, and we'd just get some thermal throttled two-way SLI performance metrics that I could laugh at. But in reality, the usage of the second card often sat at around 20%, resulting in less than desirable results. The moral of the story with Compensator has always been the same. You don't need to rig this insane, and when you do set up something like this, there are often more drawbacks than you'd expect. Yeah, sure, they'll perform pretty well in 3DMark, and if you water cool and overclock them, you'll do pretty well on the leaderboards. But that's about it. I hope you had fun watching this build. Personally, just like last time, I think it's beautiful. I love how it looks, but it's just a little misguided. I chose the four Titans knowing it would be a problem, but I did so because you can still force four-way to work in some games, and it is still benchmarkable with synthetics. We'll see what next year has to offer. I'll see you there with Compensator 3. So as you may have noticed, we were using cable mod cables for this build, just like we did with Compensator 1. And now you can use their customizer to get your own cable mod cables that are specifically for you. You just choose your sleeve type, your power supply brand, and model. You select your size and length, then the color that you want, and bam! You're done. That's it. That's all. The only remaining steps are waiting for them to show up and installing them in your system. Nice and easy. If you guys liked this video, like it. If you disliked this video, dislike it, get subscribed, all that fun stuff. Check the link in the description down below to see our sponsors and to buy stuff on Amazon so you can build your own Compensator if you wanted to do that for some reason. Also, there's links to our shirts and stuff and the forum where you can discuss how my build was so terribly misguided when that was the point of the video. Anyways, check out this video, which was Compensator 1, and I'll see you next time.