 There's a universal truth in the computer industry and that is that no matter how stupid it is, whether it's a chunk bitten out of a display or a big plastic bubble on the back of a computer, if Apple does it, someone is going to copy it. And that's the theme of today's video. This is the Dune case. A straight up, and I'm not going to mince words here, ripoff of the design of the new Mac Pro that is available on Indiegogo before the Mac Pro has even reached the market. And you might look at this and go, hold on a second Linus, that doesn't look that similar to the new Mac Pro, to which I would respond, well smarty pants, have you seen the optional front panel accessory yet? Speaking of optional, this segue to our sponsor. Ridge Wallet is the sleek way to keep wallet balls down with its compact frame and RFID blocking interplates. Use offer code LINUS to save 10% and get free worldwide shipping at the link below. Intro music Before we begin, I feel it's important to point out that while I will be making comments on the overall fit and finish and build quality of the Dune case Pro, so that's what they're calling it here, this is not a finished unit. This is a pre-production unit that they sent before their Indiegogo campaign concluded. So take that for what it is. Also, I'm not in any way endorsing their company or their Indiegogo campaign, something that we feel like we need to be really careful with when it comes to crowdfunding stuff. Without further ado then, let's pop the- Huh, there it goes. Pop the stock panel off and let's go ahead and throw this puppy on. This is one thick AF machined piece of aluminum. So you can see there's actually a two-stage process here. Shortly after Apple's keynote, I was actually watching a really cool machinist channel where they were showing how they get this effect. They actually have to go at it this way, creating these recessed domes, and then in order to get this three holes per divot pattern on the back, they then have to turn the material over and machine it again from the other side. So that's how you end up with this really eye-catching, cool design. Now, this doesn't actually look quite the same as Apple's to me though, and I'm gonna have to whip out my phone and see if I can spot any differences here. And I stand corrected. That is about as carbon-copy a design as you can pretty much have. I think I may have put it on upside down compared to the orientation of Apple's, but pretty minor detail here. One thing I will say is that the fit and finish, I haven't seen the new Mac Pro in person yet, but I would expect Apple's to be a little bit better. There are a couple of little rough marks in the circular holes on the other side. There's some striations in the finish here, and it's not the most amazing anodized finish I've ever seen. But I'd say from any further than about 60 to 90 centimeters away, you're probably not gonna notice those details. So we've got a couple of stainless steel handles that I'm not sure if they go all the way through to the bottom. In fact, I'm not sure if they go all the way through to the bottom in Apple's design, but definitely visually they carry through all the way down to the stainless steel feet. And then both side panels are just completely bare and plain. And then the I.O. I'm not a huge fan of the position here. So we've got a single power button and then two USB Type-C front ports. With that said, I don't know where the heck else they would put them. So I guess if you put this thing on the floor next to you, then you'll pretty much be sorted there. Now, there is one glaring difference between the Dune Case Pro and Apple's Mac Pro, and that's that the back does not have that fancy and expensive cheese grater machining done. It's just more of a standard ATX PC I.O. backplate back here. So Dune Case points out that this case is made of three millimeter thick aluminum and whatever. It's thick. It's heavy. That is hot. Here's our front USB connector. So one of the more classic USB 3.0s and then one of the newer USB 3.1 types. Front panel connectors for your power switch and hard drive LED. Although I don't know where the LED is. I guess we'll find that out soon enough. There's a triple hard drive mount in the bottom. Five two and a half inch drive mounts back here. So you could put a whack ton of SATA SSDs at the front. I wasn't sure if it was 120 or 140 millimeter fan mounts. It looks like it's both. OK, well, that answers that question. It looks like it is indeed a solid piece of steel that goes all the way down to these feet that screw down at the bottom. Overall, even with the panels off, structural rigidity of this thing, I would consider it to be an extremely strong point. Pardon the pun. Like there's almost no flex to this motherboard tray at all. OK, there we go. So that's where I removed that fan mount from. You can actually see the mechanism a little bit better now for how that goes in. Just hooks on there when you screwed in on the other side. And while we've got it torn apart, I guess now is a good time to show you this. This is kind of cool. So there's a little daughter board up at the top that has two USB type C plugs. Little flimsy. Be careful when you're cable managing it. But these are the internal USB connectors. So you could just use any female to internal connector here. So depending on how your motherboard connects its front USB, you are you're not limited there. To go with the look of the case, I'm trying to keep everything as monochromatic as I can in this build. So I've gone with an RM 1000 X from Corsair and conveniently Dune case has perforated the bottom of the chassis in that cheese grater pattern, just like they did the front. So that means I can install my power supply. Here we go. Such that it draws fresh air in from the bottom of the case. I've got to give Dune case full marks for accessibility, though. Once you unscrew a few components, you have access from pretty much every direction to the hardware that you're working on, which means you don't have to worry about like, oh, I'm halfway through my build and I can't plug in my modular cables or whatever the case may be. So that's pretty nice for the motherboard we're using. We're going to need two CPU connectors for our graphics card. We're going to need an eight and a six pin connector. And then, of course, we're going to need a 24 pin for the motherboard. I'll be using NVMe storage, so that'll go straight onto the motherboard. So I don't need anything for that. So right in front of me is our Epic Rome 7742 64 core 128 thread processor. I've got a Samsung 970 Pro SSD installed on it. That's the one terabyte model. I'm going to be loading it up with 256 gigs of RAM. And curiously, I've gone with a Radeon 5700 XT. Now, we've never tried to hackintosh Epic Rome, but that's why I've gone with AMD graphics to see if we can build a more powerful Mac Pro today than Apple will be launching shortly. And without all the fabrication work that we're doing on our other series about doing that. By the way, make sure you subscribe so you don't miss the conclusion of that video series. Now, you might have noticed that I've gone with a fairly pedestrian cooling solution here, just a knock to a single tower. And the reason for that is that at this time anyway, we don't have any way of overclocking our Epic Rome processor. So there's not really any point going exotic water cooling with it because honestly, it doesn't even run that hot. And we've got just a standard ATX motherboard, even though this does have 64 cores of oh no. We have exceeded our heat sink clearance. Crap. I guess we are going water cooling. I don't know if our pump res combo is within those physical limits. Okay, so I think without the adapter plate on that bottom fan, we can actually squeeze our reservoir in here. Is it still hitting the graphics card? You've got to be kidding me. New plan. We're going to use an EK Phoenix. This is the primo one. And this comes with an LGA 3647 block on it. So I'm definitely going to need a different block. Get in there. That is literally a millimeter of clearance. So the next thing I need to do is change out the block because this is for LGA 3647. Now, what I could do is take these fittings off, empty the system and then refill it. But that would take quite a while. And if I can get away with not refilling it, that would be great. So I'm going to try a theory that I've had for a while that if I can just completely submerge the tubes from my sealed AIO cooling system, so there's the old block. I'm going to get these fittings off now. Ah, no, okay. Can't remove those. We take these off. So we need to get the air bubbles out of our block. Otherwise, there's no point in doing this. Then I need to get it oriented correctly. Okay, I'm going to put it on like that. Okay, theoretically, we have changed out our block without losing any coolant. There's ample room to route cables behind the motherboard tray, which is really nice. But there's nowhere to really anchor anything unless you want to anchor to your SSD mounts, for example. That's pretty clean looking, right? It's not bad. Let's fire it up. It's probably running everything full bore right now. Theoretically, this is very simple to top up. And these fans are going full ham right now, too. Okay, so we haven't had much success booting this thing up, but I grabbed a second monitor, plugged it into the onboard VGA port. We did manage to get into Windows, and there was a setting in the BIOS that said it was preferring its onboard graphics versus discrete graphics. I toggled that to discrete, so hopefully we're going to get some kind of signal on here in a moment. Wait, hold on a second. What's going on? Why is it using the onboard again? So my Radeon 5700 XT is just stuck on this frozen splash screen, which is exactly what we were seeing before. We're up. That's it. It appears that it was a driver issue. I was so sure this thing wasn't going to work due to some kind of firmware incompatibility or something. I'd gone and gotten an RX 590, but it looks like we're good to go. When I stole the power connector for this thing, I missed one critical component. There's also an RPM sense wire that goes off your CPU fan header into the bottom of this that'll control probably not just your fan speed, but also your pump speed. So we're going to go ahead and disconnect it, see if we can quiet this puppy down a little. And let's see what happens, ladies and gentlemen. That's better. So shockingly, the BIOS of this motherboard has absolutely no way to configure the fan curve. So what I think is happening is because the temps are so low, it's turning the fan off and then cranking it back up and just getting real confused. But unfortunately on this BIOS, there's absolutely no way whatsoever to control that setting. So I went and got a Commander Pro and we're going to plug that in. That is a totally overkill and unnecessary solution, but here we are. So with some Googling, we found that apparently you can adjust the fan profiles through IPMI if you access the board's firmware over the network. But by the time we figured that out and connected another network cable and all that kind of stuff, we had the Commander Pro up and running. So we're just going to roll with that solution. So I've set it to a fixed 30% duty cycle. And we should be good to screw this back in now. And it's nice and quiet now. Well, from a timing and efficiency standpoint, I definitely have some regrets about going with this server board and epic CPU and all that stuff. But now that it's done, this build is something truly special. 256 gigs of RAM, 64 processing cores, liquid cooling and all in an enclosure that looks just like the new Mac Pro. And the craziest thing about it actually is that even with all this exotic hardware and basically silent operation, my mic's right here. We settled in at just 35% on the fan curve. And once both of these blender renders fire up, we're going to be sitting at around 66 to 68 degrees Celsius on the CPU. It's not even that crazy expensive compared to the upcoming Mac Pro. So if you like the look of the Mac Pro, but you want the performance of an epic workstation, literally an epic workstation, this is looking like a pretty fantastic way to go. If you guys are looking for a little bit more detail about what you could expect out of AMD's epic lineup, like the 7742, we actually did a full video on the CPU, a bunch of performance benchmarks. You guys can check that out. LG Gram laptops are super popular with my staff and they can be for you too, because we are giving away three of them. These things are absolutely fantastic, especially when you're on the go. They're super light, so if you've got a backpack full of your water bottle, your snack, your laptop, all the stuff you need for the day, you don't have to worry about your laptop weighing you down and they don't compromise on battery life. Often when I'm on business trips, I will go an entire night or sometimes two without recharging it and still have the confidence to know that my laptop's going to be ready for me when I need to take notes. So how do you win one of these? Well, the event starts on October 31st and ends on November 13th. We'll announce the winner on November 20th. You've got to find my post at lg-underscore-tech.it and follow the steps to win the prizes. The links are in the description. So you've got to follow at lg-underscore-tech.it. You've got to post on your channel or leave a comment on my post describing how an LG Gram would make a difference from your frustrating current laptop. And step three, you've got to tag the photo at lg-underscore-tech.it and at LinusTech with hashtag LGGram and hashtag GetGramBeFree. So I hope you guys enjoyed this video as much as I enjoyed making it. Actually, I hope you enjoyed it a lot more than I enjoyed making it because this thing kicked my butt at times, but I'm certainly enjoying the finished product. This is absolutely freaking sick.