 No joke, my new gaming PC is gonna be this thin. And let me explain why. Seven years ago, I embarked on a journey to fix my biggest gripes with gaming computers. They make a bunch of noise, and they heat up your room like it's a freaking sauna. The solution? A rack mount gaming chassis that allows you to put your PC in an entirely separate room. But it's been a few years, and with a new house and a shiny new rack came some new ideas, including building the ultimate LAN gaming center where my whole family can game together. While moving one or two gaming PCs out of the room is manageable, five of them is no joke. We could have just built five more of that original custom chassis. That would have taken up most of my rack, also dumping a ton of heat. We could have done a virtualized setup, but due to incompatibility with anti-cheat, it wasn't really practical and had very low wife approval factor. It's time for a new custom chassis built specifically for my LAN room. I'm talking one U of total thickness, integrated water cooling, integrated fiber optic USB, RTX graphics, and thanks to Pulseway, who sponsored today's video, I will be able to remotely monitor and manage all of these systems from the comfort of my phone. Sick. If we learned anything while we were building my V2 desk PC, it's that trying to cram a gaming system into a one U form factor is extremely difficult. Most motherboards VRM heatsinks don't fit. You can't use a standard ATX power supply. Most consumer water cooling parts don't fit. I mean TLDR, I guess nothing fits. So you either have to modify to make your hardware fit or you have to use server specific hardware. So Antoine, one of our engineers, had the wonderful idea of doing a two U chassis, so that is double the height with two systems in it, which would allow you to use SFX power supplies, pretty much any motherboard you want, and standard CPU blocks. But I killed that for a couple of reasons. First, you then have to take two systems offline in order to perform maintenance. And second, maintenance is also much more difficult because there's a lot more hardware packed into each chassis. Finally, we need five stations. So one of the machines would end up half filled, wasting a precious rack unit in my rack at home. So one U it is, Jake didn't agree, you can tell from the look on his face. But here we are. It's too late now. Now, I'm going to confess, I'm not actually 100% sure how this goes together. So I'm going to say motherboard here. Oh, there's some pre work we got to do here. Oh, cool. On a standard PC, you're going to end up with standoffs that are between six and seven millimeters or so. That clearly wouldn't work in here. That's like three or four millimeters we could have used elsewhere. That's like a third of our entire vertical budget for the motherboard. So instead, protocase pressed in little self cinching nuts. See there, if you look at the bottom. Oh, did I even mention protocase built this one for us as well, just like my old one? See? Absolute bros over there and sisters. Of course, this approach isn't without flaws. What you'll see on one new servers is sort of a plasticky insulation layer because the bottom of the motherboard has a lot of little contact points and you don't want those to short out on your case. We're going to do the same thing, just a little bit more janky. We're using electrical tape. Yeah, where's the electrical tape? I put it away, I was like, surely we will not need this roll of orange electrical tape for this shoot. Honestly, I don't really know if it needs it. But if you were to put this in here and had the system on and you were screwing with it and you pressed in the wrong spot, it could be bad news. This is a good idea. It's a thing that we should do. Yeah, what about a piece of cardboard? Yeah, that could also work. Hey, Jake, what? You know what's a convenient motherboard sized piece of cardboard? What? A motherboard box? Yeah, I'll just cut it up. Let her rip. You know what I'm saying? Here. Oh my God. Well, it kind of works. It actually works really well. Yeah, here, put this side. Put your fingers in there? No. I see that thumb there. Look at the taste. I'm guessing you guys already thought of it, but like, this isn't a fire hazard or anything. No, I would not anticipate that this would be a fire hazard. You're technically not wrong that you don't want anything flammable inside your computer. It's one of the reasons that an acrylic case is not actually considered a good idea and you won't find any commercial manufacturers with an all acrylic case. That along with EMI. In practical terms, it doesn't really get that hot. Where is the fire going to go from here? Also, the electronics could also just light on fire on their own. Yes. Sick fantasy of all my video game stuff going up and playing. I thought you were about to say, I have this sick fantasy of Linus's house burning down. Yeah. Like, oh. I mean, yeah, it's sick. I'll give you that accurate description. The wrench. I mean, you don't want to eat them without cooking them first. I guess you'll need a fire. Speaking of high temperatures, Pulseway's app lets you monitor things like CPU temperatures when you're on the go. And if something catastrophic like a fire did happen, you'd get a notification when your system went offline. All I'm getting from this is Linus is okay with us eating him. No, I've made it very clear many times that I would strongly prefer that you guys do not eat me when the guillotines come out. All right. Wow. That's mint. Look at that. You know what? Oh, I have the perfect tool for that. Everything Knife now available on LTTstore.com. Is it actually? We're ordering more yet. I was like, Zach, I mean, it sells really well. Why don't we just carry your knife? He's like, yeah, bro. How much do we make on this knife? Like, not very much. Two dollars or something. Yeah. I like Zach. I support this. Yeah, exactly. It's a net benefit to the customers, right? To the world. You probably noticed already that we don't have a traditional like IO shield place. That's because we don't have enough height to install an IO shield. So we're just not going to have one. No, no, no. No, we're going to 3D print one. We're going to 3D print one. Yeah, you can totally 3D. It's designed to have like a 3D print one go over top of this. You know what? I think our cardboard might be too high profile with the CPU backplate. So I'm just going to cut a cut out for it. Yeah. Well, now you got these holes. You can conveniently just line it up on there. There to about there. There you go. No, it's not this way, is it? Oh, yeah, it is this way. Okay, I thought it was the shiny side down. So I was getting very confused. Oh, yeah, that's better. What is it touching? Oh, I see. Oh, yeah, we got to cut off that part and tape that part. We're using tape here where there's a sheet metal flange that's lifting up our board a little bit and then cardboard for the rest of it. And I think we're good to go. I was trying to figure out how these little mounting plates go on this block. You see, there's like a little key and it just clips in. That's so cute. Perfect. We do not need the stock mounting bracket. Well, we need the backplate, but not these. Cool. Oh, perfect. So I can install the board. Yeah. All right. I'm going to screw it in. Shout out AMD. I know I'm always selling the screws rather really hard, but it really does make a big difference when you're trying to do one of these angled ones, like having the nice strong magnets. It doesn't just like slip around and move around. Wiggle waggle. Okay, motherboard's in. Sick. Barely clear. So we're by the audio ports. I realize now we haven't really talked about our motherboard choice. We went with MATX. It's not really as trendy as full-size ATX or ITX, the little one, but MATX offers a great middle ground. There's more expansion than ITX, up to four slots, thanks to the additional board space, but it's also not so large as to take up the entire width of our rack mount case. So for the purposes of our test system here, we're going to be using an ASUS Prime B550M-A slash CSM. It's a pretty budget-oriented board with fairly limited I.O., but we only need standard gaming peripherals since it's a LAN PC, so that's not really an issue. And it's also worth considering that we're going to need to build five of these things, so shelling out for premium motherboards doesn't make a ton of sense. Then for our CPU, we're using another placeholder, honestly. This is a Ryzen 7 3700X, and while it's totally fine for LAN gaming PCs for my kids, with both Intel's Raptor Lake and AMD Zen 4 right around the corner, even if I didn't want to shell out a ton for the latest and greatest hardware, given that these are LAN PCs, depending on how powerful those are, they could have a profound effect on the cost of Ryzen 5000 or Intel's 12th Gen, which, I mean, either of them would be excellent options depending on the pricing and the secondary market. You did a great job there. Thanks, buddy. Just like our video team does a great job of putting together high-quality exclusives and behind-the-scenes for floatplane.com. You're getting way ahead of us here. We're supposed to be talking about storage digs. Yeah, he's like going and installing the CPU block. I don't even have that M.2. It's still open. We have a number of different options for storage. The board has two M.2 slots on it, so we could just, you know, throw an Nd&E drive in there and call it a day. We added a three and a half inch drive bay at the last second to the design, so we could throw some hard drive bay storage in there and maybe do like all Nd&E for boot and then hybrid storage for game drives, or I've been trying to pitch this to Jake here, maybe you guys can help me. We could set up a fancy Nd&E NAS upgrade for my house. We already did that. Well, okay. He never actually let me take it home, so I could actually take it home, and then we could do network boot for all of these machines so we could control all the images in one place. The only concern with that is like GPU direct storage. Some games might start taking advantage of that and that could cause some problems for you. That's true. I say we just put eight terabyte Nvme's in each of them. What? No, we just spent the last like two minutes talking about being budget conscious, Jake. Placeholder then, I've got a Sabren Rocket Nvme 4.0. This is a PCIe Gen 4 drive that will do fine, just fine for direct storage when and if we ever get any kind of loading time or smoothness benefit from it. Is this gonna be too tall? Is what gonna be too tall? Holy shit, it's gonna be too tall. I think it'll be okay once it's screwed in. No, no, no, yeah, we're gonna screw it in. No, it's gonna be fine. I'll just, I'll just screw it in. Oh, she's mint, bud, she's mint. We're good? She's mint. Here, you might wanna put this other corner on before you screw the crap out of that. We haven't talked about this water block yet, but this is super cool. First of all, why water? We could have gone air, especially with the heat output of, you know, eight core gaming CPU these days, but there are a couple of reasons not to. First is noise. Yes, these systems are gonna be in a separate room, but a separate room in a house, it's not like there's a concrete barrier, so we would hear them. Second, I have a devious plan to dump the waste heat from these systems into the pool in the backyard, and it's just a little bit easier to set up a heat exchanger from hot water to cold water. Why these blocks though? Because you can put fittings into the top of it, but you can see the problem with that, them sticking out the top of the chassis, but you can also, aha, install fittings in the side, or this side, or this side, or even this side. Cool, right? There's also the challenge of fitting high-speed networking. You wouldn't want a net boot off of one gigabit. We could probably find a motherboard that has onboard 10 gig, but then there are usually those Aquantia NICs that we don't really like, so. And it would be really expensive. MHPX board, you're talking like some kind of ROG board. You're buying like a $600 one, yeah. Yeah, I don't think that's viable. Eight terabyte SSDs it is. No. RAM is yet another component where our choices were dictated by our vertical clearance. So while we might've wanted to put Vengeance RGB in the system, we're gonna be sticking with Vengeance LPX. The LP is for low profile. That's close, man. For our spec, we settled on 16 gigs of 3,200 megatransfer per second CL16. It's a nice bang for the buck. At this stage in the game, the keen-eyed among you have probably noticed that we have a random PCIe slot thing floating in the middle of the chassis here. Ah, that is where these come in. So our display port comes from the back of the chassis and then plugs into the back of the graphics card right over here. We're probably gonna need a bit of a longer cable, but that's okay. Infinite Cables is gonna hook us up, right? Infinite Cables, cool, thanks. We've got two more of them here. One of these is for fiber optic USB 3, and the other one is for, what was it? The USB on the dock. So it'll come back out and then plug into the motherboard. And then have a little pigtail. We could also convert one of the internal headers and just plug it in that way, but we'll figure that out later. Yeah, we'll figure that out later. All right, let's talk GPU. This one is a bit of a weird choice. This is a 3090. We might have some power limitations, but the main thing, of course, water-cooled card, right? But here's your problem. How is a fitting gonna fit here? Yeah, let's just illustrate for the people. Yeah, that's definitely not gonna work. Remember, you also got tubing coming out of it, right? Yeah, or you could do this, maybe. No, no. Instead, EK has this very special piece of kit from their Fluidworks workstation. Rather than the old school terminal blocks where you put like six GPUs together in a workstation, put them all in at once, use this instead. The fittings come off the side and you can take out an individual card whenever you want. Right, and that allows them to pack them in one right above the other. Single slot. Super cool. This is where it gets fun. This isn't a Gen 4 riser, so it could cause us some problems given this is a Gen 4 card. If you try to do this, a lot of the time, the system will just display nothing. Your num lock will work, it's posted, your GPU is just not getting the right signals. You wanna use a Gen 4 riser, but we don't have one long enough, so we're just gonna have to go in the BIOS and set it explicitly this slot is Gen 3, and then it should work. Ah, the power supply. We went back and forth on this a lot. The original plan was to use dual 400 watt HD Plex DC to DC converters like we did in the desk PC. So that way, the actual PSU, the power supply unit, is outside of the chassis, and it can be like a power brick. Yeah, like a big laptop brick. I mean, really, it could be anything you want because you're just taking 12 volt power going into your system and then distributing it and converting it to five volt and 3.3 volt as needed. But an advantage of going MATX for our motherboard is that we can actually fit this bad boy. This right here is an 850 watt 1U Flex ATX power supply from FSP. It's got 80 plus platinum efficiency, and if we just do a little something something like this, that should power everything we need. Technically, this isn't necessary. If we wanted to plug in USB peripherals on the other side, and it's just a keyboard, mouse, and headset, we could probably get away with just a Cat 6 USB extension, and we already have the Cat 6 cabling in the wall. But we also already have fiber optic cabling in the wall, and these iKron docks are amazing. They will do USB one, two, and three over a single fiber optic cable. And ethernet. The challenge is mounting. Each of the systems needs one of these to plug into a fiber optic cable in the server room, and then go all the way to the LAN room. But once you've got all of these in the rack, where do these go? So we came up with the idea of putting them inside the gaming machine. Now, stock, we had a bit of an airflow issue with this in that it would block all of the airflow. But by ripping off the front and the back plate, we actually not only can get our airflow straight through it, but we should be able to improve the cooling of the iKron dock itself. Usually these have a power brick that you'd have to mount, I guess, at the back of the case or something like that. But Antoine found this cute little 12 volt to 24 volt adapter, put a Molex connector on one side and the iKron connector on the other. Oh, sick. That means this thing can get powered off of our FSP power supply, and we don't have to have an external power brick. What's your devious plan for getting all of these fans hooked up? Is it devious if you don't like it? You know, like. Lots of extensions. Okay, proof of concept, fine, but I think we should probably use a fan hub in the final deployment. Somebody that's been using a fan hub for many years, they all suck and they always break. Am I wrong? He said I'm not wrong. At least extensions just work. They won't just randomly die six months down the road and then your fans don't work. This tubing is super cool. Okay, it's got these super impenetrable walls so you're not gonna lose a lot of your fluid to evaporation. And even though it's a thin walled tubing, this is what, three eighths inch, I guess? I'm not sure. The bend radius, pretty tight. This is gonna help us navigate the twists and turns in our tiny chassis here. As for how to get the water in and out of the system, this is yet another advantage to our MATX motherboard because it gives us room at the back of the chassis for these quick disconnects. Sorry? Does that tube fit over those quick disconnects? It's gonna be tight, but that means it won't leak. I am all about stretching tubing over barbs that are way too big. Back in the day, I used to put three eighths inch tubing over half inch barbs because not only would it mean that it would never leak, but there was actually a flow rate advantage because the tubing stretching out like this over the flange meant that it was a very smooth transition between the water flow through the tube and the water flow through the barb. You ready to just go for it? Yeah. So are you gonna go, is this gonna be the inlet? Ah crap, which one's which? Okay, this is out. Okay, let me get a Sharpie. Yeah, let's- This is wet erase. I don't want to put an O. Yep. O. Perfect. Oh, this is awesome. Once again, the keen-eyed among you might have noticed a little problem with our system. We don't have a pump or a radiator. Of course we do. But it'll be like a big pump that will handle all of these systems together. And the radiator is going to be the coils of tubing that are embedded in the concrete floor of the pool. This will be a stand-in. Yeah. We'll also have a backup radiator just in case it gets too hot, but I don't think that's ever gonna be a problem. I don't think it's gonna happen, Jake. Before we fill it with water, I confess, I am a little curious. Is it actually going to fit? I need a lot more water than this. I wouldn't put the lid on yet. Well, no, I'm just checking, Jake. I'm checking. A little bit of bulge. Hard to say exactly. No, it's not. What is it? It's just this 24-pin cable here. Oh. This needs to be mashed a little bit more. Oh yeah. That'll do it. It's done. It's done. He's here. Everything's done. Look at how beautiful it is. It's actually not bad. I put some fans in. They all only have one screw. They do like nothing. No, no, no. It's not bad. The fans, they do nothing. They're also running at like normal speed. I think these fans can go like 5,000 RPM if they want. Ooh. And the top's not on. You feel them here? Stick your hands right here. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. They're doing stuff. I feel them. They're doing some little things. What about this power supply? Is the game running right now? Shut up. I mean, actually, yes. Why do server power supplies sound like they do if this is possible? This system has absolutely no right to be this quiet. What kind of like black magic are they putting into this power supply? You stick your ear next to it, but it's no louder than like a normal laptop fan. This is Cyberpunk 2077 with ray tracing up the butt at 1440p on an RTX 3090. This is not some trivial load. Man, I should just convert my new Yvonne's machines to these things. I know. This is awesome. Yeah, a few little tweaks. Yeah. Not as awesome as Pulseway though. Let's see where your CPU, 4%. You closed the game? What? No. Oh. Okay, well, apparently cyber fun crashed, but that's no surprise. It's cool that Pulseway was able to tell us, hey, your CPU usage is super low. Your game probably crashed. What are you doing? They got lots of other cool features, specifically for your LAN center too. So I set up a little automation here. What's something that's really annoying when you want to go play games? Updates, right? Yeah. So we can set up windows updates to be automatic. You could set it to launch steam at 4 a.m. every night and run updates if it's not already running. Be a shame if somebody did something with a great remote monitoring and management tool like Pulseway. Hey Siri, shut off the LAN PCs. Oh, come on. Oh my God. It thinks I'm saying lamp. One moment, please. Oh no, no, no. Keep game. God damn. CPU's at 56, GPU's at 42. We do need to figure out the game crashing issue that we're running into. Hopefully it's not like power supply related or anything like that. Realistically, this computer is not gonna have a 3090 in it. That's true. Yeah. Hey Siri, shut down computer. Bye bye. See you later. It's dead. Yeah, it's bedtime kids. Yeah. Wow, you could turn on like a parental control thing too. Oh absolutely, yeah, it'd be sick. And once you have five of them, you can set it up so they're all in the same command. So you say, hey Siri, update the computers and it'll update them like. I should totally just do them all as one use for the whole house. Yeah. I think it's time. We just gotta do a little tweaking and then we'll be there. Get it stable. It's probably more windows things than anything. This drive has been on like 17 different chipsets. It's probably that. And it's probably time for you guys to go check out Pulseway. They're the sponsor of this video. Head to the link in the video description where you can try out Pulseway for free with no commitment and lock in a special offer exclusive to our audience. And if you're looking for something else to watch, Pulseway actually sponsored our last attempt at this where we tried to do a single virtualized machine with GPUs for each of the five stations. It's too bad that didn't work. It is too bad that didn't work. You guys can watch the video and find out why.