The Build Process: A Personal Experience

I ended up just using a couple layers of electrical tape and that worked out just fine, so here it is - the completed build, with five liters of it. I've got to say, the build process wasn't too bad at all. I'll also mention that the 400 watt AC to DC unit is held in there just by sheer force, it's wedged between the graphics card and the bottom panel, but trust me when I say it's not going anywhere. The DC to ATX portion on the other hand is secured to the front panel with a couple small strips of double-sided tape, and that as well is absolutely locked in.

One of the imperfections of this build though is the slight crookedness of the graphics card. The only way to get around this would be to remove the top cover from the power supply, but then you're exposing all of the components of the power supply unit, which I'd rather not do. Then there's the AC power cable adapter, which is just super ugly. I'd probably end up sleeving these with some paracord if this build was something that I was going to use long term, and since this build does use a PCIE Gen 3 riser cable but we're using a PCIE Gen 4 motherboard and GPU, I'd recommend building the system outside of the case first without the riser cable. Setting the PCIE version to Gen 3 in the BIOS and then completing the build as you normally would, otherwise you risk getting no display at all from your system.

The Big Question: How Does it Actually Run?

Surprisingly, it actually runs pretty damn good. Our RTX 360 Ti at stock levels out to around 73 degrees C at a fan speed of just under 2,400 RPM and I'd say there's a bit of temperature headroom there if you want to run a quieter fan speed instead. This is also only six degrees warmer than my results with this card on an open test bench. No doubt the best way to reduce noise levels though and GPU temperature is with GPU undervolting. This is simply running the GPU at a lower voltage than it does at stock, and as a result, the GPU pulls less power and puts out less heat.

By setting the GPU to run at 18.15 MHz at 843 millivolts, which by the way is a slightly higher clock speed than it was running at stock, we drop 8 degrees on our GPU temp along with a 400 RPM slower fan speed overall. It's a significantly quieter setup. CPU temps also were absolutely fine. The Alpen Phone Blackridge is an exceptional little cooler and the best one that I've tested at this size. The CPU temperature that you're seeing reported here is the motherboard CPU reported temp, and it's a bit lower than the actual CPU die temperature.

A Gaming System Worth Using?

Now that might sound a bit warm, but it's actually fairly typical for Ryzen 5000 CPUs under lighter threaded workloads where more power is sent to fewer cores. Overall, this is an exceptional little gaming system. Warzone here was running in excess of 100 frames per second at 1440p with around medium settings and everything ran super smooth. Cyberpunk 2077 one of the most demanding titles today is also possible to run with ray trace reflections at 1440p although you'll need to use the DLSS performance mode to get playable frame rates again though, a really solid gaming experience delivered here considering the form factor of what we're playing on.

The Power Supplies: A Success Story

I had absolutely zero issues at all with the power supplies from HD Plex. I played for around two hours on this machine and with these specs we are well underneath the capabilities of what this power supply setup can handle at stock, I saw the entire system power draw at the wall at 309 watts and with the GPU undervolt in place that dropped to just 231 watts.

Potential Upgrades

If you wanted to improve this build even further with some modding, you can actually de-shroud the graphics card and mount a pair of slim 92 mil Noctor fans directly onto the heatsink. The Skyridge 4 Mini actually comes with a bracket for you to do this, so I might give that a go in the future.

A Personal Note

One of my favorite gaming builds of all time, and honestly I had an absolute blast building this up and testing it out. It actually worked much better than I had expected. Ideally, the specs here are well suited to 1440p gaming, and you're gonna get some really good frame rates there with the 3060 Ti. So if you have absolutely any reason at all to build a gaming PC this small, I'll leave all of the parts that you'll need down below in the description as always.

A huge thanks for watching, and I'll see you all in the next one!

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enokay now this is one of the coolest gaming pcs that i've ever built and i know i say that a lot but the amount of gaming performance that is in here for just a five liter case you guys need to see this and it's thanks to the performance and power efficiency of the cpus and gpus today the power supply ingenuity of hd plex and the incredibly compact skyreach 4 mini enclosure so let's take a look at all the parts that have gone into this and a couple of things that you need to know if you're planning on doing something similar and of course the performance let's start with the case that makes all of this possible and it's one of my personal favorites the skyridge 4 mini it's unbelievably compact at just 5 liters but doesn't compromise on build quality at all thanks to those thick aluminium panels it easily fits in a backpack and you can honestly get your entire build done in this case in less than 30 minutes thanks to how simple the layout is it can fit cpu coolers up to 45 millimeters in height and dual slot graphics cards up to 215 millimeters in length and today we're going to be pushing right up against those limits speaking of which we did actually take a look at this in a previous video we'll be using evga's absolutely tiny rtx 360 ti xc graphics card at just 202 mils in length it's around 40 mil shorter than the 360ti founders edition card it's also only 111 mils in height and exactly two slots thick it's also surprisingly well built metal backplate here with a nice dense heatsink and thankfully a mostly all black shroud design but what's really exciting here is that we're getting roughly rtx 2080 super performance at a 50 watt lower tdp just 200 watts total here so to get that kind of performance in this compact form factor and at this significantly reduced price that's pretty insane for the motherboard we're going with the asus b550i rog strix where we'll be plugging in our six core ryzen 5 5600x 6 cores and 12 threads is the sweet spot for a gaming build today and the 5600x delivers that alongside some fast clock speeds and low power consumption on that note if you haven't watched one of my previous videos on amd's new precision boost overdrive 2 and how you can use that to easily undervolt a ryzen 5000 processor definitely check that out we are 100 going to be using it in this build here thanks to how good it is then for the cpu cooler i went with the biggest option that fits in this case the alpinphone blackridge with a noctua fan swap this actually shouldn't fit in the skyridge 4 mini at 47 millimeters in height but thankfully the panels do close without any issues underneath there i've used a low profile 32 gigabyte memory kit clocked at 3 200 megahertz and for storage we're keeping it really simple with m.2 nvme drives i'll also note that i did have to remove the m.2 heatsink from the motherboard to allow the cpu cooler to fit but that shouldn't impact ssd thermals too much but probably the biggest compromise of the skyridge 4 mini is when it comes to the power supply but it's not as limiting or kind of constraining as you might think considering what you can fit inside this case in the first place so as you can see by how slim this case is there's no room for an sfx power supply or even a flex atx unit that we've used in previous builds so this is where the hd plex 400 watt ac to dc and dc to atx come to play this separates the power delivery into two critical components the 400 watt ac to dc portion that converts the alternating current from your wall into a direct current and then the dc to atx brick that converts the dc source into usable voltages for our components so for my previous builds in the skyridge 4 mini we had to use this a dell external power brick which you know is a compromise in itself it's basically a third size of the case which is not really ideal but using the 400 watt ac to dc brick basically replaces this which is awesome we can now do a completely brickless build with all the system components inside the enclosure best of all these two power supply units run incredibly quiet in fact the dc to atx portion is entirely passively cooled and while the ac unit has an incredibly quiet 30 mil fan it runs passive up to 250 watts of load hd plex say that this power supply can deliver up to 400 watts of power at above 93 efficiency and can support peaks of up to 450 watts now since the ac to dc unit sits underneath the graphics card to actually make this brickless build possible we need to use 180 degree 8 pin power adapters for our gpu you can pick these up on amazon for about 10 bucks and i'll link them down below a very important note though they usually come with a thick plastic cover which protects the solder joints but you'll need to replace that with something a bit thinner for this build to work i ended up just using a couple layers of electrical tape and that worked out just fine and so here it is the completed build or five liters of it and i've got to say the build process wasn't too bad at all i'll also mention that the 400 watt ac to dc unit is held in there just by sheer force it's wedged between the graphics card and the bottom panel but trust me when i say it's not going anywhere the dc to atx portion on the other hand is secured to the front panel with a couple small strips of double-sided tape and that as well is absolutely locked in one of the imperfections of this build though is the slight crookedness of the graphics card the only way to get around this would be to remove the top cover from the power supply but then you're exposing all of the components of the power supply unit which i'd rather not do then there's the ac power cable adapter which is just super ugly i'd probably end up sleeving these with some paracord if this build was something that i was going to use long term and since this build does use a pcie gen 3 riser cable but we're using a pcie gen 4 motherboard and gpu i'd recommend building the system outside of the case first without the riser cable setting the pcie version to gen 3 in the bios and then completing the build as you normally would otherwise you risk getting no display at all from your system but the big question is how does this thing actually run well surprisingly it actually runs pretty damn good our rtx 360 ti at stock levels out to around 73 degrees c at a fan speed of just under 2 400 rpm and i'd say there's a bit of temperature headroom there if you want to run a quieter fan speed instead this is also only six degrees warmer than my results with this card on an open test bench no doubt the best way to reduce noise levels though and gpu temperature is with gpu undervolting this is simply running the gpu at a lower voltage than it does at stock and as a result the gpu pulls less power and puts out less heat by setting the gpu to run at 18 15 megahertz at 843 millivolts which by the way is a slightly higher clock speed than it was running at stock we drop 8 degrees on our gpu temp along with a 400 rpm slower fan speed overall it's a significantly quieter setup cpu temps also were absolutely fine the alpen phone blackridge is an exceptional little cooler and the best one that i've tested at this size the cpu temperature that you're seeing reported here is the motherboard cpu reported temp and it's a bit lower than the actual cpu die temperature for what it's worth i saw the actual cpu die temperature of the 5600x sitting around the 80 degree mark during extended gaming load now that might sound a bit warm but it's actually fairly typical for ryzen 5000 cpus under lighter threaded workloads where more power is sent to fewer cores overall this is an exceptional little gaming system warzone here was running in excess of 100 frames per second at 1440p with around medium settings and everything ran super smooth cyberpunk 2077 one of the most demanding titles today is also possible to run with ray trace reflections at 1440p although you'll need to use the dlss performance mode to get playable frame rates again though a really solid gaming experience delivered here considering the form factor of what we're playing on i'll also mention that i had absolutely zero issues at all with the power supplies from hd plex i played for around two hours on this machine and with these specs we are well underneath the capabilities of what this power supply setup can handle at stock i saw the entire system power draw at the wall at 309 watts and with the gpu undervolt in place that dropped to just 231 watts if you wanted to improve this build even further with some modding you can actually de-shroud the graphics card and mount a pair of slim 92 mil noctor fans directly onto the heatsink the skyridge 4 mini actually comes with a bracket for you to do this so i might give that a go in the future so there it is one of my favorite gaming builds of all time and honestly i had an absolute blast building this up and testing it out it actually worked much better than i had expected ideally the specs here are well suited to 1440p gaming and you're gonna get some really good frame rates there with the 3060 ti so if you have absolutely any reason at all to build a gaming pc this small i'll leave all of the parts that you'll need down below in the description as always a huge thanks for watching and i'll see you all in the next oneokay now this is one of the coolest gaming pcs that i've ever built and i know i say that a lot but the amount of gaming performance that is in here for just a five liter case you guys need to see this and it's thanks to the performance and power efficiency of the cpus and gpus today the power supply ingenuity of hd plex and the incredibly compact skyreach 4 mini enclosure so let's take a look at all the parts that have gone into this and a couple of things that you need to know if you're planning on doing something similar and of course the performance let's start with the case that makes all of this possible and it's one of my personal favorites the skyridge 4 mini it's unbelievably compact at just 5 liters but doesn't compromise on build quality at all thanks to those thick aluminium panels it easily fits in a backpack and you can honestly get your entire build done in this case in less than 30 minutes thanks to how simple the layout is it can fit cpu coolers up to 45 millimeters in height and dual slot graphics cards up to 215 millimeters in length and today we're going to be pushing right up against those limits speaking of which we did actually take a look at this in a previous video we'll be using evga's absolutely tiny rtx 360 ti xc graphics card at just 202 mils in length it's around 40 mil shorter than the 360ti founders edition card it's also only 111 mils in height and exactly two slots thick it's also surprisingly well built metal backplate here with a nice dense heatsink and thankfully a mostly all black shroud design but what's really exciting here is that we're getting roughly rtx 2080 super performance at a 50 watt lower tdp just 200 watts total here so to get that kind of performance in this compact form factor and at this significantly reduced price that's pretty insane for the motherboard we're going with the asus b550i rog strix where we'll be plugging in our six core ryzen 5 5600x 6 cores and 12 threads is the sweet spot for a gaming build today and the 5600x delivers that alongside some fast clock speeds and low power consumption on that note if you haven't watched one of my previous videos on amd's new precision boost overdrive 2 and how you can use that to easily undervolt a ryzen 5000 processor definitely check that out we are 100 going to be using it in this build here thanks to how good it is then for the cpu cooler i went with the biggest option that fits in this case the alpinphone blackridge with a noctua fan swap this actually shouldn't fit in the skyridge 4 mini at 47 millimeters in height but thankfully the panels do close without any issues underneath there i've used a low profile 32 gigabyte memory kit clocked at 3 200 megahertz and for storage we're keeping it really simple with m.2 nvme drives i'll also note that i did have to remove the m.2 heatsink from the motherboard to allow the cpu cooler to fit but that shouldn't impact ssd thermals too much but probably the biggest compromise of the skyridge 4 mini is when it comes to the power supply but it's not as limiting or kind of constraining as you might think considering what you can fit inside this case in the first place so as you can see by how slim this case is there's no room for an sfx power supply or even a flex atx unit that we've used in previous builds so this is where the hd plex 400 watt ac to dc and dc to atx come to play this separates the power delivery into two critical components the 400 watt ac to dc portion that converts the alternating current from your wall into a direct current and then the dc to atx brick that converts the dc source into usable voltages for our components so for my previous builds in the skyridge 4 mini we had to use this a dell external power brick which you know is a compromise in itself it's basically a third size of the case which is not really ideal but using the 400 watt ac to dc brick basically replaces this which is awesome we can now do a completely brickless build with all the system components inside the enclosure best of all these two power supply units run incredibly quiet in fact the dc to atx portion is entirely passively cooled and while the ac unit has an incredibly quiet 30 mil fan it runs passive up to 250 watts of load hd plex say that this power supply can deliver up to 400 watts of power at above 93 efficiency and can support peaks of up to 450 watts now since the ac to dc unit sits underneath the graphics card to actually make this brickless build possible we need to use 180 degree 8 pin power adapters for our gpu you can pick these up on amazon for about 10 bucks and i'll link them down below a very important note though they usually come with a thick plastic cover which protects the solder joints but you'll need to replace that with something a bit thinner for this build to work i ended up just using a couple layers of electrical tape and that worked out just fine and so here it is the completed build or five liters of it and i've got to say the build process wasn't too bad at all i'll also mention that the 400 watt ac to dc unit is held in there just by sheer force it's wedged between the graphics card and the bottom panel but trust me when i say it's not going anywhere the dc to atx portion on the other hand is secured to the front panel with a couple small strips of double-sided tape and that as well is absolutely locked in one of the imperfections of this build though is the slight crookedness of the graphics card the only way to get around this would be to remove the top cover from the power supply but then you're exposing all of the components of the power supply unit which i'd rather not do then there's the ac power cable adapter which is just super ugly i'd probably end up sleeving these with some paracord if this build was something that i was going to use long term and since this build does use a pcie gen 3 riser cable but we're using a pcie gen 4 motherboard and gpu i'd recommend building the system outside of the case first without the riser cable setting the pcie version to gen 3 in the bios and then completing the build as you normally would otherwise you risk getting no display at all from your system but the big question is how does this thing actually run well surprisingly it actually runs pretty damn good our rtx 360 ti at stock levels out to around 73 degrees c at a fan speed of just under 2 400 rpm and i'd say there's a bit of temperature headroom there if you want to run a quieter fan speed instead this is also only six degrees warmer than my results with this card on an open test bench no doubt the best way to reduce noise levels though and gpu temperature is with gpu undervolting this is simply running the gpu at a lower voltage than it does at stock and as a result the gpu pulls less power and puts out less heat by setting the gpu to run at 18 15 megahertz at 843 millivolts which by the way is a slightly higher clock speed than it was running at stock we drop 8 degrees on our gpu temp along with a 400 rpm slower fan speed overall it's a significantly quieter setup cpu temps also were absolutely fine the alpen phone blackridge is an exceptional little cooler and the best one that i've tested at this size the cpu temperature that you're seeing reported here is the motherboard cpu reported temp and it's a bit lower than the actual cpu die temperature for what it's worth i saw the actual cpu die temperature of the 5600x sitting around the 80 degree mark during extended gaming load now that might sound a bit warm but it's actually fairly typical for ryzen 5000 cpus under lighter threaded workloads where more power is sent to fewer cores overall this is an exceptional little gaming system warzone here was running in excess of 100 frames per second at 1440p with around medium settings and everything ran super smooth cyberpunk 2077 one of the most demanding titles today is also possible to run with ray trace reflections at 1440p although you'll need to use the dlss performance mode to get playable frame rates again though a really solid gaming experience delivered here considering the form factor of what we're playing on i'll also mention that i had absolutely zero issues at all with the power supplies from hd plex i played for around two hours on this machine and with these specs we are well underneath the capabilities of what this power supply setup can handle at stock i saw the entire system power draw at the wall at 309 watts and with the gpu undervolt in place that dropped to just 231 watts if you wanted to improve this build even further with some modding you can actually de-shroud the graphics card and mount a pair of slim 92 mil noctor fans directly onto the heatsink the skyridge 4 mini actually comes with a bracket for you to do this so i might give that a go in the future so there it is one of my favorite gaming builds of all time and honestly i had an absolute blast building this up and testing it out it actually worked much better than i had expected ideally the specs here are well suited to 1440p gaming and you're gonna get some really good frame rates there with the 3060 ti so if you have absolutely any reason at all to build a gaming pc this small i'll leave all of the parts that you'll need down below in the description as always a huge thanks for watching and i'll see you all in the next one\n"