It CAN be done - The Potato PC

Many people claim to be gaming on a potato, but very few have the spuds to actually do it. And I know what you guys are thinking. Linus, it's easy. You just mash a little bitty Raspberry Pi into a there, and boom, it's done. But come on. That's small fries. We want the full starch experience. Friends, I am talking a full Windows PC in one of these. And since it's a plant, well, it's gonna need to be watered. Which, oh God, we're liquid cooling it? That's just the beginning. When we're done, this

potato is gonna play Baldur's Gate 3, Cyberpunk, Halo Infinite, and Sponsor Segue Simulator 2000. Oh, I love that game! Almost as much as I love Thorum. Their rings and watches are made from unique materials like Gibeon meteorite and ethical, naturally shed antlers. Check them out at the link below and use code LTT for 20% off. Our biggest problem for this project, ironically, is that potatoes are very small. So initially, we set out to find bigger potatoes, but in spite of some promising leads

, finding one big enough to fit a full-fat gaming system was a fruitless endeavor. Get it? Even our hand-selected Super Spuds are much smaller than a standard Mini-ITX motherboard, so we turned our attention to finding a smaller computer. And that we did. Meet the Minisforum EM680. It's got eight Zen 3 Plus cores that turbo up to 4.7 gigahertz and Radeon 680M RDNA3 graphics. It's shockingly powerful for such a small package. The whole package is just 10 Pringles tall. We're gonna have a link bel

ow if you wanna pick up one of your own. Of course, even at that size, it's not small enough for us. So we'll be taking it apart with this prototype LTT precision screwdriver, complete with bit storage and hybrid ceramic bearing top. Yes. Yes, you will. Sign up for a notification at lttstore.com. Gotta love that. Nice, strong magnet. I couldn't believe how small this computer was. Originally, we had another Minisforum that is about 14 centimeters, both directions. And that was small to me. But w

hen we got this one in, I was blown away. I didn't know computers came this small. This is tiny. So small. This is actually the power of a gaming PC in the palm of my hand. Now I've got the power of this cooling solution in the palm of my hand here. Okay, pop that out. Oh, liquid metal on the stock cooling solution. After the issues we had with it on custom builds, I just never thought this stuff would go mainstream. But with the right protective measures, like these covers for the surface mount

components and these gaskets, it seems like manufacturers can make it work, even big ones like Asus and Sony. It really does help you get the most out of a small cooling solution. Of course, we apparently will not be using this one because we like playing on hard mode. Hey, there we go. Oh, cool. They've got a main board up here and then they've got a daughterboard down here that's handling all of the IO, including the micro SD slot. IO is gonna be a challenge, huh? USB4 is truly incredible. We

actually only really need two USB4s to go in, one for power and one that's gonna go to a dongle for everything else. Now that we've got the whole thing apart, I can show you how the two boards go back together. There we go. And that's it. CPU, 32 gigs, LPDDR5 memory. A terabyte of PCIe gen four storage and even USB four. So we could hook up an external GPU to this thing if we really wanted to. We don't want to though, because we want it all to fit in here. So without further ado, let's throw th

is little guy into the frying pan. Figuratively of course, unless? Now that we found a computer small enough, we need to select our potato. Oh, any one of these is fine? Any of these should do. I think there's some that are better candidates. Let's try this one. She's soft though. How long have we had these potatoes? About a month. They're a little old. How about this guy? That's pretty, that's a pretty good size. He's got a nice regal shape to him. The, it kind of looks like you. Never thought

I'd be asking this, but what's our plan for potato carving? My original plan was to slice the potato in half and then just scoop it out with an ice cream scoop. Oh yeah, pumpkin style. That's what I did in all, exactly, all my testing. Okay. David's getting a cutting board right now, but the way I see it, it's not necessary. Not for a fruit ninja like me. Damn, I actually kind of nailed that. This cutting board is much fancier than I expected. Oh, wow. Full swag, Corsair. Anyway, which way do yo

u find it's best? There's no method to this madness. It's just madness. You'll want to be careful when you get close to the edges. Sometimes it can kind of just jump and then rip some skin off, but. I see. Of the potato or of my hand? Yes. Who'd have thought a potato has this much juice? Speaking of, now that we've worked out size, our next problem is that potatoes are, well, food. You know, boil 'em, mash 'em, stick 'em in a stew. However you skin them, they're not an ideal environment for a co

mputer or any electronics for that matter. How are we looking horizontally? Uh. Pretty good. Good news. Reaching the IO is not gonna be an issue. I'm up. Yeah, like the IO is going like right to the edge. Oh, wow. We chose kind of the perfect potato. I couldn't help noticing then that I'm hollowing this out too much, maybe. Airflow, baby. Sure. For a water-cooled system. Sure. Do we have a fan? Why would you need a fan? You're water cooling. I keep getting potato juice in my eye. It's good for t

he skin. Sure, but is it good for your eyes? There's an eye of the potato. It's the eye of the potato. The keen-eyed among you might have noticed that we were just kinda willy-nilly putting this thing in here to mitigate some of the risk of the juice shorting out any of the components on our board. We gave it a battering, like not this, like French fries, a battering of conformal coating to protect it from dangerous potato juices, all while being careful to leave access to any ports. Or any cont

act pins that we need for the system to function. Of course, that wasn't the original plan, was it? No, the original plan was to preserve the perfect potato before the shoot. I tried dehydrating, baking, freezing, a vacuum chamber, resin, a resin vacuum chamber, but nothing really worked. No matter what I did, it would rot, collapse, or just look disgusting. I see that. So instead, we decided we're just gonna YOLO it, do it all on set, for better or for worse. You're welcome? Yeah, I'd say that'

s for better. Is this even safe, let alone food safe? I wouldn't take a bite. Anywho, another part of the original plan was to transplant the entire cooling system from the Minisforum just to make our jobs a little bit easier, but that's dead too, huh? Yeah, it turns out problem number three, potatoes aren't very good for cooling. In fact, they're kind of good at insulating. So we had Justin, our resident mad scientist, fabricate this absolutely gorgeous water block. He did an amazing job. It lo

oks so good. Even like the design on the top, I don't know if that was intentional, but it looks really good. It looks so cool. The cold plate is machined from billet copper, and then the rest is resin 3D printed. Now, I'm told I'm not allowed to take it apart for you guys since the O-ring is kind of fragile, but we've got a render and you guys can actually find the plans for this in the video description if you ever need to... This. For some reason. We ended up having to reinforce the seal with

some CLA to prevent leakage, but the rest of the parts are recycled from our laptop water cooling adventure. Don't watch that video right now if you have a weak stomach though. Or if you want to witness history, because if you want that, you're going to have to watch this video. Okay, moment of truth, the block's on. It fits perfect. It actually does fit really, really well. All we've got to do is carve out some IO. You'll have to let us know in the comments. Is it game-tato or put game-o? Now,

David, question for you. Do we need to get at any of the other IO or is this side enough? That's all we need. We can power it through this dongle. We can do up to 90 Watts. Okay. Through this. Let's give it a shot. First boot. That's my computer. Hey, don't mock my computer. No, I love it. From my research, I don't think anyone has actually built a gaming potato. No, I didn't manage to find one either. So. World's first baby. Which is kind of shocking. With how many times it's been memed. Yeah,

I was expecting to find like a hundred different YouTube videos about it. And then there's basically Homeless, who's gonna just do it way better than us. You can't do better than this. Don't challenge him. No, no, no, you can plug it right into the dongle. Or I can plug it right into the potato. I have proper peripherals, but for this part, we'll use these. Proper peripherals? Oh God. How do we power it on? I guess, is there just a switch? So there's a light, there is a power switch and there s

hould be a light or there wasn't a case. Okay, there's a light. We know we don't have the water cooling hooked up yet, but hopefully we can at least just get a post out of it. How long does this thing take to post? It doesn't take that long. You need to come on, turn up. Okay, it's off. That's good. Ooh, it's really hot, it's really hot. That's a good sign though, right? I mean, yeah, but also we didn't get an output. Let's get the water cooling hooked up outside of the potato then. Yes. Real qu

ick, real quick. We've gone with a dual 40 millimeter radiator, which for this kind of thermal load should be enough to run completely passively. And then this adorable little pump from the water cooled laptop set up. There's water all over the board. What happened? It leaked. Fudge. Glass half full. You guys get to see the inside of the block now. I mean, theoretically, this board's conformal coated, so. That's a good point. My bigger concern is just that we didn't get an HDMI output from this

thing. That's fair. Our contact with the dye is actually not great. It's probably fine. Just need to put some more thermal compound on here. Let's just test it without it being installed and see what happens. Oh my God. Did it work? Okay, that's a sensible picture. By the way, we're kind of bringing it back, but in a more everyday wearable form. Ah, coming soon to LTT store. I'm gonna find the leak. I'm gonna stamp it out. That's how you stop a leak. You just do, stop leaking. Oh, snap. Literal.

Oh no. Yeah. How long does it take to resin print a new top? I guess we're about to find out. While we're waiting for our new block to print, let's talk about the advantages of resin printing. You can do more complex shapes with higher detail. It's low cost as well as much faster than machining from acrylic. And it's just watertight, which is kind of important when we're making a water block. So it's a much better choice than FDM printing. This is gonna take about 40 minutes. It's pretty fast.

Once we're through that, we're going to wash it and cure it. And we're gonna get back to it and hopefully finish this today. The downside to resin printing as we experienced, it can be brittle depending on the resin you use. We're now using tough resin, which should give us a little more Linus- proofness and the other big downside is just it's a mess and there's fumes. It can be kind of annoying when you're done a print just dealing with the leftover resin getting it back and you know Watertight

, could you 3d print some water cooling tubes? Are we making a video on that right now? The top is not the same as the previous one that was printed. Oh, I see. It doesn't have the divider in the middle, which quite honestly is not going to make a difference. Fantastic. And what could go wrong? Y'all ready for this? These holes are really small. Are you guys aware of that? Yeah. It's, look, the blocks- Well, that's why it cracked. Are you aware of that? I wasn't aware of that. Oh, here, look. Ju

stin flew pretty close to the sun on the size of these holes, and you can see that's actually probably what caused the cracking. We did a rush cure job, so the resin's still a little malleable. Oh, well, that's good. It's good. This is gonna go. It's gonna go, it's a goer. Not a shower. Without it being cracked, which is a plus, time to mount this bad boy. Now, just a gosh darn second here. It's not as thick as the old one and the screws are too tall. We can fix that. We will never be able to un

screw and re-screw them though. 'Cause this will mangle the threads. Oh. Hey, and we've got much better contact with the dye this time. I wonder if those previous screws were sticking through a little bit as well. Oh, maybe. There it is. That's what I'm talking about. Oh, it looks like cheese. I wanna eat it. It's an appropriate topping for a potato, certainly. Oh man, I wish I had the foresight. What, to make a block out of cheese? Is conformal coating cool or what? The fact that we just spille

d water all over this board and here we are like half an hour later just using it. Why doesn't everything have conformal coating on it? Because it's expensive. It adds another step and it's more difficult to repair after the fact. Oh, that makes sense. So there are reasons. I'm gonna just start covering everything I own in conformal coating. Do you have like a spittle problem? Is there a reason? Really excited when I game. Is there a reason your electronics get wet? I think we're good. Tough res

in, sure. Well, it's working. Oh, we need to make a little cutout for the tubes. Oh yeah, we need quite the cutout for the tubes. Oh, balls. So David, do you wanna eyeball this? Sure. So right about, yeah, sure. Okay. He looks like he's got braces. Who knew a potato case could be so modular? Man, I'm water cooling my pumpkin next Halloween. Did we have any thoughts for how to like seal up our case? Like what about hot glue? Would hot glue? Hot glue's worse. Hot glue's worse, all right. Oh, so yo

u've actually put measurable R and D into this. I've tried everything to try and make potatoes happen. If you can pull on the tubes a little bit, just to, yep. Oh boy. Oh yeah, there we go. Oh yeah, oh, there we go. Okay, a little more. Oh yeah, oh yeah. Oh buddy, I mean, oh spuddy. Oh spuddy, that's a filthy joke. What do you expect? It came out of the ground. Oh, we need power button. Oh right, no, no, that's okay. I got a solution for that. Okay. Now you're speaking my language, my power butt

on. Okay. My jankwich. So this, maybe I could cut a little spot for it. After, after, first let's make sure this thing works. Oh, a pump. Whoa. All that's left then is to seal up our potato. Oh, uh-oh. Probably fine. Oh, 'cause we just, yeah. Yeah, yeah, hold on, hold on. See advanced repair. No, we got to Windows before. I bet this just boots. This probably just boots. Time to seal the deal. The only thing we're missing is some peripherals. Oh, wow. That worked really well. That immediately was

like, "Yo, you're not taking this apart anymore." Okay. Potato PC. Okay. Okay, does it need, I think we need a little stand so it doesn't roll around. What's it, potato wedges? Potato wedges, I get it. What about? Okay. Our potato fry monitor bezel. Oh my goodness. Wow, David, you made that. Hash brown desk mat, baby. Oh, what? Oh, what, why? Oh. And what better mouse to use than a potato mouse? Did you guys get a Makey Makey or something? No, it's just a mouse. They took the insides out. I con

formal coated it and it works. I think I can even hear the clicks. Yep. Yeah, there it is. Surprisingly, this does appear to be tracking serviceably. Hold on, I'm gonna launch a game. Let's play some, hold on, the click is a little bit of a challenge. I'm launching Halo Infinite. Okay, here we go. This works. Oh my God, it actually kind of works. Ah, ah. And no self-respecting gamer can possibly complete their setup without RGB. Potato powered RGB. You've got one LED lit. Yeah. R, G, B. Was ther

e not enough current to light more than one LED? So I actually have a battery powering it currently. Oh. It's cheating. It was really cool when it first was put together. You're lucky I didn't have time to make the potato keyboard. The mouse is surprisingly somewhat usable. What do you think of the hash brown desk pad? It's really, it's kind of unpleasant and greasy, but. LTT store when? Okay, well, how's our CPU doing? We're at 50 degrees right now. That's definitely warmer than we got when we

first tested the system. Okay. But it wasn't in a potato, so. Change of plans. We're going with Doom Eternal. The goal, one kill. I was pretty impressed with the performance. I was getting out of this thing. I was a little bit weird and doomed 'cause I was only getting 25 frames and I realized ray tracing was on. Oh. You know what, 25 frames with ray tracing, pretty good. Oh man, my arm muscles from how hard it is to push on the click. I am getting 45, 55 frames per second. Right click. Get up!

Come on! Oh, did I get him? I think you did. Oh no, you didn't. No, I didn't. Hold on, right click. Am I, oh, I'm not, am I not on the right? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah! Glory kill, glory kill! Here we go, here we go! Yes! Potato gaming boys! Med pack, med pack! Oh, my mouse- No, it's coming apart! My mouse fell apart! Hold on, I got this! I can't click. It's coming apart, no! I can't click. This has got to be top 10 stupidest things we've ever done. No. No? Top three. I'm so happy I

got to be here for this. The desk mat's coming apart. Oh, no! Oh, wow, the everything. Okay, but like, can we appreciate for a moment how amazing this is? With root access, we're managing some seriously impressive hash power. Which of us is responsible for that line? I think it was a team thing. Sorry, it was Big Potato that forced us to put that in there. As much of a meme as this project was, it is amazing, guys, what you can do with a tiny APU-powered PC these days. And I really hope that ev

en if this wasn't the most practical application of this, this gets your tractor rolling, coming up with cool ideas for fitting powerful computers in places that they have no right to be, like in this, the world's first peelable case. And in this segue to our sponsor. If you guys enjoyed this, if you like janky, dumb, but spectacular builds, you might like our video where we built Compensator 4 with the most expensive consumer parts we could get our hands on.