COMINO OTTO REVIEW - LIQUID COOLED, 2080 tI, mini-itx powerhouse

Published by Jason Proctor
1589410800

Liquid Cooled Engineered Powerhouse with a Miniature, Chic Styling.

First Impressions

Some immediate thoughts instantly came to mind when I removed this out of the shipping container and placed it on the desk. First was obviously how it looked aesthetically. The eyes are directly drawn to the white, liquid-filled distribution panel. It impressively molds in a curved shape onto the rectangular die-cut metal case. My first impression is “wow, this thing has some very interesting and stylish engineering design going on!”

It doesn’t have the typical flat design we see of most distribution panels available in the custom PC building market. The liquid channel and reservoir section seem to have a thought-out flow route as well. Definitely something I was eager to see in action!

Next, the PC builder in me wondered just how well the venting would play out with it being such a small enclosure with some rather serious gaming hardware in there. From the source materials I confirmed this was the OTTO Master model with an Intel Core-i9 9900K CPU and ASUS ROG STRIX RTX 2080Ti O11G Gaming GPU on a Mini ITX ASUS ROG Z390-I motherboard with 32GB DDR4-3200 (2X16Gb) Memory. There’s also a 750W SFX Platinum PSU inside.

The hardware connection options are all standard for what you can expect, although I do appreciate the range of audio connections this Mini-ITX has vs other ITX boards on the market.

Turning it on. Let’s see this thing lit up!

With such an obvious display piece style design I wanted to see this lit up on my office desk! The ASUS suite software was user friendly enough to use and I found the ASUS Aura RGB program with ease. The software support is standard with their motherboards so I won’t go into details of using their applications. On to the pictures!

Performance and Temps

So onto what we need to know most, does the design allow all this hardware to flex those buttery smooth frames? The PCMR seal of approval to meet the standards of high framerates, but not high temps! Verdict? Yes, yes it does.

I was quite impressed, actually pretty damn impressed. I overclocked all of the i9-9900k 8 cores to 5.0Ghz @ 1.35V and the 2080ti at +100Mhz boost and +500Mhz for the memory. Ambient temperature was 18c (64f). I like it cold what can I say? In all gaming runs and a few 3DMark benchmark runs, the GPU maintained 45C and the CPU maintained 55C temperatures.

Framerates were as expected for the hardware so no surprise there. I also ran it for a few hours with some Folding@Home work units for team PCMR setting the CPU configuration to utilize all cores and threads for a 100% utilization. The GPU again maintained 45C temps and the CPU maintained 65C temps. Well under thermal throttling danger!

What’s in the box?

So let’s see what is inside the OTTO that’s taking all this abuse like a champ.

The aluminum panels are held on by neodymium magnets and come off with ease.

A bright ASUS Aura-compatible RGB strip greets you to the internals neatly laid out as well as any experienced builder could manage.

A quick peruse and you see the Hardware Labs Nemesis 280GTS copper radiator with two 140mm Noctua 2000 RPM fans up top. Both the CPU and GPU are routed through this radiator. The specification sheet for this radiator states it can remove up to 800W of heat. The motherboard and GPU each have a Comino engineered full-cover copper water block rated with a combined heat removal claim of 720W. I’m going to have to believe these claims based on how cool the system is running under load.

Here is a video of the Comino Copper plates being made, which is in itself fascinating: