Gadgetory

the Corsair Flash Voyager go is the easy way to move photos music and videos between your Android device and your PC click now to learn more so the funny thing about that I'm holding a slate right now click is that I've actually been working on building this computer since before we even had any practices like slating or I had my own company and a staff of people all for the sake of making YouTube videos about computers and the irony there I guess is that we've been doing this professionally all this time and I still can't manage to actually build my own computer and complete it it's been mostly done for a while but there were some delays in releasing the video because the LED strips on using these are phobia UV LED slips there are strips they're actually fairly unique most of the LEDs on my original strips actually failed so we weren't going to be able to film it very well so I finally gotten around to swapping them out with some brand new ones and we are ready to take you guys on a tour of my personal rig so we'll start with the component selection the CPU is a 49 60 X I don't really recommend extreme additions though really what I recommend is 4770k if you need hyper-threading 45 70 K if you're just gaming for threads is enough and then if you're doing content creation or any kind of professional work where you can really leverage additional course 49 30 K those are the three CPUs that are like really the high performance options within Intel's lineup for the RAM I'm using Crucial Ballistix tracer this is actually an early revision of the memory that's not really compatible with the X 79 platform at all and has all kinds of problems unless I run into extremely lose timings and it's all like crappy I have better Ram there's definitely Ram that will work better with my board but for the sheer bling factor I did go with this stuff it's not perfect and it's funny because like crutial has a utility so you can program the LEDs on it now by default they're going to be activity LEDs so they'll flash slowly if you're not doing much and then the flash will be fast if you're doing something really in 10 so intensive but you can configure them to do all kinds of different patterns and stuff unfortunately crucial is missing two crucial patterns and that is off and solid I don't really want them to flash like this what I would like is to have the under glow one solid the way that they are and I would like to actually turn the top ones off because I find them a little bit over-the-top but I'm still going to stick with them anyway for the motherboard I've got a Seuss's workstation class LGA 2011 board this is the new Ivy bridge-e compatible model P 9 X 79 EWS so the e is the new part the reason I went with the workstation class motherboard is I'm just so sick of consumer-grade stuff just not really working right it feels like the more features anyone tries to add to something it's like this router has like beam technology like focuses your you know antennas like a dish where your laptop is like I just want something that's a workhorse workstation grade and this one does it it's got the overclocking stuff it's got a decent audio codec it's got USB 3 like it's not a server board where it's like green PCB and like 2 USB ports at the back but it's it's also not over the top with like OC panels this and voltage check points that just plain works absolutely love the board it also has tons of PCI Express expansion I wasn't sure at the time of originally planning this build if I was going to go SLI so that would take up 4 of the slots and then at the time I was using a sound card it's actually still in there but I don't actually use it anymore so I was using a sound card I wanted a 10 gigabit NIC which I have pulled out now because I don't have a 10 gigabit switch at my house anymore and finally I have a raid card on the rig as well so I wanted seven PCI Express slots so that's another reason to go with a workstation class board like this it is a little bit on the wider side which is kind of funny because when I was cutting the hole in the motherboard tray for my 24-pin connector to wrap around i had to position it as if i might someday put a regular ATX board in and it still won't show and be ugly so I had to like squeeze those cables to get them out around the edge of the motherboard because it actually goes over the the hole that I cut on the motherboard tray for the GPU I'm running a GTX Titan my original graphics card solution was a 590 or I was thinking about going Quad SLI with five 90s but Quad SLI just really doesn't make any sense to me it doesn't scale particularly well unless you're running at very very high resolutions and it introduces some driver issues that there's just no real solution for other than to turn off SLI and if I'm going to put four GPUs in my system we're talking like a couple thousand dollars worth of gear I better be using it all the time where I'm just not going to put it in so the only reason I upgraded from the 590 which is actually a faster card than the GTX Titan in terms of raw performance was that I really wanted gamestream for my Nvidia shield so that I could stream to myself and you have to have a Kepler based GPU for that to work so the Titan ended up in here because we didn't have duplicates of any other graphics cards we had two titans so I was like okay the one Kepler that I can actually grab happens to be a Titan so I threw that in there we also had a water block for it from coolants that is absolutely beautiful so that was why I went with that I'll talk more about the water cooling after for the power supply I have an XFX thousand watt 80 + Platinum modular power supply that I sleeved myself I didn't do a great job of thus leaving you can do much better if you individually sleeve each one I am using murder our MD PCX sleeving or whatever that stuff is I got it from Charles for murder box so I'm using really good sleeving but I did it a little bit differently than most people instead of doing each individual wire I actually did each sleeve over two wires so you can't get quite as close to the connector this way but I actually find it looks a little bit cleaner with fewer wires and it did make the the cables less bulky when I was trying to route them around inside which was important as you're going to see when I show you the cable management at the back and how difficult that was the reason I went with this power supply this is what like the only reason was that it was based on the same platform as see Sonic's thousand watt platinum and that was the first power supply that had the zero decibel fan feature so that the the power supply actually only turns on its fan when you get to I think it's around twenty to thirty percent load so most of the time that fan actually doesn't even spin speaking of fans that don't even spin my fan controllers and M cubed T balancer that's strapped on the back I'll show you that more later but on this side there are four fans on the quad radiator in the bottom that's an old thermal chill PA one twenty point four not quite classic thermal chill it's got the 15 mil spacing but it's still thermo chill so it's like old school water cooling high-end junk so there's four down there those winds spin all the time then there's two on a hardware labs black ice Pro that is a pretty ancient radiator in the front that's actually my first water cooling radiator first want to ever bought with my apogee block and I think I just did my CPU the first time I picked up an MCP 350 pump way back then and that ended up failing at some point I think I don't really like those half-height pumps the mCP the DDC series not a big fan of using a d5 now so that one's hidden in the basements got the janky entire bration mount ever where actually it just has a little like rubber sleeved wire between it and the side panel so that it doesn't pass any vibration to the case so I've got a black ice Pro in the front that has two fans that aren't spinning and then you may have actually noticed that the two fans in the back here are also not spinning the two on the top do scan all the time so the M cube t balancer takes care of that so when the system is just running at the desktop or a web browsing most of the fans in it are actually off and then the other ones are running extremely low speeds and then as soon as I ramped up speeds everything kicks into high gear so I have 2 temperature sensors one at the top of the motherboard and then one that is actually taped with thermal compound between it and the bottom radiator in place so that I can monitor water temperatures and air temperatures within the case and the appropriate fans react accordingly whenever those temperatures increase so I don't remember I was going with that so raid card that's an LSI 9268 I at the time that was an extremely high-end card and it was optimized for maximum throughput on large SSD raid 0 arrays which brings us to my SSD arrangement I might not show these to you guys yet but there are eight SSDs around the back of the case app what the hey we might as well just like start cracking this baby open so there are eight Oh and these are tight with the powder coating I'll talk about the case after because the case is quite a story lots of lots of things altered on that oh I guess I should talk about the side panel before we get into the SSDs okay so the side panel was a nightmare because I don't like plexi side panels because they're not really very clear they're easy to scratch you can put micro scratches all over a plexi side panel just by wiping it down with a microfiber cloth like they're just terrible they're very very reflective compared to glass and they're just not as good but unfortunately what I wanted was to get someone to cut a glass panel and very very carefully drill holes so that I could actually mount the glass panel on the back with bolts through the front so it would be extremely secure they delivered me a piece of glass with all the holes drilled but I gave them my side panel to do the sizing and they a couple of the holes were actually off on the glass and you know what they did they took my side panel not painted yet fortunately they took my side panel and just like widened the holes so I was like oh okay great not only can I not use this because it's going to look terrible and the piece of glass broke when they were drilling the last hole or whatever so not only have you not delivered me a useable piece of glass you've widened the hole on a side panel that I actually can't replace because every tj7 is a little bit different and Silverstone won't even give you a new side panel because there's a chance that won't fit with the curvature at the front so what I ended up having to do then is a kind of a more ghetto solution so I just went to a glass shop got a regular piece of glass and they offered to use an industrial double-sided tape to tape it on for me that's how it's attached then I went to Home Depot I got a couple little finishing nubbin things there and I just glued them on so that's how the side panel works I wish I had a more sort of glamorous story about that um what was I talking about right RAID controller so I guess this will be my first opportunity to show you guys the horribleness at the back here it is an absolute rat's nest back there and part of it's my fault but part of it is just that there's a lot of cables going on back there so that is the eight drive raid 0 array that powers my personal machine it is kind of ridiculous it's really stupid nobody nobody if people ask me about my personal machine all the time and I say just because I'm running something doesn't mean you should nobody should run this configuration that is eighth course Air Force refurbished SSDs running in raid zero off of that raid card it is pretty much going to fail at some point but I do nightly backups and I keep almost nothing of substance on it other than maybe the odd save game here and there so everything else goes off to an ass so that's why I have an Intel NIC in here just for slightly better performance to the nads it really doesn't make much of a difference these days especially because of workstation board like this has an excellent NIC on it already so the cable management for that was done with one of the case modifications that I had to do which was cutting cable management holes down at the bottom of the motherboard tray in addition to the CPU tray cut out that the T jo7 doesn't come with natively the 24 pin and 8 pin and 6 pin for the graphics card cutouts that are over here on this side as well as these cable management holes that are cut into the divider between the top of the case and the basement just so that I can get cables up to the top without using the cable management holes that are included in that divider because they're they're quite ugly you can't really hide the cables there at all so what kind of performance do I get out of this and well well over one gigabyte per second reads and writes so it's extremely fast I actually changed over from these SSDs to just a single SSD for a little while because I don't remember I was doing some kind of maintenance and I didn't notice immediately that there was a difference but then when I went back to these ones I was like I had forgotten how fast it was it's actually really really really fast just again not something I really recommend I do have an optical drive in my system something that a couple of you have probably noticed by now and the story there is that I originally added an optical drive to it because I got a great deal on a fairly unique item at the time LG did an HD DVD / blu-ray reading drive it was a couple hundred bucks but I got it for like a hundred and it was also a DVD rewriter and a CD writer I think I'm not sure if it can yes and wait hold on yeah so so it records DVDs and CDs and reads Blu and HD DVDs and I was like okay this is the last optical drive I'll ever need and it turns out I was right so it's in there so the reason that it's still in there is because I only sourced six of these these are original and tech 900 front cage covers and I only sourced six of them so I didn't have a seventh to put in even if I did want to take the optical drive out plus the way that that front radiator is mounted with just like a piece of like sticky double sided velcro thing rolled up under the bottom so that it like sticks in place and then velcro on the bottom of the DVD drive and the radiator stuck to that I can't really take the optical drive out anyway so that's why I have one yeah doesn't think it's not great so the fan controller I guess I guess I kind of talked about that already I'll cover a couple more things about liquid cooling I'm using bits power truesilver 3/8 inch ID 5/8 inch OD compressions I think that 3/8 ID 5/8 OD is pretty much the sweet spot in terms of performance because if you go lower than that you go down to like quarter inch tubing you're going to drop about a degree of performance maybe two and if you go up to 1/2 it doesn't really make a difference and then the advantage of 3/8 over 1/2 is you can get much tighter Bend radii without kinking so I really really like thick wall 3/8 inch tubing and then these are the compressions that go with it the other thing is that you get better compatibility by going with 3/8 inch tubing because half inch compressions especially if you get thick walls so 3/4 inch OD tubing the compressions to go but those are huge and they barely fit on anything so that was why I went that route this is a t-virus reservoir right here it's a clear outside and then I my original one was actually frosted blue for this for the heel double helix inside but I are made it and I be kind of screwed it up they sent me back a clear when it actually looks just fine they used to look a little bit better back when the cathode in there wasn't so faded out I got to get a new one and get it replaced but very very cool item you can get those from frozen q what else ha yes fans ok you may have also noticed the complete absence of Noctua fans yes I'm shallow part of the problem is not that I don't think Noctua fans can look good I think they can look good some machines in fact our upcoming hackintosh build guide is going to have Noctua fans in an H for 40 from NZXT and I think it looks really really sharp in there but the problem is that it needs to go with the rest of this system and it just doesn't so I needed blue fans and the good news is there are some very high-quality blue fans available so on my bottom radiator I'm using the original silverstone air penetrators I think they're a p1 21s or something like that so what's great about those is they take your airflow and they turn them into kind of a like a cyclone like a funnel of air away from them and because the basement here only has this intake on the rad which is by the way mounted with Velcro just on the bottom so takes the airflow through and then I want it to push it out the other side but there's nothing kind of containing that airflow because this is this is quite open so I wanted something that is able to direct airflow like that so that's why I went with those there and then for everything that's visible up here in the top I'm using gelid wings because they undervolt quite gracefully they're easy to clean you can actually pop the blades right off them if you want to clean them which is quite ok I'm not going to do it now but that's quite nice and they're reasonably quiet even at load they also come with really nice rubber grommets so it was quite a chore to do this one but the rubber grommets are installed on the back ones and then the one on the inside where normally in the TJ o 7 you slide the fans in and then screw them in I had to get the fans inside to actually Bend that cage open force the fans in somehow thread all the little rubber grommets through and then Bend the cage back shut I'd cut my hands every time I've had to do that and cable managing is kind of a nightmare as well because there's only a little tiny like gap left where you can slip a wire through it ha liquid cooling components I think that's pretty much it for the water oh yes that's not it so the sort of the the centerpiece of this rig is an Apogee gtz from Swift tech that is the gold plated limited edition of it I got number 169 I also had it altered a little bit so the hold down plate is normally just I think it's more of a flat powder coat but I've got Mountain Monza's black Winkle powder coat which matches the outside of the case put on there after markets I figured if I'm sending in the case I might as well send in that piece too the only thing in here that I could have powder-coated I think that I didn't is the casing for the optical drive that I just spray-painted it still kind of bothers me when I look at it but not that huge of a deal I guess and then I already mentioned the mCP 655 or d5 pump in the bottom I do really recommend if you're going to go with a d5 pump that you go with the variable speed one not only does it go back to a higher rpm than the fixed one which is fixed at about four out of five of the variable one but when you turn it down all the way I keep mine all the way down you're only going to lose a couple degrees to a few degrees of temperatures and it is extremely quiet it's one of the people talked about this all the time it drives me crazy like the internet doesn't know silent silent is silent and not silent is not silent MCP 350s are not silent DD C's are not silent at all they're loud and this one when you turn it down is legitimately extremely quiet almost silent I mean my mics on my chest here that's what my rig sounds like nothing that is satisfactory anything else is not silent so there's that um I think that's pretty much it for like the component choices so let's talk about the case the origin of this case and had a lot of people ask me why do you why do you use that tj7 that thing is ancient and you're right it was a gift from my wife way back when we were dating it was the first big ticket item present that she ever bought me so there's some sentimental value there and then there's also the fact that I personally don't think a better case has been made yet and better is a subjective word it means different things to different people to me better means a combination of a lot of things it means the design it means the build quality it means the craftsmanship that went into it are there cases with better features than this one that are perhaps more water-cooling friendly you don't have to mount your front radiator with velcro and your bottom radiator with well also velcro yes there are better cases in terms of features these days but the the feet the manufacturing feet of this single unibody piece that goes all the way from the back of the top to the back of the bottom and is a single thick piece of aluminum has not been replicated since the TJ o7 except by the TJ 11 which I have a whole set of problems with aside from it being too big for me I just don't find it as I don't find it as space efficient as the TJ o7 I don't want anything bigger I mean this thing already weighs 59 pounds full of hardware I don't need anything any bigger or any heavier so that's that's my that's my whole thing there so the craftsmanship of it is something that I really appreciate I don't really like plastic if I don't have to use it and the other thing is why would I need to upgrade I've had a lot of people tell me why don't you go to switch 810 well because the switch 810 is plastic for one thing and for two I think it's pretty gaudy looking whereas this is a more a very clean very classical look and it fits all the hardware I need people like oh the switch 810 fits this in this I don't care I'm running one graphics card it's sort of normally ATX board I don't have an XL ATX board I have six fans six 120 millimeter fans worth of radiator to cool a GPU and a CPU like that's it so it's already extremely silent what do I need more for so then II way that's why I still the tj7 there are some things where people have a good point that I've spent way too much on this TJ o7 I mean back in like my first build that I didn't it where I really wanted to like go crazy on it I wanted to get the mid plate actually polished so it's like a raw aluminum stock and I wanted to get it polished to a mirror shine I'd seen it done before and it looked really really good so the place I took it to to get that done they completely screwed it up they made a total mess of it and it was like completely unusable so that was the point where I was like okay well I will have to powder coat the interior so I went to mountain mods I got them to powder coat the interior this was all like the first time the outside still had the very beautiful stock anodized aluminum finish on it so when that got beat up and it was time to redo the build anyway and I was going to tear the whole thing apart that's another thing that's great about the t07 again features that aren't on a spec sheet it can be taken apart completely it is assembled with screws not with rivets so but when it came time to take it apart again I was like okay I'm going to send the whole thing away I want to get it powder coded for the outside but the inside was all beat up from upgrading hardware and you know dinging it and stuff like that so I started looking into how to get powder coating stripped Oh extremely expensive involves like chemical baths and there's like no guarantees that the parts leave and make it so I took a gamble they came out okay but I think it cost me a couple hundred bucks like it was ridiculous but only there's so one of these PCI screws it's not really threaded anymore I just have like some Loctite in there so that it stays and then other than that it survived the the chemical bath pretty well so I sent it away to mountain mods to be coated again and other than one screw up on the right side panel which looks pretty ugly it actually came out really really well I think they're black wrinkle finish is one of the most beautiful powder coating finishes available it's actually uses quite a glossy paint but then there's so much texture to the finish that the light scatters really well and it ends up having more like a net matte effect anyway so that that cost me another I don't know 150 bucks remember like that and people kind of look at and go well you could have just bought yourself a new case because you powder-coated it once strip the powder coating off powder coated it again I'm just like yeah you're probably right but you can't achieve this case with the changes that I've made to it including the cable management in the back and well mostly the cable management in the back is so low that I really added to it without buying a TG l7 and getting it powder coated anyway so buying a new TG o7 still cost like 350 or 400 bucks or whatever so there you go I might as well just reuse this one one other change I did make to the case is the front IO I've completely done away with the audio ports because I'm using an objective to an ode AK now so I don't need the front audio on my case so all I have in there is 2 USB 3 ports which is something that the case doesn't come with by default this little off this little door right here is actually kind of a funny story once I had the case painted the build-up of the paint made it so that the stock magnet wasn't strong enough to attract the door and cause it to close that we just fall open so I had to send down the powder coating on the steel piece inside the door and then I had to go steal a fridge magnet that had a rare-earth magnet in it was one of those cute little like like bulletin board tack ones that has a rare-earth magnet in it so I just like cut that thing open and then steal the magnet out of it and then the mega it was too big to fit so I had to like file it down and like superglue it in there and that's the only reason that front door closes so that was a that was pretty janky um front days are just mounted with like wood screws basically there's a lot of things that are super and perfect about the machine but I think that's part of what gives it character right let's talk Oh cable management at the back so there's a lot of stuff back here there's the temp probes that help me control the fan speeds there's all the fans so every fan in the system is plugged in in the back on the back here somehow so I think down here I have handmade adapters so that all four fans on the bottom radiator can be combined into a single lead to come up to the top up here and then everything else kind of runs back here as well the tea balancers something I get asked about a lot it's a real bear to configure I don't recommend that people buy it unless they want to fight with it for probably a good like you know three to six hours to really get it working properly but once you do I've had this thing for a few years now and I've hardly even touched it so you know it's great for what it is it's not great for a lot of the other things that it is I guess I don't really have too much else to say I'm just kind of looking at some of the other sort of notes that I have for myself so there's some kind of funny little imperfections and geto solutions I get asked by quite a few people how to keep their graphics card from sagging and the solution that I managed to come up with is really really stupid I took like a little piece of it's a piece of a V checkpoint so it actually is like a wrapped rubber little metal piece inside and I jammed it in between the PCI slot rear like bracket piece and a DVI port and what that did is it gave the graphics card a little bit of extra support so it ends up being a little bit straighter it's not even it doesn't make that much of a difference though and the rear side panel it's really funny because it's almost impossible to close so is this like is this something that Steve Jobs would be proud of I don't think so but is it something that serves me extremely well and has been worth the effort though I don't know it serves me well I don't know if it was worth the effort but I that pretty much wraps it up that is the end of personal rig update 2012 and it is very unlikely that I will be touching my personal rig any time in the next probably couple of years other than maybe a graphics card upgrade that's something that people ask me about a lot as well as why'd you go so like ghetto why are you just using you know regular primo flex tubing and like curves like this when the fashion these days is to use angled fittings and very straight tubing runs and I love that I think it looks fantastic but the issue is that I've always been of a philosophy that something that's your actual daily driver rig has to be very easily upgradable so this approach gives me a lot more flexibility in terms of if I want to do a GPU swap I can probably get a GPU swap done in like I don't know 20 minutes tops and whereas if you have like all like hard piping tubing it's pretty much impossible it's a real nightmare like I can just like take my CPU block off I can do a CPU swap in like eight minutes so stuff like that making sure that the system is upgradable and something that I can continue to add to in the future is something that I've always kind of thought about as I've built up this machine although I think now we've reached the point where I'm really not going to make too many changes to it other than when star citizen launches I'll be putting in at whatever makes sense at that point we'll see how things shake down with mantle and directx12 and whatever graphics card ends up going in there that's pretty much it guys sorry for the super long video like it if you liked it dislike it if you disliked it leave a comment and let me know if you have anything to say about the rig obviously I'll be reading the comments pretty carefully on something that's you know about my own sort of pride and joy here don't forget you can support Linus media group by contributing to us monthly to allow me to build more computers like this evidently actually it's funny I should okay before I finish the video I'll tell you guys which ones are samples and which ones I actually legitimately paid for so you can do that you can buy t-shirts you can change your M sorry my cameraman fell asleep at the wheel over there so the you know SD card got all filled up because he made that last shot takes so long so I was just going to say as always guys thank you for watching and don't forget to subscribe and then now I don't even remember the story I was gonna tell what was it oh yeah oh yeah which stuff which stuff like legitimately paid for and which stuff with samples okay so we'll go through part by part the case has cost me a grand total of and my minal wife so because it was bought initially has cost like easily about a thousand dollars up till now like but when you consider that it's made it through quite a few builds and that's been over a span of like five years now or however long it's been four or five years it's like buying a new really nice case every year I guess so I could justify that to myself ah the radiator in the front like I said was part of my very first water cooling setup the optical drive I bought the t-virus reservoir I'm just trying to remember nope that was a sample so I did that one as a that was an unboxing the motherboard itself was a sample for masseuse the RAM came from crucial the CPU again I would not recommend running an extreme Edition unless you get them as like an engineering sample and you don't have anything else to do with them and you throw them in your rig the waterblock that that Apogee I actually had Swift tech offer to send me one of these limited edition which they only did 200 of them gold-plated and I was like nope Gabe I can't do that I have to buy it I must buy it because otherwise I won't feel worthy to own such a very very cool piece of computer hardware so I paid for the CPU block all the fittings as well those are really expensive the truesilver fittings the Titan and the coolants block were things that we used for a video and then the the Sennheiser sound card that came with that came as like a bundle with a headset for my wife the raid card yeah that was that was my problem and then the SSDs who spent a brand on those that was one of the biggest computer purchases I've ever made was buying all those eight SSDs at once but it was a really good deal like to this day it still holds up pretty well from a price to performance standpoint this whole solution so it was about 1500 total or so because I was able to get those drives for under $1 per gig because like a crazy reefer blow out this is back in San force one days getting them under $1 per gig it was a really good deal so I was like ok this is my opportunity I'm gonna get my ultimate SSD set up nine hundred gigs SSD super fast I went for it so it's like crazy balls this radiator was a purchase those fans were purchased the XFX power supply was a sample so but I would have bought one if I wasn't able to get one otherwise but don't tell XFX that and I think that pretty much wraps it up so there you go guys the benefits of being a youtuber yes you do get a bunch of samples which is really really cool but oh I bought the tea balancer as well but it also forces you to like buy other stuff to go with it well it doesn't force you but it you know yeah and it's like getting a job somewhere where you have like a great staff discount you end up spending more there even though you have your staff discount than you would have if you just didn't work there and didn't go there every day so alright I think I'm done now yes I'm done you