i just built a new computer which is funny because
i don't really remember doing that maybe i need to retrace my steps
retrace my steps retrace my steps
let's see here we've got a threadripper CPU
yep aorus master motherboard
okay fedora Linux
hey wait a minute i'm the wrong Linus oh
well as long as we've got all these parts together we might as well assemble them
and see what it's like to compute as the
one and only Linus
or Linus okay there's two of us but
the other one and today's video was brought to you by
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funnily enough i've never actually made a video
about the other Linus he's a finnish american immigrant with u.s citizenship
Linux is his namesake and brainchild and
he holds the Linux trademark but no longer contributes much code himself
most of his personal contributions since 2012 have been in merging code written
by others he still does retain the highest authority to decide which new
code is incorporated into the official Linux kernel and he is famously
opinionated saying exactly what is on his mind and says he is agnostic with no
political affiliation Linus's law is that given enough eyeballs all bugs are
shallow since we're on a bit of a fun facts role how about some fun facts
about the Linux mascot tux through three
logo competitions tux was submitted as an entry but actually won none of them
as a result tux is not the logo but rather the brand character inspired by
Linus's love of a picture of a penguin figure he found on an ftp site
tux was coined as an acronym for torvald's eunuchs
and the first and official drawing of tux was done on a 486
dx250 running Linux and the first public
release of a defeated contender was
and i kid you not a furry with a
keyboard thank goodness we ended up with the penguin
who could very well be a furry but without a keyboard about tux Linus
has said some people have told me they don't think a fat penguin really
embodies the grace of Linux which just tells me they have never seen an angry
penguin charging at them in excess of 100 miles per hour they'd be a lot more
careful about what they say if they had all right
fair enough sir enough chit chat let's get building now normally over the
course of building a computer like this i would talk through my
rationale behind the various parts as we install them but because i didn't pick
any of these parts i am instead going to lean on zdnet's excellent interview of
Linus torvalds explaining why he chose all the parts he did now we've settled
on a 3970x 32 core AMD ryzen
threadripper processor here and apparently that was because he had
originally planned to go with the ryzen 9 3950x
but determined that it would have been a small incremental upgrade over the 9900k
that he was using previously now lynas normally goes for regular consumer cpus
because they are typically the best bang for the buck and he actually likes the
integrated gpus that Intel puts on their cpus because he doesn't like any more
fans in a machine than absolutely necessary
this might make a threadripper with its 250 watt plus power consumption seem
like a bit of a weird choice because that does bring the potential for more
or noisier fans but what's great about threadripper is
that foreign hedt platform if you need
the performance it's actually not a bad bang for the
buck so i think this was a really great choice
lioness's choice of the Gigabyte aorus tier x40 master is probably going to be
pretty uncontroversial he looks specifically for motherboards
that have good power delivery believing that there's little more basic than
power delivery and this is apparently a result of him having systems that were
unreliable due to brownouts so
it's kind of a funny thing to look for a motherboard that specifically has
features designed for like great overclocking and then
never overclock them at all for my part i like the board's mix of
good onboard features like five gigabit Ethernet and wi-fi six and expansion so
it's got five pci express expansion slots four of them are 16x physical and
one of them is one x physical meaning you can plug basically anything you want
in it it's got support for the usb type-c internal connector as well as
three m.2s all of which have little heat sinks on them which admittedly aren't
going to increase their performance and probably won't increase their longevity
but they can help to soak up some of the excess heat during short periods of
intensive use but one thing to watch out for with this guy is case compatibility
because not only is it slightly wider than standard atx it has a right pin 24
pin connector so you got to make sure you have a bit more space available in your case for cooling Linus
went with a Noctua nhu14s with a second
nfa14 fan in a push-pull configuration
this was apparently because he's very sensitive to noise and wants something
quiet and has had good experiences with Noctua in the past truly a man after my
own heart about knocked to his fans lena says that even when the fans ramp up
under load he doesn't find the noise particularly annoying and it's more of a
soothing whoosh white noise sound without the whining or rattling that he
associates with lower end fans apparently despite the noise advantage
that a liquid cooler could provide Linus is not a fan he doesn't want to deal
with a custom loop and doesn't trust the
reliability or even the capabilities of aio coolers and especially doesn't want
to deal with any unnecessary gurgling or
pump noises for RAM Linus actually couldn't find
exactly what he was looking for and ended up settling on some generic ddr4
2666 memory saying that it was fine memory but i really wanted ecc the
problem was that because of parts availability ecc is not currently priced
sanely so he just decided you know what forget it this is good enough for now
and should work fine he actually doesn't
even need apparently 64 gigs of memory he just went with it because he wanted
to populate all four of the memory channels and RAM is cheap right now
anyhow for our part we chose these g skill rip jaws v sticks just because
they are low profile enough to clear our cooler and they're the same speed that
venus is is using for storage there was no question that Linus was going to
choose solid state it has apparently been over a decade now since he's
touched any spinning media and he even tries to avoid using cables which is
possible thanks to m.2 anywho after
experiencing some reliability issues early on in the SSD era Linux apparently
found samsung to be quite reliable and is sticking with what works for him if
puge's data has anything to go by i would say this seems like a pretty darn
good choice so he settled on a one terabyte 970 evo plus as i mentioned
before when it comes to cooling products Linus does prefer Noctua over other
brands unfortunately Noctua doesn't make
cases so he went with his second choice be quiet!
this is the dark base 700 a quiet
optimized case but with plenty of room for hardware and
um well Linus did notice when looking at the
front intake that it looked a little bit more restrictive compared to the rear
exhaust so what he did was order an extra silent wings 3 fan to go in the
front of the chassis
one thing to watch out for if you were to replicate this build is you're going
to want to remove the middle standoff in the top row because
like many Threadripper boards this one
doesn't actually have a screw hole there to make more room for
power delivery very thoughtful preparation from the manufacturer here
you can see even this fan cable up here has been carefully routed above the i o
so that it doesn't get in your way when you're trying to install your motherboard one of the things lena said
about this case is that with the right fan control setup in the BIOS and of
course assuming that you connected your fans to the correct headers the paper
manual for the motherboard apparently had horrible pictures and you got the
CPU and system fan headers the opposite way around for the first build
what you get is a machine that is basically silent when it's idling and
then without any annoying wine although not silent under full load for power
supply Linus settled for the gx 850
and i do mean settled because parts availability due to the pandemic has
made it difficult to find some specific parts in fact we even had to switch out
to a gx 650 for our build because not
even csonic could provide us with a gx 850 directly now as with the motherboard
Linus cares a lot about power delivery basics he goes basically what's the top
potential power use of this machine okay i'm going to pick a power supply
with 2x that rating and then look for reviews and reputable brands this is a
good strategy for a couple of reasons number one it means that you are
basically guaranteed to not under buy your power supply which is an obvious
problem and number two if you're a silence freak which we know that he is
it means that your power supply may in many cases barely ramp up its fan if at
all even under heavy load hey
yeah it's clean it's clean boys that
leanest knows how to build a computer for graphics Linus went with and i quote
some random sapphire rx 580 graphics
card thing is Linus isn't that interested in
gaming and dislikes having to account for graphics in fact preferring to just
have something modern built into the CPU and i can understand that how it's more
important to have the correct feature set in the hardware than it is to
actually have the performance if you're not a gamer this is another quote it's
overkill for what i do fair enough sir
as for why he might choose to go team red versus team green well it is no
secret that lenas has publicly feuded with NVIDIA
in fact even one time going as far as to say
unvidia um in the middle of i think it was a
conference or something wasn't it yeah it was it was pretty it was pretty
public so um rx 580. we didn't find any pictures of
the actual machine online so i can't verify this but given his choices i
think it's fair to assume that Linus didn't spend many many hours on perfect
meticulous cable management but did at least do a decent job so that's what
we're going for here it seems like a pretty well thought out machine the kind
of thing you wouldn't just throw all the cables in willy-nilly with the machine
fired up it's already what i would describe as
quiet but it's definitely not silent
fortunately Gigabyte has extensive fan
tuning options in their BIOS and we're gonna go ahead and take some guesses as
to what Linux might be using so first up
we're gonna set both our CPU fan and our CPU fan opt so that's the
optional secondary one to silent mode and we're going to use our CPU as the
fan control temperature input the other thing that we're going to do
is we're going to change both of them to enabled for the opt stop mode right here
that allows the fans to actually turn off completely under very very light
loads although there's no guarantee that with the 32 core processor anything
qualifies as low enough thermal output to completely turn off sysfan6a this is
the header that i'm using for my case fans so i'm going to go ahead and
because his graphics card is clearly not going to see heavy use i'm going to tie
this one to CPU as the temperature input as well and once again i'm going to
enable stop mode our RAM has xmp i'm
gonna go ahead and enable it just so we can lower the latencies a little bit i
doubt his does but okay all right we deviated in one way
after firing up the machine for the first time i wasn't actually happy with
the level of silence so what i'm doing is i'm changing the threshold for the
zero RPM operation to about
50 degrees on the CPU and then i'll have the fan speed ramp up
from there and that is one
quiet system the only thing we could do now to make
it quieter would be to put the panel
on not only does it look nice it actually blocks a lot of sound
that is not a shabby looking machine
other than the fedora Linux installer that we've got sticking out of the front
of it yes that is the daily driver flavor of Linux
that Linus torvalds prefers so we're going to go ahead and
just boot it live for now of course it's not enough for us to just build lena's
system we have to benchmark it and we can't just use any old gaming benchmark
so instead we're going to be compiling the Linux
kernel and this is the kind of thing that he might actually have to do on a
fairly regular basis taking some patch applying it booting it for testing
purposes and what our hope is is that we'll be able to do it very quickly
because otherwise i'm going to be standing here for a very long time you might have
noticed we had a couple of arguments in the command line there so one of them
was time that's going to tell us how long the test took after we're done and
another was the number of threads so we're using 64 threads to take advantage
of the 32 core smt CPU in our machine
here even sounds high performance doesn't it
strong you know like
stop it we are done already that only took just over three and a half minutes
this is one fast machine and yeah the fans ramped up a little bit we
got some heat coming out of the back but that is very reasonable you know i think
the thing that stands out to me most about this machine is just how
carefully thought out everything about it is now you might assume that an
average software developer really takes the time to get to know the pc hardware
but many of them don't even bother to build their own computer because they
can't be bothered they're busy writing software latest on the other hand has
actually done us a huge favor you guys might have noticed that over the years
we have actually never done a developer-focused build guide or even
build log and part of it is that we don't really fully understand the needs
of developers as much as a true developer would well thank you Linus
other Linus for doing it for us because
this is not only performant it looks great it's quiet and the only thing that
i look at here and i go ah that's really not the way i would have done it is the
memory which is something that he already acknowledged was not perfect i'd
have gone with maybe 3 200 megahertz RAM just to get that
little bit of extra snappiness so thank you Linus for helping us out hooking us
up with this fantastic parts list here for development work and thank you to
zdnet for the original interview that we obviously leaned on for making this
video you're gonna find links to all these parts as well as that interview in
the video description finally thank you to our sponsor
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them out at storyblocks.com Linus tech tips if you guys enjoyed this
video maybe check out uh hey check out my video on the dell xps
13 two and one it's a variant of the xps
13 that Linus torvalds has also spoken
very highly of he says he likes that machine so much for himself that he
ended up buying one for his daughter when she went away to school so there
you have it