we all make mistakes what a blue screened single graphics and
when I built my personal gaming machine I made a few I bought a workstation CPU
for no good reason I Hardline water cooled it which has caused me hours of
headaches and I chose arguably the worst
possible solution for storage an 8
terabyte software Raid 0 SSD array they
say don't let your memes be dreams you know what I say don't let them be your
actual life the good news is I had a chance to rectify all of that in our
epic tour of micron's Idaho r d facility I had the honor of manufacturing my own
custom memory modules using engineering sample chips but micron's condition for
that was that if they were going to go to so much trouble I had to actually
daily drive them but my system doesn't support ddr5 so I guess I need a
platform upgrade now the Intel versus AMD question was settled already in our
recent drag race but it's taken until now to sort out all the other details
and well I guess I'll just put it this way this is going to be a very
unconventional video given that I am actually downgrading the system in more
ways than one just like I downgraded this Segway to our sponsor let me see
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it makes sense to start with the very no not that no it was supposed to go into
place like that that's what I meant to do but I
let's start with the very worst decision that I made the eight terabyte raid card
unlike a conventional raid card the aorus Gen 4 AIC SSD doesn't actually
contain any raid Logic on it it just
takes the 16 PCIe Gen 4 lanes that come
up through the slot here and then splits them up into four quad Lane m.2 slots
the advantage of this approach is that it's economical since you don't need an
expensive controller on the board but the disadvantage is that this card will
only work on a motherboard that supports PCIe Lane bifurcation so the ability to
take a slot and split it into more Lower Lane count slots now some consumer
motherboards support that but it's most common on workstation and server boards
the other disadvantage is that because this is essentially just four
independent drives the only way to get them to operate together is using
software raid meaning that you can't just take this card plunk it in any
system and assume that it's going to boot up as the eagle-eyed among you have
probably noticed that last bit is not necessarily a problem today since I am
sticking with AMD this time around but it doesn't change the fact that this is
not a very elegant solution which means you're probably thinking one of two
things right now either why did he do something so stupid when he knows it's
stupid or that April Fool's video is real and the guy's actually an idiot and
I wouldn't really blame you for either of them the honest answer is that I 50
percent just wanted more capacity than you could get on a single m.2 at the
time and the other 50 percent was straight memeing I absolutely know
better but I mean come on when they said the PS5 SSD was faster than any pcssd
they practically dared me to put one of these in my system also I couldn't
resist seeing the look on Jake's face now to introduce the new life drive this
is the sabrin eight terabyte Gen 4 plus it's PCIe gen 4x4 rated for 7.1 and 6.6
gigabytes per second reading writes it's got the same eight terabyte capacity in
a tiny little package like this and I don't have to deal with any software
raid Shenanigans yeah this is much more sensible we were worried that my
software raid setup would cause me one last inconvenience on my way out the
door but thankfully with a compatible board and an old copy of paragon disk
manager we were able to make short work of it this is actually booted to the new
drive and we're ready to shutter down and move on with the build now a funny
thing we noticed during the migration is that based on the data rates it seems
like trim might not have been working properly meaning that while the raid
card does use a full Gen 4 by 16 slot
with 31.5 gigabytes a second of theoretical bandwidth that's twice the
bandwidth of even a Gen 5 m.2 slot it was using basically none of it
meaning that our first downgrade where I go from this to this is probably going
to improve performance now that we've got a sensible SSD that doesn't require
16 PCIe Lanes off of the CPU we can go
with a much more sensible platform the heart of which will be the ryzen 9 7950x
with only 16 cores this is our second
technical downgrade I was running a threadripper 3960x before which is a 24
core CPU but the 3960x is Zen 2. while
this uses AMD's shiny new Zen 4 architecture meaning that even though
the clock speeds are only a little bit higher the real world performance
particularly in single threaded applications like games is a lot faster
now when we tested the 7950x versus Intel's core I9 13900k the gaming
performance was basically neck and neck meaning that when it came time to pick
one it came down to price AMD has
slashed the 7950x from its introductory price all the way down to 600 US dollars
in the time since we did that video it looks like Intel has followed suit but
we made the decision I've got water blocks and motherboards and all that
kind of stuff anyway so I guess this is what we're doing you're probably wondering by the way what's going to
happen to my old threadripper it's going to be going into one of our editing workstations since not only did AMD
never provide an upgrade path for this platform they aren't even producing any
more chips for it so they're really hard to get along with the price drop on the
chips the motherboards for socket am5 have become much more affordable I mean
look at this the x670e PG lightning isn't cheap it's 250 bucks but that's
still half the price even a third of the price of some premium Boards out there
and has basically everything that you could need 14 plus two plus one phase
power design two and a half gig Lan ample PCIe and USB expansion and perhaps
most importantly for me a gen 4x4 slot that's wired up directly to the PCIe
lanes coming off of the CPU where I can install a Thunderbolt 4 card I have kind
of an unconventional setup at home with my PC in another room and Thunderbolt
allows me to have all the i o that I could want at my desk over a single
cable I haven't even got my board installed yet and I'm already stripping it down I found something interesting
AMD's x670 extreme platform supports
more PCIe Lanes than their regular x670 and the way that they do that is they
actually just wire up two of their motherboard chipsets in serial one after
the other the reason I came across this is this is my first in detail am5 build
and I was trying to figure out where to put my SSD so the way you do that is you
check the block diagram for the motherboard and you're looking for whichever m.2 slots are wired up most
directly to the CPU notice the block diagrams that there were two chipsets
first one then the other which means that if I were to use this slot or this
slot there's more potential bottlenecks as those PCIe Lanes make their way back
to the CPU compared to this one and this one since this is a Gen 4 drive and I
might want to add a higher speed Gen 5 Drive in the future I'm going to go
ahead and choose the slot that's wired up through only one chipset rather than
the one that goes through two of them it probably won't make any difference but
you know hey if you want to be a purist about it then this is the best gen 4x4
slot on the board this one also happens to be the only Gen 4 slot that comes
with a heatsink not again like that matters but hey it's there oh next up
we're doing water cooling here we go holy crap this thing is heavy apparently
EK sent over their Quantum velocity to
drgb am5 full nickel oh that explains it
the bottom is machined out of pure electrolytic copper and then unlike most
blocks which will have an acrylic top so you can see through them the top is more
nickel plated copper I don't know that I would recommend water cooling these days
the price to Performance just isn't there but you can't deny the looks and
the advantage of this particular block is that it is designed for socket am5
and the dye layout of ryzen 7000 specifically to provide optimal Cooling
to be a back plate in here I don't believe it I think you have to
disassemble the Block in order to install it what look I don't want to
believe it either I know I know you'd think I was just finding an excuse to
talk about the high quality ratchet and
included bits of the LTT storage screwdriver but no I think I actually do
need to do this I've never met a water block I couldn't figure out how to
install I'm not about to start now I'm taking my shot my one shot my one
opportunity mom's spaghetti right now yep oh I see because I gotta install
these yeah yeah yeah I thought that you know there was going to be more of this
and these were gonna be screwable into the back
I might have to look this up installing the water block put it there and then
using the included t7 L-shaped wrench
fasten that wait what we brought Alex in as a consultant here to make sure that
I'm not a complete idiot am I missing something here
okay in the meantime let's talk memory these are super weird
modules they are 24 gig modules meaning
that with two of them which really is kind of optimal for am5 I'll have a
total of 48 gigs of RAM my third downgrade from the 64 gigs in my old
system but since they're ddr5 they should be substantially faster how much
faster I don't know the Micron straight
up memed the labels and while I have run them before I don't remember what they
are so we'll find out once we Boot It Up of course we're not going to install them just like this as a gaming system
we need some heat spreaders but not just any old heat spreaders will do we
settled on these matching blue I have a
bit of a theme going on here matching blue heat spreaders from some ancient
Micron fully buffered dims from back in
the day and there's a couple of reasons that we decided on an FB dim spreader
when I said there were a couple reasons for using these spreaders there was
actually just one reason see this little raised bit in the middle here that's to
accommodate the buffer chip on these fully buffered dims
now ddr5 doesn't have a buffer chip but what it does have is onboard power
control so this is called the pmic and it seems to my eye like it's a little
bit higher than the memory ICS themselves meaning that I wanted a
spreader that would
for that here's something I didn't really anticipate the memory packages on
this are a lot lower is this even going to cover them also ddr5 is a touch wider
so if I can just wow that's wild look how much this has
faded there's no ICS on the back of this module so probably it wouldn't do
anything bad but there's a possibility that it would short something if I put
this on here like this what I'm going to do is I'm just going to put like a
thermal pad back there and to help space it out this thermal pad is very sticky
which is good that's what it's supposed to do right there yeah good good good
good good good good good good good okay now I'm just going to try to hand Bend
this oh yeah now I just got to put the clips on stickers back on stealthy ddr5
nice nice
yeah we figured it out this
is how you turn it oh and you turn it this way so you're taking the screw and
instead of screwing it in from the top you are pulling it into the threads from
the bottom with this little Torx key
that means that our stock backplate on this motherboard was perfectly fine and
everything was fine all we needed to do was look more closely here
please tell me this isn't cross-threaded we're going to forge our own path here
new threads
hopefully that was tight enough that will have to be drilled out this block
is never coming off the sport now that the board's all geared up we are
basically ready to do the upgrade huh
not really the weight distribution is not what I thought it was yeah there's
clearly still a lot of water in it though well I don't know you know what
sure how bad could this be all right easy peasy no problem it's gonna be like
the fastest system upgrade ever until we go to put in hard line tubing
oh yeah also we're gonna need to water block this card
oh I'm feeling good about this assembly of
this card it looks like it's just a handful of screws on the back plate and
then more screws through the PCB and this cooler is just going to pop right off please tell me it's easy to
disassemble oh I mean there's some water but that's fine
there was a spill at some point evidently for those of you wondering I
am not going to be changing the power supply and the reason is that this
particular 80 plus titanium unit from seasonic
it's a thousand Watts that's more than enough for a single GPU system which is
all anyone really does these days anyway so I'm just going to go ahead and leave
it alone
blow harder okay oh oh yeah definitely
to blow harder I was joking following instructions yeah it's really going in
the bucket
it occurs to me that I don't know the exact height that that inlet's at that's
what I'm doing this aha okay
and now oh my gosh it is close to being
too long hey look at that beautiful
we definitely took one shortcut but
In fairness to us this is a really hard Bend so we didn't
we're pretty much ready to Cable manage it up and go given the last time that I
daily drove AMD was over 10 years ago you guys are probably wondering what's
the deal with the 7900 XTX in the build well there's a couple reasons for it
first I'm in the middle of the AMD challenge so I'm going to AMD whether I
like it or not and second why not AMD
right now I mean yeah it's still expensive it's a thousand dollars for
this card but for the first time in a long time AMD's not only competitive
with the top offerings from NVIDIA but their driver improvements over the last
few years have been unbelievable so I've
already had this card in my system for at least a couple of weeks I just
haven't had any issues with it so by all means you're welcome to stay Radeon 7900
XTX it might not look new but it's kind of having a pretty new
looking Vibe here David what do you think yeah you know I wasn't sure about that
crusty blue memory but I am loving it it looks good it fits all your cables and
everything looks awesome yeah it looks like oh we didn't put in the Thunderbolt
card yeah oh and the 10 gig did you put the 10 gig in no okay so yeah they're
still here there's still stuff for us to install yeah getting our hands on this guy was kind of a pain in the butt
they're sold out everywhere so we had to go to eBay but it's an essential
component of my build because I use Optical Thunderbolt cables to run my
peripherals really far away from my tower this is a Thunderbolt add-in card
and it's using the latest Intel controller codename Maple Ridge which I
love because that's the town that I grew up in
shout out Maple Ridge yeah all right anyway the point is it
adds two 40 gigabit per second Thunderbolt ports supports up to 27 watt
charging and you can use it to add Thunderbolt to any supported motherboard
and you might be thinking really Thunderbolt on an AMD board the answer
is yes not just usb4 actual Thunderbolt
because the Intel Thunderbolt chip is this guy right here and while
motherboard manufacturers are super cagey about this for some reason if you
dig into the specs for these add-in cards they aren't Intel only and you can
find lots of AMD boards that support them including this one right here the
main requirement is that while Thunderbolt is PCIe based so
theoretically those four lanes are what we're using to get all the bandwidth out
of these ports the board has to have a special Thunderbolt header so I just
need to go ahead and plug this guy
Boop just like that so much for cable management and then it's weird but this
particular card calls for a second USB 2
connection to an internal header now I already used up both of my usb2 headers
for my front panel connectors but here's a perhaps little-known trick
you can convert USB 3 to USB 2 by simply
not using all of the extra pins boom boom wow that bottom PCIe 16x slot
is just 1X electrically that explains why we couldn't use almost any of the 10
gig network cards that are out there because most of them use a buy four
interface so a longer interface which you could absolutely plug into one of
these slots but it would only be getting a quarter of its expected bandwidth oh
except this one from OWC which uses a gen 4x1 interface which happens to be
just about the right amount the 10 gig networking let's go ahead and put this
little guy in here are you going to tell the people why you need 10 gig I mean I
don't need it it's fast though it's really fast two and a half gig is such a
good middle ground these days okay here we go let's fire it up
oh wow those blocks look incredible you got
a red light hey oh oh are you kidding me that's not good I hope it's not a RAM
well actually I hope it is RAM that's probably the easiest solution why is it
that every video we make turns into a troubleshooting video oh it's posting
automatic repair wait automatic repair diagnosis diagnosing your PC hey this is
a lot better than the red light and no screen we got 20 seconds ago now we blue
screened sorry we lose an accessible boot device it's your drive blue blue
screen yeah and it's an accessible boot device
this is why you don't set up your boot Drive in the 4x2 grade zero
configuration and then we transfer it to an eight terabyte Sovereign Drive what's
the point there was none take that PlayStation we've got a couple ideas for
how to fix this one is to just try the drive cloning process again and see if
maybe something went wrong another is to
try to drive as is but maybe enable AMD
raid in the BIOS and just see if it's something to do with trying to load the
AMD raid driver as it's trying to boot since that's faster why don't we do that
first actually all right we're going to try NVMe RAID
Mode oh yeah yeah nice yes oh hey what speed does
this RAM run at 5600 CL 46 not the
fastest thing ever but then it might be slow but damn it it's mine you know how
sometimes a computer is not just fast but it's like Snappy and I could be like
boom like I'm open Steam and then it's gonna be like wow connecting to your
account boom steam let's go oh why have I not configured this to not come up
it's like I hate myself I am all AMD for
the first time since I was 18 years old
is that wild or what like they're not just competitive on one because even in
the dark times they would occasionally be competitive on GPU or like kind of on
CPU but both so long
casual 240 FPS in Halo infinite and make
sure it's all cranked yeah let's turn it to 200 render scaling now I mean why not
right a 150 frames per second Halo infinite 200
we're running 4K boys come on come on
come on get back here what are you doing yeah he's gonna turn around and kill you
it's not gonna melee nothing I got him boom and he wasted his rocket launcher I
consider that a win a one-to-one trade where you take out the rocket launcher
okay look I play the objective David just like objective of this video is to
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massive throwback to the first time I
did a black and blue themed build that's right personal rig update 2013.