I'm told this will be one of the easiest A&D ultimate $5,000 tech upgrades that we have ever done.
Because you see, Robert here, one of our longest-standing editors, actually built a computer,
a whole damn battle station for himself last year.
So all he put on his wish list was a simple old NAS to help store old projects that he no longer works on.
So what's the deal? You're getting ready to leave me?
Like everyone leaves me? You know, checking back two months or whatever, you know, we'll see.
Wow, that was a far less reassuring answer than I expected.
Okay, so it's just a giant homework folder then. Pretty much, yeah. I have some old, I actually have a lot of stuff that's just on like loose, like, portable hard drives and that,
that's just like just sitting there and it's like, I need a place for it, so. You're so innocent. Do you even know what homework means?
It's been a while. What does that mean?
Oh wait, never mind, never mind.
In all seriousness, a NAS is an outstanding upgrade for someone like Robert who does some freelance work on the side.
I mean, there are certainly worse things he could spend his money on. Our resident Funko expert, Elijah, pointed out that as much plastic junk as he has,
at least he never spent AMD's hard-earned money on...
Who is this? Robin? Arsenal, Green Arrow's sidekick.
How much did this cost? Uh, I think it was $450?
$4.50. $450.
You have got to be kidding me right now. He's a San Diego Comic-Con exclusive minifigure, so there's a limited number of him.
Lego is only as expensive as you let it be. You know, people will sell it by the pound on Facebook, right?
Yeah, well, I didn't buy it, AMD did, so, you know, they made the bad financial decision.
Please tell me you spared some budget for tech stuff. Oh yeah, there's, we got, I mean, we got the NAS, we got some speakers, soundbar, camera gear and, uh, VCR.
Barely tech at this point.
I mean, how are you even going to notice this one in the army of other Lego figures?
Oh, that's just the really expensive ones, basically. There's a lot more scattered around here.
Ah, yes. I thought Obi-Wan with beard.
Obi-Wan with different beard.
This, this is how you got featured on our worst setups before.
Poor financial management.
It's that spooky time of year, and five lucky souls will soon wield the dark power of AMD's Ryzen 99950X3D processor.
Enter, if you dare. This sweepstakes for a chance to claim one of these beasts forged in the depths of silicon.
Trot, did you run the strategic GPT? Oh, yes.
Make my sponsor talking point spooky. The point is, the link is in the video dead description, but be warned, once you've seen this kind of performance, there's no going back.
Mwahahaha!
Thank you AMD for making this terrifyingly good giveaway possible, and good luck, brave PC builder.
There is even more in the bedroom, it's hard to get into the bedroom right now, but then you can see the shelf from here.
There's even, uh, even more.
And then these ones are some of my favorites, so that's why they're in here. Right, so you can watch them while you sleep.
Or they can watch you while you don't sleep. I can say with certainty that LEGO is the thing I've chosen, my disposable income to go towards, it's, yeah.
I picked kids. Both are valid choices.
Disposable, you know? No, the income, not the kids.
The scenes are cool. Yeah, the scenes are cool, this is cool.
You had collector's money for a piece of film strip from a film, and you chose the Phantom Menace.
It was a Christmas gift. From now you're greatest enemy.
You have a bunch of VHS tapes already, but you didn't have a player yet.
Yeah, yeah, I had a bunch of tapes from, because I moved out about a year and a half ago, so I still had access to a player, but then when I moved I didn't have one, so.
Right, so you needed to re-acquire a player so that you could watch classics like The Brave Little Toaster.
Yeah. Do you watch it as an adult, or is it more just about owning a piece of the nostalgia?
Actually, I haven't watched it in a while, but this was like when I would go to my grandma's for sleepovers and that, this was like the movie we would watch, and that, so that's, yeah, pretty much for the nostalgia.
Are these VHS copies from your childhood, or are they ones you acquired as an adult?
Basically, all childhood, but between my grandma and my nana, and that, I took a bunch of the tapes that, because whenever I'd go over for sleepovers, it was movie night and that, so I took a bunch of the ones that we used to watch and that, so that's legit.
Want to talk us through your soundbar choice? I'm not a huge audio person, so that's actually why there's a lot of audio gear here, because it's stuff I wouldn't normally buy myself, but when I was looking, I ideally wanted to get one with a dedicated subwoofer, and that, so I went on Openbox and was able to find one for about the price of just a soundbar.
Did you know about Openbox before Scrapyard Wars?
Yeah, actually some people had told me about it, because I didn't, and dude, they have some deals from time to time.
Yeah, Openbox.ca, shout out. Not a sponsor. Not a sponsor, but, because how could they afford to sponsor anyone with prices that low?
You know what, let's have David and Rhys throw this on the TV, and then you and I can build the nest.
Okay. Robert, problem. Oh, uh, yeah, well, we got a solution for that.
Trick or treat, smell my TV's feet.
You should see the branding for this, there is, the tutorial for this on Amazon is a guy dressed as Scorpion from Mortal Kombat.
I love that I get to spend my days with my people.
I hate that these are my people.
Alright, Robert, let's build a nest.
You're a PC builder, if I recall correctly, right?
Have you built a couple computers before? I built one last year, and it's my first time building it, so I followed a bunch of our tutorials.
I started like 7.730 on a Friday night.
I didn't get it to fully boot properly until about two in the morning.
Okay, well, today will be a big, big improvement.
Now, you went a bit of an unconventional route here.
You've actually gone with a last generation AM4 platform, specifically the Ryzen 7 5800 XT.
Why did you choose that for your NAS? It was one that was suggested to me by the writers.
Okay, I will explain then. It's an 8-core 16 thread processor that's going to give an ample performance for high-speed copies to and from his network storage device.
And, having 8 of those cores, not to mention still decent efficiency, even compared to modern chips,
means that if you wanted to run some virtualized applications like, say, he wanted to move into this century with, you know, a Plex server, for instance,
he could totally run that on his NAS. Now it's up to you to get that chip installed.
The only time I've done this, it was the Do Not...
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It was the Do Not Mention brand.
So this will be my first one of this, of AMD.
Do Not Mention brand? I assume we're not supposed to name the competitor.
I mean, I can see why AMD wouldn't want us to name a competitor in the videos, but like Intel, who cares?
I mean, it's an honest question at this point.
You're literally choosing AMD's three-generation-ago product over their competitor.
That could change. It could change in the future, but...
Okay, put it in the corner, in the corner.
For CPU cooler, Robert has gone with the cooler.
It's the Peerless Assassin 120 SE Black from Thermalrite.
When I edited the writer's build $1,000 PC video, Ploof and Adam picked this one, and they were, like, excited about it.
They're excited about the price-to-performance ratio.
This thing is unbelievable for the price. Thermalrite is killing it.
Okay, you're going to need this, and you're going to need a screwdriver.
Mine's in my office. Well, yeah, you always have one.
LTTstore.com, baby. How scientific do you want to be?
Not very. Let's just lift it and hope that we get the right... Just wing it. Just wing it.
Looks good to me. All right.
Now thermal compound. And if I mess this up, the entire internet will roast me for it.
Oh, it doesn't matter anymore. People are over it at this point, I think.
Oh, well, not like that. No, I'm kidding. I'm kidding. I'm kidding. I'm kidding. I'm kidding.
Uh, this is critical. Yeah. Watch out.
Didn't you do that in the restart screen? This is the problem with having video editors.
They know everything. They see everything.
They see every flubbed line, every mistake, every bad hair day.
Stuff we're not supposed to see. I'm really hoping that we had the legs high enough so we don't have to redo it.
Oh, it's more high than we need. Do we need to go down one?
No, I think that's probably perfect. Yeah, Robert wants the extra space, right?
And then there's any time when we're editing footage and it's just like, oh yeah, he's just got his pants off and he's changing in the back there.
That's... Well...
Oh my God, you were rolling on that? Okay.
I feel like we're going to have a lot of stuff that doesn't make the YouTube cut for this one.
LMG.gg slash Floatplane.
Hit him with the new Mogurt. Did you do the new one?
Yeah, actually, I do a lot of the Mogurt stuff now.
So a lot of the new stuff that you've seen in that, that's been all me.
Robert did the intro for Scrapyard Wars 10, which was freaking outstanding.
We got 32 gigs of RAM.
Keep a track of that. 3600, CL18.
I mean, decent DDR4 kits are pretty affordable these days,
although not as cheap as you might think, you know, being outdated and all of that
because production for DDR4 hasn't been as high.
So prices have kind of been a little bit all over the place.
I have a question. How is this going to help at all?
It's going to sit on top. Oh. Yeah.
Why not just wall mount? Basically just like, I guess it's like making more holes in the wall to have to deal with later.
You have all kinds of holes in your wall. Yeah. Those are hung with nails.
Robert, where does the soundbar plug in?
Oh. There's no power. No, there should be the power bar down there.
I mean, yeah, but it's full. It's full. It is?
It's because your power bar is half AC and half USB ports.
What kind of power bar is that? So the switch in that will get moved into the middle here and then the VCR will go on the end there.
Right, right, right, right. But as for the plug situation, didn't realize that.
I guess I'll have to get a new power bar, but for now we can just plug in the soundbar
and probably just unplug one of these.
Oh, I haven't seen the N5 before.
This is from Jon's bow. They make some really cool little compact cases.
It can fit 12 hard drives and four SSDs.
You're good. Nice. Is it time to install the VCR?
Uh, sure. Should we talk about what's special about it?
I mean, Dan's dad sort of, I assume refurbished it for you because I know that he does that.
The only special thing I know about it is it's got a weird ass remote.
That's not that weird. Yeah, that's not that weird. You're just too young.
Yeah, I've seen that. You also have the cheap RCA to HDMI adapter that I really hope I didn't recommend,
but it's fine for VCRs. Uh, the corner's mushed.
Oh, wow. She got dinged. But that doesn't affect the assembly because this is just the final cover piece.
There's something so satisfying about plugging in RCA. I don't know if it's just nostalgia or if we've lost something with the HDMI standard,
but it feels so good. It's fine.
So as long as you can get a new cover piece, it'll be cosmetically perfect.
Okay. Wow, this is great. Man, I really like John's bow's cases.
Way to go, John's bow. A couple 120 millimeter fans for pulling air through those 12 hard drives in the front,
full-size ATX power supply, full-size ATX motherboard support, which gives you lots of room for PCI expansion cards,
which, funnily enough, in a NAS can actually mean more than in your desktop computer these days
because you might want to have accelerator cards for encoding movies
or, excuse me, Linux ISOs, high-speed networking, HBAs for additional drives,
and then the front is just mesh for days.
Great for airflow. This is very used.
It's like discolored on the back from heat.
Oh, that's probably okay. As long as this isn't one of those counterfeit LSI cards,
which, if it's really heavily used, maybe it isn't.
Okay, well, this will do another eight drives, so that'll do the full complement of 16 that this case can accommodate with the onboard ones.
Yeah, this is like a SAS 12 gig card. This is, oh, was this expensive?
I don't think it was too expensive, but I think that's why it's used, is that they save cost there.
While they're finishing up the NAS, we're going to work on the audio interface and the Yamaha HS5 speakers.
Robert, it seems like you've committed one of the common blunders.
Where are these speakers going to fit on your desk?
It is a tight fit. The plan is for them to go on either end.
We can move the monitors a bit. And I think based on the measurements of, like the box is very big,
but based on the measurements of the actual speakers, they should fit in those spaces.
Any reason you picked the Focusrite Scarlett Solo?
Just Google. Robert, you don't really use this for stream, but you do do content creation.
What do you use for a mic? So it's actually, it's this guy here.
So when I go to record in that, I just get this up to standing height and then swivel this guy around.
And now you can record. Or it's just like a USB powered mic.
Yeah, it just plugs into the computer and then I use like audacity or whatever to record on my desktop.
Have I got some great news for you, the XLR input on this?
You can upgrade your mic to anything that isn't that.
Honest, would you say what's more important, good video or good audio? Good audio.
Well, to a point. Yes. You need acceptable video.
Yes. So he's going to watch it at home. Cell phone video is acceptable.
Audio. I would say so these days, yeah. And then as long as you have good audio, we've shot like, dude, we did that one recently where David and I went shopping in the Best Buy.
And we just, as long as we're wearing like a professional quality pack and microphone, we shot a bunch of it on like, not just on a cell phone.
But like, on the selfie camera of a cell phone because we're cell filming.
I don't think I saw a single person say they cared about it.
No, the audio matters so much more. Yeah. You just got to make sure it's extra good.
What do you think of these speakers, placements?
You're kidding, right? I didn't know how to tell Robert.
Is it funny? No. Fix it.
I can't believe you guys called me over to look at this.
I was over here being perfectly productive, shocking hard drives, getting them ready for installation.
They pulled me over there to look at that. Let's talk about hard drives instead.
Sure, they're boring. But these are boring iron wolf pros, 12 terabytes each, and they come with data recovery service as part of their, I believe it's a five year warranty.
So pretty great choice. Oh, you're back.
Feel free to throw those drives in. Can you bring that a little bit closer?
The cable's too short. No. Oh, I guess we're just going to run the cable across.
Robert, you're going to have to buy longer cables. I mean, obviously the angles are weird, but it's so much better than the monitor speakers.
The only way to know for sure is to do crap, right?
I'm not even in what is supposed to be the sweet spot, and I can already tell that it's awful.
Also, what is this?
Yeah, originally I thought the cable on this was going to be longer and be able to be more in the center than those would have reached.
No, no, no, no, no. My concern was that you don't have proper acoustic isolators.
I love the cable. No, I'm kidding. I'm kidding.
The micro vibrations of the cable. I mean, the speaker clarity is outstanding, which I really get to appreciate having my ear right next to it.
Yeah, actually, not bad at all for not having a subwoofer.
That's, like, great. I'm going to leave you a spot to put a GPU.
Okay, because I believe that that is actually more important.
Like, if you ever wanted to use it for Plex or something like that.
Are you ever going to run a Plex server? At the moment, not that I think my Plex server is my DVD case.
This is an odd choice. You put in a two and a half gig PCIe network card.
These days, it's usually cheaper to get two and a half gig networking just integrated onto the motherboard,
but I guess that was less true in the AM4 days.
Let's run the power supply. We chose the RM750 because it's a perfectly suitably adequate quiet power supply from Corsair.
Thanks, Corsair. We're kind of at the end of the pile of stuff, and there's just this FX30.
Why do you have this, Robert? This is for basically my own content creation, maybe some freelance work,
and it's my first proper cinema camera because prior to that, all I had was phone camera,
which did the job, but definitely better.
You also have a Sigma contemporary lens, which is a pretty solid choice.
Some SD cards, dummy battery.
What the heck is this stream deck pedal for? This is something that, to be honest, I thought I would never own.
I bought the Elgato prompter off of David when he was selling a whole bunch of his stuff,
and unfortunately, as far as I could find, any small Bluetooth remotes don't work with the prompter.
You need an actual Elgato product in that, and because my setup is a standing setup,
I can put this down at my feet, control the prompter, and keep my hands free.
It's just three buttons, and that's basically all I need.
Scroll up, scroll down, play pause on the prompter, and we'll be good to go.
This is nice. The back of this case is just unlimited cable stuffing space,
so you can just chuck everything back there and then not worry about the fact that the bottom is just a complete rat's nest.
And that's it. This is ready to go.
I mean, okay, it doesn't look like much right now, but I'm thinking let's make sure it all works and then we can button it up.
Robert, is this your new chair? Yeah.
What happened the last one? Well, here's my previous chair.
And here's the other part. Oh. Oh, wow.
I was leaning back in my chair, getting ready to watch some YouTube, and it just snapped.
Okay, everyone wandered away, but I have bad news for them.
No! I had this kind of, like, subconscious, like, oh, you really need a GPU. You should have a GPU.
I'll leave room for a GPU. This doesn't have onboard graphics.
Shit.
Hey, I know something that you could, that you could sell to raise some money for a GPU.
I mean, can we pull the one out of here or something? It doesn't need to be a powerful GPU, just anything.
To be clear, in the longer term, there would be nothing that would prevent him from running this without a GPU in it at all.
It's just that while we're configuring it right now, it's going to be a bit of a pain.
Jesus. My God, man, clean your things.
I think I've opened that computer once.
I went and I put in the SSD because we forgot about that before.
We went with a P3 Plus because it's fine for a boot SSD.
All right, we got a GPU now. Here we go. Hey!
We'll be using HexOS for his NAS software because I don't know.
The fact that I invested in something makes everyone comfortable using alpha software.
I'm not at the point where I'd recommend it yet, but here it is.
I didn't pick it.
You guys installed the VCR. Does it have headline issues?
It certainly seems like it does. It doesn't advertise that it has the four heads.
Soundbar. Big improvement. As long as you're watching relatively modern content.
Anything I say is just going to get teased about.
You were about to say you can't tell the difference, weren't you?
I'm out.
Oh boy, what's this? On my family's last trip to Disneyland, my brother and I both got some of these.
At the time, it was very expensive to ship both these and the blades home.
We never got any blades, but now we do.
This video is going to come out right before my brother's birthday.
Surprise! There we go!
Okay, put some passion in it.
Taking a bat to your big boss.
Why did they never go for the legs? Mind you, I died there.
We've got the stream deck pedal hooked up to the prompter.
So middle button should be play pod.
Oh, it paused, okay. And then should be scroll down.
I'll speed it up a little bit. And then scroll up.
HexOS is installed. Now what you gotta do is go to deck.hexos.com.
Here, just click that link. Boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop.
Sweet. Oops, turn away, turn away.
Don't waste the information, yada yada.
Don't Hex or his mainframe. What do you want your server name to be?
Oh, uh, BPP.
Arkham Asylum. From Batman.
I know what Arkham Asylum is from. Now, hopefully, we won't need the TrueNAS interface again, but it's there in case you
want it. That's one of the cool things about HexOS is it's kind of a layer on top of TrueNAS
to make it more user-friendly. So if you're the kind of person that finds TrueNAS very easy to use, good for you.
You can stop typing that comment. We're impressed, but you just don't need to tell everybody about it.
And if you're the kind of person who finds this a little bit challenging and obtuse,
HexOS is there for you. 94, 98 megabytes a second.
Brilliant. Perfect. We are maxing out our gigabit connection right now.
They're hard drives, so they're not going to be super fast. And I think you've only got gigabit to your system here.
You're going to probably want to rectify that. Do you have a two and a half gig switch?
No, I do not. That's some stuff I'll have to look into.
So that'll be something for your next tech upgrade, which I wouldn't mind doing.
It's nice hanging out. And you know what? It's nice implementing a tech upgrade that is other than a couple of egregious, uh,
wastes of money. Pretty practical. We ended up with a NAS for archival storage.
We ended up upgrading the TV setup in the living room with a nice little soundbar setup.
We ended up upgrading his audio, which will be fixed later, and we got a bunch of sick
streaming and freelancing gear. Did I miss anything?
I mean, there is the stuff that we haven't actually shot yet, we issued that afterwards or...
Oh, let's go look. Oh, you mean this? I covered this.
This was the egregious waste of money. So thank you very much, AMD, for sponsoring this ultimate $5,000 tech upgrade.
I will see you at the next one. No, no, no, you have to unbox that.
Why? It's way too cool. Just the ghost rider, everything else I don't care about.
Who cares? I care. I want to see this.
How do you not care about a demon skeleton? If you guys enjoyed this video, why don't you go check out Dennis's AMD Ultimate Tech
Upgrade. It had, honestly, more practical stuff than this one did.
This was the single most expensive item in the upgrade. How much was this?
Before tax was 900 Canadian.
Why would you be opening it? This has been like a holy grail.
I've wanted to get one of their statues for a long time. I mean, he's heavy.
I can definitely appreciate the craftsmanship of it, $600.
And this one, there's a lot more there, a lot more expensive. Right, because this is like no-name-ass hero.
Shut up. I've never even heard of ghost rider.
You've never heard of ghost rider? Nick Cage played him in a movie, twice.
I have never heard of ghost rider. I'm so sorry. Johnny Glaze.
Johnny Glaze? And we're done.