Then maybe it's broken? It should not make that noise.
Gurgles. Okay, cool. It actually turned on for-
Ah! Oh. You've seen us build computers costing anywhere from $69 all the way into the hundreds of
thousands. But just because you appear on screen with some of the hottest hardware on the planet-
Doesn't mean that's what you go home to. So what does our team run at home?
Solid gaming rigs. Home-built servers. AI Dev Mules?
The hell's an AI Dev Mule? How about all of the above? But before we get to that-
I hope you enjoyed this- Jankly cobbled together, cycling tour sponsor.
Hey, I'm Dan. I am the technical architect for Linus Media Group.
Today, I brought you my AI development mule called BrainCube, or more affectionately known
as the COMPBOX. You can see it uses the AK Mystic White opaque coolant.
I've been wanting to make that joke for about 10 years now, and yeah, I'm a child.
Hello, I'm Nicole, and I am the talent and culture coordinator.
Today, I brought to you a PC that I bought off someone on Facebook Marketplace.
My name is Colton Potter. I'm the head of business development. I do business development.
What is that? It's a good question. I brought to you guys the most powerful 2023 handheld PC that my money could buy.
The ASUS ROG Ally 2023 edition.
As you can see, I've got the D-Brain kill switch case on it, which I got only a couple
months ago. My name is Emily Seddon. I am one of our post-production supervisors, former video editor, and this is my PC.
I built it about four years ago, I think, COVID PC.
Before I started at LMG, I built it not knowing how to build computers, but it's been upgraded
ever since. The only original stuff in it, I think, is the boot SSD and the hard drive.
I'm Nicholas. I work in the Labs. I look after Mark Bench and most of the automation that takes place with our testing.
I brought today my main daily driver gaming rig.
I'm Natalie, and I'm part of the Creator Warehouse team. I'm the inventory coordinator, so anything you see on lttstore.com, I'm somewhat involved.
The kind of PC I brought today is my Corsair gaming PC that I run daily at home.
There's a lot of Corsair stuff in it. I'm Adam. I'm a writer for Linus Tech Tips.
I brought in my home server. I've named it affectionately Old Man, because that is what it is.
It's a big box that I use to store backups, Linux ISOs, and tons and tons of legally
acquired media. It is actually like a server.
It's a Lenovo Think server, and it has a server motherboard, as well as a Xeon CPU
in it. But that doesn't just mean it's good. So today, what I brought in was my NAS box or NAS machine running TrueNAS.
My NAS or network-attached storage is where I stole all of my data.
Oh, sorry, I say stole. My name is Justin, and I am the fabricator here at LTT.
So today, the PC I have brought in for you is my gaming slash CAD rig that I use at home.
Primary gaming machine, and then when I need to do all my design work, whether it is for
stuff here or for the crazy crap I'm building at home, this is the machine I use for it.
We turn it on and see it drip. Gurgles.
Ooh. Pretty colors.
There we go. Ooh. Look at all that RGB that I actually really hate.
These are not the colors I run at home, just so you know.
Okay, cool. It actually turned on for... Oh.
So I've been building this over, I don't know, the last six months or something like
that. It's gone through a few different iterations. It went off with a pair of 2080TIs and has now moved up to the triple 3090 configuration
you see here. I decided to buy it off someone because I didn't want to go through the hassle of researching,
buying every single PC part by myself. And at the time I was in university, I was pretty busy, and so I've paid someone on Facebook
Marketplace to do it for me. This I built last year, mid-summer.
This one I built two, two and a half years ago.
It's funny. I think the day that our video review came out on it, I think it was the first day that
was available in stores. And on that day, before this, I had a Steam Deck, and I sold my Steam Deck on Facebook
Marketplace, and the guy who came to buy it was like, hey, you work for LTT.
I just saw you guys' video on the ROG Ally, and I was like, yeah, that's what I'm selling
this to you for so I can go buy it. It was pretty sick. It was last year at the Christmas party, and I had won a PC case.
So there's only two options when you win a PC case, either you get rid of the case or
you build a computer in it. I developed to build this PC back in 2020, before that I was just running off a laptop.
It's also probably the longest computer I've ever owned. I have not opened this in two years.
It's grody. This system is primarily developed as an AI Mule.
So learning how AI development works, learning how inference works, learning how training
works, all that sort of stuff, running models at home, and also kind of acting as an internet
server. So, you know, not everybody has access to play with AI, so I wanted to be able to set
this up in VMs and separate out GPUs, so friends of mine or other people could actually
have a GPU and have a dedicated space to play with it instead of having to pay for tokens,
that sort of thing. I decided to upgrade because I was lagging a lot on my Valorant games, and I decided
I've had enough. I mainly use this for gaming at home.
I've done a little bit of freelance on the side, which is slowly picking up a little
bit more, so it's used for editing, light editing, nothing crazy like what we do.
Yeah, but mostly gaming on the side. I wanted to handheld specifically this handheld for two reasons.
The first being that I'm a parent, so I don't get as much time to be able to game at my
computer at my desktop PCs I used to. And then the second thing is I like this because it has Windows.
I know you can configure the Steam Deck to have Windows on it, but I looked up a couple
of videos and I was just not down for that, so that's why I got this.
I was trying to just build the best gaming experience.
I'm more of a gearhead and I have this addiction of chasing the FPS, even though I play games
like Heroes of the Storm, but I need 400 frames because I know I can have 400 frames.
My main goals when I picked up this server was that I wanted something cheap, but also
that would have a lot of room for expansion. This is a 8-bay storage server, and it is filled with almost all of the hard drives.
There was a hard drive in here, and when I moved it, it fell out this morning.
Luckily, I have Unraid, which means I have a parody and also I have a spare backup anyways.
So some of the projects I'm working on at home right now that I'm using this machine
for is both me and my father, we're heavily into doing RC cars and things like that.
My dad's more so into the RC semi-sides of things, so trucks that are a little bit more
scale-looking. So right now, we're working on making a bunch of scale accessories for the cars, or for
the trucks. We just finished a project recently where we built a 14th scale low-boy trailer for
one of his trucks. It's all 3D printed, and I had to design everything in CAD for that.
I didn't really have a budget when I built this originally. It was just sort of cobbled together from parts I either got from the company or other
ones I had lying around. Yeah, it's got 33090s in it, but I bought the two that are waterblocked here kind of
secondhand. I believe they're crypto-mining-abused cards, so I don't feel too bad about it.
The air-cooled one here, which I still haven't got a waterblock for, is actually my personal
one that I used to have. I've since upgraded to a 4090 in my main rig, so it gets a hand-me-down GPU.
I remember 100% how much I paid for it. It is the biggest purchase I've made at the time.
I was really proud of it. It is $3,000. I'll include it.
I had a budget around, I think, under $2,000 for just the PC parts itself, not including
the peripherals. So I think, in total, I spent about $1,500 Canadian.
I got this for, like, $150, not including the drives.
That's really where the drives are much more expensive.
I have, like, some regrets about this thing. One, is that since it's a literal server, I have a redundant power supply, but it's a
server power supply. There's no cheap ATX power supply that is in this form factor.
I would build it myself next time, because then that would be, like, smaller upgrades.
So, like, I know now, for example, the memory is pretty small.
Later on, I would encounter probably a problem that I don't have enough memory, so I can
probably do that myself. My dream is that I just have a single cluster of computer in the corner, and then everything
in my house is just a thin client. So if I did anything, I'd rather build just one big machine, some of the server rack stuff.
I don't have the room for it at home, but that would be ideal. One thing that's super frickin' annoying about this server is that Lenovo includes all of
these little hard drive trays, right? You're like, oh, sweet, thank you.
They're not a hard drive tray. They're just filler.
It doesn't do anything. It just takes up space. You have to buy other hard drive containers.
I had to buy third party ones, because they're $40 each.
I got these on eBay for, like, $20 a pop, not the drive.
The hard drive I got for much more money, that's a 20 terabyte drive there.
I still have to pay so much for the caddies, and I can't get it back in, and I'm mad.
I don't regret it, but I would get something a little bit more modern and a little bit
less servery. I've had a few issues since I bought this thing in July of 2023.
This thing's cooling system started making these god-awful noises to the point that I
couldn't play any games. My wife wouldn't even sit next to me, because she thought the thing was going to, like,
blow up. I just factory reset the thing, and then it went away.
It warms up my entire room. I've turned off the heating in my room for the past two years.
I'm hoping it saves me money, but I don't know. I've recently lost the ability to put it to sleep.
The sleep button just disappeared in Windows, and I don't know how to get it back.
I looked it up for, like, a few days, and my boyfriend and I were trying to figure it
out, and we couldn't. So it only, I just lock it and let it kind of turn off on its own.
The quirk about this one is that this fan and cooler combo, I tried to fit into a low-key
RAW S1, like, garbage can style cooler, but I had to, like, try and file down the sides
because it was basically smush up against it like a child on a candy window.
So instead, I just zip-tied it to this one and slapped it in here.
Sometimes the power button, if I turn it on in a certain way, it gets stuck, so you power
it on and it just stays held, so it just shuts itself off.
That's cool. This GPU has a fun little quirk. Oh, it's not really a quirk, it's a safety feature.
And where the fittings go in here, there is these little, like, brass copper rings that
if any little bit of liquid gets on there, it'll throw the GPU into a liquid detection
mode so that way it doesn't fry your GPU or anything. However, the problem is, the fitting I used on this side here is a little bit too big,
so it's actually coming into contact with the ring on occasion, so if I just bump my
computer too hard, it will cause it to freak out, it'll shut the whole entire computer
down, and yeah, it's a fun time.
That's the SATA cable for the DVD drive. I haven't even opened it.
I don't know, there could be a DVD in it.
What's in the drive?
Maybe it's broken? It's busted. So as much as I love this case, the GPU is mounted so that you have to plug in underneath,
and in the video where Linus roasts all of our setups, you can see this propped up on
the two CPU boxes in the corner of my desk, so it gives it enough clearance.
Let's get this DVD out of here with our, look at that, that's our bit, and our precision
screwdriver with storage from LTTstore.com. All right, that was the moment of truth.
Damn, empty. So I've got a couple other computers at home.
I've got my main rig, which is now 49er to K with a 4090.
I have one that my cat sleeps on, which is a Threadripper system.
That was a waste of money, I'll tell you that. And then I've also got a little John's bow NAS.
I built basically the exact same one that we did in a previous video.
Awesome little NAS. I think it's got about 50 terabytes or something on that. So I've also got a 24 bay storage server too.
That's just kind of sitting in the middle of my living room right now. It's still very loud, even though I changed all of the fans and the power supplies over
to Noctua's. So I think that's probably about it. Most of them are just sitting on the floor.
I just got a NAS, I just put together a NAS for like home photos and stuff, which is
great. I'm using the Ugreen one. I'm slowly transitioning to Mac because I get older.
I just like it to work. And it's working okay.
No. We have a few more computers at home. So obviously my fiance has his own tower and then we also recently, he recently just built
another one for the TV downstairs in the living room so we can like easily cast like Chrome,
YouTube, anything games if we wanted to. As for the other computers that I own, you can watch my AMD upgrade because that's where
I got that. Though now it has been moved into a beautiful fractal terra enclosure.
It's a great system. So I guess the next up for this system is probably going to be a waterblock to A100.
I've still got to be able to put in the two 2080 Ti's.
I think I'm running out of PCI slots. This board has seven.
This is the Sage, I think 621W, something like that.
It's already got a 1500 watt power supply so I need to do some more custom cabling and
things like that. But again, it's supposed to have cards pulled in and out of it, which is why it's all got
all the EK quick disconnects on basically every single fitting on this rig.
Do you have any upgrades planned for any of your computers right now?
No, I'm broke. So if I were to upgrade my PC in the future, I don't think I'm going to stick on AM4.
I think we're kind of at the last legs of where AM4 is going to be good.
So we've probably got another three, four years out of it. I love this case.
This is one of my favorite cases, but I could go for something a little bit newer.
The new Leanne Lease without the bezel would be really cool.
Or the Borg Cube PC case that David has is kind of what I wanted and then he took it.
I'm aware that the LIX came out early this year. I didn't want to upgrade because it didn't have a more powerful processor.
I know there was a few different kind of power things they unlocked with the bigger
battery and stuff like that, but if I can find a handheld within the same ish price
point that can run games at a high FPS or just better, I will absolutely upgrade.
I'm just waiting for that thing that has the biggest leap to justify me spending my
money to kind of buy it, if that makes sense. Thanks for watching.
If you enjoyed this, why not take a trip down memory lane and look at the previous time
we did this. It was quite a while ago and things have changed quite a bit.
Loof still has a way too expensive of a computer though. It's just that man can't be helped.