WEBVTT

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Then maybe it's broken? It should not make that noise.

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Gurgles. Okay, cool. It actually turned on for-

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Ah! Oh. You've seen us build computers costing anywhere from $69 all the way into the hundreds of

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thousands. But just because you appear on screen with some of the hottest hardware on the planet-

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Doesn't mean that's what you go home to. So what does our team run at home?

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Solid gaming rigs. Home-built servers. AI Dev Mules?

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The hell's an AI Dev Mule? How about all of the above? But before we get to that-

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I hope you enjoyed this- Jankly cobbled together, cycling tour sponsor.

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Hey, I'm Dan. I am the technical architect for Linus Media Group.

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Today, I brought you my AI development mule called BrainCube, or more affectionately known

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as the COMPBOX. You can see it uses the AK Mystic White opaque coolant.

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I've been wanting to make that joke for about 10 years now, and yeah, I'm a child.

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Hello, I'm Nicole, and I am the talent and culture coordinator.

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Today, I brought to you a PC that I bought off someone on Facebook Marketplace.

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My name is Colton Potter. I'm the head of business development. I do business development.

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What is that? It's a good question. I brought to you guys the most powerful 2023 handheld PC that my money could buy.

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The ASUS ROG Ally 2023 edition.

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As you can see, I've got the D-Brain kill switch case on it, which I got only a couple

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months ago. My name is Emily Seddon. I am one of our post-production supervisors, former video editor, and this is my PC.

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I built it about four years ago, I think, COVID PC.

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Before I started at LMG, I built it not knowing how to build computers, but it's been upgraded

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ever since. The only original stuff in it, I think, is the boot SSD and the hard drive.

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I'm Nicholas. I work in the Labs. I look after Mark Bench and most of the automation that takes place with our testing.

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I brought today my main daily driver gaming rig.

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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.

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The kind of PC I brought today is my Corsair gaming PC that I run daily at home.

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There's a lot of Corsair stuff in it. I'm Adam. I'm a writer for Linus Tech Tips.

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I brought in my home server. I've named it affectionately Old Man, because that is what it is.

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It's a big box that I use to store backups, Linux ISOs, and tons and tons of legally

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acquired media. It is actually like a server.

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It's a Lenovo Think server, and it has a server motherboard, as well as a Xeon CPU

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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.

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My NAS or network-attached storage is where I stole all of my data.

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Oh, sorry, I say stole. My name is Justin, and I am the fabricator here at LTT.

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So today, the PC I have brought in for you is my gaming slash CAD rig that I use at home.

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Primary gaming machine, and then when I need to do all my design work, whether it is for

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stuff here or for the crazy crap I'm building at home, this is the machine I use for it.

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We turn it on and see it drip. Gurgles.

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Ooh. Pretty colors.

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There we go. Ooh. Look at all that RGB that I actually really hate.

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These are not the colors I run at home, just so you know.

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Okay, cool. It actually turned on for... Oh.

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So I've been building this over, I don't know, the last six months or something like

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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

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you see here. I decided to buy it off someone because I didn't want to go through the hassle of researching,

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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

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Marketplace to do it for me. This I built last year, mid-summer.

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This one I built two, two and a half years ago.

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It's funny. I think the day that our video review came out on it, I think it was the first day that

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was available in stores. And on that day, before this, I had a Steam Deck, and I sold my Steam Deck on Facebook

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Marketplace, and the guy who came to buy it was like, hey, you work for LTT.

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I just saw you guys' video on the ROG Ally, and I was like, yeah, that's what I'm selling

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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.

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So there's only two options when you win a PC case, either you get rid of the case or

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you build a computer in it. I developed to build this PC back in 2020, before that I was just running off a laptop.

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It's also probably the longest computer I've ever owned. I have not opened this in two years.

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It's grody. This system is primarily developed as an AI Mule.

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So learning how AI development works, learning how inference works, learning how training

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works, all that sort of stuff, running models at home, and also kind of acting as an internet

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server. So, you know, not everybody has access to play with AI, so I wanted to be able to set

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this up in VMs and separate out GPUs, so friends of mine or other people could actually

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have a GPU and have a dedicated space to play with it instead of having to pay for tokens,

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that sort of thing. I decided to upgrade because I was lagging a lot on my Valorant games, and I decided

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I've had enough. I mainly use this for gaming at home.

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I've done a little bit of freelance on the side, which is slowly picking up a little

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bit more, so it's used for editing, light editing, nothing crazy like what we do.

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Yeah, but mostly gaming on the side. I wanted to handheld specifically this handheld for two reasons.

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The first being that I'm a parent, so I don't get as much time to be able to game at my

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computer at my desktop PCs I used to. And then the second thing is I like this because it has Windows.

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I know you can configure the Steam Deck to have Windows on it, but I looked up a couple

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of videos and I was just not down for that, so that's why I got this.

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I was trying to just build the best gaming experience.

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I'm more of a gearhead and I have this addiction of chasing the FPS, even though I play games

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like Heroes of the Storm, but I need 400 frames because I know I can have 400 frames.

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My main goals when I picked up this server was that I wanted something cheap, but also

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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.

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There was a hard drive in here, and when I moved it, it fell out this morning.

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Luckily, I have Unraid, which means I have a parody and also I have a spare backup anyways.

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So some of the projects I'm working on at home right now that I'm using this machine

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for is both me and my father, we're heavily into doing RC cars and things like that.

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My dad's more so into the RC semi-sides of things, so trucks that are a little bit more

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scale-looking. So right now, we're working on making a bunch of scale accessories for the cars, or for

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the trucks. We just finished a project recently where we built a 14th scale low-boy trailer for

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one of his trucks. It's all 3D printed, and I had to design everything in CAD for that.

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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

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ones I had lying around. Yeah, it's got 33090s in it, but I bought the two that are waterblocked here kind of

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secondhand. I believe they're crypto-mining-abused cards, so I don't feel too bad about it.

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The air-cooled one here, which I still haven't got a waterblock for, is actually my personal

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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.

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I remember 100% how much I paid for it. It is the biggest purchase I've made at the time.

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I was really proud of it. It is $3,000. I'll include it.

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I had a budget around, I think, under $2,000 for just the PC parts itself, not including

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the peripherals. So I think, in total, I spent about $1,500 Canadian.

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I got this for, like, $150, not including the drives.

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That's really where the drives are much more expensive.

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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

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server power supply. There's no cheap ATX power supply that is in this form factor.

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I would build it myself next time, because then that would be, like, smaller upgrades.

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So, like, I know now, for example, the memory is pretty small.

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Later on, I would encounter probably a problem that I don't have enough memory, so I can

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probably do that myself. My dream is that I just have a single cluster of computer in the corner, and then everything

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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.

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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

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these little hard drive trays, right? You're like, oh, sweet, thank you.

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They're not a hard drive tray. They're just filler.

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It doesn't do anything. It just takes up space. You have to buy other hard drive containers.

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I had to buy third party ones, because they're $40 each.

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I got these on eBay for, like, $20 a pop, not the drive.

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The hard drive I got for much more money, that's a 20 terabyte drive there.

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I still have to pay so much for the caddies, and I can't get it back in, and I'm mad.

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I don't regret it, but I would get something a little bit more modern and a little bit

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less servery. I've had a few issues since I bought this thing in July of 2023.

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This thing's cooling system started making these god-awful noises to the point that I

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couldn't play any games. My wife wouldn't even sit next to me, because she thought the thing was going to, like,

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blow up. I just factory reset the thing, and then it went away.

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It warms up my entire room. I've turned off the heating in my room for the past two years.

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I'm hoping it saves me money, but I don't know. I've recently lost the ability to put it to sleep.

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The sleep button just disappeared in Windows, and I don't know how to get it back.

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I looked it up for, like, a few days, and my boyfriend and I were trying to figure it

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out, and we couldn't. So it only, I just lock it and let it kind of turn off on its own.

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The quirk about this one is that this fan and cooler combo, I tried to fit into a low-key

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RAW S1, like, garbage can style cooler, but I had to, like, try and file down the sides

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because it was basically smush up against it like a child on a candy window.

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So instead, I just zip-tied it to this one and slapped it in here.

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Sometimes the power button, if I turn it on in a certain way, it gets stuck, so you power

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it on and it just stays held, so it just shuts itself off.

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That's cool. This GPU has a fun little quirk. Oh, it's not really a quirk, it's a safety feature.

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And where the fittings go in here, there is these little, like, brass copper rings that

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if any little bit of liquid gets on there, it'll throw the GPU into a liquid detection

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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,

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so it's actually coming into contact with the ring on occasion, so if I just bump my

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computer too hard, it will cause it to freak out, it'll shut the whole entire computer

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down, and yeah, it's a fun time.

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That's the SATA cable for the DVD drive. I haven't even opened it.

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I don't know, there could be a DVD in it.

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What's in the drive?

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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,

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and in the video where Linus roasts all of our setups, you can see this propped up on

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the two CPU boxes in the corner of my desk, so it gives it enough clearance.

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Let's get this DVD out of here with our, look at that, that's our bit, and our precision

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screwdriver with storage from LTTstore.com. All right, that was the moment of truth.

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Damn, empty. So I've got a couple other computers at home.

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I've got my main rig, which is now 49er to K with a 4090.

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I have one that my cat sleeps on, which is a Threadripper system.

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That was a waste of money, I'll tell you that. And then I've also got a little John's bow NAS.

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I built basically the exact same one that we did in a previous video.

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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.

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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

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to Noctua's. So I think that's probably about it. Most of them are just sitting on the floor.

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I just got a NAS, I just put together a NAS for like home photos and stuff, which is

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great. I'm using the Ugreen one. I'm slowly transitioning to Mac because I get older.

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I just like it to work. And it's working okay.

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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

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another one for the TV downstairs in the living room so we can like easily cast like Chrome,

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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

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I got that. Though now it has been moved into a beautiful fractal terra enclosure.

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It's a great system. So I guess the next up for this system is probably going to be a waterblock to A100.

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I've still got to be able to put in the two 2080 Ti's.

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I think I'm running out of PCI slots. This board has seven.

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This is the Sage, I think 621W, something like that.

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It's already got a 1500 watt power supply so I need to do some more custom cabling and

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things like that. But again, it's supposed to have cards pulled in and out of it, which is why it's all got

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all the EK quick disconnects on basically every single fitting on this rig.

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Do you have any upgrades planned for any of your computers right now?

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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.

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I think we're kind of at the last legs of where AM4 is going to be good.

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So we've probably got another three, four years out of it. I love this case.

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This is one of my favorite cases, but I could go for something a little bit newer.

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The new Leanne Lease without the bezel would be really cool.

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Or the Borg Cube PC case that David has is kind of what I wanted and then he took it.

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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.

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I know there was a few different kind of power things they unlocked with the bigger

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battery and stuff like that, but if I can find a handheld within the same ish price

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point that can run games at a high FPS or just better, I will absolutely upgrade.

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I'm just waiting for that thing that has the biggest leap to justify me spending my

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money to kind of buy it, if that makes sense. Thanks for watching.

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If you enjoyed this, why not take a trip down memory lane and look at the previous time

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we did this. It was quite a while ago and things have changed quite a bit.

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Loof still has a way too expensive of a computer though. It's just that man can't be helped.
