Picture this. The year is 2102. You're sitting down to play some video games when BOOM!
Suddenly, a radioactive bat appears outside your house. And the worst part?
The radiation made your computer blue screen right in the middle of a raid with all of your friends!
Well fear not, because Fallout 76 sponsored this video to find a solution,
and we spent their money on a pallet of lead to build the radiation-proof gaming PC.
Really, Alex? Yes.
Did that actually tick just now? Yeah, there's background radiation.
Good timing.
Radiation surrounds us at all times, and for the most part, that is totally fine.
In simple terms, radiation is just energy being moved from one place to another via waves
or particles like light from the sun or the Wi-Fi in your house.
Where problems start occurring is when the energy increases enough to become ionizing radiation,
knocking electrons out of an atom or molecule.
In a video game, say Fallout 76, that could cause a beneficial mutation.
But in the real world, it's far more likely to cause cell damage or cancer.
And if that electron happens to be inside your RAM or your CPU,
it can cause a bit to flip, turning what should have been a zero into a one or vice versa.
In 2024, there aren't too many places where you can go that the levels of background radiation are in immediate danger.
But ever since the nuclear apocalypse on October 23rd, 2077,
the Fallout universe has been regularly experiencing unsafe levels of radiation.
And it gets worse. Given that the goal of Fallout 76 is to nuke a radioactive bat,
keeping ourselves protected while we do that is key.
Now, for players, there's a lot of options. Radaway, Radex, and even Vegetable Soup.
But for their precious gaming PCs, there's sadly nothing.
To demonstrate what might happen in this situation,
we'll be using our Lumafield CT scanner, which is capable of yeeting enough ionizing radiation to see through steel.
It is entirely possible to kill electronics if you leave them in there long enough.
And if you put running electronics in here, they'll become pretty unhappy pretty quickly.
Allow me to demonstrate. Geiger counter.
PC.
One sec.
I assume that noise is bad.
Yeah, let's see what we can do about that.
The first and easiest thing to do to increase your computer's stability is to simply accept that sometimes poo happens and account for it.
For mission-critical uses, like scientific computing, financial systems, or data centers,
they use registered ECC memory, which doesn't just send the data from your CPU to your RAM and vice versa,
but also extra bits that can be used to validate that data.
A super simple example could be if you wanted to make sure that your two twos arrived in one piece,
you could instead send two to four, and then also tell the computer to make sure that two plus two equals four.
If something goes wrong and you got a two and a three, you'd know because it would equal five.
In practice, ECC algorithms are much more complex, but they're beyond the scope of this video.
If you want to learn more, Derek from Veritasium has a great explanation in his recent video on QR codes.
In DDR5, there is some inherent error correction, which some memory vendors will mislabel as on-die ECC.
This isn't true ECC, and you can see that the real stuff has extra chips.
Four for storing data and another for error correcting.
But Buffer DCC has a different key and cannot be placed in consumer motherboards.
Unfortunately, we don't have any unbuffer DCC here today, but realistically, in the radioactive wasteland of Appalachia,
just correcting the occasional bit flip wasn't going to cut it anyway.
We need to stop it happening in the first place, and you don't need birth control when you're wearing eight condoms.
Bring in the lead. Did you write that or did I?
I wrote that. Okay, because I don't remember approving that in the script, but that's very funny.
Here we have spent $1,000 of Bethesda's money on 300 pounds of lead, then $600 on shipping that lead,
and then $800 on a safety consultant.
We gave us this nice booklet on what you need to know to not get harmed by aforementioned lead.
Am I supposed to have read it? This page that I marked is the only important one.
Oh lord, this is a classic case of the cure being worse than the disease.
You do not want to mess around with this stuff. Man, this is freaking heavy.
Oh, where the heck do you even buy 300 pounds of lead?
Metal supplier, let's call them up, ask for it, that's about it.
Which is kind of crazy to me, because this stuff is way more dangerous than some of the things that chemical suppliers do restrict access to.
If you have a business address, you can get basically anything you want, they'll just send it to you.
I did not know that. Anyway, we need to make sure we don't touch it.
Lead is a poisonous neurotoxin that has no safe exposure level whatsoever.
It also gets absorbed into your bones and stays in there for decades with a half-life of 46 years,
meaning that people that were alive in the 70s before lead gas and paint were banned
are still actively receiving lead poisoning from their own bodies.
Explain in Congress.
Lead poisoning can lead to learning difficulties, irritability, mood disorders, poor memory,
loss of sex drive, infertility, and many other bad things.
Lead use was also estimated to have decreased the IQ of the average American by four points while its use was still commonplace.
That was a difficult torch for the new generation to carry, but somehow they managed it.
Fun fact, by the way, going to an indoor shooting range even just once or twice a month
can expose you to enough lead dust to cause problems.
What you're supposed to do is put on those gloves and then these gloves, those ones are doing the protection.
These are for cut protection so that the lead doesn't like cut you.
Oh, sure, okay. Should we open the bay?
Nah, probably not. The worst thing that we can do is stir up dust, which is why we're not in there, where the air flow is really good.
This is hilarious. Yeah, the safety committee kept on trying to get us to do other things,
but it's just way too funny to have to do all of this.
You know, I didn't see anything in the WorkSafe handling stuff about just it being friggin' heavy.
Wow, it's got a cool bluish hue to it.
Yeah. I've never done this.
The thing that you need to be careful of is the lead oxide.
So if you look, if you do that, there is now lead on my finger.
This is totally fine as long as I don't now lick my finger or go for a smoke or anything of that sort.
Can you pick your nose? I wouldn't recommend it.
Theoretically, lead is highly malleable and should therefore be pretty easy to...
Oh, wow, that's really easy. Yeah.
Oh, okay.
Is that enough to start? I imagine.
Do you want to explain these tools to us? Professional.
This is a leather punch. We can't be drilling into the lead because that creates dust, which is bad.
So we're going to try and use this leather punch to make holes in it.
I think it's going to be difficult and annoying.
We're going to cut the lead. Yes.
By just punching holes in it. There are other plans.
We can like put spikes through it.
But this, if it works, will be the easiest.
So we'll probably want like a quarter inch, maybe a little bit more of overlap on each side.
Okay. We'll kind of take the pieces of lead and like overlap them and then tape them.
We'll tape them? Yeah, we'll tape them. Do we have lead tape?
We have aluminum tape. But that's why you overlap it.
Okay. Okay, wait.
Oh, so I don't have to use the stupid leather punch. We have snips.
We have snips. Alex. Oh, we still need to put holes in it.
I thought you wanted me to perforate the thing and then just like bend it.
I was like, this is the stupidest plan ever. Okay, there.
Okay, fine. No, so we're going to metal it. Yeah.
No, it makes way more sense. But we're going to use some bolts to attach it to this.
Sure. Fine. Yeah.
No, that's fine. Just wear the leather punch. Yeah.
No, I get it. I get it now. I thought you wanted me to cut it with that.
That would be awful. Yeah, I know. That would be really bad.
Oh, wow. Somewhat easy.
It's like cutting plastic.
Heavy, heavy plastic. That is one ragged ass line, but, uh, progress.
Okay. Ow. Ow.
Ow. Ow. Ow.
Ow. Ow. I guess that's bad.
Aargh. Woo.
Dude, it's so heavy.
But that's a feature, not a bug.
Lead's density is what makes it so effective at blocking radiation.
Effectively nothing can get through it.
So making our system radiation proof is just putting a whole lot of mass between the source
of the radiation and our sensitive components.
Definitely need to mark out some lines and do a cleaner cut,
but that'll be easier now that I don't have to contend with the entire roll of lead as I'm
trying to snip through it. Okay, I think the key is just being willing to bend the crap out of it
while you're cutting it and then bend it back when you're done because it's really not hard.
Boom, flat. Trying to line these up pretty much perfect here because
while good enough would be good enough to protect the computer, it's not going to help us get the
actual bolts through, so I want these to be very, very well lined up. Okay, there's your first lead
plate. Wow, that's heavy. Like I know in my head that it's heavy, but like wow, that's really heavy.
It's like the gold controller. Yeah. Like cognitively, I understand that there's different densities of
materials, but damn, like is it a problem that we're going to have just like steel bolts and
we're going to have small holes in our plating? Probably. There we go. Oh, this is the outer plate.
Okay, that makes sense. Come on. Yes! There we go. Yes!
With this overlap, what's your plan when the side panel overlaps and the top panel overlaps?
We'll just do like overlap, overlap, overlap, overlap, just stack them on top of each other
and probably just whack it with a hammer and add some aluminum tape. I don't think that's going
to be as easy as you think that is. I don't think it's going to be easy. Oh, well, okay, then we're
on the same page. How is this so far off? Dude, it's not aligned at all. Okay. Yeah. Well, that's
actually good news. The fact that this isn't wide enough means that our two tall side panels
will fold over very nicely. Yeah, so we can just put it over top. That's easy. Yeah, no problem.
Done. Our incompetence worked out for a change. Sometimes you can air or stack in the correct
direction. Hear me out. Yeah. Strategic overlaps. We take this top piece off. Yeah. We actually cut
it flush to the front. Yeah. We do the side panels next and it like wraps. Then we do the front panel
huge and it wraps around the side panels and around the overlapped top. And we use the bendiness.
And then for the back, we basically just cut little armor pieces for all the parts we don't
need access to glue them on. Sure. Double sided tape. Okay. That last part was where I was testing
to see if he was just going along with everything I was saying because that's terrible. So tell me
something. Yeah. Should I just go for it? Sure. Okay. I'm going to shape this thing. Do you want
a whacker? Yeah, we need a whacker.
With the two sides, it's kind of coming together like visually. Right? Dude, actually making the
PC out of lead may be the best way to make it look like it's from the Fallout universe. Yeah.
We probably should have bolted it before we whacked it. Shoot. Alex, Andrew called it.
She's not going to go deep enough, not quite. Now, under normal circumstances,
I would just take my side panel, put a new hole in it that's closer to the edge, but
being contaminated and not being able to touch any of our stuff is pretty friggin inconvenient
right about now. Question for you. Can we just take a nail and our contaminated hammer and just
send a hole through this thing? Probably. Yeah. Okay. Why don't we just do that then? Yeah. Contaminate
one nail instead of our drill and drill bits and... Yeah. Okay.
Okay, memes aside though, are we expecting this to work? Like, do we know, you know,
how much radiation can slip through a small gap? Obviously, this armor is not going to be perfect.
Every single time that a radioactive particle hits your PC or yourself, there is a chance
that something bad happens. And so, by doing this, we might not 100% eliminate the chances of
something bad happening, but it's going to be way lower. Like, think of all the areas where
theoretically a particle could come through. Yeah. It's basically not. This is one of those
projects, man, where like, you're in the planning stages and you're just like, I don't know. Is
this just really dumb and we shouldn't do it? Or is this really done and we should totally do it?
This is definitely the latter. Okay. So what did you say? The side panel has to go on
before the top panel, right? Right. Whoa. Geez. I almost lost control of it as it was coming down.
Okay. Now you get it? Oh dude, she's latched. Nice. Easy. So we'll bend this back and then we'll
bend it one more final time after. Okay. So we'll fold these over and the front we fold up.
Question for you. Yes. The bomb's not going to go off under the computer. Do we need armor on the
bottom or could we have some ventilation? Are you determined to kill this thing? I guess we could
just attach a fan on the bottom. It would probably help it a lot, a lot.
All right. It's basically done. It needs a little bit of finishing work to look more
complete and together, but we can do that on Tuesday after it's not the weekend.
I might have missed out on some of the finishing touches here, but
it's heavy. I guess I get to do the big moment. Have we weighed it yet?
We have not. We did a wave, but I have done some trimming and stuff.
Dude, she's thunk.
Look at her go. Like, damn. All right. Good god, I haven't gained weight. I'm 174 pounds,
and I guess I probably shouldn't touch the lead. Actually, let's uh, I mean a little bit of lead
is good for you, right? No. It's like iron, a little bit of iron in your diet, a little bit of
lead in your diet, a little bit of iron. Great. A little bit of lead. Oh, goodness me. Not too much.
In your diet. Get it? Lead in your diet. Okay. I got it. I got it. I can do it. I can do it.
I've got this. I've got this. Okay. I'm just going to get it to the edge of the table.
Okay. What did I say that was? 174? Oh my God. I'm at 150 now. I still have my other foot on
the ground. Just put it on the scale. Here we go. Here we go. Oh my God. 264.2. Please don't
drop it. No, no, I got. That was 90 pounds dead on. Wow. Is this even safe to put in the Luma
Field? I don't know. They still haven't gotten back to me with a maximum allowed on that. Well,
they should have thought of that before they sent us a Luma Field. All right. Here we go.
Oh, do you want to play games on it or throw it in there first? Oh, we got to play games on it. Yeah,
we've got to prove it's a working computer. Yeah. Okay. Also, there is a Geiger counter in it right
now that is on. Okay. I haven't heard in a long time. I should think not. Any brilliant ideas for
how to turn it on? Oh my God. A nail. Really? Yes. I mean, it's better than what we had for the
PCs in the back of my van, which was nothing. Can really feel the lead, you know? Like it's got
that lead feel, like the leady goodness. Okay, ready? Boom. Oh, it works perfect, dude. It actually
works really well. No, it actually works perfect. Why are you not working still? I may be able to
reach the onboard HDMI Alex, which would be really helpful from a troubleshooting standpoint.
This can't get any pressure on it. Oh, I got it. Okay. So the HDMI is in. Oh, thank goodness that
HDMI port was right there. If it was anywhere other than right at the bottom of the IO. Wait,
why did we go into the BIOS and not Windows? Oh, God. Oh, God. Where's your boot devices?
There's no storage Alex. Oh, there was something. Remember Alex? Yes.
The NVMe carrier wasn't in quite right. And I thought it was fixed.
But maybe it is not. Well, it clearly is not.
Well, I guess this is getting finished tomorrow.
Here it is. Big moment. Does it still game? I couldn't help noticing that it's running great
now. But is there any air in or out? There's a tiny bit of air that's getting in the bottom,
but who cares? We have a Resorator. All the heat's coming out of here. Well,
all it has to do is run the game. Oh, before we do that, I did scan it in the Luma field.
Do you want to take a look? I do. Hello, Mr. Camera. I'm very sorry about this.
There's the picture. Oh, so it worked. Yeah, you can see this little bit here. Oh, yeah,
look at that. It didn't quite hit it. The rest is the computer.
Flawless victory then. Yeah. Nice. Let's see if the computer still works. Or
realistically more like if it ever worked. I think its problems are nothing to do with
radiation exposure and everything to do with the fact that it is in a sealed container.
Yeah. Do we tell them that we had to take it apart and put it back together because the PCIe
bracket fell out? No. Okay. I guess we did. Let's see how the game runs on our machine. Wow. CPU,
GPU temps? Not bad. Give me all your stuff. Hey, give me that rad X. Go on. Go on. Go on. Go
on. Get pilgrim. How much more do we need to play to prove that this system actually totally kicks
ass? We're not getting a ton of FPS, but that's our older GPU, right? Like our CPU is at 52 degrees
and our GPU is at 43. And if a nuclear bomb goes off, it'll be fine. It totally will,
unironically, survive as long as it isn't in the blast radius. Yeah. I'll dodge you. I'll dodge
you. Oh yeah. Look at this computer. The ultimate Fallout 76 PC. You've outdone yourself, Alex.
I've really done myself on this one. This was so much work. Oh my God. It was awful.
It was terrible work. But it has the world's greatest power button. Yep. If you enjoyed this video,
because you love seeing me and Alex have things go according to plan, you might enjoy the one where
we tried to repair eight dead motherboards that we bought on eBay. It was fun. It was fun.