How do you upgrade a man who already has seven computers?
Well, we're going to have to figure it out because our very own king of Labs benchmarking
Mr. Nick Harris just won an AMD ultimate $5,000 tech upgrade.
Congratulations, Nick. Here's one stick of memory.
This is mine. I know I borrowed it for this bit.
We actually got a whole bunch of really cool stuff, including some pro networking gear,
a new test bench, some smart lighting, and he even had room in his budget for a friend.
Isn't that cute? Oh God, it's weird.
No need to hurt his feelings, my friend. He had so much fun with Riley, I'm going to have fun with him as well.
Wait, that phrasing is kind of bad on that.
And he's also got some sick new gaming gear from our sponsor AMD.
Let's see what someone who tests hardware for a living would buy for himself.
Hello, LTT viewers. I've been told that our recent giveaway segments have been too much fun.
It's gotta stop. And AMD representatives have requested that this giveaway contain no thrilling or comedic
aspects whatsoever and zero flights of fancy.
With that said then, it brings me no joy to tell you that AMD is giving away two amazing
gaming buttons containing AMD Ryzen 7 9800 X3D CPUs, basically the best CPU on the market,
and PowerColor Hellhound Radeon RX 9070 XT 16 gig graphics cards, basically the best
9070 16 gig as well. By entering using the link below, you too can have so much fun that you'll get a talking
to from somebody. Maybe your dad, but what your dad won't have is one of the best gaming combos on the market,
unless he also received one of the two giveaway bundles.
It can be yours by entering the giveaway using the link in the description.
Have fun gaming with your dad. Okay, back to the video.
How do I put this?
This is one of the most vanilla nerddom spaces that I've ever been in.
Sorry, I've never been called vanilla before. No, I mean, no matter what nerddom it is, it's represented here.
We've got Star Wars, we've got Lego, we've got Dungeons & Dragons, we've got computers,
we've got Star Trek, we've even got some of those vinyl things.
What co-pops? Everyone seems to have a niche that they're into, but somebody has to be a normal nerd.
There's a bunch of 1%ers, but who's part of the 90%? It's like that moment when you're in traffic and you realize, I am the traffic.
You're the type of guy who goes to Comic-Con. No fan expo.
Even worse. I like your lo-fi Lego Star Destroyer though.
It's a work in progress. Wait, is that how the Star Destroyer actually works?
It uses Technic for the inside? Not in the movies, no.
Well, this seems controversial.
I mean, I'd have ours if we had one.
Let's look at your upgrade, which I can barely even get to without tripping over a computer
or two. Well, that's why we're not building one today. We're upgrading all the infrastructure around the computers.
We're solving networking for me once and for all.
Al has had a 5 gigabit deal. Now most of my devices are only like 1 gig or 2.5.
So with ubiquity, I'm like future-proofing. No matter if I move again or whatever, all my stuff is 5 gig with 10 gig SFP ports if
I choose to. Cool. Okay.
All right. Let's do some networking first then. I don't want to say you're in the way, but...
Fine. I'll tell you guys about the USW Pro Max switch over here then.
We've got a really nice mix of ports and functionality here.
We've got eight PoE plus ports that run at gigabit speed, eight PoE plus plus ports that
run at gigabit speed, and then eight PoE plus plus ports that run at 2.5 gigabit speed.
Then we've also got a couple of 10 gigabit SFP uplinks.
This allows him to run as much security camera or home automation crap as he could pretty
much want because it has a total of 400 watts of power that it can deliver over Ethernet.
And then of course, high speed networking. What are you working on?
The disc. Wow. Yeah.
You know what? Good job. Thanks.
No, yeah. Just be natural. Just talk to us.
Be natural. Like vanilla natural? I'm sorry.
I didn't mean for that to be like mean. I just...
No, no. Vanilla is not a bad thing to be. Not everyone has to be spicy all the time.
I just feel a little bit like your place is how the Big Bang Theory might have set up
like a nerd's apartment, you know?
Dude, that's mean. Yeah. See, that's...
Wow. That's really bad. Went from vanilla to like Big Bang Theory.
Say bazinga. Say bazinga right now. You're joking.
Bazinga. I don't really do networking and rack mount.
Yeah. No, I did pick up on that. So if you're not familiar with Nick, he's mostly on like the software side.
So developing benchmark tools, methodologies, and it's mostly on like consumer hardware.
Because like the stuff is kind of a different beast.
Like I wasn't familiar with all the, you know, various standards for rack mounting crap
until I had to be because of work either. Basically, if it's physical, I don't do it and that's exercise and networking.
That's not even true. You've been coming to badminton night.
By the way, I don't think I have ever seen this before.
Where on earth did you get Robertson rack screws?
Whoa. I don't know.
I don't know him. Who's Robertson?
You know the square ones. Like the Canada only ones.
Adam, you appreciate this is super weird. Yeah.
That's crazy. I've never seen a Robertson rack screw. Oh, sorry.
Let me try again. Whoa. You know, Nick, I wouldn't have been as surprised.
You didn't know what a Robertson screw was. If I had seen the absolute hack job that you did on this show.
I didn't do that. It came like that. This is dangerous.
I should have warned you about that. You should have.
I forgot it was. This is a freaking weapon. Question for you, Mr. Harris.
Would you like your switch to go in from the front or do you prefer your switch inserted
from the rear? Normally, from the front. Like a normal person.
Thank you. Well, some normal people do like it from the back.
It's a lot of prep work. Would you like me to explain the pros and cons both ways?
No, no, that's fine. Just in the front is fine.
Yeah. Okay. With the main switch installed, let's have a look at some of the other networking gear
with us. Right. This is the Cloud Gateway Max.
I don't know. I wanted to give it a shot. I think it has like stuff.
The premise in software development, lifecycle, is get it working first and then iterate
and optimize after. So get it working and then condense.
This explains why Markbench has never done it. Wow.
Okay. You know what? If this is going to be my platform to defend lab's things, okay, what?
Markbench is in Rustbench and it's actually all automated now and we have a queuing thing
that is... You don't care about that. No, I do actually.
Markbench is super cool. Like we did a ShortCircuit on a GPU recently and like the testing was really fast.
No, I'm trying to... Why did I buy this?
Presumably so that you could use a single keyboard and mouse for up to four computers.
I can read the box as well. Thank you. So I did another NAS as well though because I was going to do the 321 rule where I have
three drives in the one NAS, two drives in this one, and then one drive in the cloud.
That is really not... Oh, that was funny though.
One drive in the cloud? I like that.
Why don't you explain 321 to the fine folks? What is that?
I have a true NAS box that has three drives in it.
I have this UNAS box with two drives in it. Okay, that's not 321.
Three copies of your data in at least two different mediums, one of which is off-site.
For drives, we've gone with a couple of eight terabyte iron wolves.
We don't need the pros because it's just two drives in this box and we don't even need
a ton of capacity because Nick's not, you know, putting all of his seven movies on here.
It's just going to be presumably the bare essentials, you know, photos, documents, that
sort of thing, right? Yeah.
Yeah. How did it take me this long to notice the chair that was on his kitchen island?
Did this just get put here? Okay, where do you want your NAS?
Oh, it's all going on top. What is the point of a rack?
Okay. Nope. Do what the client wants.
Govee gave us, like, a level or your size, but it looks like Yipekuri's got you.
What are you doing? Are you going to do that? Don't worry.
No, no, no, no, no. I'm not going to do that. Yeah, it was going to be hidden up there.
What if I... You don't need to access it.
Until I... The whole point of the network access to...
I won't be able to read the little LED on the front. It's got a light.
Why would you need to do that? And yes, you will because there's slots, slats here.
You know, I can re... You know what? I can rearrange it after...
You know what? What? No, no, no.
Sorry, sorry, sorry. Let me go back. This is a brilliant...
I like this. Put it there. Okay.
This is what I was talking about. So we can have the gateway just hidden away up there, and we just have this one little
Ethernet cable and everything's clean. Everything clean, everything fine.
I'm using the Ubiquiti Wi-Fi man app to scan your apartment for where you have the weakest
signal. And finally, it's your bathroom, which means that's where we're putting the access point.
I mean, it's where I do my wordle every day. Exactly.
Did you see the Mandalorian theme of the washroom though?
What? Okay, I want to see this.
What? What? What?
Wait, Adam, you haven't even seen the best part.
With the matching toilet cover. Yeah, you didn't see the floor mat?
Okay. Nick, I have the switch. I have the gateway.
I have the NAS. What else am I putting in this rack? Please tell me it says many things as possible because that's the point of racks.
Oh, that was me. This is going underneath.
Okay. And then I also need a UPS.
Yeah, I guess the UPS can just go right back on the shelf.
What's this? That is a 2.5 gigabit network card.
Helpful. I knew that. What are you doing with it?
It's going in one of the seven computers. Because they all don't actually work. Because they all don't actually work.
You're getting even more helpful every time. Yeah.
So which one? I don't know yet. You know the PC that's in front of you or behind you, the Proxmox?
That one was supposed to go up here. But it's feet, even without its feet, it's like just too big.
So the idea was I was going to put it into the smaller fractal pink case.
Because that fits in with just a little bit of a...
So this is the true NAS box. I just put a new replacement drive.
So it should be good to go back in the rig. By the way, this is not the right size at all.
Earthquake stuff needs to move around a little bit.
We're going to have a lot of stuff left over from this one on the cutting room floor, LMG.gg
slash Floatplane. We'll see you there. All right, check this out.
The reset switch is right here. Which means that if I tuck this thing in here under the shelf, there we go.
Oh, buddy, you can totally still reach it.
Right there. Boom. And the best part is now it's a structural NAS.
Look at that. Are hard drives okay being like that?
Yes. Yes, they are. Look how nice that is.
We have the UPS, we have the NAS, we have one system, dude.
And we've only taken up like half your rack now. Is there a reason you felt the need to put a gigabit StarTech network card in this system?
Yeah, well, one of these systems didn't, whether it's the Proxmox OS or TrueNAS, didn't like
the onboard motherboard. So I put this in here.
But I can't remember which. I'm going to assume this is the one that needs to be the add-in card because there would
be no other reason on this green earth to put this card in a system.
Why? Because it's horrible. Look at it.
It's tiny. Yeah. Well, it's a micro network card.
By the way, what is up with this? The cable management of this system is actually really nice.
This is the one thing you cable manage? I cable manage the PC builds, but not the rest of the house because I did the small form
factor gaming rig and it's actually pretty great. Yeah, what's up with that?
This is the one part that people don't see. I know.
I don't understand why you don't understand. Big moment.
Mr. Harris, try your chair.
Yep, it's Mish.
What? See, this is the one thing I have no idea how it works are these sensors.
My understanding is that they're like battery, but I have a plug on this.
Wait, what are these? These are hygrometers? This is for in the washroom, one in here and one in there.
For what reason? Just to know the humidity? Yeah.
I literally was just looking for stuff to put on the wall that connects to home assistant.
You could have gotten motion detectors, you could have had your bathroom so that... I know what I'm moving.
Lights turn on. Later.
No GPU in here, right? DC1? Well, no, but I don't remember if it had one before.
Wait, did I hear that correctly? Your Proxmox system has a 7950X, like a 16 core in it.
Yes. And then TrueNAS is a 5600G.
How many cores do you have in this domicile?
7950X, 5600G. That'll be a 5600XT.
That's a 12 something. Apple something.
And then 7800X3D as the gaming rig.
Oh, actually the 12900K and the 23090s.
That is freaking ridiculous. I can't believe I'm building a system with a 7950X in it and it doesn't even have a GPU.
Are you going to do GPU pass-through in the future? Yes, yes I will.
GPU pass-through for Plex.
Okay. Hey, but look at this.
So tidy, right? It's great.
Yeah. Was this mounted here before? No, I just kind of hang it once in a while.
No, I didn't have the hardware at the time. Oh, okay.
Do you know? Nope. Why are we even here?
Are you sure? You have that whole thing of screws. Can I just check and see if there's a screw that happens?
Sure. But this wasn't the monitor. The screws are right here.
The very first ones I picked up. He has four of them. He 100% has them.
Noice!
Nick just informed us that his bedroom is more humid than the rest of the apartment.
I just want to know what is actionable about that? I can open a window.
What is this thing? It's pixel light. Pixel light?
I'm going to have put the weather on it.
The only reason Google still lives is until the reach of many is who I talk to to turn
my lights on and off. So it'll be that for display, weather, time, alerts, whatever, and then the reach of many
is my voice. There we go.
Hear me out. What if we put this in here instead?
No, that's going in there.
So we're going to have a mouse and keyboard that are going to be right here in the event that they are needed because, I don't know, we didn't remote into these systems for some
reason. Whenever I need to remote in, it's usually because the network is down, and to fix it
I just need to plug in a keyboard anyways.
I'm with you. That looks so much better than it was when we got here.
Right? Yeah. We can put the desk there now because I'm actually done with the rack.
I didn't realize how small this desk was.
Micro desk. Do you have a power bar back here? Oh, he has a power bar at him.
I just unplugged the light and the speaker. Wait, what? Don't you want your light and speakers plugged in for when you would live here?
Nope. I'll use the longer one. That only has two because I only need to plug in two things.
But about the test bench, I'll take the power bar from my gaming rig.
Actually now's a great time to talk about what you're doing with that test bench. So you picked up a Ryzen 7 5800 XT as well as an RX 9060 XT and my understanding is this
is something to do with Linux testing. I had an extra motherboard and RAM.
Yeah. I put it together because I don't know, Bazite and Catchy are catching on.
So we did some, let's see, Catchy catching on, get it?
At the last we did some testing and it was super easy.
So I went and found on Marketplace a 3600 to put in the AM4.
So we're doing this today. So I picked up Long Live AM4 socket, like the fact that I can find a 3600 from how many
years ago and then find a processor, not even a year old.
And then what's the plan to do with that? Would it move to like a dedicated PC for the TV possibly or like?
Nope. This desk is going in the corner and it's just tri-
Alright, let's build it up.
To get all the networking set up, we're going to have to get this test bench configured.
Off comes the 3600.
And on goes the 5700 XT. Sorry, you're changing the cooler out?
It came with a better cooler. It even has RGB.
For someone who doesn't like RGB, you sure put a lot of it in here.
It's to play with home automation. I don't know, I got sensors now.
Yeah, for high-grammation.
The lights can show, the lights can be the same color as the temperature so I can be
like, ooh, it's getting hot in here. Really?
No, no one, take off all your, whatever.
I do think their stock coolers are an under-appreciated thing about AMD.
They really set themselves apart from the competition as part of the kind of the rise
in comeback and then that's something that they've just stuck with ever since then.
Just having dramatically superior stock coolers wherever they do include them.
That's that. I guess I haven't talked about it at all. We've got a Challenger 9060XT 16 gig from Asrock which is not the most powerful card
in the world but for something that just needs to be able to handle basic game testing,
it is more than enough. Hey Nick, what's this SSD for?
More games. On where? The test bench.
Oh, okay. So we've just got a PCIe Gen 5 drive for games on a test bench.
You are a confusing man. We have a couple of things here that are going on your desk and your bedroom.
So what are you, what's the point of adding these two things to your jerk station?
Come on, you can't call it that. It's in his bedroom, that's what it is.
This is replacing my G502. This is an audio interface from Mo2 who I've never heard of.
How did you find out about Mo2? Oh, Mo2's been around for a while, like Ederol and Roland and stuff like that.
Okay, so they're like an established audio brand. They're well known. This is basically like a Focusrite Scarlett 2i2.
You have two inputs on the front that can either do quarter inch or XLR.
And on the back, you have a midi in and a midi out as well as a couple of other outs for
monitors. This is pretty slick. And I see that you have a bass guitar and a pedal.
Are you going to play for us? You kind of have to. Why not?
Sorry? Well, you can't get an upgrade for your instrument and not play it for it.
Yeah, I can. I just watched Sven not do it. That's because Sven doesn't know how to play.
I don't either. Do we have a keyboard and, oh, this is for the test bench?
Yeah, it's a Gravastar Mercury. Oh, that's pretty funky.
That's cool. Dude, look at this corner.
This is like Command Station corner. I freaking love it.
Whoa.
Tuned in and ready to help, like a pocket sized assistant without the pockets.
So this is just tuned in to open AI or is it running a local?
No, it's open AI right now. Would the goal in the longer term be to run a local LLM for it to do all your home automation
stuff because I can't imagine you'd want to burn open AI tokens to turn your lights on
and off? No. The idea is to be local, yes.
So the idea is that he will sit beside the pixel display and the Google Nest goes away
and then I can just talk to him.
Do these do anything or are these just for show? They're just for show and emoting.
It's got a plethora of emotions so you can ask it to look something in old.
Okay. Scared, surprised. Do your best impression of an angry horse.
Can't do animal impressions but I can show a frustrated emotion if you'd like a humanish
footprint. Sure. Do your best.
Best take on frustration, no horse sound that hopefully gives you the idea.
You know what? Good job. What is going on here?
I was trying to... We're getting things kind of cleaned up for the, you know, the after pictures and stuff.
You know this is not where art goes, right sir?
Yeah, that needs to go on the wall still.
Yeah, we should have put this up today. That's so cool.
I think Adam even has exactly the place for it.
Oh shit. Right? That actually works really well.
Boom. If you told me that Spider-Man can't flew in it's zocked me.
What do you think? I don't know. It was underneath the TV.
It was doing just fine there but now it's up so it's good.
I think this is about to boot. Yep, memory training just finished and it's rebooting.
She's up and running. Think we're done.
We got your rack completely sorted out.
You've got way more hardware in it than you did before.
There's no computers to trip over in the entire dining room, living room area.
Did you guys even change anything over here?
Why does it feel so much nicer?
Honestly, I think we just cleaned up. Hey, the RGB, the RGB lighting doesn't hurt.
It hurts me. It hurts me. What else did we even do?
We added his new mouse and his audio interface to his computer.
We upgraded your Wi-Fi with your new Ubiquiti access point.
That's in the back. I put up little sensors everywhere.
You got your hygrometers. His backups are now officially 321 and of course the centerpiece of the entire setup,
the Ritchie Mini, that for now is kind of expensive to run but in the long term is going to be
a fun project to get a locally run AI assistant to help, I don't know, do something when your
humidity changes? Turn the lights red.
Sure. Thanks AMD. This has been another fantastic AMD Ultimate $5,000 tech upgrade.
If you guys are looking for another one to watch, hey, why not check out one of the other
members of the Labs team, Lucas.