"The Compensator" Build Log - Our most insane build ever!
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2016-05-06
·
1,578 words · ~7 min read
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welcome to the build log of the compensator this will be a computer with
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no stops pulled four titan x's 128
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gigabytes of gddr4 RAM 1.2 terabyte NVMe
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drive from Intel and an Intel 5960x
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and some benchmarks to crush if you want to see more build logs in the future
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wreck the like button let's do this
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freshbooks is the super simple invoicing solution that lets you get organized
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save time and get paid faster click now to try for free
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this won't be a particularly hard computer to build it's just going to be
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kind of particularly epic these white boxes if you guys are
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wondering what the heck these are these are all the titan x's
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this is the sli bridge that i'm going to have to use
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yep
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128 gigs of RAM just insane
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dominator platinum 2400
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it comes with lighting strips
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cool so you could take your usb 3.0 header
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plug it in here and then you'd have a usb 2.0 plug that
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you could plug into your board down here
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nice some cable management stuff that's pretty cool
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some rings
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and take this cage out back here just so i have better access to uh cable
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management stuff i kind of hoped that these fans were separate so this is for
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lights so there's i guess three yeah there's three different lighting strips
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in this bag that comes with the case you have these three knobs
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so you can i guess control the brightness we'll have to see later on
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when i put in the motherboard i like having the case on its side and this thing on its
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side is huge
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this block is far too large but my problem with
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this case is i have to fit it up here and i did it in totally the wrong order
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i should have installed this first
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all right we are back to essentially nothing
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wow that's a problem
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these light cables back here are super in the way
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a fair amount of squish on those little leds but i think they'll be okay wow
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that's close clearance so yeah at this point i don't know if i
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would necessarily recommend a triple rat in this case
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i've already had to undo a lot of screen things in and i hate that so much i've
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got the board back in and the cooler is being fed through so i
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just installed two screws into the motherboard and i'm not going to do any more for now i just want
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to make sure that i can get this cooler installed i have to remove this
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obviously i'm not going to do that quite yet because i just want to make sure it
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fits first so right fractal good job
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your short cables were like perfect
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i think that's how i'm supposed to do it why wasn't that screw going in oh
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these are the ones i'm supposed to be using the first one i got was this
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done installed
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that was a nightmare so we're now back
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on track i'm going to finish screwing in the motherboard because i kind of gave up
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after two screws people like selfie stuff
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this might not make a ton of aesthetic sense right now once the graphics cards
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light up because they're all stock coolers they'll all have green lights and then it should work
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how do i want to do the fans okay so for the CPU
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pump i'm probably not going to go behind the motherboard actually
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and i'm going to try to use this splitter but it might not work
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okay so now i have a little triple fan thing
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going through the back
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it's kind of cool that it can already reach
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i should have installed the power supply first
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god i knew it
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so the reason i just did all of that and wasted a whole bunch of time because i
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have to do a whole bunch more work is because this cable can go like this
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instead of either coming through this hole
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or going through one of these holes and coming all the way up and looking super
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dumb i'm just gonna go for gold and install everything right now
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before i install this cooler
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so you put a graphics card in it just looks a billion times better
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the line s is it possible for m.2 clearance to like
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super bone over a graphics card well look
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let me try um what are you
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cooling in this is gonna be interesting all right so we're just doing some cable
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management
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so we're getting really freaking close to being done i have to put the glass panels on but i
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want to test to make sure the system works first and i have to put the cover
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for the screw so the graphics cards on and then we're pretty much done
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i wanted fans in the top because the area of the computer that has the
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graphics cards in it is going to be very starved for air
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the chopsticks win again
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oh my goodness the sli bridge
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chopsticks
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okay are like lights on i know but there's no lights on
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your face oh so
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it's not posting so we're gonna swap in a much lower
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capacity 16 Gigabyte kit of RAM
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just nothing uh yeah i just wasn't posting it most of
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the time oh my god i don't have time for this i would actually try CPU first
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oh
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the chip was dead
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it's not posting and we're trying to figure out why i've never tried a
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photography oh all right so it was CPU twice i don't
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know maybe it just needed a receipt so what i'm doing now
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is uh installing the tci express power to the motherboard
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are those chips dead or at least one of them
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i'm voting for dust
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hey Linus
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come check this out that's like kind of doing that for me
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yeah so it comes with three RGB lighting strips that you can control manually on
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the back of the case i might have found a case i finally like
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so our top GPU GPU one is running at 52 degrees idle our second GPU is running
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at 47 48 degrees idle our third GPU is
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running about 44 45 degrees idle and our
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last one our fourth GPU is running at 37
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degrees idle so that bottom one is doing a lot better than the others but we'll
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see how much they heat up once we actually start benchmarking all right
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benchmarking is complete this rig would have seriously benefited from water
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cooling the graphics cards as they were all riding on about 20 or 83 degrees and
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probably would have done better with GPU boost if the result wasn't 83 degrees
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all the time our issue with the RAM ended up being solved by ASUS saving the
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day again there should be a public BIOS
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of the one that we used fairly soon so don't worry too much about that if you
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want to recreate something here all that being said issues did remain there were
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micro stutters all over the place with the sli setup that we had and it
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rendered certain parts of certain games almost unplayable our rig crushed 3d
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mark and it was cool to get into the top one percent of systems even without
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overclocking although if that leaderboard was based on price for performance it probably would have been
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a different story in conclusion i'm happy with the results
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of this experiment but the true conclusion will come next year when we
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make the compensator 2.0 this rig did
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really well in the games we tested it in but we don't really have any proper
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comparative data for that because we never really run our games on that
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insane of settings all the time and yet again the parts we chose were silly why
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were those parts silly well four-way sli is kind of nuts check out Linus's
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scaling video here to explore that more
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128 gigabytes of RAM is also quite a bit over the top check out Linus's video on
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that exact very kit here and cpus uh
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that tier are a little bit unnecessary for gaming or a lot of it unnecessary
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for gaming check out my video on that here i hope you guys enjoyed this
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exploration of the bleeding edge thanks for watching guys if this video
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shop at amazon buying a cool t-shirt that doesn't have anything to do with
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now that you're doing all of that stuff you're probably wondering what to watch
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next so click the little button in the top right hand corner to check out this
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video where i check out the 980 ti arctic storm edition from zotac