 Brandon, what happened to your computer? Your whole house has been taken over by babies. Is this your workstation? And the dream office I painted for you is a nightmare. Looks like a prison cell in here. It's clear to me that if there's anyone in tech crisis right now, in need of a $5,000 Intel Extreme Tech Upgrade makeover, it's our OG camera operator, Brandon. But I couldn't help noticing that you're kinda trying to double dip here, because I already built you a computer. That's true. It is a little old now, so what are we doing today? We're building the best photography editing setup I could think of. There's also a camera show. And your wifi sucks, right? Yes. Well, I couldn't help noticing part of the problem is that you have it sitting on a box at the very corner of your house. Well, okay, we'll talk about that. We'll talk about that. We're gonna fix that. Thanks Intel. We're gonna have some fun today. Let's go. The first thing we're gonna do is walk around his house and find all of the things that are not supposed to be here. Like say for example, this iFixit kit. Has my name on it. Right, but at work. There's so many that we've had over the years. Why would you need to have it labeled Brandon? Well, hey, I set this up so that we could use it with the iFixit kit. Which explains nothing about this one. Well, yeah. It's brazen. It's brazen ladies and gentlemen. He steals not one, but two. Also this was supposed to be my office. That's why it's here. But now this is gonna be the baby's room. Yes. It really is a good thing that you had this room painted by such a professional painter. I don't know, I see some flaws Linus. Hold on. This is actually not my finest work. Back on topic. I'm assuming that this is not going to be replaced. Oh no, you don't recognize this? Oh my God. Is this stolen from the office? Yes. Crying out loud. It was a very temporary solution. I had a much worse just telco router and I needed something that was performing slightly better but then my upgrade was gonna happen soon. So there was no point like, you know setting up the brand new one. So I borrowed one. That means your wifi is decent now already just from having a better router. So we can only get better once we have a multi access point set up. Cool. That's gonna be awesome. This I'm pretty sure you bought. Yes. The good old razor blades. Does yours still work? So I replaced the battery in this from an eBay battery. It didn't work. Really? So it turns on plugged in, but as soon. I was testing. Yes. These were our Christmas bonus. I used it for a long time. Six, seven years ago? Yeah. Prototype LTT mouse pad. What is it with the OG employees thinking they're entitled to our prototypes? Ed had more than one of these. It was in the swag pile. Can see why you need a camera stuff. Yeah, no kidding. This is like, oh my God. Brandon's a photography nerd and there's no reason for him to own a photography nerd thing unless it has some kind of specific purpose. This made in China, 35 millimeter focus free point and shoot. Why do you have it? I found this in my mom's house. She had no idea why she had this. And I think it was like a toy camera that someone gave to her for me. You could actually look at this and it's technically my first camera, even though I don't remember using it as a child. You remember at the beginning when we were using my lenses for work? I bought this at that time. I couldn't afford lenses, okay? I'm 99% sure that this isn't stolen from work, but like the guy needs a camera shelf. That's my first camera. You just told me a different camera was your first camera. Okay, that was child's first camera. So now you're a thief and a liar. Now I don't think, what are you, what is that face? I'm just waiting for your judgment. No, I built this computer. Technically, sort of. Very nice. It has changed since you built it. Yeah, I mean, obviously I didn't do this. Since you built me this PC, the cooler motherboard and GPU have changed and the CPU. So most of it's changed except for the power supply. The CPU started to get pretty sluggish recently. So I kind of just stopped using this desktop, honestly, altogether because I got an XPS and then that was working better. Oh, oh, Percy. Would you like to go out? Hi. He really wants to go outside. Okay, buddy, let's go upstairs. Oh, no doubt this new machine is gonna be a lot better. Now I know you've fancied the H1 for quite some time. In fact, didn't you buy our own? So actually, over here. What, is that another one? This was the one I originally bought. Yeah. And then NZXT heard that I was gonna use my upgrade with the original version of the H1, which I'm sure many people know. That's the problem. It set itself on fire. Safety issue. Technically, to NZXT credit, they sent me the new screws and they sent me the new GPU riser. Okay. So I have that, it's actually over there. Also, I will admit there's one more thing from the office still here that I- You still have one of those? Yes. You're not the only one, but these LG 31 inch 4K monitors, some of them disappeared because, well, Linus went, you know, just temporarily, I might need to use them at home to do like work sometimes. And then none of them made their way back. Give me that, give me that. There you go. You're returning to logistics. I'm gonna start unpacking computer hardware stuff then. In the meantime- Maybe you build the computer while I build the shelf, because that might take a bit. And then also unbox some of the other stuff. Oh my God. I see a lot more than just one IKEA box here. So we need to call in an emergency logistics strike here. Let's ask someone to come help us. And we have a surprise guest. This is my partner, Sophia. Hi. There we go. There, so that's it. There we go. Did I scratch it? Oh no, that's supposed to be there. I saw this line, I was like- If that was you scratching it, that's straighter than your paint lines. Ha ha, oh, David throwing shade. Oh, are we gonna meet another surprise guest? Oh no. Brandon's baby gives me so much joy because he's the first one of the other dads at LMG that has had a baby as challenging or more challenging than my first born. He's happy about this because he wants me to suffer the way he did. The good news is that like my son's amazing. And so you'll probably be amazing, you know? I'm sure there's a correlation. I mean, I was apparently a really easy baby and I turned out awful, so. Ha ha ha. Awkward question for you, Brandon. I couldn't help noticing that this is a many generations old motherboard. I bought this from the office with the CPU that's in this box. It's still Intel. That's true. The 9700K is a great chip. It just felt wasteful. I didn't need to buy more. So I figured, use what I have. Fair enough. I've been cursed with front IO on every desktop PC I've ever used. My office PC front IO doesn't work. This computer that Linus built for me, the IO front IO never worked. So far the common denominator is that I built both of those machines, but it's not me. It's not me. The front IO works on lots of other computers I built. The headers are plugged in. It just didn't work. So I'm going to be interested to see if the front IO and this guy works. It'll work. I give you my Linus tech tips guarantee that your front IO will work. I sincerely hope that this GPU fits. What? This is a really beefy 36TGI. I was told that it would fit. With all the cooling. Thank you, EVGA. Oh, that looks solid. Yeah, we're good to go. Do you have the instructions? Couldn't find them in the box. IKEA instructions suck. Well, the instructions suck, but I'd still say you're better off with them than without them. Wait, what's this? Oh. Okay, so she's more competent than me. This is why. She's taking care of a baby every day and I'm just pointing cameras at things. Yeah, exactly. Hey. I'm kidding. I'm kidding, David. We work really hard. We work, I'm joking. Yeah, the one thing that Brandon actually assembled before we got here. Hey, the lamp too. The lamp. You assembled a lamp? Oh, okay. But it's a sick, this is, okay. How do you assemble this lamp, Linus? That is a pretty cool lamp. You didn't clean it, Brandon. Yeah, I need to. Oh my gosh. I actually probably need to. It's dirty on the inside. Yeah, I need to take it off and take it apart. So Brandon be all like, yeah, I built that too. By the way, we're gonna have to take it apart and rebuild it. So actually you did negative progress. It's a later problem. Steel case chair. I've never actually tried a steel case. I've tried Herman Miller. I've tried like all the different gaming brands and everything. I actually liked the way they do the lumbar support. It's like hard, but padded. Okay, that's a good quality foam. You know what's funny about this? I will have still not built my own computer. Why am I letting you get away with this? I've already got my PCIe riser hooked up. They've got this really nice little plastic piece that keeps you from folding it too much or too little. This is a terrible screw job. Totally unprompted. She has no horses in this race, but you're complaining that's a terrible screwdriver. Okay, I'll give you ours. I'll see what you think. I want your completely unbiased thoughts on it. Well, yeah, it's better because it doesn't shake the whole time. It's not available yet, but it's coming very soon. One disadvantage to an older platform, even though the performance might be fine, is that you might not have support for the latest standards though. Brandon, at best, your front I.O. is going to be about 75% functional because you don't have a USB-C front panel header on here. Wait, does this even support M.2? Please tell me it does. Is it on the back of the board? Oh, it is, it is, it is on the back. I thought it did. I like looked at this. Okay, yes. Oh my God. Linus, you're giving me a heart attack. Let's put your SSD in. Wow, you went with a Rocket 4 Plus? Okay, I can tell you right now you're not getting the most out of this SSD because this is Gen 4 and this is a Gen 3 board. Yeah, Ikea furniture, wait, what? Why does it feel like it's not fitting? Wait, is someone making that noise or is that the Ikea furniture? That's the baby. Oh, that's the baby. Can I just say how much I love my job today? I think this is upside down because there's a hole up there. Cavalries here, surge from logistics, apparently was out, but not off. HDMI, power, did I ever wire up the front? That's not a great sign. This CPU and this motherboard are not compatible. What? Oh no. Dude, your board's only good up to seventh gen. That's why it's not turning on. So, are there any ITX boards? We don't have very many. Oh, what's this? 10th gen. How much budget do you have left over, Brandon? None, I'm actually a little bit over budget. Okay, give me some time. Okay. I watched Andy's upgrade back in the day and I saw his BenQ light bar thing. I just had to have one. Apparently, this is the newer version that has a better controller, said Andy. So I'm excited to actually unbox it and see how this goes. Well, I'm glad you put so much thought into your lamp. Meanwhile, I'm sitting here shopping for motherboards. Linus, lighting is a very important part of my life. So is a functioning computer. Because this is the lowest floor of my house, my garage door is actually behind David right now. And the door to the outside being blocked by this shelf is where we go on walks. So I always come in here and track dirt in. And yes, you can get rugs that help with that, but it's never perfect. So, vacuum. We just had these at the office. I think they're from the channel Superfund where they sucked up sand. Oh, yeah, yeah. So there's a very high chance there's already sand in this. Oh, nice, perfect. There's nothing used, nothing new, nothing borrowed, nothing blue, just nothing. I'm sorry. CPUs are so reliable that once it's a couple of years out of current, there ends up being this like glut of CPU availability and almost no motherboards for them. Because the motherboards are dying and the CPUs are not. Yeah, and because it's ITX, I mean, the sales volume of ITX, I could find you anything you need if it's ATX. If we're going 12th gen, we actually have modern boards at the office. This is hilarious. He's like, no, man, I'm gonna use like old Intel. It's like good enough and we're going 12th gen after all. Hey, but your front IO, the curse is lifted. That's true. Yet to be lifted, the computer isn't on yet. You know what? Why don't we send Surge to get the 12400 and find a motherboard. I'll get the wifi fixed. Oh, sure. This monitor is gonna be such a game changer for you. I am so excited about this monitor. It is everything I've ever wanted in a monitor and more. So when it comes to just editing photos, you're not after necessarily the brightest freaking display. So what you want is calibration. What you want is size, obviously. Now, the thing is, I think I actually was the one who sought the short circuit for this. You were? I don't remember anything about it. Okay. Because we're in a quite vertically tall, but small townhouse, it doesn't really affect us that much because they're not gonna be so far from each other that it's gonna be a real problem for them to talk to each other. The main thing we need to consider is how we stagger them from floor to floor. We've got three stories to work with. So we wanna go like this, then like this, then like this in order to optimize the coverage of each one. That means our next order of business is doing some scouting. I know there's ethernet here because this is where Brandon used to have his desktop. And there it is. We're gonna use that for one of our decos. I'm installing this fully monitor arm. If you can tell right here, David, there's a slant of the wood on my desk. So it's not flat when it bites, which I think might be a problem because that monitor is not super light. This can just go like this. Cable managed. Gorgeous. The way that this is attached, it's just like a screw here. So if we loosen this screw, we might get more play. Heck yeah. Come have a look at this. It actually worked amazing. Better than I could have expected. Oh my God, that's like, that's clean on there. Yeah. We could put the deco here in this room, but it would basically be right under the one that I put in the kitchen. Okay. The other place for it would be in the garage, but there's really nothing, Wi-Fi in the garage. So, oh wait, you do OTA updates on your car. I do. Well that should, it would be good if those are fast. Yeah. Okay, I'm gonna put this in the garage then. I'm just gonna put it on that shoe rack, okay? Sure. Okay. Just got the base mount on. Hopefully I do this right. Does it slide in this way? There we go. Hey. Okay, so I clearly have some tension adjustment to do. You had slash half. Yes. An 8-bay NAS already. It's right here. Oh, there it is. Here's my 8-bay that I've had forever. It is filled with four terabyte drives. Right. That's not a lot of capacity these days. No, it is not. And I didn't really want to have to go through all the trouble of moving all the data from that NAS to maybe the server at work temporarily, and then put it all back onto something else. So you're gonna be a two NAS household now. Yes. This is not a perfect solution to my problem because eventually this will also run out. Yeah. But it is- So you're just kicking this can down the road. Yes. Future Brandon will find another solution to this. Long time Future Brandon, because each one of these individual drives, and you went with Exos Enterprise. Yes. Nice. Each of these drives holds as much as half of that NAS. So you've doubled, tripled, this will be used for parity, you've tripled your storage. Yes. In only five bays instead of eight. Yes. Nice. This should be just absolutely killer perfect Wi-Fi all over the house now. These tend to be a little bit sticky in terms of which access point they're connected to. I doubt I'm connected to this one. I'm probably connected to the one on the other floor, but I mean, even connected to the mid floor one, it's very usable. I just don't see Wi-Fi being a problem anywhere in this house from now on. Okay, let's go fix that computer. The good news is you're getting the most out of your Gen 4 SSD. Here comes our 12400. This is six performance cores and then four efficiency cores for a total of 10. I mean, the more important thing is that Alder Lake compared to, what did you have, a ninth gen? Yeah, ninth gen. Yes. Way better single threaded performance, which for applications like Photoshop can actually be more important than your multi-threaded performance, depending on what you're doing. We've got, oh, what is even is this? 5200 mega transfer per second, two by 16. Here's one thing I expect. Well, here's the Kingston Workflow Station, SD card reader, micro SD card reader, C fast card reader. Is this kind of a spiritual successor to that Lexar thing we used to really like? Yeah, so we have this at the office now. Okay, cool. And I was like, well, I have to have one for myself. You have these little modules that have different IO, like this is a type C one and a type A. And then these ones are SD, more SD. I probably only asked for SD. The king of SD, okay. I only really use it. He's a standard definition kind of guy. And the cool thing about them is that you can use them in here, right? Where it just uses a single USB-C connection to your computer. Or because it's all USB-C all the time, you can just plug a USB-C cable into this and it's just a super lightweight, small card reader and you can take it with you on the go. Thanks Kingston. I'd say that the fit and finish of the molds. We actually have tape around the ones that are at work. Not amazing, but minor critique. Guys, please tell me you have thermal compound. What we- I'm kidding, I'm kidding. When I went back for the motherboards, I got some. Don't do this to me. Why? You have to leave soon. We're not even close to done. Yeah, I know, but I'm not the one who's getting upset. How are you planning to connect this computer and those NASs to the network? I had a switch upstairs so I could bring it down. In a perfect world, I'm gonna get like Basta storage or something for above my desk and I'll drill a hole through it, run the NAS on the top so that this cable just goes straight up instead of going down. And then Brandon's gonna celebrate his kid's sixth birthday because that's how long it's gonna take to get to that. I'm getting real close on this PC by the way, boys. Okay, well my speakers are about to get plugged in. Nice, okay, we're close then. Is this non-LTT desk pad part of your upgrade? Yes. Surely you knew you were gonna take some flack for that. As much as I like the LTT store design, it doesn't quite match my setup. That's fair, we do need some more colors. It's kind of amazing for how far away we were 20 minutes ago. Hey, not bad. How not far away we are now. Oh buddy, there it is. Hey, did it just post? It did. Nice. 32 gigs RAM, Core i5-12400K, everything's detected. There's our M.2 drive. Hey, that looks pretty good. Hey, that looks awesome. One of the last additions I haven't talked about yet is these 95 CRI 40 watt LED bulbs that I'm going to put all in the light fixtures in the room. And that is also what is in this lamp. And why do you need those? Color accuracy. No, I know, you're explaining to the audience. These are pretty bright, pretty efficient and dimmable. And it'll make the pleasantness of the color of this room a lot better day to day. Brandon, do you have a USB type C something that I can plug in and make sure your front IO works? Does the keyboard work? Sure does. Okay. All right, how about now? Wait, wait, wait, we're not done yet. Does the keyboard work? Yes. Okay, third time's a charm. Does the keyboard work? Wow. The curse is over. Okay, what's the dance of the front port working? Oh my goodness. Okay, don't break anything. You've gone full dad now. That's hilarious. I don't think the Brandon Lee I first met would have done a curses over dance. It's something about just not sleeping for a year. Yeah, you stop caring. This is not bad. I don't know, dude. I cannot say that I'm sold on this particular. Does this turn? It turns. But why would you ever want to shine light at your monitor? It's not going at the monitor. It's going down. It's going straight down. You know what? The setup looks beautiful. Let me just turn off the light. There you go. Now you're like, you know, you're taking some notes. I can see without having to have a lamp that only shines in one direction, not in where I'm looking. And then I have my other lamp there with the high CRR bulb. That's also just adding a little bit of ambience. So you're in the zone now. Yes. Well, there's no doubt in my mind, this is about as ultimate as it gets for a photography editing workstation. We've got powerful single threaded performance with an Intel 12400, another 64 terabytes of storage added, color accurate lighting for the room, not to mention a color accurate monitor, all the ingest capabilities that any one man could possibly desire on top of camera storage that takes all the random stuff that we found all throughout the house and gets it out of Brandon's poor SO's way. Not to mention prevents all of it from being shoot on by the baby. Yes. The only thing it still needs at this point is a little bit more TLC in terms of cable management, but we'll get that sorted out by the time you guys are looking at this gorgeous glam tage of the finished setup. I hope you guys enjoyed Intel Extreme Tech Upgrade Brandon Lee edition, massive thanks to Intel. And if you guys are looking for something else to watch, then maybe go check out, man, what would be, if you enjoyed this one, you might enjoy Riley's as well. The minimalistic setup.