 The truth is, I am not happy with the current state of Linus Tech Tips. To be clear, my team's amazing, and we've basically perfected our gateway drug formula. It's that taste of hardcore tech that goes down smooth and has been turning young gamers into compsci majors by the thousands for over a decade. The good news is that all changes today. I'm about to show you my plan to radically change the face of Linus Tech Tips, but it's going to take time and it's going to be extremely expensive. Which is why this video is brought to you by NZXT Build. NZXT wants to make building a custom PC easier. With NZXT Build, you just set a budget, see how the computer performs in your favorite games, and they do the rest. Use the link below to get your own custom PC today. Welcome to LTT Lab 1. This has been a dream of mine for a long time, but due to a number of factors, including the white hot real estate market here in Vancouver, I found myself waiting and waiting for the right time. When what I should have done was just pull the trigger ages ago, regardless of the cost. We're hiring a couple of writers this time around, including one for MAC address. You can apply down below, but that's not what this is. The vision for this lab is pretty simple. In the time I've been doing this job, tech journalism has suffered blow after blow after blow. Nearly every publication that I followed as a young enthusiast has either folded or been bought out by a soulless corporate interest. And most of the journalists who guided me through my early years have retired or, more likely, moved over to the manufacturing side, where there's still money to be made. That ends now. The gloves are coming off. Are you an expert on mobile gaming performance or displays who needs a second day job to survive? Are you stuck in marketing for a major board manufacturer and hate every minute of it? Do you think I can't afford you? Try me. When I'm done, every square foot of lab one is going to be filled with engineering personnel and equipment that will take our content to the next level, starting behind this door. And you're going to want to be part of it. Oh, look, it's a Luke. Hey, guys, you probably already know that for the last four years, I've been working on full plane dot com, our early access video platform that's full of behind the scenes and video extras for our supporters. What you might not know is that more recently, we've been hard at work expanding our development team to tackle other projects, not just full plane dot com, like these cool browser quizzes and games for the verified actual gamer program and our Merch Message Notifier for orders on LTC store dot com for our live streams. We're expanding our team even more. This time we want to throw some dev muscle behind the writing team by integrating or creating tools for automated benchmarking processes and data collection. I also want a data scientist for some unrelated stuff. So at the moment, I'm only actually personally hiring two of the 15 positions we've got listed. But if we get the right applicants, who knows, maybe three of you will be sitting here. After a paint job and maybe some new ones. Yeah, this is this is pretty impressive. OK, look, we just took the session on Friday. OK, anyway, this is where the real action is going to be. Before you can really appreciate it, though, you got to hear the vision. So let me lay it out. This corner at the back of the room here, that's where we're going to have our thermal and acoustic combo chamber. Why a combo chamber, you might ask. Well, because it doesn't matter how cool your laptop runs if it sounds like helly taking off and it doesn't matter how quiet it is if the CPU is drowning in a pool of its own soccer. So the plan for this is pretty simple. We'll be DIYing it naturally, and we're going to put the indoor side of a mini split heat pump along probably this side over here, along with some kind of smart damper that will allow the airflow to either go into the chamber or redirect out of the chamber with exactly as much granularity as we need to maintain an exact temperature inside the room. Once that target is reached and our loaded devices, let's say a desktop PC running blender, have reached equilibrium, we'll hit a kill switch that'll disable the HVAC and any circulation fans that we have inside the chamber for some time period. Let's say 10 seconds while we take an acoustic reading. Assuming a large enough internal air volume and a low enough noise floor, clearly this room is going to need to be treated. We should be able to measure acoustics under various conditions, say at room temperature versus on a very hot day, both accurately and precisely. Now the exact size and layout of the chamber is definitely subject to change, but what I know for certain is that we're going to have a station right out here, probably along this side, that's going to be for recording the performance of the device at each of our target temperatures as well. Since on a modern device, it's more a question of when it throttles as opposed to if it throttles. Also along this wall is going to be the gear that we need to seriously amp up our thermal testing game. We already have the manufacturing capabilities in the workshop to build super precise thermal load generators. So here we're going to use a combination of internally designed tools and real world CPUs to run through as many coolers as we can get our hands on. That is why the staffing aspect is so important. This isn't even about making videos anymore, it's about cutting through the BS in order to decide what to make videos about, which means that most of the testing that we do in here is going to be published more in the form of white papers on a written website, as opposed to, you know, behind me making a big thumbnail face like. This whole space will need to be climate controlled, obviously. There goes 15 grand. Thankfully, I've got this. Mwah! Wine check! Oh, and I've got a new and improved accounting team. We're looking for an accountant and a bookkeeper, and we'll have links to all the new positions in the video description. Now, Kyle, most of our audience hasn't really met you. I'm an engineer for Crater Warehouse. I'm designing the portable battery bank slash shoe dryer thing, an RGB housewares item that is currently under wraps, and I also took over Alex's early development on the screwdriver. I'm a big, I'm not reading that. No, you have to. I'm a big nerd. Excellent. So then tell me, what would you put along this wall? I actually think it would be really cool if we had a thermal camera setup for time-lapse capture so we could see the heat soak into a cooler. It could actually tell us the efficiency of the heat pipes, for example. As for other things, truthfully, it's anything that can be objectively measured. It's just a question of equipment, budget, and type. Man, I'd love to test stuff like PCI Express signal integrity, or we could look at the performance of VRMs on like every budget motherboard so we could figure out not just who's cheaping out, but like, does it matter, right? We did a video recently looking at a whole bunch of different motherboards and found that the performance differences were actually quite significant from one board to the next. I mean, is that something that you could conceive of us being able to test here? Absolutely. I mean, what about power supplies? For sure. Power supplies are one of the most important parts of a system. If that goes, it could take other things with it. But it's not just whether it goes or not. Like, could we meaningfully evaluate them so we can test them? Could we evaluate them so we could tell people, okay, at $99, this is the best one? Yeah, like this stuff like efficiency, how much power you're putting in versus how much you gain out. Is the voltage stable? Are you getting 12 volts where you need 12 volts? How much is that going to cost me? Could be more than 15 grand. Cool. On the subject of power, I think this would be a great place to set up for something like a test bench for phone thermal throttling and charging rates and stuff like that. Not every thermal test needs acoustic measurements and it'd be nice to have a second smaller thermal chamber maybe over on this side where we could evaluate things like phone performance degradation over time while gaming. Man, the software guys are going to have their work cut out for them. Like, in my perfect world, I'm imagining that we just put the phone in there, we run a 3DMark benchmark, right? We use machine vision to take the results, log them. Obviously, we capture an image every time for safety. Then we use a robotic hand to run the benchmark again right away. We detect when the performance bottoms out, then we run five more for safety, and then it turns on a light on the outside of the chamber to say it's done. I mean, can it be done? Whatever you say, Linus. Absolutely. I mean, you're paying for it. Let's go this way. I think displays are one of the areas of technology that we can do a way better job of evaluating with just a little bit of gear and know-how. I mean, pretty much everything about them can be objectively measured with high-speed cameras and easily available devices like input latency testers and color emitters or spectrophotometers. And I would imagine something like that would go here. Oh, obviously, I'm not going to let Steve be the only tech media outlet with a fan tester, by the way. I've been jealous of Corsairs for many years, so I guess we could put that, I don't know, here or something. Or maybe we'll just leave fans to Gamers Nexus. Hard call. I guess it depends what our priorities end up being. I want to hear from you guys what you want to see us take to the next level. Speaking of next level, let's head to the next level upstairs. It's time to talk about how we're going to pay for all of this. As I already mentioned, not all of the new positions are LTT labs. One of the biggest growth areas for our business right now is in merch. So that's right, you guys are going to pay for it. You guys paid for all this. By buying beanies, desk pads, water bottles, hoodies, you guys are funding. You're already doing it. The biggest reinvestment into our content that we have ever made. And we are going to need more. So if you or someone you know is in the fashion industry, or if you're an engineer who's more interested in product development rather than product evaluation, check out the link below. We've got those positions as well as a product manager to handle ordering and logistics to add to the Creator Warehouse team. As for this space, I know neither what it was intended for before. See these weird power outlets that are up along the ceiling, Brandon? Super weird, bunch in the floor as well. Nor do I know what I'm going to put in here later. It could be another sound treated room, but maybe this time for evaluating soundbars or home theater speakers and projectors. It could be a small lab for testing active noise cancellation or headphone frequency response curves or battery life claims or touch-me-in-input responsiveness. It's hard to say. The only thing I know for sure right now is that you guys are still here watching this video, which means that you're as excited about this new direction as I am and maybe you want to get involved. So feel free to put your hat in the ring, but don't be disappointed if we don't take you. This time around, we're looking for industry professionals and it is not going to be easy to get into the lab. But don't be discouraged because we actually have even more positions available that I haven't mentioned yet. So make sure you check out the jobs page on linusmediagroup.com so you can be part of our next chapter and also check out our sponsor, Jackery. Wait, we still need sponsors. Thanks Jackery for sponsoring this video. Jackery makes solar-ready portable power stations that are designed to improve outdoor life by providing power outdoors whenever and wherever you need it. Their Explorer 1500 portable power station has enough juice to keep all your devices powered and connected. Its huge 1500 watt hour capacity and 1800 watt output rate allow up to seven devices to be plugged in simultaneously. It takes only four hours to recharge it from 0 to 80% and you can check out the Explorer 1500 at the link below and get 10% off with code linustechtips. If you guys enjoyed this video, maybe you want a blast from the past. Why don't you go check out our first studio tour back when we were still working out of a house in Langley. It's a bit of a contrast. Wow, back then I would have given anything for this as our main studio let alone as a dedicated lab.