 Here, let me turn it on. Oh, don't worry about it. I always have that. It's okay. People think that everyone at LMG must have the most cutting edge tech in our homes or that everyone here is a PC building aficionado. But the truth is very different. So today we're going to show you our own personal rigs and tell you the real story of how they were built and bought. Just like how we're going to show off our sponsor, Ridge Wallet. Ridge Wallet has redefined the traditional wallet with its compact frame and RFID blocking plates. Keep your wallet bunch down and use our offer code LINUS to save 10% and get free worldwide shipping. I actually started this originally on a free 8100 from my friend, like an i3-8100. And that got me on the coffee lake. Nowadays, I've got a 9900K and I've got a 3070. I was actually crazy lucky. I got mine at MSRP and the original MSRP too. So I think mine was like $850 after tax or something. I got it for like a pretty good Canadian. So, you know, it's a little less than that in American dollars. But yeah, pretty good. This PC actually built pretty recently. Now I've sort of evolved my computer over the years. It's a lot of iterations with a lot of the same hardware. But this one is mostly pretty new. So we got inside is a 5900X cooled by an NHD 15S, a RTX 3080. I think this is the FurtherWin 3 one. One terabyte Gen 4 Corsair SSD. Two 4 terabyte hard drives that I have in RAID 0 for games. And that's pretty much it. This is a really weird configuration because as you can probably tell, it's a giant case. This is the Corsair 5000X. This is like as big as they get without going to the 1000D. Previously, I had an ITX rig and I finally, you know, got my own place over the last couple years. And I don't have any need to move this computer anymore. So I'm like, screw it. I'll just get the biggest gosh dang case I possibly can. And that's what this is. Now I can fit so much hardware if I want, but I haven't got a new motherboard. I still have the X570, I think it's X570i Strix from Asus. It's a little ITX little nugget in there. It takes up like not even a quarter of the case. A little backstory. I went to school for 3D animation and 3D modeling. And they gave me this laptop to work with. This is an Alienware R317. It has 16 gigs of RAM, 970M, and a 650H. This was okay, but when I came home from England three years later, I needed something that actually could do work. And the 970M just doesn't have the horsepower or the overhead to render intense scenes or even to load geometry fast. So I put together this monster. This starting is a 1950X Threadripper. 16 cores, I think 32 threads. This is my bread and butter for 3D modeling. Granted, it is not the fastest, but the more cores you have, the more efficient workflows and divisions of that workflow you have. Next, I have two 1080TIs. These are Asus Strix 11 OG, and these are again for rendering. Even though I have a SLI bridge here, half the time I actually have it turned off because rendering itself doesn't actually use a bridge. Actual cost at the time because RAM was expensive, Threadripper was expensive, it was about $7000. But I was lucky because my parents decided to try mining at the time. And luckily we had some mining cards laying around. So I got both of them for $800 each. I remember I waited like a really long time to actually buy a laptop because I've been looking at the Dell XPS forever, but they're doing a refresh in 2020. And on May 13th, 2020, I ordered it immediately as soon as they launched the pre-orders. So my XPS has the Intel i7-10875 Comet Lake, and it's got a 1650 Ti GPU. And I've actually upgraded the RAM from 16 gigs to 32 gigs because that was a fairly inexpensive upgrade and one that I didn't need immediately. And Dell's upgrade price for the RAM was not worth it, so I just waited a little longer, waited for RAM to go on sale, and then upgraded it to 32 gigs. The main thing I actually use this for is photo editing and general purpose PC usage like internet browsing, Netflix once in a while. Sometimes a little bit of light video editing, but lately not so much. And I find that whenever I do a photo shoot and I want to edit the photos immediately, I usually just have my laptop with me, so I'll go to a coffee shop or somewhere, chill and photo edit for like maybe an hour after a shoot. And it gives me that kind of immediate satisfaction of like, okay, well, this went well or this didn't go well or I can fix this here. And that workflow for me is so much more conducive to creativity, and I can do it immediately. Where's your PC? It's right here. Hold on. It is by far my most favorite PC I've had to date. Wait, that's not a... That's not a PC. It plays games, right? Sure. So I built my PC in like the peak of COVID in like 2020 around like February or March, just when that stimulus check hits. Ooh, delicious. I don't know, honestly, like the whole build is like 2020 Reddit's recommended part list. 3600 from AMD, Cooler Master Hyper 212, and MSI GTX 1070 that I got used because this market nowadays, especially around the time when I bought this thing was crazy. Like I was lucky to get this around like the $300 Canadian range. 300 bucks? Yeah, no, seriously, 300 bucks. That's serious. Yeah, shout out the guy who I bought it from from Facebook Marketplace for selling this bad boy for like a hot $300. You the man. Like, look at this. It comes with its own input device. It started off in 2002 when I got the first version of my PC, and every 10 years or so I've been walking into Best Buy and buying the next version. It's been great. It has been a great performer. It has expandable storage using one of these USB ports, and it's been very upgradable using one of these USB ports, and the performance of it has been fantastic. You know, I can go home, I can play GTA V, and I can go and make myself dinner by the time it loads a mission. It's fantastic. It's an Intel Core i7 4790K, and that's it. You have a GTX 980 Ti. And there's a GTX 980 Ti. Yeah, it was painted in an LTD video, and it happened. Look, you might have noticed from the photos that the computer seems to be very awkwardly positioned in another room. That's why I didn't bring the computer in today, is because what I did was it was getting too hot in that room because, you know, computers put out heat. So I thought, oh, I'll just shove it into the next room and close the door, and then all the heat will be in another room. But then, of course, you need to, you know, have longer cables, and I just I didn't want to unplug all of that, and I didn't, so I didn't, because it's annoying. And now I can have air conditioning in the office, because then I'm not having to, like, warm and cool the air, which is stupid, right? So that's what that's about. So I built the system. There's a video of, like, the motherboard LED just blinking, and Linus didn't even know what the problem was, but yes, I needed a new motherboard. So I get that all working, and then there's a power outage. And when the power came back on, there must have been a surge, because then the power supply was screwed, and the computer kept randomly shutting off or restarting, and I thought, oh, it's just Windows updates, because, you know, and then there were still some problems, but I finally have solved all of the problems, and now it works. Yeah, I don't know the specs. I don't know how to build computers nearly as well as Linus does, and I made a lot of mistakes, and it just it just works now, I guess. At the tail end of 2019, I decided to move down to Vancouver in the hopes of finding a job at the animation studio. Unfortunately, and fortunately, I found a nice place here. So I don't actually do much 3D work anymore, except here. Like, I designed the build corner set, the podcast set, short circuit set, and other than that, really, I don't touch it much. So my use case for this type of system has kind of dropped. In the future, what I'm probably going to do is lean more towards a gaming type rig, even though now that I have a son, that's not going to happen much either. You have probably the cleanest cable management that anyone has shown. Do you think you could show us the back? Ah. This front is fine, but this is slightly embarrassing. I'm not really happy with it. It is kind of a mess. And honestly, this case, as beautiful as it is, isn't the most easy to work with. Like, who looks at the backside? It's not clear. Just don't worry about it. The moment of truth, the cable management, that's right. Oh my goodness. It's not bad. The power supply isn't modular at all, so I did my best with what I got. So I found as many twisty ties as I could, and I popped it in there. For me, the most important thing is that it'll play all the newer games to come at like medium settings, at tiny VP. Like, I don't know. It's nothing special, but it does the job for me, and I'm more than happy with her. I don't remember quite where this started. I have had a consistent, like, mostly white color scheme, but I think the earliest iteration of this was a 4770K with a crappy, I think, gigabyte motherboard that ended up dying and a Node 304. It's a cute little case, kind of looks like a mini fridge. But the problem with it is the power supply is in the front, like here. Your motherboard's back here, and then the fan is up here. So the airflow just completely misses the motherboard. So I would look at temps, and the VRMs would be at like 95 degrees, like all the time. And, you know, of course, one day I come home, go to turn my computer on, nothing happens. Something you guys might not realize, but if you have any friends that are, say, mechanics or contractors or something like, you might have heard from them that mechanics don't like working on their own cars because they spend all day working on cars, and it kind of is the same for people that build computers all the time. I just have no interest in touching this thing ever. It works. I just leave it. You guys just got scammed. Took the side panel off. Can't even see. Remove the other side. I cable managed a little bit. OK, yeah, I cable managed a little. Yeah, this is not bad, actually. Another reason I actually ended up with this case is I built a system for LTT in this case, and I realized, like, it looks really nice and it comes with the RGB pre-wired, and it has really nice, like, cable tie-down spots. So you can see this whole portion is pretty nicely managed, but these were pre-installed. You just had to undo them, slide the cables in and tighten them up. The only one I really added was here. But I think I could add a little bit more. I think I could do a little better with the cable ties, maybe from lttstore.com. You know, you guys can get your own at lttstore.com. There we go. Look, that's even better. I've got a 1TB M.2 NVMe on the board inside there, and then I've got an extra 1TB SSD just plugged into the back, whatever. I've got these blue extensions that I bought from CableMod. This orange extension is just for SATA, I think. Or no, it's a Molex Molex extension for it, because I've actually got... So then if you'll notice, I actually put a sound card in. I know, it's a sound card. I bought it because my drivers broke. I could not for the life of me figure it out. I reinstalled Windows, I formatted everything, rebooted it, my drivers were still broken. I don't know what happened. I honestly don't. They're fine now, so I don't even need this thing anymore. But to its credit, this sound card does have a little better than the onboard audio, so I'm overall, like, not unhappy with my purchase. Plus it has RGB when that's going, and so I'm not going to complain. I needed a Molex connector for it. Like, who uses Molex anymore, right? Yeah, so for the back... I guess Linus isn't the only one who drops stuff now. I have a lot of extensions and stuff running, so there's, like, a lot of cable back here. But that's why I love this case, is because you've got all of this space for cable management. So I was super stoked on the laptop, and I had it for about two weeks, and I had it in the office, was just using it normally, and then Alex actually walked up to me to try it out. And he tried out my touchpad, and informed me that I actually had the touchpad issue that was going on in the first early units of this version of the XPS, where there's, I think, a weird dead zone on the left. I then proceeded to have to send it back to Dell and get a replacement, which was actually a pretty good experience overall. They were very quick and responsive, and they had me a new unit in less than two weeks from my first email. But yeah, honestly, besides that, that's been the only quirk that I've had. The battery life has been good on this thing, speed's been good, the touch display has been very responsive. And I actually, I used to make fun of Linus while we were shooting videos back in the day with laptops that were first getting touch screens, saying, like, oh, that's unnecessary, that's really dumb, like, why would you want that? And I will admit, I have started using it probably daily. Especially, like, things like pinch to zoom, or if you're looking at a photo and you really want to, like, move around to edit a different part of it, it's pretty handy. So the reason why I only have this as well as my Switch and then my old consoles is because I grew up in a console household. We were only allowed one system, and as much as I would see other people building PCs at the time and wanting to learn more about it, I never quite had the funds to build my own. And so the best bang for the budget to get into playing games for me was simply to just buy an Xbox. Especially this, you know, it's the One X. It was the most powerful at its time up until about nine months ago. And when it was on sale, it was a very easy buy. You just throw down the money and then, you know, you can easily make it your own by getting different accessories if you wanted to. And you can kind of tell thanks to the dbrand skin job that I half attempted on here. You might be saying, Matt, why is there no skin on the top? Easy, because I suck at skinning devices. That is why. So what do you use for tasks you would normally do on a PC if you even need to do any? There's this really awesome thing and it's pretty great. I'll show you quick fast here. It's called Samsung Dex, but essentially everything that I do is always done off of my phone. So I would make music videos for my band back in the day, and I would cut the videos using Adobe Rush. I would take pictures from the stage and I'd edit them in Lightroom on mobile. And then anything for my GoPro, I would use the GoPro app and just fix it up there as well. But everything PC based was either done on my 2012 HP Envy, which is way back in Winnipeg because it's broken or otherwise everything was done off of my S10. You wanted to see what my home PC is, and this is pretty much it. The only other thing really would be, you know, you got to have your mic system for your PC. And then, you know, the whole thing about a PC is you're buying it so that you can have access to as many games as possible. And while I like that approach, you can also buy it another console and then you have even more access to games. So I bought a Switch when they first came out. Is that a Steam Deck? This is how I play every game that I want to, other than PlayStation, because my name's not David and I don't like the DualShock controller. Thanks to Pulseway for sponsoring today's video. Pulseway lets you centrally manage all your desktop servers, network devices, and cloud infrastructure from one place. You'll be the first person to know when a user has an issue or when there's a problem with your IT environment. You'll have out of the box commands to take actions like killing processes, resetting user passwords, running PowerShell commands, backing up files, and even remote control. 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