 I just built a new computer. Which is funny because I don't really remember doing that. Maybe I need to retrace my steps. Retrace my steps. Retrace my steps. Let's see here. We got Threadripper CPU. Yep, Aorus Master motherboard. Okay. Fedora Linux? Hey, wait a minute. I'm the wrong Linus. Oh well, as long as we've got all these parts together, we might as well assemble them and see what it's like to compute as the one and only Linus or Linus. Okay, there's two of us, but the other one. And today's video was brought to you by our sponsor Storyblocks Video. Save time and money with Storyblocks Video. Getting studio quality stock video clips for a fraction of the cost. You can check them out today at the link in the video description. Funnily enough, I've never actually made a video about the other Linus. He's a Finnish-American immigrant with US citizenship. Linux is his namesake and brainchild and he holds the Linux trademark but no longer contributes much code himself. Most of his personal contributions since 2012 have been in merging code written by others. He still does retain the highest authority to decide which new code is incorporated into the official Linux kernel and he is famously opinionated saying exactly what is on his mind and says he is agnostic with no political affiliation. Linus's law is that given enough eyeballs all bugs are shallow. Since we're on a bit of a fun facts roll, how about some fun facts about the Linux mascot Tux? Through three logo competitions, Tux was submitted as an entry but actually won none of them. As a result, Tux is not the logo but rather the brand character inspired by Linus's love of a picture of a penguin figure he found on an FTP site. Tux was coined as an acronym for Torvalds Unix and the first and official drawing of Tux was done on a 486 DX250 running Linux and the first public release of GIMP. A defeated contender was and I kid you not a furry with a keyboard. Thank goodness we ended up with the penguin. Who could very well be a furry, but without a keyboard. About Tux, Linus has said, Some people have told me they don't think a fat penguin really embodies the grace of Linux. Which just tells me they have never seen an angry penguin charging at them in excess of a hundred miles per hour. They'd be a lot more careful about what they say if they had. Alright, fair enough, sir. Enough chit chat. Let's get building. Now normally over the course of building a computer like this, I would talk through my rationale behind the various parts as we install them. But because I didn't pick any of these parts, I am instead going to lean on ZDNet's excellent interview of Linus Torvalds explaining why he chose all the parts he did. Now, we've settled on a 3970x 32 core AMD Ryzen Threadripper processor here. And apparently that was because he had originally planned to go with a Ryzen 9 3950x but determined that it would have been a small incremental upgrade over the 9900k that he was using previously. Now, Linus normally goes for regular consumer CPUs because they are typically the best bang for the buck and he actually likes the integrated GPUs that Intel puts on their CPUs because he doesn't like any more fans in a machine than absolutely necessary. This might make a Threadripper with its 250 watt plus power consumption seem like a bit of a weird choice because that does bring the potential for more or noisier fans. But what's great about Threadripper is that for an HEDT platform, if you need the performance, it's actually not a bad bang for the buck. So I think this was a really great choice. Linus' choice of the Gigabyte Aorus TRX40 Master is probably going to be pretty uncontroversial. He looks specifically for motherboards that have good power delivery believing that there's little more basic than power delivery and this is apparently a result of him having systems that were unreliable due to brownouts. So it's kind of a funny thing to look for a motherboard that specifically has features designed for like great overclocking and then never overclock them at all. For my part, I like the board's mix of good onboard features like 5 gigabit ethernet and Wi-Fi 6 and expansion. So it's got 5 PCI Express expansion slots. Four of them are 16x physical and one of them is 1x physical meaning you can plug basically anything you want in it. It's got support for the USB type-c internal connector as well as 3 m.2s all of which have little heatsinks on them which admittedly aren't going to increase their performance and probably won't increase their longevity but they can help to soak up some of the excess heat during short periods of intensive use. The one thing to watch out for with this guy is case compatibility because not only is it slightly wider than standard ATX it has a right pin 24 pin connector. So you got to make sure you have a bit more space available in your case. For cooling Linus went with a Noctua NH-U14S with a second NF-A14 fan in a push-pull configuration. This was apparently because he's very sensitive to noise and wants something quiet and has had good experiences with Noctua in the past. Truly a man after my own heart. About Noctua's fans, Linus says that even when the fans ramp up under load he doesn't find the noise particularly annoying and it's more of a soothing whoosh white noise sound without the whining or rattling that he associates with lower-end fans. Apparently despite the noise advantage that a liquid cooler could provide Linus is not a fan. He doesn't want to deal with a custom loop and doesn't trust the reliability or even the capabilities of AIO coolers and especially doesn't want to deal with any unnecessary gurgling or pump noises. For RAM Linus actually couldn't find exactly what he was looking for and ended up settling on some generic DDR4 2666 memory saying that it was fine memory, but I really wanted ECC. The problem was that because of parts availability ECC is not currently priced sanely, so he just decided you know what forget it. This is good enough for now and should work fine. He actually doesn't even need apparently 64 gigs of memory he just went with it because he wanted to populate all four of the memory channels and RAM is cheap right now anyhow. For our part we chose these G skill rip jaws v-sticks just because they are low profile enough to clear our cooler and they're the same speed that Linus is using. For storage there was no question that Linus was going to choose solid state. It has apparently been over a decade now since he's touched any spinning media and he even tries to avoid using cables which is possible thanks to M.2. Anywho after experiencing some reliability issues early on in the SSD era Linus apparently found Samsung to be quite reliable and is sticking with what works for him. If Puget's data is anything to go by I would say this seems like a pretty darn good choice. So he settled on a 1 terabyte 970 EVO plus. As I mentioned before when it comes to cooling products Linus does prefer Noctua over other brands. Unfortunately Noctua doesn't make cases so he went with his second choice be quiet. This is the Dark Bay 700 a quiet optimized case, but with plenty of room for hardware and and ummmmmmmm, well Linus did notice when looking at the front to intake that it looked a little bit more restrictive compared to the rear exhaust. So what he did was order an extra silent wings 3 fan to go in the front of the chassis. One thing to watch out for if you were to replicate this build is you're going to want to remove the middle standoff in the top row because like many thread ripper boards this one doesn't actually have a screw hole there to make more room for power delivery. Very thoughtful preparation from the manufacturer here you can see even this fan cable up here has been carefully routed above the IO so that it doesn't get in your way when you're trying to install your motherboard. One of the things Lina said about this case is that with the right fan control setup in the BIOS and of course assuming that you connected your fans to the correct headers the paper manual for the motherboard apparently had horrible pictures and you got the CPU and system fan headers the opposite way around for the first build what you get is a machine that is basically silent when it's idling and then without any annoying whine although not silent under full load. For power supply Lina settled for the GX850 and I do mean settled because parts availability due to the pandemic has made it difficult to find some specific parts in fact we even had to switch out to a GX650 for our build because not even Csonic could provide us with a GX850 directly. Now as with the motherboard Linus cares a lot about power delivery basics he goes basically what's the top potential power use of this machine okay I'm gonna pick a power supply with 2x that rating and then look for reviews and reputable brands. This is a good strategy for a couple of reasons number one it means that you are basically guaranteed to not under buy your power supply which is an obvious problem and number two if you're a silence freak which we know that he is it means that your power supply may in many cases barely ramp up its fan if at all even under heavy load hey yeah it's clean it's clean boys that Linus knows how to build a computer. For graphics Linus went with and I quote some random sapphire rx580 graphics card thing is Linus isn't that interested in gaming and dislikes having to account for graphics in fact preferring to just have something modern built into the CPU and I can understand that how it's more important to have the correct feature set in the hardware than it is to actually have the performance if you're not a gamer this is another quote it's overkill for what I do fair enough sir. As for why he might choose to go team red versus team green well it is no secret that Linus has publicly feuded with Nvidia in fact even one time going as far as to say you Nvidia in the middle of I think it was a conference or something wasn't it yeah it was it was pretty it was pretty public so rx580 we didn't find any pictures of the actual machine online so I can't verify this but given his choices I think it's fair to assume that Linus didn't spend many many hours on perfect meticulous cable management but did at least do a decent job so that's what we're going for here. It seems like a pretty well thought out machine the kind of thing you wouldn't just throw all the cables in willy-nilly. With the machine fired up it's already what I would describe as quiet but it's definitely not silent fortunately gigabyte has extensive fan tuning options in their bios and we're going to go ahead and take some guesses as to what Linus might be using. So first up we're going to set both our CPU fan and our CPU fan opt so that's the optional secondary one to silent mode and we're going to use our CPU as the fan control temperature input the other thing that we're going to do is we're going to change both of them to enabled for the opt stop mode right here that allows the fans to actually turn off completely under very very light loads although there's no guarantee that with the 32 core processor anything qualifies as low enough thermal output to completely turn off. Sysfan 6A this is the header that I'm using for my case fans so I'm going to go ahead and because his graphics card is clearly not going to see heavy use I'm going to tie this one to CPU as the temperature input as well and once again I'm going to enable stop mode. Our RAM has XMP I'm gonna go ahead and enable it just so we can lower the latencies a little bit I doubt his does but okay all right we deviated in one way. After firing up the machine for the first time I wasn't actually happy with the level of silence so what I'm doing is I'm changing the threshold for the 0 rpm operation to about 50 degrees on the CPU and then I'll have the fan speed ramp up from there and that is one quiet system. The only thing we could do now to make it quieter would be to put the panel on. Not only does it look nice it actually blocks a lot of sound. That is not a shabby looking machine other than the Fedora Linux installer that we've got sticking out of the front of it yes that is the daily driver flavor of Linux that Linus Torvalds prefers. So we're going to go ahead and just boot it live for now. Of course it's not enough for us to just build Linus's system we have to benchmark it and we can't just use any old gaming benchmark so instead we're going to be compiling the Linux kernel and this is the kind of thing that he might actually have to do on a fairly regular basis taking some patch applying it booting it for testing purposes and what our hope is is that we'll be able to do it very quickly because otherwise I'm going to be standing here for a very long time. You might have noticed we had a couple of arguments in the command line there so one of them was time that's going to tell us how long the test took after we're done and another was the number of threads so we're using 64 threads to take advantage of the 32 core SMT CPU in our machine here. Even sounds high performance doesn't it? Strong you know like bow bow and baa. We are done already that only took just over three and a half minutes this is one fast machine and yeah the fans ramped up a little bit we got some heat coming out of the back but that is very reasonable. You know I think the thing that stands out to me most about this machine is just how carefully thought out everything about it is. Now you might assume that an average software developer really takes the time to get to know the PC hardware but many of them don't even bother to build their own computer because they can't be bothered they're busy writing software. Linus on the other hand has actually done us a huge favor you guys might have noticed that over the years we have actually never done a developer focused build guide or even build log and part of it is that we don't really fully understand the needs of developers as much as a true developer would. Well thank you Linus, other Linus, for doing it for us because this is not only performant it looks great it's quiet and the only thing that I look at here and I go ah that's really not the way I would have done it is the memory which is something that he already acknowledged was not perfect I'd have gone with maybe 3200 megahertz ram just to get that little bit of extra snappiness. So thank you Linus for helping us out hooking us up with this fantastic parts list here for development work and thank you to ZDNet for the original interview that we obviously leaned on for making this video you're gonna find links to all these parts as well as that interview in the video description. Finally thank you to our sponsor Storyblocks. With Storyblocks you can save time and money thanks to their massive library of high quality footage after effects templates, music and more. All the content is royalty free for personal or commercial use and speaking of commercial use we use them all the time commercially especially over on our tech wiki channel where the goal is to make videos as fast as possible so we don't always have time to go and get a pickup clip or shoot something and why bother when you can just download it. New clips are added regularly so you don't have to worry about using clips that are like 10 years old so go check them out at Storyblocks.com slash LinusTechTips. If you guys enjoyed this video maybe check out uh hey check out my video on the Dell XPS 13 2-in-1 it's a variant of the XPS 13 that Linus Torvalds has also spoken very highly of he says he likes that machine so much for himself that he ended up buying one for his daughter when she went away to school so there you have it.