 It's day 823 and my COVID lockdown beard is still going strong. If I'm on loopy, sometimes I do wonder. Yvonne keeps telling me to move, but I don't believe her. It's all just a blur. Car, studio, car, sleep. I want to believe her, but my gaming setup is still exactly the same. If I moved, wouldn't I have upgraded my burnt-in monitor? Where's the RGB lighting? What is this microphone doing in my face? Why is there an LG C2 box on the ground? And who is my sponsor? KiwiCo. KiwiCo makes hands-on projects for kids that are designed to be much more than just a toy. Visit kiwico.com slash Linus to get your first month for free. You can learn more at the end of this video or at the link down below. The truth is, I already have an S-tier gaming setup, but there are a couple of things that have been nagging at me since my last upgrade. Starting with the monitor. As much as I love the inky blacks of OLED, this particular model from Aorus is based on an older panel that doesn't get that bright and does suffer from frequent image retention that it needs a pixel refresh recycle in order to mostly get rid of. It's also absolutely huge, meaning that when I'm streaming, my camera, even if I have it resting on the top of the monitor, is basically looking down at the floor behind me, which, since I haven't finished moving in, is not the most attractive scene. Another streaming-related issue is lighting. To be clear, I love the KeyLite Airs. Wi-Fi control, adjustable color temperature, adjustable brightness, freaking awesome. But since I prefer to stream in a darkened room, I have to crank these things up so bright that combined with the dimmer display, makes it so that I can barely make out what's on screen and I get a lot of eyestrain. Now, I'm not swapping out the lights. I already said I love them. But what I can do to fix that is turn down my lights by changing out to a camera that offers better low-light performance. We happen to have an A7S II kicking around that has some issues that prevent us from using it for production. But with a bare minimum fix, it is definitely good enough for streaming. So we're gonna swap out my Rebel T6i for this, which will mean better resolution and way better low light. On top of improved low-light performance, the T6i is limited to, I think, at 720p or 1080i. So I'm gonna get way better resolution on my face cam. This next one's a very blindness problem. I find that when I'm gaming or using my computer in general, I move around, I shift my position a lot, which means I am constantly moving my microphone around to keep it close enough to my mouth that its cardioid pickup pattern is still going to sound good, which made me think, I mean, our video, we don't use a microphone like this in our videos. So why do I have to use it for streaming? Wouldn't it be better if I just took a lavalier microphone or, better yet, a shotgun, put it in a fixed location where the pickup cone is gonna hit anywhere that I might happen to sit, and then forget about it? I don't know if this is gonna work very well, but this mic was kicking around, the NTG8 from Rode. We don't really use it in our production, so I figured, hey, I'll bring it home and give it a shot, at the very least. And finally, every game streamer needs some RGB in the background, right? Right. What's in the box? Oh my god. It's got a power brick. Where are we supposed to put these? This is 75 watts. I'm pretty stoked, though. This should be good. I mean, the only problem is, where do you want to run it all? There's a plan. Right here. The issue, though, is I have no idea how this is gonna fit in there. You can cut these, probably. Yeah, but look how long this lead is. That's a pretty long lead, yeah. It's gotta plug into this puck. Yeah. Where the devil is that supposed to go? We can plug it in here, because you have a power outlet there. Every single one of these shelves needs a strip. There's supposed to be power in a box here. Wait, what is this? Is that not already like a bar of diffused lighting or something? No. This is a bar of being a bar. And that is power. I don't think these power outlets are supposed to be here. What? Why not? Like, it's supposed to be an integrated power supply for all the strips. Sure. I mean, that sounds great. But I think the electricians just went and put a de-plex receptor here. So then what are these empty leads going to? I don't know. Maybe nothing. Awesome. I'll get a multimeter. Do you mind holding this for me for a sec? Oh my god, yeah, sure. I just want to see if these are live. Sure. Okay. Zero. Yeah, nothing. Try flipping it to AC. That's good. There you go. Yeah, that'll do. Zero. Yes. Okay. What the? So they're very fragile, probably, too, which is... Oh, good! We could not do the RGB and we can do... I can get the QD OLED and we can do more about the displays. Let's summon Dan. Hi, Dan. Hi, you on speaker? Yeah, you're on speaker. Oh, how you guys doing? Great. Here's what we're dealing with. We've got these diffuser things in here, these diffuser channels. Everything is wired, I think, down to this electrical box, which for some reason contains a duplex receptacle. This is the power supply for these strips. And because each one of the enclosures has its own controller, you need to power each one of these little controller dongles separately. One of the other challenges is that the leads on the dongles are quite long. And so if the idea is that we have like the controller puck here and then the strip in here, we're going to have a big dead zone over on the far left. So we're just at kind of a loss. Oh, okay. His profile picture is so perfect for this conversation. All right. Well, I'm going to bring my soldering tools. We can shorten a bunch of those leads there. I'll grab some stuff and I'll be there as soon as I can. Okay. Okay. Do you have any thoughts on a 12 volt power supply that fits in a duplex receptacle that can do like a lot of power? Oh my goodness. These are 24 volt. Why? Why the devil did we end up with 24 volt LED strips? I love Jake. Love you, Jake. You know what I told Jake I wanted? I told him I wanted a simple five volt power supply, addressable RGB, like five volt with the thing. These are like house lighting. I just want some ambiance. The good news is I found where these wires go. Great. You're not going to like it. Where? What? They're all in here. Oh my God. And in terms of powering them, well, we've got this bare AC wiring, which is great. I called the contractor and he's talking about ripping open the wall behind this in the closet. And I'm sitting here going, I do not need this project to drag on any longer. So here's my proposed solution. We put the little boxes with double-sided tape right here. We wire up these with the barrel plugs that come with the included power supplies and just wire it into the back of the box right here. We cut a little hole in the edge of the diffuser strip right there. So it fits in there like that. And every shelf just has its own little controller dude out of a jig sitting in the corner like that. The wife approval factor of the solution is quite low, but it apparently did make it over the bar because Yvonne also doesn't want to rip open the drywall in the closet. I might have another solution for you, but I'm unsure if you're okay with you want like blue and RGB and all those different colors. I was hoping for different colors. Yes. Okay. Because what we can do is we could probably just take the positive negative and white leads splicing together in the backside. And then you just have white LEDs with your two cables. I'd really prefer to have RGB. Then we got to do the boxes. Did you think of color and then just wire that color? Then you just stuck with one color. We've got these fancy Z-Wave Aotech strips and we're going to run just one color. I mean, come on. Okay. All right. Cool. Bye. Um, this is interesting. Well, this is not a table. What is a table? I guess the table is anything that you want to be a table, but we were hoping to use this monitor for something. Can I help set you up somewhere else? Now that this one's liberated, let's talk about the two main options for a king tier gaming monitor right now. Starting with the Alienware 3423DW. It's a 34 inch curved ultra wide, and it uses Samsung Displays QD OLED technology in the panel. That means you have all the benefits of OLED, like perfect blacks and amazing pixel response time, but without the drawbacks, it shouldn't burn in nearly as much, or at least nearly as quickly, and it's much brighter. But LG, maker of classic W OLEDs, hasn't been sitting on their butts either. This is the 42 inch version of their C2 Evo, which is brighter, more color accurate, generally better than their last gen in every way, and most importantly, is six inches smaller, because as much as I have tried to make 48 inches work, it's really big. It's a little small. Yeah, it's a little small. I did not think about how much smaller this was going to feel. It looks gorgeous, aside from that it's not running at the right resolution right now. Like the colors obviously just pop on this thing. I know this is going to sound kind of weird. I do not like having multiple monitors at home. I don't work at home. I don't want to be tempted to work at home. But it's not even about work. It's like, oh, I want my game here, and then I want like Discord or Reddit or something here. I mean, I usually put my chat here on my phone. Okay, sure. So I do have a secondary display, but I don't, because yeah, that's the other thing, because I usually use it for like Twitch chat and stuff. I like to just do one thing at a time. We're in a thousand nit peak brightness mode right now, by the way. Look at these lights. They don't look like white spots on a wall. They look like, whoa, hi buddy. They look like lights. And it does 175 hertz regular, but if you want 10 bit color, you got to go down to 144. I'm okay with 144. Right, 144 is fine. 144 is a lot. Look at that, that's a fire. It's fiery. See, this is what QD OLED does. This is not just a green colored kind of whitish thing with some green around it. That's a green light. It casts everything, glowing green. It's just a different level of realism. You haven't seen the C2 yet though. We do have to give the C2 a chance, but I do definitely like this eye line a lot better. And at 42 inches, the C2 is going to be a lot higher. I'm not a huge fan of this stand, but I could always just install an arm. That is an option. The bezel is almost too thin. I can't. My webcam is going to interfere unless I put, I'll just put like a little spacer in here or something like that. So it sits up a little bit higher. Mine does. Yeah, that'll, that'll. How's this going? It's going really well. Are you being like Dan about it or? No, no, this is actually fine. You'll get what you want and this will all work really well. Come with me. If you want to live. I got a full light hooked up already. Yeah. I've gone through and traced all of the power cables for it. And I cut the end off of your power supply. Cool. Yep. See you later. And so when we plug this in here, no fire yet. Yet. And we'll go back in the other room. What if we just take this end and pop that off? Yeah. And attach the wires directly to the box and we don't need that big cable. And we've got a nice hole here. Oh, actually that seems way better. And yeah, yeah. So we do put the housing back on though, right? The housing will still be on. Genius. Well, relative to how today's going. Room temperature IQ. I have a question. Do we have to go morettes on these ones or could we just go shrink wrap? Shrink wrap or soldering or crimping, whatever you want. Okay. It's easiest for me to just do morettes right now because we've got to get rid of all that extra cable. I need to figure out a solution to deal with the crappy, crappy JST plugs that are in there. We'll figure out a solution, make it look nice. Hey, Vaughn, how's the wife approval factor here? It will sit like that on the bottom of each shelf. Yeah, I think that's good. Okay, we're good? Yeah. Yes. That's the biggest hurdle. Ooh, all other things being equal. I think I'm kind of leaning this way right now, man. It's much, the screen space is really good. That is a good size. Let's just go ahead and get it. It'll turn on. Poof. Sorry. I don't have an HDMI cable. Well, I don't know what you're going to do then. It's a TV Linus. It doesn't use display port unlike your old Aorus monitor. Crap, I have a whole thing. I've got an optical display port cable running downstairs. I'm display port ready, boys. I checked your hub and everything, hoping that there was HDMI and nothing. We've got a hub and it's got HDMI, but then it's going to display port over USB-C. So I don't know how well the signal is going to transfer over everything, but we'll see. Let's find out. Whoa, hey, how you doing? Oh, look at that 30 Hertz. Hey, see if it'll do 60. It will, it will. It'll do 60. It should do 60. Yeah, we're going to need another solution. Fortunately, I brought home this optical HDMI cable with the intention of running it to the theater room from my PC so that I could game in the theater room from my computer, which is in the mechanical room. But I guess we can use it for this for today. With the way I have things set up, all I need to do is wrap a little piece of tape around this cable and... Hey, Ploof, start pulling. I'm pulling. Wait. What a slick idea. Oh, crap. Wait, wait, wait. Oh, okay, go for it. You can pull the cord back. I might need a little bit off the spool. No, you're good. I already loosened the spool a bit. All right. Hey, we're golden. Check this. We're golden. Here we go. 120 hertz. Oh, 120. Oh, my God. Might have jumped the gun a little bit there. 2.0, right? Not 2.1. I think the cable is the weak point in this particular link. I think it'll do 60. That's okay, though, because I think I can still evaluate it like this if I just set it to 1440p 100 or something like that. Ooh, I'll do it. Oh, active cable. It might not even do that. Oh, balls. Okay, 60 then, I guess. I know it hurts. Man, TVs have... Good, huh? That's funny. You should be a writer. Wow. I'm trying 1440 120 and it is not working. Yeah, it should do 1080 120. Yeah, but 1080 panel this size. Doesn't want to do HDR 1080p 120. You got to choose... Bloody cable, man. You got three points on the triangle and you can only choose two. Okay, 1080p 60 HDR. Try that. It does do like up to 800 nits or so peak brightness, which isn't quite the 1000 that the Alienware or the G2 does, but it's still significantly brighter than the C1 or the G1. Other than that, it's pretty similar. One of the biggest factors, though, is going to be how bright it gets relative to how bright these need to be once we swap out the camera, because that's why it's so distracting because they're so much brighter than my display. Flipping on HDR was a problem. Yeah, it really doesn't like it. It didn't give me the reverse setting as prompt. I know. I'm doing 4K 60 HDR. I don't think it's going to work. I think it'll work. Okay. Use HDR already. Here it goes. We got this. Balls. It's a lot of it. It's a lot of signal, man. 4K 60 HDR because it switches 10 bit color. Well, look, it's got VR and G sync. And FreeSync Premium. Yeah. And the size is like perfect, right? It's pretty great. You assumed I was going to settle on this one. Yeah, 100%. Yeah, I have it. Okay, that's fine. I can live with that. For this, it's totally fine. And you can fix this in the future. Yeah, get a proper 2.1 cable. It's not quite as good as the QDL. I know. But it's really close. It's really close. And you don't want more screen, like extra. You just want more space. So I think this is the one. It fits your desk like perfectly. It kind of does. And the camera is in a way better spot. Actually, we should grab OBS and let's have a look at how we're doing there. Oh, that is a way better, way better angle. Yeah. Time to swap out this camera. Kalan and asked me to point out that we haven't actually filmed the conclusion for the video repairing this broken camera and you guys can stay tuned to see that. Am I just using that lens and I'm just using this? Yeah, we got it. Speed booster. We got an E mount and or whatever. And I've got the cables that should work for it. Power. We're not 100% sure right now, but I brought a bunch of batteries. Okay. So we'll use it with batteries if we have to. But I think it can use the USB cable. Okay, let's give it a shot. So cool. Sorry, what kind of HDMI am I expecting to use here? A micro here. Oh, okay. Yeah, I have a micro to HDMI. This cable. Well, really the receptacle on the camera side of it is the reason that these keep having to be put out of service for us because when you're shooting a video, you can't rely on this tiny little screen. You need an external screen that's big enough that you can see if the image is in focus and unplugging and replugging and unplugging, replugging and strained from moving around. They just all break. But sitting stationary. It's fine. Should be okay. I can't see anything. Let's try deactivate activate. Hello. Oh, hey, look at that. Yeah. Easy peasy. You want just 1080p probably, right? Yeah, I think 1080p is fine. Whatever is easier on the camera. Twitch can't do 4K anyway. Yeah. Sup, David. And I can see that printer behind me though. I got a solution. You remove the printer from the room. Oh my God, that's where the printer goes. Oh yeah, that's not annoying. Right? Okay. Yeah, this is way better. I don't even notice them. Okay, they could go brighter. Yeah, having them much brighter. Oh man. Oh man. Oh. Well, that's not gonna work. Okay, so you want one a little brighter than the other. I'll go like 8% subbed in. Hey, freaking awesome. Love it. We're definitely gonna need to do a bit of a before and after for this. This is my Rode podcaster. Good mic. Just has to be in my face all the time. Let's give this a shot with a shotgun. I do have to say I feel like I'm compensating for something a little bit right now. Maybe a little bit. Maybe a little bit. It's gonna fill up. You're gonna get every single part of the whole room with this thing. Yeah, well, so yes and no. This is actually a pretty narrow pickup field microphone. It's designed to be held by a boom operator like a solid three, four feet away from the mouth of the talent. So maybe, but maybe not. David says that this particular microphone might not have the ideal pickup pattern for an indoor application where we're gonna have reflections from my voice bouncing off the wall behind me coming back to it. We want more of like a spherical pickup pattern right in front of it. But at the very least, we can use this to validate the concept. So I think I've got this dialed in in my GoXLR settings here. That's all that's left to do with the monitor. See how it sounds. Hey, now I can hear. What's up, guys? What's up out there in radio land? Actually, you know what? It's not perfect. It's definitely not perfect. But if I have it like kind of here, let me think. So I'll move around, move around, move around, move around a little bit. I might have to go back just a touch. In the meantime, if I really wanted to have something like sitting in my face, I could also use it like this and turn it down a little bit. And there's still more echo, absolutely more echo. But with a little bit of treatment. Yeah, I'm just gonna do it. Yeah, I'm gonna get away with this, I think. I never have to think about my microphone. I never have to look at it. It's not in my way. Yeah. I like it. I'm doing it. Aside from being stuck with HDMI, one of the challenges of using a TV as your computer monitor is that it won't necessarily be able to wake up properly when you come sit down and move your mouse. When your TV is off, it's off and the computer has no way to tell it to wake up. However, did we end up using the service remote or? I didn't use the service remote. It's through an app called LG TV Companion. Is that from LG? No, I don't think so. I got it on GitHub. I don't know if it's going to do exactly what you want, but I think it'll get pretty close. Basically, what I can do have at least with this is that you can make your TV go into a blank state. And then you use wake on LAN. Yeah, use wake on LAN. As soon as it uses your mouse, as soon as it detects your mouse, it'll go back on. That is a really janky solution. But it works. Okay, let's give it a shot. I swear to God it actually works. Okay, so try it out. Turn it on. Touch the mouse. Touch the mouse. Hey, look at that. That was really fast. It's because it's not like fully sleeping or anything. It's just blanking the transmission. But you're not going to get burning or anything because your TV is blanking. And I've got it set to one minute right now, but you can check it out. Right now, but you can change the settings to like 10 minutes without any kind of motion on your keyboard. Wow, I got to do this at work. That's kind of awesome. It's actually pretty sweet, right? Yeah, that was one of my biggest complaints using a TV as a monitor. This is great. But that worked, right? Yeah. So open the app again. How cool is Jperson 77? Hell yeah. Shout out. Doing the Lord's work. Naturally, logistics won't want me to take some of this stuff I borrowed back to the office. So I'll just pack it all into my LTT store backpack, which is finally available for order. Get yours today. LTTstore.com. So durable. And as much as I love my Office Master OM5, it's okay. The butt cushion is not firm enough for my butt. I go through it and then it kind of goes to sleep after like an hour, hour and a half. So I've gone with a Secret Labs chair that, complete with magnetic headrest. Oh yeah. This is going to be awesome. I need to not put my screwdriver in my back pocket when I do that. See, call me Chris video. Break her chair or what? I stuck a bit through the back of her chair. Did that not make it into the YouTube cut? I haven't seen her video yet. It's definitely in the six hour cut on Float Plane. For those of you who are wondering where and when I stream, these are my botanical gardens, by the way. And then I think I also have my zoo here. Hey, there we go. There's my zoo. Usually it's on Twitch and Float Plane and then the archives go on FloatPlane.com. Oh, look at that. Damn, Daniel. I have a couple more boxes to get in. We're nearly there. Wow, that's awesome. And over on the other side, we've got, you used only one power brick for 13 of them. That's right. Yeah. And now it's only at about 190C, so it's not going to start melting the plastic yet. I hope this doesn't start a fire. Eh, probably not. Okay. Now what remains to be seen is whether or not they will work. Hey, it works. Let's try 99. It's blue. Green, 50. I don't know. Okay. It's purple now. Well, definitely some things to learn about that and some things to tell you about our sponsor. KiwiCo. Designed by experts and tested by kids, KiwiCo is a monthly subscription service that delivers accessible, creative, and hands-on STEM learning, providing engagement for kids and kids at heart. With nine different lines covering ages zero to 99, KiwiCo has something for absolutely everyone. And their crates include multiple ways to play, decked out with parts, instructions, and an educational magazine to build each crate into a unique learning adventure. Here's what we built this month. The Koala Crate had a play-based camping activity with a campfire, bear backpacking, snacks, and stories perfect for your two to four-year-olds. The Mechanical Sweeper KiwiCrate is for kids five and older and teaches some basic engineering with a deep dive into info about whales and other deep sea creatures. For those spacefarers, we've got the Bottle Rocket Tinker Crate for tweens and teens, where you can build and launch a bottle rocket through the power of chemistry. With KiwiCo, you can get started on a learning adventure for the whole family, and most subscriptions are under $20 a month. And for a limited time, you can go to kiwico.com slash linus to get your first month for free. If you guys enjoy this video, check out the last time I upgraded my streaming setup. It did not go as smoothly as this. And also, if you're looking for any of the products that we featured today, they're going to be linked in the video description.