- I'm doing it. I'm installing it.
This is it. The SSD endgame.
15 gigabytes per second, 8 terabytes, PCI Express Gen4.
This is the SSD that I was waving around on stream,
being like, "Oh, that's a nice SSD
you've got there, PlayStation 5!
Be a shame if someone came along
and absolutely shrekked it."
It may be four times the price
of a PlayStation 5 all by itself,
it may require another three grand in additional hardware
in order to utilize it properly,
but I will be damned if some PS5 is gonna come along
and be faster than my PC!
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(upbeat music)
In case it wasn't already, I want to make this clear:
The fact that this SSD is really fast or whatever
is not a genuine knock against the PS5.
The PS5 is expected to cost somewhere between $400 and $600
for an entire gaming system, including a high-speed SSD.
By contrast, in order to unlock the full potential
of this puppy right here I need to upgrade my gaming rig,
which is already a Ryzen 3rd Gen 12-core processor.
The reason for it is not necessarily
that I need the extra cores,
although we can talk a little bit more about that later,
but rather that I need the extra PCI Express lanes,
because this card requires a full
PCI Express Gen 4 16x link in order to reach full speed.
That is the same interface that would be used
on a high-end next-generation graphics card,
and Threadripper is just the only way to do it.
Let's start with the motherboard choice.
In the past, I wouldn't describe myself
as an Asus diehard or anything like that,
but they've definitely been my default go-to over the years.
This actually changed, for not only this upgrade,
but actually the last one as well,
because Gigabyte and Asrock are the only ones,
as far as I know, that have solutions for Thunderbolt,
which is what this little add-in card is right here,
there we go, on AMD platforms.
And as some of you might know,
I actually run my system in a separate room
from where my monitor and my gaming peripherals
and everything are so that I can completely isolate
the noise from my rig and not have to listen to it.
So Thunderbolt is how I actually get
high-speed connectivity to my computer.
That makes the TRX40 Designare from Gigabyte
basically the default choice for me,
because it's got four 16x PCI Express Gen 4 slots,
with two of them actually being wired up at 16x.
So right there's a graphics card, there's the storage,
and then in one of these other two
I'm gonna go ahead and pop this Titan Ridge card,
which has two Thunderbolt 3 ports on it
for a total of 80 gigabit per second.
Actually, I don't know. It might be a single controller.
I think it's a single controller. It might be 40 combined.
It's frustrating, you know?
It's a generally accepted truth
that Thunderbolt is flakier on PC than it is on Mac,
but the PC makers really don't do themselves any favors.
This board literally comes
with that Titan Ridge Thunderbolt 3 card,
but to my knowledge,
the board is not actually Intel Thunderbolt 3 certified,
which is why it doesn't say Thunderbolt 3
on the box design anywhere.
It just says, "Includes 40-gigabit-per-second
GC-Titan Ridge add-in card."
The instructions don't say which slot to put it on,
because that can actually matter.
A lot of the time it's recommended to install it
in a slot that is hooked up to the chipset
rather than directly to the CPU,
so I'm just gonna be kind of guessing as far as that goes.
And apparently...
Oh, actually, no. Okay.
I think there is a cable for it somewhere in here,
it's just not mentioned anywhere in the manual, and...
(Linus laughs)
Apparently this motherboard comes with, uh,
the same SSD carrier that I was going to install.
That's amusing.
Enough about that. Let's go ahead and get the CPU installed.
Now, aside from the 88 lanes
of PCI Express Gen 4 connectivity
that 3rd Gen Ryzen Threadripper CPUs have,
I also wanted to make sure
that when it comes to competing with the PS5
I'm set up to handle compressed game data.
Now, in their presentation about the SSD architecture
of the PlayStation 5, Mark Cerny said
that in order to get equivalent performance
to the dedicated decompression chip
that they built into their custom chip
you would need anywhere from,
I think he said, somewhere in the neighborhood
of eight to ten Zen 2 CPU cores.
So in order to make sure
that I completely overkill that mark
I went from 12 cores to 32 cores,
so I'll be able to decompress game data for days here.
Just gotta make sure I install this CPU correctly first.
One.
Then two.
And then three.
This is one heck of a memory kit G.Skill sent over.
Now, 3200 megahertz is not crazy-fast,
but on Ryzen processors there's actually
really not much benefit to going beyond a certain speed.
It's the latencies that impress me.
These are graded for 14-14-14-34 at just 1.35 volts.
That's really tight.
I just realized this thing only has Gigabit networking.
How does that make any sense for a Designare
$600 motherboard?
Now for the worst part of any upgrade:
Draining the water cooling loop.
This is why I knew it!
I knew I shouldn't have gone hard-line.
I was just like, "Well, whatever.
It's been three years between upgrades this time.
I'll probably go another three years."
And then I had to have a faster SSD
than the PlayStation 5.
This is the ultimate First World temper tantrum.
All right.
Let's drain this thing.
This isn't even my dumbest idea ever.
(suspenseful music)
Ho ho!
Who's the idiot now?
I gotta undo this cable tie.
LTTStore.com.
Oh! Hi there.
Um, yeah. It's peeing on me.
Okay, what if I tilted it up more?
- [Crew] Andy?
(Linus gasps) Ooh, ooh, ooh!
Holy!
Okay, Andy!
- I'm gonna hold this. Can you lower the table, please?
Hoo!
Okay. Fantastic.
Also, this tube appears to be empty,
which means this is gonna be a cinch.
Yep, I only put three motherboard screws in.
Welp. Okay then.
Look at that!
Hoo!
How much water's left in here?
Wow. None.
Outstanding!
So I hadn't actually checked this before we started,
but it turns out...
Oh yeah.
The top PCIe slot on this board
is the same as the one that came out,
so this run can just go right back where it was.
Just gotta give this a little wiggly-wiggle,
make sure everything's still in there.
Give this a little tighty-tighten,
make sure that's still in there.
Ka-boom.
Bam!
Graphics card back in.
Oh, wow.
This is gonna be so much easier than I thought.
Look at this.
All I've gotta do, as long as I don't overdo it,
is shave down this tube until this lines up with that.
Ah!
This is how confident I am.
I'm loading up the collars and the O-rings. Like, I'm ready.
Well, this was almost uneventful
to the point of being boring, wasn't it?
This could actually work.
I'm not a huge fan of this Corsair filling thing
because the seal here's not perfect,
so when you squeeze it too hard it can make a bit of a mess,
but this seems to be actually working.
Check this out.
Dee-dee-dee-dee-dee-dee-dee. It's a little slow.
But I'm gonna try and fill it as much as I possibly can.
It's test boot time, starting with the good news:
It doesn't leak.
The bad news is that I've got an error code 60,
and it's not firing it up.
It appears to be, oh. Okay, that's helpful.
It appears to be a DRAM issue.
It would be very unfortunate if I had to
remount the CPU in the socket.
I really should've tested that
before I put the water cooling back in place.
Aw! I'm so upset right now.
Wait a second. Are these tubes empty?
I think these tubes are empty. It's not quite full yet.
Okay, I might be okay. This might not be that bad.
Ah, that's a lot of thermal compound.
To be clear, this is not something that I recommend.
Well, that was bound to happen eventually.
My pump is still plugged in.
(Linus exhales)
At least I said I didn't recommend it. (laughs)
No, no, it's fine. It's fine.
It's just distilled water.
It's actually gonna dry and it will actually be fine.
It's just...
Thankfully, the memory was over here.
My laptop escaped completely unscathed.
That could've been so much worse.
Theoretically, that won't happen again.
Holy crap, it's not unplugged. Okay.
To be clear, I don't recommend running a CPU
with no heat sink at all like this.
I'm just trying to see if I get any kind of POST whatsoever,
and then I'm gonna immediately turn it off.
It does look promising.
Come on, come on, come on, come on, come on!
What's this? B0!
I wanna see B0.
Tried mounting that 3970X a couple more times.
Keep getting POST code B0.
No further time to diagnosis this,
I got games to play this weekend,
so I guess we're going for our 24-core,
but that's okay, 'cause that still gives me
eight extraneous cores I totally don't need
to, you know,
decompress PlayStation 5 games or whatever.
Enough of that, then. Let's install an SSD, shall we?
The Titan Ridge card goes in here.
It's got DisplayPort in on the back,
so that comes straight outta your graphics card,
into the Titan Ridge Thunderbolt 3 card.
That way you can actually run displays over Thunderbolt 3.
Otherwise, it's not a display adapter,
so it wouldn't have any way of outputting that.
So you gotta kinda tie that in in a kludgy way
with an external cable.
Got the SSD.
Oh, please tell me I'm gonna be able to get this in here.
It might've been better to put this in before.
You know, I might need to pull this out.
Dang it!
It's like a full-height, full-length card.
It's not exactly easy to get in
when you've got hard-line water cooling over it.
It's so unnecessary, everything about this.
Why am I even doing this? Actually, you know what?
I'm gonna throw my other SSD in here
so we can do some quick benchmarking on this one
without actually loading an OS on it.
So I'm booted to my old drive. This is my 1-terabyte SSD.
And then you can actually see each of the 2-terabyte SSDs
showing up individually.
That's because we need to do some BIOS configuration
before they will all be rated together.
There's an internal connector here for Thunderbolt,
and I have no idea what the purpose of it is
'cause I haven't seen this on other
Thunderbolt add-in cards.
But there's a USB-2 cable as well,
and that, evidently, goes into a little USB-2 header
here on the back of the board.
Well, it can just sit there for now.
The last thing I need, and I alluded to these before,
is these little Mini DisplayPort to DisplayPort cables.
So each of these will plug into
one of the DisplayPort outputs for my graphics card
and go into a DisplayPort input on the Thunderbolt card.
Like that. Comes with two.
Boop!
Now to configure booting to the new SSD.
The first thing we need to do is go to SATA configuration.
Then NVMe RAID mode enabled.
Then we gotta give it a quick restarty-start.
I also enabled Thunderbolt while I was I was at it,
'cause I put the Thunderbolt card in there.
We manually enabled bifurcation on our PCI Express 16x slot.
Now we need to go into RAIDXpert2,
which only only shows up if you enable PCIe RAID.
And we're gonna ahead and...
Not do that. I'm goin' RAID 0 here, boys.
I don't put any valuable data on here.
It's just gonna be full of games. Physical disks.
Windows installed in basically the normal way,
and here it is, 7.21 terabytes of usable space in Windows
at PCI Express Gen 4 x16 speeds,
and how Gen 4 x16 are they?
Woo-hoo-hoo-ho!
Wow!
13.88-gigabytes-per-second writes and just shy of,
actually, oh, 13.5-gigabytes-per-second reads,
depending on the size of the file transfer.
That is absolutely freaking ridiculous.
And it's actually possible that if we just take
some larger ones, like let's do another run
from 4 megs to 32 megs, here we go.
Let's see how fast these puppies go.
Hoo!
That is somethin' else.
I mean, it's really too bad that you need so much CPU
in order to just be able to process it.
Mind do, you got 24 cores.
It actually doesn't hit it that hard. (laughs)
Oh, man.
That's it.
You heard it here first.
I'm never upgrading this machine again.
24 cores oughta be enough for anybody.
Maybe, you know, if I need more than 64 gigs of RAM,
throw another kit of memory in there.
But 8 terabytes of 12.5 to 14-gigabyte-per-second storage,
I think it's fair to say that oughta be enough for anybody.
Is that, like, what? In 10 years, 20 years?
Am I gonna need more than that?
- [Crew] Probably.
- Oh, shut up. There's no way.
I mean, we're still gonna be working with text documents.
You know?
Ho.
That's kind of crazy.
This machine actually has the performance
to do the same things the PS5 can do
with texture streaming, literally while you're rendering
and moving around in the game, and all it cost was...
10x the price?
Yeah, that's not so bad.
Not as bad as this segue to our sponsor.
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- [Crew] Andy?
(Linus gasps) Oh, oh, oh!
Holy!
Okay, Andy! - Yeah?