- We've talked about fiber-optic Thunderbolt cables before,
and these things are crazy cool.
They'll do 40 gigabit per second
to distances as long as 50 meters.
And they're so durable
that you can tie them in knots and pull on them like this,
without them breaking.
50 meters, I mean, that's pretty far,
but Thunderbolt allows you to daisy-chain
multiple docks and peripherals
to achieve distances much, much further.
We have got six spools of 50-meter Thunderbolt cables,
and we are going to be hooking up this GPU,
almost a thousand feet away from our computer.
That's right.
I'm gonna show you guys the new unit
where we're gonna be doing some more of our benchmarking
and testing and we're gonna run the cable all the way there.
And it's sponsored by NZXT's BLD.
So naturally, we're gonna be using one of their gaming PCs
as our source,
except obviously we're gonna want to rip that 3080 Ti out,
put it in an external enclosure
and then go for a little walk here.
(vibrant music)
Obviously, before we go off adventuring,
we wanna get a baseline
for what kind of performance we would expect
running a normal, just three-foot copper cable,
from our Thunderbolt port to our GPU here.
So we're gonna go ahead
and fire up Shadow of the Tomb Raider.
I'm running at the highest settings, 1440p,
exclusive fullscreen, with motion blur disabled.
Ah, come on!
All right, 60 FPS average.
Now let's see what happens when we take it somewhere else.
David, do we wanna jump the fence
or do we wanna like go around, or what?
- [David] Jump the fence, baby!
- You wanna jump the fence?
- [David] Heck yeah. - All right.
Let's jump the fence, baby.
In that case, I'm gonna put the 3080 Ti down.
These zippers better hold up.
(walkie-talkie thuds) Ooh, crap!
I'm having too much fun already.
- [Colin] You need me to hold one end here?
- Yeah, and go ahead and plug it in.
Hopefully our neighbors don't, like, trip over this.
- I hope this works,
I only tested it with two cables.
(all laugh)
- Ow, ow, ow, ow, stop!
Oh my God!
This fence is barbed wire, David.
Oh no, they're backing their truck in.
Long story.
We need to run a cable
all the way from this building to one over there.
You're backing in now,
- right? - [Truck Driver] Yeah.
- And then are you guys done for the day?
- Oh boy!
- If I got it out of your way now,
then would we be good after that, probably?
- [Truck Driver] Yeah.
- Hey look, it's Brian.
- Hullo.
- You're good to plug in, over.
(walkie-talkie beeps) - We're plugged in.
I will go plug in the GPU.
Why don't you come back and fire up Tomb Raider?
Where'd it go?
- Oh, we're gonna make it.
- [David] Are you sure?
- Well, no, I'm not entirely confident,
because the thing about Thunderbolt,
it requires very, very tight tolerances in terms of latency.
At 300 meters, we are approaching the point
where even at the speed of light,
that is a non-negligible amount of latency
for something like a high-performance graphics card.
So I'm hoping we will make it the full 350 meters.
But this is by no means a guarantee.
I actually lied a little
because you don't need both a hub and the GPU
at one node at a time.
- So we only need one of these at a time.
- We only need one of these at a time, yeah.
- Well that's fine.
- We'll test 50 meters first.
Okay, so is this thing on?
Hello?
Oh yeah, yeah, RGB is on, okay.
Oh man, these hikes back and forth,
they're gonna get pretty stupid.
- That's a long way around.
We got the small...
let's go.
- We've got a blue screen on the computer,
so I'm just restarting it.
(walkie-talkie beeps)
- Okay, good luck.
- I unplugged it while the game was running
and I think it just got a little confused.
We are off to a real good start here.
Ooh, that's very interesting.
We've dropped 15% of our performance already.
(walkie-talkie beeps)
- Wow!
Okay, come grab this cable then.
15%!
- Is that because of the raw distance?
Is it because of the signal translation that's happening,
to convert to optical and then back?
Will it get worse?
- I feel like Ned Flanders, just,
- Oh, hi there.
- [David] Hi.
- Oh, I see you.
There's a Thunderbolt glory hole going on over here.
- Heh, yeah.
My poor new jacket.
- All right, so let's go ahead.
We're gonna unplug our Thunderbolt GPU,
plug in our first Thunderbolt dock,
which is acting as a...
Hey Colin!
- Hi.
- Razer in their infinite wisdom
doesn't label this bloody thing.
Does this one support daisy-chaining?
- I think so.
- Let's double check that,
'cause I actually use one of these at home
and I think it might not.
- And I'm gonna go get the rest of what we need.
So another hub, another jackery
and I will be right back.
Yeah!
- I believe what we've done here is supposed to work.
Now, something to note is that external GPU's
are really not supposed
to be hooked up through a hub at all,
let alone five hubs.
We have no idea if this is gonna work at all, let alone,
well, oh, hi there.
- Hi, neighbor.
- Would you like like a graphics card?
- I would.
- And a cable cable - And a cable.
And a jackery.
- Oh right.
Well here, should I just come for a little ride with you.
- Or you're just gonna ride on the cart?
- Yeah, yeah.
I was just gonna -
- Tell you. - Scoot it.
No!
- Five bucks, as I scooter with this 3080.
- Ti, Ti. - Ti.
That's something one handed, let me tell yah.
(blades rolling)
Okay, we got the 3080 Ti,
Linus scooting in the daiquiri and stuff over it.
Really, we should have handed it over the fence.
I don't know what we were thinking.
In the meantime,
we can spool out this cable straight down the parking lot.
You see how much further we can get this line.
A lot, oh, nope, there's one more winding.
Okay, that's another 50 meters.
- The building we're going to
is this the next complex to the right there,
and it's unit 120.
- 120.
- Yeah. - Okay.
Oh, I totally need a...
Oh even better.
I needed both of these things.
Make sure it's powered.
- [Linus] Oh boy, it's barbed wire.
- No way.
- I'm aiming for that spot right there.
- [David] Oh God!
- What could go wrong.
Yvonne's gonna kill me.
(Linus thuds)
- Now that's interesting.
(screen taps)
I think our performance is actually better this time around.
I think it might've just been the driver
being kind of like bugged out
from the sudden disconnection before.
- It starting to rain.
- So this is my genius idea.
We'll just put a Rubbermaid bin on top of -
- Garbage bags. - [Linus] Am!
- 55 FPS.
So wait, no, that's worse again.
I didn't see any weird stuttering
or anything in the gameplay.
The performance is a little bit worse.
It seems like we're losing,
there's a little bit of overhead with each of our hubs
that we're going through.
You know, as much as it might not be
as good performance as you would expect from a 3080 Ti,
it's sure as heck running.
If our display and our peripherals were at the other end.
So the computer's got a Thunderbolt connection
and we're gaming over on that side,
the run is a hundred meters,
but actually it has to go round trip.
So you've got your PCI express run,
going to your GPU over there.
And then the GPU actually has to send back
the display port information all the way back to us here.
So it's going 200 meters.
You guys are good to unplug.
- Okay, here we go.
So unplug that, yep.
You wanna handle carrying the graphics card?
This is our third 50 meter cable.
We're just plug it in willy-nilly.
Keep it. - Oh boy.
Yeah. - Yup, yup.
Yup. - Oh geez.
- Fiber optic don't mind being run over, right.
- You're gonna just drive over the fiber optic layer.
- Okay, give it a couple seconds here.
But you should see the GPU real soon.
Let's try and make this faster.
We can run the next line while we wait.
Sorry about the landscaping.
Those are roses out.
Ah, okay, we're in unit 120 apparently,
I have no idea where that is.
Do you know where unit 120 is?
- [Passer-by] Which address are you talkin'?
- I can find out.
What address is unit 120 located in?
- This is very interesting.
I managed to launch the game,
but I haven't made it past the splash screen.
- Ooh, we're hitting a limitation.
- How close are you guys to the new office?
- [David] I don't know which building we're in.
- I see the problem, it launched with the wrong GPU.
Let me see if I can get this sorted out on my side.
Still no information on which building I need to go to,
classic Linus.
- The Nvidia GPU is not showing up.
I'm gonna give the system a quick restart
to see if it pops up,
but you might wanna give me an unplug and replug.
- Okay, I'll walk back to it now.
- How sure are you
that you're plugged into the correct ports on the Razor one?
The input is the one on the front.
- Oh, then I'm definitely not plugged in the right one.
So, we're in the front port now.
- [Linus] I think at the back, it doesn't matter.
- Okay.
- I wanna make it very clear.
And this is not just because Corning
sent us a bunch of their Thunderbolt cables.
This is far beyond what is reasonable for this spec.
We just wanna see the limits.
I got no GPU showing up yet.
- Okay, I just unplugged and re-plugged it.
- It's still not showing up.
Do you wanna try the same port that I did?
(whirling sound)
- How much do you wanna bet
that he's already coming over on a scooter?
(all laugh)
- It's that building right there
- [David] The middle one or the right one?
- Right, there.
- The one with the red awning there.
- Yep. - Okay.
He said it was down the right side.
Is it showing up at all?
I'm like kind of worried
that the cable got mushed when someone drove over it.
- Colin, can you hear me?
- I'm expecting, he's going to team call me,
yep there it is.
- My walkie-talkie battery died.
- A shocker, okay.
Someone, myself included
and some other guy drove over the cable.
So, hopefully it's still intact.
I think it will be fine.
Do you see it on your side?
- No.
- Oh, there should be an LED.
Hold on.
Okay, yep.
Okay, we got LEDs on now.
So the GPU is definitely on now.
- And my system is locked up.
- The GPU just shut up.
- Let's let's try replacing that one cable just to see
and we'll go from there.
Worst case scenario,
I'll just take you guys
and I'll show you where the new unit is.
- Aw! Aw! Aw!
Okay Jamie, plug it in are the LEDs on?
- Yeah, I just blue screened again.
What did you do Colin?
- We're trying to turn it off and on again.
And clearly it also turns your off and on again.
- No GPU, what do you think Colin,
can we maybe try to at least plug in a USB drive
at the new office and I'll transfer a file or something?
It's the fact that you've got this GCE device
or on the other side,
something like USB is not nearly as sensitive to latency so.
- I have one of those Samsung T5's fives in my pocket.
- Maybe just plug in that T5 and I'll see if it shows up.
- Okay, let's do that.
- Ah, come on!
- And I'm plugging into the T5.
- I only see the Seagate FireCuda so far.
- Well, the Corning reps did tell us this is a bad idea.
- I don't think I was I was CC'd on that email.
- Retreads.
- Are we on all Razor docs so far?
- There's two docs.
There's one on the other side of the fence
and then one in the middle of the parking lot.
- Are you plugged into the one
that's at a hundred meters, then?
- The drive is plugged in at 150 meters.
- So you should have one more dock then, right?
- No, we're plugged in directly into the Thunderbolt cable.
- That won't work because there's no power.
- Ah! You're right.
I am, ah, okay, yep!
- That's the limitation of optical cables
while they can carry data,
they need to both be powered
and you need to provide separate power
for any devices you wanna plug in.
So Colin had a little moment there
and he tried to plug our drive directly into the dock,
which explains why it wasn't coming up.
So he's gonna plug in our third dock
at the 150 meter mark.
And let's see if this thing shows up.
I'm, I'm actually pretty hopeful right now.
- [David] Uh-huh!
Who's that?
- Now's as good a time
as I need to take a closer look at our source here.
NZXT BLD's build systems,
let you configure your pre-built,
the way that you would a custom rig.
So you can go AMD or Intel.
They've got a two year warranty,
with two business they build service
and everything else about it is custom.
Now we actually got an AMD machine originally,
but because everything about NZXT BLD
is using off the shelf like enthusiast grade,
custom components,
there was absolutely no compatibility issues of any sort.
We're gonna have a link below,
where you can learn all you need to know
about NZXT BLD and let's check in
with how those guys are doing.
- People always tell me, I look awkward when I run.
That's probably the case.
Hey, we're plugged in.
You seeing anything over there,
they're going over Thunderbolt, rest in peace cables.
- But it was exciting.
- Hello.
- Oh my God, I wasn't on speaker.
Nope.
- Nothing, hey.
- No dice.
And that kind of makes sense
because nothing would prevent Corning
from making a hundred meter
or a 200 meter version of their cable,
other than if just the signaling didn't handle
that kind of distance very well
and we were crazy to even try it in the first place.
- I guess there's a limit to how far you can go with fibers.
We tried though, we really did.
- Honestly, I'm pretty pleased
we even made it to a hundred meters,
even though we didn't make it to the new office.
So why don't we head over there
and I'll show you guys the new location,
kind of talk about what we're gonna do there.
So, unfortunately we couldn't find another unit
in the same complex that we're in,
but we really need the additional space
because we wanna get our hands on
some new testing equipment and stuff,
to really take things to the next level,
and there's nothing in our complex.
So, oh, we saw a for sale sign here.
It's only about 150 meters
or about 500 feet as the crow flies,
from our existing office.
But because it's so winding and roundabout here,
we're probably gonna have
to get a handful of electric scooters,
so people can kind of scoot back and forth
between the two buildings.
Unfortunately, the possession date
isn't for a little bit
and the existing owners just couldn't be bothered
to let us in just to show it to you guys today.
So, it's this guy right here.
Unit 120.
So it's about 3000 square feet.
And obviously we couldn't do any of this
without you guys watching
and sponsors like NZXT BLD.
So thanks for sponsoring the video.
Thanks you guys for watching.
See ya!
Oh, if you're looking for something else to watch.
The last time we played around with fiber optic cabling
was in my house,
when we had a single server
and then fiber optic display port and USB
running all over the house
so that it could act as the central brain.
That was a pretty fun video.
There was a dead squirrel, which was unfortunate,
but yeah, Colin found it in the attic.