[rippin' jazz tunes]
[boxes plopping down]
Greetings and welcome to an LGR computer thing
that’s a smidge more modern than usual.
Cuz yeah, today we are putting together a brand new workstation / editing rig using
all these lovely parts here, among other things.
Ahh this is always exciting, we’re gonna be going over the parts I chose, dismantling
my old build, putting together this brand new one, setting everything up with Windows,
and then putting it through its paces with a few select programs.
Yeah, upgrading my work PC is something I do every four or five years or so, with my
last build being back in early 2016.
I didn’t do a video on that, but it was this machine right here,
what I called my mini-fridge monolith.
I’m actually gonna be using this exact same case for today’s build and just swapping
out all the internals, cuz I dunno, I’m still quite fond of it.
It’s a Fractal Design Define XL R2, one I chose not only for its brushed steel industrial
kitchen aesthetic, but because I was actively seeking
something with a ton of space that’s super quiet.
It’s got these giant, slow-moving fans on the front, the back, the bottom, a huge BeQuiet
CPU cooler installed, and tons of room for everything I wanted for parts and cable management.
And what I’ve had in here since 2016 was an Intel i7-6700 CPU, 64 gigs of DDR4-3000
RAM, a couple of M.2 drives, a couple SSDs, and an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 Ti.
Oh and an old Avermedia capture card, which I’ve been meaning to upgrade for years but
it does the job so whatever.
And yeah, I mean, all this stuff works fine still.
But only just fine, because my workflow has changed quite a bit since 2016.
I’ve used Adobe Premiere since forever, so that’s nothing new.
But I’ve also started using After Effects more for things like my intro and text graphics,
as well as a bunch of filters and plugins that really bog things down.
Not to mention I’ve upgraded cameras three times since then, with my current one being
a Lumix GH5S recording at 4K 60fps and 150 megabits per second.
And ah, yeah, all that combined has slowed things down a lot while editing, even with
proxies, and render times have gone through the roof.
So that’s why I decided to go all out this time and grab a buncha stuff that’s admittedly
unjustifiable if it weren’t for my job.
The centerpiece being this insane processor here, the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3970X.
I’ve been setting aside cash for it ever since I saw what it could do when it launched
in late 2019, and then when I got my tax refund this year I just decided to take the plunge.
[chuckles] This thing alone cost two thirds of what my entire previous PC cost,
and again, if it wasn’t a business expense I would not be able to justify it.
32 cores, 64 threads, 144 megs combined cache.
Yeah just complete nonsense that’s really all about getting me a smoother time editing
and rendering, this is not a gaming build or anything like that.
Not to say it can’t game, I’m sure it’d do just fine in that regard.
But if I was building a new gaming PC I’d go with an i9-9900KS
or something with fewer cores.
In fact, I’ve got an Intel-based PC in my living room that I use exclusively for playing
games, that’s a whole ‘nother rig that doesn’t do any work and is just built for gaming.
This is all about the work, and to that effect, I’ve also chosen a motherboard that seems
like it’ll do what I need: an MSI Creator TRX40.
I’ve gone with Gigabyte boards for the longest time, but I’ve been impressed with the MSI
board I have in my gaming PC and figured I’d give one of their sTRX4 models a try.
It’s got a crapload of ports and overclocking features and things I’ll never use.
The sound chip for instance, I don’t use on-board sound at all, it’s all external
solutions for me and work these days.
Currently a Mackie Big Knob Studio for both recording and playback, it works well for
my mics that needs XLR phantom power and uh.
I like the big knob.
Anyway yeah, moving onto the memory situation, and I’m going with my longtime preference
Corsair, this time 128 gigabytes of their Vengeance LPX DDR4-3600 CL18 RAM.
Should be a tad faster than what I had before, and of course it’s twice the amount.
Believe it or not I do push 45, 50 gigabytes of memory used in certain projects, sometimes
even more with really big videos like the E3 one I did a while back,
so the extra headroom will be nice.
Speaking of which, I also really wanted to boost my storage speed, so I went with three
of these Samsung 970 EVO Plus M.2 NVMe sticks, which should be stupidly fast.
Even more so than the 950 Pros I had in my last build, and those were already quite quick,
just far lower in capacity.
These are two, one, and one terabyte, so I’ll be using the two for my main video assets,
one for proxies and screen captures, and the other one for the operating system
and application files.
I’ve got another 4 terabyte SSD already that I’ll keep as well, but it’s a lot
slower so it’ll likely be for overflow of things
that haven’t been moved onto my network storage.
Yeah that’s other stuff, there’s about 128 terabytes both here and off-site that
I used for storage and backups.
Continuing with these parts though and my search for silence.
I went with another BeQuiet CPU cooler since I was so happy with the last one I had, this
one being the Dark Rock Pro TR4.
I don’t wanna do liquid cooling or have any audible pumps or motors or loud fans,
so these huge coolers of theirs are fantastic.
Just a couple of enormous, slow-moving fans and a monstrous heatsink
that’s about as big as your head.
In terms of power, I’m going with -- well this is actually my old power supply but it’s
still awesome so I’m keeping it.
It’s an EVGA Supernova thousand watt power supply, one of their 80 plus platinum ones
for whatever that’s worth.
It’s served me well for years now, never left me hanging on power needs, and it’s
got all modular connections and it’s super quiet, so yeah, it makes the cut.
Lastly there’s the video card, this EVGA RTX 2080 Super FTW3 whatever the heck.
Not the best card in existence for gaming, but again, it’s not a gaming build so it’ll
do the job with its 8 gigs of video memory and such.
Less than the 11 gigs I had before, but it’s still faster overall, supports RTX, and I
didn’t see the need to shell out for a Ti or a Titan on this rig.
I’m holding out for the 3080 before going whole hog on a new GPU, and even then that’ll
be dropping into my living room PC and not this one, so the 2080 Super works fine.
Oh and uh, yeah 64-bit Windows 10 Pro, I guess there’s that too.
Nothing exciting there but there it is.
Right!
So that’s it for the parts, I am more than ready to put this thing together.
But first, let’s take the old one apart real quick,
and start assembling all this Threadripper goodness!
[music softly fades out]
Alrighty so, first order of business is getting my 2016 build disassembled,
at least most of the way.
As discussed, I’m gonna be keeping the power supply
and one of the 2.5” SSDs installed in the new machine,
and the video capture card will be sticking around as well for the time being.
Same goes for all the 120 and 140 millimeter case fans,
along with the blu-ray burner I have in there.
Which uh, heh, come to think of it
I’ve never once used for burning or even reading blu-rays.
But I like having it on-hand for all the older optical media that I’m constantly reading
and writing for other LGR projects.
Here’s one part that won’t be sticking around though, this older Sandisk Ultra 3D SSD.
I think this one’s only 250 gigs and it’s quite a bit slower than the others, so yeah,
it’s better suited to an old laptop or something.
Then there’s the 4 terabyte SSD that I will be keeping installed.
Even though its read/write speeds are slower than the M.2 sticks, it’s still nice to
have the additional local storage for lesser-used files.
I really dig Fractal Design’s removable drive trays by the way, just one of the many
things I love in this case.
That and the fact that it’s so wide open inside, making it super easy to reach all
the screws on the motherboard, something I can’t say for most of my previous ATX cases.
Seems like there’s always some weird metal doohickey in the way of one little screw or
another, or large CPU coolers would bump up against the sides but nope, not here!
Anyway that’s that.
The motherboard is outta there, along with all the rest, so let’s move onto the new stuff!
Starting with the MSI motherboard and its ridiculous number of quirks and features.
THIS!
Is one appealing design, I gotta say.
Those eight RAM slots bring to mind heftier server boards, I quite like it.
And it’s not too far off the deep end of “try-hard gamer boi” aesthetic either, thankfully.
Though it does have some RGB nonsense happening on the I/O panel,
a crystal-looking thing they call “The Mystic Light.”
Eh it’s fine, I can turn it off if it’s bothersome.
I just prefer minimal or no RGB lighting and purposely avoid
things like glowing memory modules and LED fans.
I swear, half the builds I see online these days are lit up like the Vegas Strip on acid,
I don’t get it.
Ah well, enough old man being old, let’s see what else is in here.
We got a bag full of drive cables and things, nothing I need since I already have everything
in there from the last rig.
There’s also this impressive-looking wi-fi antenna, again not needed since c’mon now,
10 gig ethernet is where it’s at.
And then there’s this PCI Express card, one of the more intriguing inclusions with this board.
MSI calls this the M.2 Xpander Aero Gen4, an unappealing mouthful of a name, but a highly
useful card that takes the mainboard’s M.2 slots from 3 to 7.
Yeah, this whole top part of the card comes off letting you insert 4 more M.2 SSDs.
Awesome for any future expansion!
But seeing as I only have 3 of them right now, let’s set the card aside and go ahead
and get these installed on the motherboard itself.
The way this works on the TRX40 is that you have two metal heatsink bars screwed on there.
Removing them provides access to the M.2 slots,
complete with thermal pads covered in blue protective film.
Pretty dang fancy compared to what I’ve had before, I’ve only ever had a couple
slots out in the open with no built-in heat dissipation at all.
So yeah, just gonna remove the blue film on the thermal pads, slot each of the three modules
into place, and screw those heatsink plates on top of them to keep everything down.
Nice.
Should keep things a bit cooler,
and it also just looks snazzy as crap all tucked away like that.
With that outta the way it’s time to whip out the Threadripper, and man, this is some
[chuckles] excessive packaging, to say the least.
Honestly it looks more like a plasma rifle power cell or some sci-fi macguffin
than it does a CPU holder.
What are you even supposed to do with it afterwards, set it on a shelf, just empty?
Extraneous packaging aside though, this is truly a gorgeous bit of hardware.
Kinda reminds me of the Pentium Pro in terms of how oversized the processor is, what a
mesmerizing piece of high tech art.
It also came with a big ol’ watercooling mount,
as well as this Threadripper-branded screwdriver.
The latter is used to unlock this metal socket covering, so you can remove the plastic pin
shields and get to the uh, sliding insertion thingy.
Heh, yeah this is new to me man, check this out.
The whole CPU, orange plastic and everything, slides right down into this little cradle
and clicks down into place over the pins.
Then you screw it all back in there so it connects, and it is now good to go!
Sure have come a long way from ZIF sockets.
Next up is the RAM since it goes underneath the CPU cooler, and since I’ve got four
identical modules, they’ll go in these four slots spaced apart from one another in order
for optimal quad-channel support.
Then we’re ready for the Dark Rock Pro cooler
in all its comically-sized copper aluminum glory.
Pretty sure I’ve seen smaller children actually.
And hey neat, it came with its own screwdriver.
A pretty nice one too from the feel of it.
First step here is to screw in these metal brackets and plastic standoffs around the
socket itself, which is where the heatsink will screw into here soon.
And it actually came with some generic thermal paste in the box, but I’m gonna use some
of my trusty ol’ Arctic MX-4 instead.
How much do I use?
Enough, that’s how much.
Got that slathered on the Threadripper, and now we can just plop down the whole cooler
on top, place the metal bracket in between, and screw that down through two holes
in the top of the heatsink.
Sure glad it came with that screwdriver, otherwise I don’t know if I had any that were long
and skinny enough to get down in there.
Lastly, there’s a 135mm fan that goes in the middle of the heatsink assembly.
That clips right into place with these little metal brackets and gets plugged into the CPU
fan header on the motherboard right alongside the other fan so they’re both able to be
controlled at once.
Alrighty, things are moving quickly at this point!
Just gonna get everything we’ve done so far dropped into the case and screwed into
the existing standoffs, conveniently they’re all the same as last time.
And I’ll start connecting some of the power cables for the motherboard,
CPU power, and the case fans.
As well as the SATA drive cables, USB ports, and all the different front panel connections.
At this point the expansion cards are about all that’s left, with the graphics first
on the agenda since it’s so large.
And yeah, these RTX cards are monstrous, taking up three PCI brackets around back.
It still seems crazy to me when cards take up two slots, three is just hilarious.
Now, normally I’d install the GPU into the first PCI Express slot, but ah.
Yeah, doing that would completely cover up the chipset fan on the motherboard, something
I’d rather avoid if I can.
So I’m gonna install it a couple slots down so it sits below the fan.
Not exactly ideal I suppose, but it’ll work since each slot is PCIe 4.0 x16 anyway, and
I only have one more card to install.
That being the old Avermedia Game Broadcaster HD,
which I use to capture old PC footage below 1080p.
It’s just a tiny little thing, slots in there no problem.
And yeah, that’s about it!
Other than spending a while tidying things up and generally taking care of cable management,
the only thing left to do will be installing Windows and setting up all my software.
Check it out!
The new LGR Threadripper workstation is lookin’ mighty fine indeed.
I’m gonna assume I didn’t miss anything stupid and get the side panels put back on there.
Then hook everything back up, power it on, and see what happens!
[music fades]
[computer powers on in near silence]
Ahh, the sweet sound of nothing!
It can be hard to tell if it’s turned on at all audibly,
just the way I like it since I record so much in this room.
And yeah, once it’s tested out all the components and memory and stuff, we reach the MSI BIOS.
Success!
Everything seems to be plugged in and working as intended, so that’s a good sign.
And dang there sure is an extravagant amount of junk to look at and tweak in here, which
is one reason I wanted another MSI board.
I particularly like the Board Explorer screen, where you can mouseover and see each and every
component, cable, add-on card, and peripheral that’s currently active on the PC.
I mean, I guess you could just look down and see for yourself, but whatever, this amuses
me and I enjoy its existence.
After this, it’s Windows setup time!
And yeah yeah, Windows 10 setup, blah blah it is what is.
After a few minutes it’s all done.
The only thing that needed to be manually set up was my capture card, but otherwise
it’s back to business as usual.
So let’s test some crap out!
I mean, just look at all those threads
[laughs] 64 threads across 32 cores, resulting in about
128 times my previous level of arousal, mmm.
Naturally the first thing I had to try was SkiFree for Windows 3.1.
Oh yeah, smooth as silk even in ultrawide.
It’s barely even taxing the CPU at all, what a beast!
Yeah okay, enough joking around.
So the actual first thing I tried was Duke Nukem 3D Atomic Edition from 1996.
Amazingly, it runs flawlessly in DOSBox, with hardly a skipped frame or a hint of slowdown!
The Ryzen Threadripper is truly the future.
All right for real now though, let’s go for Premiere Pro.
One of the biggest reasons I wanted the upgrade was to improve rendering times, and here’s
some footage of the previous 6700K machine encoding a typical 12 minute LGR video with
all the settings and stuff I normally use.
On there it took over an hour to finish rendering that particular video.
And that was one of the better scenarios,
some of my longer videos took three or four hours.
Now let’s try it out on the new PC, same exact file, settings, all that.
We know it’ll be faster, but by how much?
A lot! [chuckle of disbelief]
Yeah it only took 25 minutes to finish rendering the project,
using identical plugins and export settings as before.
Ahh, fantastic, that’s seriously like a weight lifted off my shoulders right there.
And yeah, that’s about it for the new work PC!
Even knowing what kinda numbers I’d be getting beforehand, having looked at endless tests
and benchmarks online, it’s still somewhat mind-boggling to see for myself what this
setup can do with my own video projects.
Including this very video you’re watching, this entire thing was edited and rendered
in record time using the new rig,
and it was a buttery smooth experience the whole way through.
As you’d hope for how much it cost, jeez, imagine if it sucked.
Thankfully it doesn’t though, and I’ve used some of the extra time to enjoy a few
maps of Doom Eternal, and appreciate how well it makes use of all
those processor threads. What a bonkers thing.
I know some games will require disabling a number of cores or they won’t run, something
the included MSI software makes pretty simple, thankfully.
But so far, all the games I’ve tried have worked great without having to disable or
tweak anything, it’s all been rock solid.
Yeah, even though it’s a work PC it’s still been undeniably fun messing around with
games just to see what it can do.
And hey, if it’s in this video, that means it’s technically work right?
Oh yeah for sure, this is definitely work.
Doom, Wreckfest, Red Dead Redemption 2, Minecraft RTX,
I say they’re all sortakinda work
at this particular moment in time.
Doing YouTube as a job is bizarre.
Speaking of which, I hope you enjoyed this video!
I know it’s not my usual fare but I tried making it enjoyable regardless.
Do check out some more LGR if ya like this kinda thing.
Especially if you’re into retro computing, I post new videos each week.
And as always, thank you very much for watching!