- I wouldn't, oh crap, we blew the breaker.
You know why this computer cost $20,000?
Because it was from the bulk aisle,
and they charge by the pound there.
Hey, just kidding.
It all comes down to performance.
This video is sponsored by VRLA Tech
and they're having us take a look
at a top tier specimen
Ah, from their Threadripper Pro Workstation lineup.
Oh my gosh, this thing is heavy.
Oh no, my laptop.
You've seen the fractal Define 7 XL before.
I think last time around
we put about 20 hard drives in it,
but if you don't fill it up with hard drives
it can fit all kinds of other cool things.
Optional solid top panel;
will not be needing that
with the kind of hardware we've got stuff in here.
Extra hard drive sleds.
Let's take a look at the accessories VRLA Tech includes.
Case screws.
This is just all the accessories
that would've been included in the box
for the enthusiast grade parts that they're using,
but instead they consolidated.
This is a lot of PCI slot covers.
Second bag has all the power cables
that we're gonna need for our power supply
in the event that we wanna plug it into the wall,
or wish to upgrade the machine in the future.
Not that there's anything to upgrade it to today
since it's already the absolute,
freaking, top of the line.
Oh, till the wheels fall off your trailer.
Man, the Define 7 XL feels
like kind of a relic of a bygone era.
You know, who wants a mini ITX small form tractor machine?
The bigger the computer, the better.
In this case,
that does actually appear to be true.
Oh, the bottom of the case
is one gigantic removable mesh air filter.
So that's where a ton of
our air intake is gonna come from.
But, just that, not gonna be enough for the
There goes my back panel.
I appear to have experienced some shipping damage.
Oh, yeah, there's no windowed side panel or anything.
Hey, this is all professional, all the times.
I'm not getting derailed though.
I wanna still talk about the outside,
where at the front we're gonna find,
ooh, I like this, four of Noctua's NFA 12 fans.
That's gonna be some air flow.
Ooh, and on the top we got another four of them.
That's over 200 US dollars in fans alone.
Wow. It's full of bubbles.
This is actually more necessary than you'd probably think.
Remember that thing that just happened,
where this thing probably got kicked around
by the courier and one of the little plastic clips
managed to break off.
This prevents anything like that
from happening inside so that you can
at least still run the machine
while you wait for a VRLA Tech to get you sorted
out with a replacement little plastic clip.
What it means though, is that it is
tres important that you pull all this stuff
out before you actually try to run the system.
It looks like this particular piece
needs to be removed from the back.
Definitely be careful pulling this boy out,
cuz if it gets caught on a cable
like a SATA cable or something like that,
it could conceivably rip it off.
But it looks like ours came out
without anything eventful happening.
I do think this system got an extremely rough ride though.
You can actually see this cable, right here,
is coming out at a bit of a strange angle
from that hard drive.
It's not broken or anything, it just bent a little bit.
That seems to be the worst of it though.
Everything is strapped down, nice and tight
held in place so it can't really come loose
from its connector and shipping.
And it's nice to see
that even though there's no window on the case
they're still taking the time to cable manage it properly.
And that's one of the reasons that that's so important,
especially for a prebuilt system
that's gonna be shipped, you know,
halfway across the continent.
Brandon helpfully pointed out
that the machine's not as much
of a looker as you might expect.
You got your brown Noctua fans,
you got your no case window, no RGB to speak of.
And my retort to that is that
sometimes it's not about the looks,
sometimes it's about the raw power.
That looks good to me.
We've got dual founders edition RTX 3090Ti's in here.
That's right, the 3090 and the 3090Ti
both still support NVlink, which means that
technically you could use them in SLI in games
but realistically what you're doing is
you're using these bad boys for compute
and the NVlink connection between them,
Ahh, which you can see right here,
enables high speed communication between the cards
that actually allows them to share the frame buffer,
share the video memory between the two cards
to work on larger data sets.
It's a lot of compute.
Honestly though, I think the motherboard IO
might be as impressive as the GPU compute.
We have a whopping eight USB3 10 gigabit per second ports.
Oh, sorry, that's all the type A ones.
We have another type C 10 gig port
and a type C 20 gigabit per second port.
We've got WiFi 6 on board, as well as, 7.1 audio.
Does someone, does anyone still hook up
like surround sound analog speakers to their computer?
I'd love to hear from you in the comments.
Should they even bother to include these ports anymore?
And I really love this,
dual 10 gigabit network ports on this thing.
What a beast.
I guess it stands to reason this motherboard has
all the bells and whistles at 999 US dollars.
This is the Pro WS WRX80 Sage WiFi SE.
Whoa, it's got a whopping 3 M.2 Slots on it
at PCIe Ge4 speeds and can support
additional NVME storage devices
or really anything else via
it's total of seven PCI Express Gen4 16X slots.
It features one of the most oversized cooling solutions
I have ever seen on a motherboard,
and it is chock full of other professional features
like the whopping 3 PCIe auxiliary power inputs
and support for IPMI remote management.
So you can actually remote
into this machine even when it is fully powered down
update the bios, do anything to it completely remotely.
We've got a whopping 256 gigabytes
of DDR4 3200 mega transfer per second memory in here.
The only thing more wild than that is the fact
that that's only about an eighth
of the total memory that this platform can support.
And then for cooling, this is a bit of a surprise
but VRLA Tech has gone with the NH-U14 thread.
Actually, I guess that's not that surprising
because Noctua doesn't make a threadripper version
of their NHD 14 or NHD 15.
So I guess we'll find out very shortly
if this is gonna be enough airflow
to keep this 64-Core Threadripper Pro 5995WX cool.
Enough teasing. Are we ready to fire it up?
There's a peel on the front.
Oh, I missed it. Sorry.
One of the things contributing
to how heavy this is is the 1600 watt power supply
which I mean I can see why they, whoops.
I can see why they did that.
Because if you're ever gonna upgrade
these 3090 TIs you will need it.
I know I, I know the N word, right?
You will actually need it for the F word future proofing.
And then the other big contributor is the fact
that it's got a bunch of mechanical hard drives
in it in addition to its M.2 storage devices.
So we've got a whopping 3x18 terabyte hard drives in here.
So you can store all your workstation stuff on the system
or you can use those dual 10 gigabit
network connections to store it elsewhere.
Fun fact, if you're in North America
you will need an entire dedicated 120 volt
15 amp breaker for just this workstation
and the peripherals you have hooked up to it.
Moment of truth considering the rough ride it got
there's no guarantee that this is gonna fire up first try.
Okay, that's all good so far.
Man, it turns out when you've got enough of them
even Noctua fans can make some noise.
Oh boy. Are you gonna go?
Yes.
Let's just make sure everything's showing up okay here.
64 cores. All right.
There's our four terabyte fireCuda 530s
for a total of eight terabytes of PCIE Gen4 storage.
16 PCIE Gen4 bandwidth to all of those slots.
Absolutely wild.
I guess we're just gonna boot into Windows
to find if those hard drives made it.
I hear them clicking so it should be okay.
We had an issue booting it up the first time
but I think I've solved it.
Some of these workstation or server boards, I guess,
is where they would inherit it from,
actually number the PCIE slots one to seven from the bottom.
So, I asked Jake, our producer,
to plug the monitor into the top card;
thinking that would be the primary slot
when in fact it would be the bottom card
that would be in the primary slot,
and I think we're gonna boot up just fine now.
Oh, well this is some useful feedback for VRLA Tech.
What they've done is they've tied
all these cables at the back together
which can actually create a large mass
that can move around in shipping,
putting more strain than you would expect
on the connectors that are attached to that,
that big mass of cable, and you can see,
our primary card had its power connector slip out.
Whoopsie daisies. There we go.
The sprint. Mmmmm.
I think a receipt of our GPUs might be an order here,
and the glass half full angle on that is
at least it gives me an excuse to talk about
the LTT ratcheting screwdriver, which as you guys can see,
I'm using to remove these thumb screws
without accidentally dropping them.
Got it all sorted.
There can be issues with auto negotiating
PCIE links speeds on some AMD systems.
Looks like we ran into that, but,
by manually setting both of our GPUs to PCIE Gen4.
Ba ba ba ba, success! Everything looks good.
Oh my word.
The question now becomes what can we do with this?
I mean, we can game.
Cyber punk wouldn't launch
according to CD project Red's website.
The most common reason for that is
not meeting the minimum required spec.
I suspect that wasn't the issue today.
In any case, we're gonna play Doom Eternal instead.
I think it's probably been over a year
since I've used SLI.
To be clear, nobody recommends that
on a gaming machine anymore, I mean, not even VRLA tech.
They have a lineup of gaming machines
and I'm sure that they pretty much,
universally, do not have SLI
but they can't stop me from using it for gaming.
So you know the micro stuttering here is not bad.
You know why?
Cuz it's only using one of the GPUs.
Love it, but it's running great.
175, 200 FPS.
I don't know if I've ever seen it this smooth
on ultra nightmare settings at 4k.
And of course, I'm recording
at the same time effortlessly.
At least that's something the second GPU can do.
Wow. The GPU that's actually being used
topped out at just 74 degrees.
Our CPU never went over 55, 56.
Fans, they work.
All right, let's try and find something that will
actually use both of our GPUs and our CPU though.
All right, here we go. CPU multi-core
And...
Done. Not bad. 67,000 points.
My God, it completes this benchmark so fast
that it gets a short cooling cycle
in between actually being utilized.
It ain't the quietest machine in the world
but you can't fault the cooling performance.
We've settled in
at around 66 degrees Celsius max on the CPA.
Of course this is without the GPU's blowing hot air at it.
So I've got an idea for how we can hit it a little harder.
We're gonna go into our CINEBENCH preferences
and we are going to use only 96 of our CPU threads.
That's out of 128. We're gonna go ahead and start that.
Then we're gonna go into blender.
I've already disabled our CPU, so see it's done.
Set it to 10,000 samples and we're gonna hit both
of our GPU's with peak hardness
and see what happens.
10,000 samples. Okay, let's try that again.
Hello. There we go. 94% CPU usage.
96 to 97% GPU usage.
Good. This still actually has some time remaining on it.
Let's have a look at what our temps look like.
It doesn't get any louder, so that's a plus.
Definitely a cooling first design.
I wouldn't, oh crap, we blew the breaker.
That makes sense.
- [Off Screen Voice] Yeah, it does.
- Okay, one moment please.
And this is why you should always use a UPS
that is appropriately sized for your machine.
You see this forced to install graphics.
I don't even have GPU drivers anymore after that crash.
To be clear, this is not VRLA's tech issue.
This is just, you should not let your computer
shut down suddenly in the middle of a heavy load like that.
Short circuit, more like blown circuit.
After a reboot, we're still having the problem,
so I guess it's time for a quick tech tip.
This is a little utility called DDU
that anytime you're having a GPU driver issue
is the first thing you wanna turn to.
Yes, before you contact tech support
at your system integrator or whatever the case may be.
Please wait.
Man, if the amount of effort it takes
to get a system up and running
has any impact on the end result
this thing's gonna be freaking amazing.
DDU, tech tips, display driver uninstall.
Here we go. GPU nvidia.
Perfect, clean and restart.
Highly recommended. Let's go.
I didn't do anything but I think we're back.
Why, Windows search? Why? Why not the 64 one?
That's what everyone on the web wants.
Hey, maybe that one you ******* idiot.
Feels kind of like a, like a spiritual dance
at this point, more than actual troubleshooting
cuz this is on here fine.
There was, there was nothing wrong with
how this was installed.
Okay, sure.
Do not, I repeat, do not
let your computer suddenly lose power
in the middle of a heavy load like that.
Immediately the message comes up, I click it and
then it proceeds to not launch the nvidia control panel.
I love it.
It's almost like SLIs
of dead technology no one cares about anymore.
Okay, here we go. We're enabling it.
Be clear, when I say dead, I mean
for gaming for other workloads it can still be very useful.
Crushing CINEBENCH, crushing blender rendering,
screen recording, is there anything it can't do?
How about go shopping on LTTstore.com?
Wow, it can do that too. Here, this guy has a hood.
Whoo. Package power on that CPU.
Just shy of 300 watts.
GPU power in the neighborhood of 300 watts each.
This is really not very consumer grade.
I'm sure there's a consumer somewhere spending
like 20 grand on a computer just cuz they can.
Not that you're stuck with Zen 3.
VLA Tech offers five different workstation lineups.
Verizon, Verizon Threadripper,
Verizon Threadripper Pro, and then also Intel Core and Xeon.
So you can kind of pick your poison
just depends on what you're doing.
Depending on the industry, it might be better to
have fewer cores that clock higher
and are more cost effective, or you might
actually need a ton of cores, ECC memory support
and all of that full fat workstation stuff.
Sponsored or not, this is a great result
for the thermals on this system.
Our CPU ended up under 80 degrees, 76 to be precise.
And our GPUs, the bottom one is 65 degrees
with the top one which is taking in hot air
from the bottom GPU at just 75 degrees.
That is very, very reasonable.
And it actually didn't get any noisier thanks
to the Noctua cooling fans. Pretty sick.
The main reason VRLA Tech sent over a workstation
was because after looking at their gaming PCs
I was kind of curious what they can do.
And while $19,000, obviously a lot of money,
you can see where it went.
I mean, spec it out.
This hardware just is that expensive.
If it's not for you, don't worry.
You can check out VRLA Threadripper Pro workstations
or the ones based on maybe something
more reasonable like an Intel core
or regular Verizon at the link down below.
And once you're done doing that
make sure you get subscribed to Short Circuit.
So who did you guys all bet on in the big
Linus versus Dennis fight?
- [Off Screen Voice] Dennis, obviously
- Dennis obviously, all right.
Channel super fun guys.
Make sure you're subscribed.