- Here, lemme turn it on.
- [Jessie] Oh!
- Don't worry about it, it always does that, it's okay.
- People think that everyone at LMG
must have the most cutting-edge tech in our homes.
- Or that everyone here is a PC building aficianado.
- But the truth is very different.
- So today, we're going to show you our own personal rigs.
- And tell you the real story
of how they were built and bought.
- Just like how we're gonna show off our sponsor,
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(techno music)
- I actually started this originally
on a free 8100 from my friend,
like an i3-8100.
And that got me on the Coffee Lake.
Nowadays, I've got a 9900K, and I've got a 3070.
I was actually crazy lucky, I got mine at MSRP,
and the original MSRP, too,
so I think mine was like 850 after tax, or something,
I got it for a pretty good, Canadian, so you know,
it's a little less than that in American dollars,
but yeah, pretty good, hey?
- This PC I actually built pretty recently now.
I have sort of evolved my computer over the years,
it's a lot of iterations with a lot of the same hardware,
but this one is mostly pretty new.
So we got inside, it's a 5900X cooled by an NH-D15S,
a RTX 3080, I think this is the For The Win 3 one?
One terabyte, gen four, Corsair SSD,
two four terabyte hard drives
that I have in RAID 0 for games,
and that's pretty much it.
This is a really weird configuration,
'cause as you can probably tell, it's a giant case,
this is the Corsair 5000X, this is like as big as they get
without going to the 1000D.
Previously I had an IGX rig,
and I finally got my own place over the last couple years,
and I don't have any need to move this computer anymore,
so I'm like "Screw it,
I'll just get the biggest gosh dang case I possibly can,"
and that's what this is.
Now I can fit so much hardware, if I want,
but I haven't got a new motherboard.
I still have the X570, I think it's X570-I Strix from Asus.
It's a little IGX, little nugget in there,
it takes up like not even a quarter of the case.
- Little backstory, I went to school for 3D animation,
and 3D modeling.
And they gave me this laptop to work with.
This is a Alienware R3 17,
has 16 gigs of RAM, 970M, and a 650H.
This was okay, but,
when I came home from England three years later,
I needed something that actually could do work.
And a 970M just doesn't have the horsepower or the overhead
to render intense scenes, or even to load geometry fast.
So, I put together this monster.
This starting is a 1950X Threadripper,
16 cores, 32 threads.
This is my bread and butter for 3D modeling.
Granted, it is not the fastest,
but the more cores you have, the more efficient workflows
and divisions of that workflow you have.
Next I have two 1080 Tis.
These are Asus Strix 11 OG,
and these are again for rendering.
Even though I have a SLI bridge here,
half the time I actually have it turned off,
because rendering itself doesn't actually use the bridge.
Actual cost at the time, because RAM was expensive,
Threadripper was expensive,
it was about $7000.
But, I was lucky because my parents
decided to try mining at the time,
and luckily, we had some mining cards laying around,
so I got both of them for $800 each.
- I remember I waited a really long time
to actually buy a laptop,
because I'd been looking at the Dell XPS forever.
But they were doing a refresh in 2020,
and on May 13th, 2020, I ordered it immediately
as soon as they launched the pre-orders.
So my XPS has the Intel i7-10875, Comet Lake,
and it's got a 1650Ti GPU,
and I've actually upgraded the RAM
from 16 gigs to 32 gigs,
because that was a fairly inexpensive upgrade,
and one that I didn't need immediately,
and Dell's upgrade price for the RAM was not worth it,
so I just waited a little longer,
waited for RAM to go on sale,
and then upgraded it to 32 gigs.
The main thing I actually use this for is photo editing,
and general purpose PC usage like internet browsing,
Netflix once in a while.
Sometimes a little bit of light video editing,
but lately not so much.
And I find that, whenever I do a photo shoot,
and I want to edit the photos immediately,
I usually just have my laptop with me,
so I'll go to a coffee shop or somewhere chill,
and photo edit for maybe an hour after a shoot,
and it gives me that kind of immediate satisfaction like
"Okay, well this went well," or "This didn't go well,"
or "I can fix this here,"
and that workflow for me
is so much more conducive to creativity,
and I can do it immediately.
- [Jessie] Where's your PC?
- It's right here, hold on.
It is by far my most favorite PC I've had to date.
- [Jessie] Wait, that's not a...
- [Andy And Jessie] That's not a PC!
- It plays games! Right?
- [Jessie] Sure?
- So I built my PC in the peak of COVID in 2020,
around like February or March,
just when that stimulus check hit.
Ooh, delicious.
I don't know, honestly, the whole build is like,
2020 Reddit's recommended part list.
3600 from AMD, Cooler Master Hyper 212,
and MSI GTX 1070 that I got used, because,
this market nowadays, especially around the time
when I bought this thing, was crazy,
like, I was lucky to get this around $300 Canadian range.
- [Jessie] 300 bucks?
- Yeah, no, seriously, 300 bucks.
Dead serious.
Yeah, shout-out to the guy who I bought it from
from Facebook Marketplace for selling this bad boy
for a hot $300.
You the man.
- Like, look at this, it comes with its own input device.
It started off in 2002,
when I got the first version of my PC,
and every 10 years or so I've been walking into Best Buy
and buying the next version.
It's been great, it has been a great performer,
it has expandable storage,
using one of these USB ports,
and it's been very upgradeable,
using one of these USB ports,
and the performance of it has been fantastic, you know?
I can go home, I can play GTA V,
and I can go and make myself dinner
by the time it loads a mission.
It's fantastic.
- It's an Intel Core i7 4790K.
And that's it.
- [Jessie] You have a GTX 980 Ti.
- And there's a GTX 980 Ti.
Yeah, it was painted in a LTT video,
and it happened, look...
You might have noticed from the photos
that the computer seems to be very awkwardly positioned
in another room.
That's why I didn't bring the computer in today,
is because what I did,
was it was getting too hot in that room,
because you know, computers put out heat,
so I thought "Oh, I'll just shove it into the next room
and close the door.
And then all the heat will be in another room."
But then of course you need to have longer cables,
and I just didn't wanna unplug all of that,
so I didn't.
'Cause it's annoying.
And now I can have air conditioning in the office,
because then I'm not having to warm and cool the air,
which is stupid, right?
So, that's what that's about.
So I built the system,
there's a video of the motherboard LED just blinking,
and Linus didn't even know what the problem was,
but yes, I needed a new motherboard.
So I get that all working, and then,
there's a power outage.
And when the power came back on, there must've been a surge,
'cause then the power supply was screwed.
And the computer kept randomly shutting off or restarting,
and I thought "Oh, it's just Windows updates,"
'cause you know.
And then there were still some problems, but,
I finally have solved all of the problems and now it works.
Yeah, I don't know the specs, I don't know
how to build computers nearly as well as Linus does,
and I've made a lot of mistakes,
and it just works now, I guess.
- At the tail end of 2019,
I decided to move down to Vancouver,
in the hopes of finding a job at an animation studio.
Unfortunately, and fortunately,
I found a nice place here.
So I don't actually do much 3D work anymore,
except here, like I designed the Build Corner set,
the podcast set, ShortCircuit set,
and other than that really, I don't touch it much.
So, my use case for this type of system has kind of dropped.
In the future, what I'm probably gonna do
is lean more towards a gaming-type rig,
even though now that I have a son,
that's not gonna happen much, either.
- [Jessie] You have probably the cleanest cable management
that anyone's shown yet.
You think you can show us the back?
(sighs)
- This front is fine, but,
this is slightly embarrassing.
I'm not really happy with it,
it is kind of a mess,
and honestly this case, as beautiful as it is,
isn't the most easy to work with.
You're like, "Who looks at the backside?
It's not clear. Don't worry about it."
- The moment of truth, the cable management, that's right.
Oh my goodness.
It's not bad.
The power supply isn't modular at all,
so I did my best with what I got, so,
I found as many twisty ties as I could,
and I popped it in there.
For me, the most important thing is that it'll play
all the newer games that come, at medium settings,
at 1080p, I don't know.
It's nothing special, but it does the job for me,
and I'm more than happy with her.
- I don't remember quite where this started.
I have had a consistent mostly white color scheme,
but I think the earliest iteration of this was a 4770K,
with a crappy I think gigabyte motherboard
that ended up dying, and a Node 304.
It's a cute little case, kinda looks like a mini fridge.
But the problem with it is, the power supply
is in the front, like here.
Your motherboard's back here, and then the fan is up here.
So, the airflow just completely misses the motherboard.
So I would look at temps,
and the VRMs would be at like 95 degrees all the time.
And of course one day I come home,
go to turn my computer on,
nothing happens.
Something you guys might not realize, but,
if you have any friends that are say mechanics
or contractors or something like,
you might've heard from them
that mechanics don't like working on their own cars
'cause they spend all day working on cars,
and it kinda is the same
for people that build computers all the time.
I just have no interest in touching this thing ever.
It works, I just leave it.
Ah...
You guys just got scammed.
Took the side panel off, can't even see.
- [Jessie] Remove the other side panel.
- I can't, well maybe just a little bit.
Okay, yeah, I can manage a little.
Yeah, this is not bad, actually.
Another reason I actually ended up with this case is,
I built a system for LTT in this case,
and I realized,
it looks really nice and it comes with the RGB pre-wired,
and it has really nice cable tiedown spots, so,
you can see this whole portion is pretty nicely managed,
but these were pre-installed, you just had to undo 'em,
slide the cables in and tighten 'em up.
The only one I really added was here,
but I think I could add a little bit more,
I think I could do a little better with the cable ties,
maybe from LTTstore.com?
You know, you guys can get your own at LTTstore.com.
There we go, look, that's even better.
- I've got a one terabyte M.2 NVMe on the board,
inside there, and then I've got an extra one terabyte SSD,
just plugged into the back whenever.
I've got these blue extensions that I bought from CableMod.
This orange extension is just for SATA, I think.
Or no, it's a Molex extension,
'cause I've actually got...
So then if you'll notice, I actually put a sound card in.
I know, it's a sound card.
I bought it because my drivers broke.
I could not for the life of me figure it out,
I reinstalled Windows, I formatted everything,
I rebooted it, my drivers were still broken,
I don't know what happened, I honestly don't.
They're fine now, so I don't even need this thing anymore,
but to its credit, this sound card does have a little better
than the onboard audio,
so I'm overall not unhappy with my purchase.
Plus, it has RGB when that's going,
and so I'm not gonna complain.
But yeah, I needed a Molex connector for it.
Like who uses Molex anymore, right?
Yeah, so for the back...
I guess Linus isn't the only one who drops stuff, now.
I have a lot of extensions and stuff running,
so there's a lot of cable back here,
but that's why I love this case,
is because you've got all of this space
for cable management.
- So I was super stoked on the laptop,
and I had it for about two weeks,
and I had it in the office,
was just using it normally,
and then Alex actually walked up to me to try it out,
and he tried out my touchpad, and informed me
that I actually had the touchpad issue that was going on
in the first early units of this version of the XPS,
where there's I think a weird dead zone on the left.
I then proceeded to have to send it back to Dell
and get a replacement,
which was actually a pretty good experience overall,
they were very quick and responsive,
and they had me a new unit in less than two weeks
from my first email.
But yeah, honestly, besides that,
that's been the only quirk that I've had,
battery life has been good on this thing,
speed's been good,
the touch display has been very responsive,
and I actually, I used to make fun of Linus
while we were shooting videos back in the day with laptops
that were first getting touch screens, saying like
"Oh, that's not necessary, it's really dumb,
why would you want that?"
And I will admit, I have started using it probably daily.
Especially things like pinch to zoom,
or if you're looking at a photo
and you really wanna move around
to edit a different part of it,
it's pretty handy.
- So, the reason why I only have this, as well as my Switch
and then my old consoles is because
I grew up in a console household,
we were only allowed one system,
and as much as I would see other people
building PCs at the time,
and wanting to learn more about it,
I never quite had the funds to build my own,
and so the best bang for the budget
to get into playing games for me
was simply to just buy an Xbox.
And especially this, you know,
it's the One X, it was the most powerful at its time,
up until about nine months ago,
and when it was on sale, it was a very easy buy,
you just throw down the money and then, you know,
you can easily make it your own
by getting different accessories if you wanted to.
And you can kinda tell, thanks to the dbrand skin job
that I half attempted on here,
you might be saying "Matt, why is there no skin on the top?"
Easy, 'cause I suck at skinning devices, that is why.
- [Jessie] So what do you use for tasks
you'd normally do on a PC?
If you even need to do any.
- There's this really awesome thing,
and it's pretty great, I'll show you quick fast here.
It's called Samsung DeX.
(chuckles)
But essentially, everything that I do
is always done off of my phone, so,
I would make music videos for my band back in the day,
and I would cut the videos using Adobe Rush.
I would take pictures from the stage,
and I'd edit them in Lightroom on mobile.
And then anything from my GoPro,
I would use the GoPro app, and just fix it up there as well,
but, everything PC-based was either done on my 2012 HP ENVY,
which is way back in Winnipeg, because it's broken,
or otherwise, everything was done off of my S10.
You wanted to see what my home PC is,
and this is pretty much it.
The only other thing, really, would be,
you know, you gotta have your mic system for your PC,
and then, you know, the whole thing about a PC is,
you're buying it so that you can have access to
as many games as possible,
and while I like that approach,
you can also buy another console,
and then you have even more access to games.
So, I bought a Switch when they first came out.
- [Jessie] Is that a Steam Deck?
- This is how I play every game that I want to.
Other than PlayStation, because my name's not David,
and I don't like the DualShock controller.
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