- We've built a lot of
over-the-top PCs on this channel. Seven gamers, one CPU,
the 16K gaming station, but all of those had something in common. Nobody in their right mind
would ever actually buy them. So today the goal is a
little bit different. We're building the absolute
highest-end gaming PC that we would actually recommend. So it needs to be blazing
fast but also stable. It needs to be, well,
expensive, but also something that we could with a straight
face say there's a chance someone is actually gonna buy it. So we're talking a pre-binned
9900KS at 5.1 gigahertz from Silicon Lottery, we're
talking dual RTX 2080 TIs, and air cooling, because guys,
it doesn't make a difference. And this video is brought
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device with GlassWire. Use offer code Linus to get
25% off at the link below. (upbeat music) To help me in my quest to
build the fastest gaming PC money can buy, I've enlisted Jake. - [Jake] Oh, oh, oh! - You got a little something
on there, just go ahead, yeah, just rub that in. The challenge, though, is
that due to BC guidelines, we actually have to stay at least two meters apart from each other. Here's what we're gonna do. You're gonna take that
end of our very long table and I'm gonna take this end. You're gonna focus on the case, I'm gonna put the motherboard
and all the components on there and then at
the end we're just gonna (claps) you know? Really, wow. Wasn't even me. - Hard drives, cables, I need-- (Linus yells) Ah, those are-- - Yeah but still!
- Solid state. - Let's kick off with our CPU choice. Now obviously, AMD Ryzen
third-gen processors deliver a ton of value. But when it comes to
absolute balls-to-the-wall gaming performance, thanks to their slight single-threaded performance edge, Intel still comes out ahead
in the majority of games. Now with that said, as games
start to take advantage of more processing
threads, that could change, and something like a 3900X
or a 3950X with four or eight more cores than this one
respectively could beat it. Maybe we'll try out some
Apex Legends when we're done building up the machine, but
for now the king of the roost really is still the 9900KS. And this one is a little bit special. So we got this pre-binned to 5.1 gigahertz at stock voltage, pretty much, right? - [Jake] I think it's like 1.25. - A little bit boosted
from Silicon Lottery. Now we would've bought
the 5.2 gigahertz one, for what is it, like $900? - [Jake] It's like 1,100. - But they were out of those,
thankfully for my wallet, because they did not just provide this to us, which is great. Thanks for buying CPUs on the
company dime, Jake, love it. - [Jake] Well, they gave
us a discount, all right? - It's only got eight
cores and 16 threads, compared to a top-end
Ryzen with up to 16 cores and 32 threads, especially
for the price we paid, but in most games, that
shouldn't make that much of a difference. We will fire up some Apex
Legends though, just to see. - Now obviously case choice
is a little subjective, based on, you know, what
style you're going for or how many fans you want
or what radiators you got, but for us we were basically
just looking something with the most airflow
possible, 'cause we're gonna have a lot of hardware in there. That's two 2080 TIs, 500
watts, and that CPU overclocked is probably 250, maybe,
so something like this, the PC-O11 from Lian Li, with nine fans. We're gonna completely
load it up with Noctuas, here we are. Should be plenty of airflow for our setup. - For motherboard we're using
the Maximus 11 Hero from Asus. We could have probably gone with the Code, with its cooler-looking
aesthetic and better rear IO, but there's no VRM difference,
so given that this is all about performance and most
of the motherboard is gonna be covered by, well, all the
money we spent on performance with these graphics cards,
there was no purpose to it. Now their top-end board,
the Formula, has like, water-cooled VRMs and all
that good stuff, but again, no real difference in performance, and we're air-cooling anyway, so. As always the process is lift up the arm, align the little golden
triangle with the little dot on the motherboard or the
little triangle on the cover, insert the CPU, but down the hold-down and lower the arm,
this'll pop off, hold on to this in case you retire
your motherboard in the future. - If we were truly trying
to be unlimited budget with no bounds, we coulda
gone with the 1600-watt, but we wanted obviously to be
a little bit more sensible, so this is the thousand-watt
Prime Titanium unit from Seasonic, they make
awesome power supplies, totally not sponsored,
we just love their stuff. - Because we're not using subzero cooling and extreme overclocking or
anything crazy like that, the only way we can squeeze
more performance out of our system is by
getting faster components in the first place, so
we've gone with some 3600 megahertz CL14 sticks of
Trident Z Neo from G.Skill. These are a combination of high speed and extremely low latency,
and we've got 32 gigs of it, which I'm not expecting to
be a bottleneck for gaming anytime for at least the
next couple of years. As for why we went RGB, honestly
we wouldn't have spent more on it, but unlike the
old days, when you used to compromise some of your
speed to have RGB lighting, nowadays the high-end stuff
is just a lot of the time RGB. I don't make the rules, okay? - One of the objectives
we set for ourselves when planning this
project is that it needed to be stuff that was off-the-shelf,
something you could just pick up and buy or add
to your shopping cart and build in a couple days,
so we went with CableMod's Pearl Cable Kits in their carbon color, which should match our
Asus board really well. - That's gonna look awesome. One area we did go a little
over the top was our SSDs. We're gonna run two
Samsung 970 PROs in RAID 0, but I don't even mind
this, because compared to their 970 EVO, it uses
MLC flash, so we should get extra longevity out
of it, and quite honestly, the choice to go with
two in RAID 0 was more just about having two
terabytes of capacity and less about trying
to get more performance by RAID 0ing SSDs. Honestly it makes very
little difference once you go to an SSD as we demonstrated
in this video right here. - [Jake] Oh no, there's a
dent in this hard drive now. - [Linus] You gotta be kidding me. - [Jake] Just a little one. (Linus laughs) - When we're working on a
showcase build, more often than not we will use a water cooler, even if it's an AIO water cooler, just because the amount of, whoa, hey, ho there. The amount of extra space
they leave around the socket and the aesthetics of the
tubes and the LED fans and all that cool stuff
looks really great, but the cold hard truth is
they don't actually perform any better than a really
high quality air cooler like this Noctua NHD15,
and now that Noctua has a black version of it, (exhales) water coolers don't
even look that much better. Jaku, where's the exhaust on this case? - Um.
- Top or back? - Bottom.
- Bottom, you're going bottom exhaust, so you want
me to have the fan going down? I mean I can. - [Jake] Can you? - No.
- Okay, well, yeah. - The options are back and forward. - [Jake] There's a hole here, but there's not gonna be a fan. - Okay.
- Just do it, whatever. There's gonna be so much
airflow in this case anyways, it's not gonna matter. These are hard drives. These are gonna hold
all the stuffs we need. - [Linus] That's why we chose them. - That's why we chose them. You're probably thinking,
wow, 16 terabyte IronWolfs, those are overkill! And you'd be right. We just had two spaces
in the back of this case, so we figured, let's just
use those extra drives Seagate sent us, and throw
'em in the back of the case to fill those slots. Man, it's kinda crazy to think
that this is 32 terabytes of storage just in this
little block right there. - I know, right? My first computer that I remember, our 386 or whatever it was, had a
100 megabyte hard drive. And then we upgraded, we
got a 600 megabyte one, and I would always have to move programs off the 100 one, 'cause my dolt family would install everything
there, and I'd be like, no, we have to put everything over here! This looks stealth as F. All it needs now is GPUs. I'm wearing our GPU shirt, lttstore.com. - I can't imagine a
situation where I'd be like, the product manager for X
motherboard company and been like, you know what we need? Red SATA cables. This is what we're gonna
manufacture in bulk. - I just don't understand why things are the colors that they are by default. Why aren't they just
black in the first place? - Yes! (laughs) - Why was red ever--
- Or these? These are worse. - Yeah, okay, you wouldn't remember this. You were probably too
young, but Gigabyte used to ship powder blue ones. - Ugh!
- Yeah. It was pretty awful, and that
was on their high-end stuff, back in the X58 days.
- Oh man. The best, though: DFI. UV yellow. - Oh wait wait, is this the Gigabyte one you're talking about, these things? - No that's Intel, those
are sick, those are UV blue. Those look awesome. With a UV light those things are awesome. Big PP? - Oh they're big PPs, they're 3,000. - That is so unnecessary.
- It's amazing! - Here's your fans. - Oh my god, why? - Well I can't hand them to you, can I? - Well yeah, I guess you're right. They're Noctua fans, so I
could probably throw this at a wall multiple times
and it would be fine. - You could probably throw it at a TV and the TV would break, not the fan. These are gonna be real close together, is this the right NVLink bridge? - [Jake] Yep, yeah they're gonna be tight. - (groans) So what I'm
gonna do to make my life a little bit easier is plug
the eight pin connector in now. You can't tell, but this
is my life being easier. That is such an annoying ringtone, only because it's the one
that I used to use though. That has woken me up at
like four in the morning for a flight so many times in my life. - Oh my God, it doesn't fit. - What doesn't fit? - Oh my God. - Oh you've gotta be kidding me. - (laughs) What, are you kidding me? Oh no! (laughs) Oh no, that's so bad. Let's just switch to an AIO, I guess? - I look pretty good, you're
not even paying attention. So we got the graphics cards plugged in, got an OS loaded up, and
we'll try this thing. Got a little update for you. After we completed the build, we found that with the PCI express slot
spacing of that motherboard, there was no way for us to
install our two triple-slot cards in such a way that the
top one wasn't going to absolutely suffocate, so we switched to the MSI Z390 GodLike. It's got a bunch of great
features including support for overclocked memory,
18 phases of power, fancy onboard audio, and most importantly, a much better slot
layout so that we can get one extra slot between them
for some extra airflow. With the new spacing,
our cards are clocking up as expected and everything
is set up for the showdown. As it turns out, our 5.1
gigahertz pre-binned CPU is $750, exactly the price
of a Ryzen 9 3950X 16-core. So Jake is over on the other
side at the studio there, 'cause he doesn't have a
sore throat, and he has an identically configured AMD system that he's going to drag race against ours, telling us once and for
all if we actually picked the right gaming system,
because when it comes to other things, 16 cores,
definitely a lot more than eight. So we're not gonna be looking at anything other than gaming here. For Shadow of the Tomb Raider,
we're running everything cranked at 4K with the
only exceptions being that we're not running RTX DLSS and we have turned off motion blur. We're using TAA for anti-aliasing
and we're ready to go. I'm at like, 80 FPS in the
opening move around Laura, oh up around 90. - Drum roll.
(bangs table) - Average FPS 103. - Average FPS 97, ah! - I win by, ooh, 5%! All right, here we go boys. Three, two, one. All right, I'm at 500 and change. Benchmark's done, my average
is 381, what's yours? - [Jake] Uh, 300.8. - That doesn't tell
the whole store though. So we're gonna check
our frame view numbers in Notepad++ here. - Render minimum, 13.5. - Oof, I'm at 25.7, double
the frame rate in the smoke. 99% of my frames were over 99.5. - 99% of mine were over 85.4. - Okay, so that's actually
a significant win, that's about a 20% uplift. - Oh my god, this is
bright, the HDR, oh my God. - Like so many games, it
doesn't have any support at this time for multi
GPUs, so we'll be using just one of our RTX 2080 TIs. We're running everything on
Ultra Nightmare with HDR at 4K. What difficulty level you want, Jake? - I'm Too Young to Die. (chuckles) - Ayy, got 'em. All right, here we go boys. Let's rip up some demon
baddies, oh wow, I'm gonna die. - How are you gonna die? Oh oh man, oh man. I'm looking at about 86.6
on my render average, and then render 99, one,
two, three, four, 69.3. - So that's a 10% advantage
here, which surprises me because Vulcan tends to favor multi-threaded processors more. With that said, the 9900KS
is still an eight-core, 16-thread processor, and there's a limit. Finally it's time for Apex Legends. We're running everything
at insane slash maxed out, we're running TSAA and
we have no FPS target, V-sync disabled. - Pick up a second weapon, oh
yeah, pick up another weapon. I grabbed the Spitfire,
it's the second on the left. Then I'm gonna switch weapons. - Wow, when you really max it out, this game's kinda heavy, eh? I average 96.8. - 87 1/2, I thought I
was gonna win this one. - 10% up, I mean I guess
that's what a pre-overclocked processor does for you, but all right. Well it looks like we done did okay. We wasted a little bit of money
on a second graphics card, most of our games didn't really
get much benefit from that, but other than that, looking pretty good. It seems like a pre-binned,
pre-overclocked CPU from Intel is still able
to edge out AMD's 3950X, which is their fastest gaming CPU. With that said, the situation might change when AMD launches their
fourth-gen Ryzen processors, which are rumored to be built
on TSMC's five nanometer node. - Really, I didn't hear that
actually, that's insane. - Yeah, it's gonna be interesting. Mission accomplished then. Without spending extra money
on things we don't need, like 18-core processors, we
built the unlimited budget gaming PC and it really does
perform better than something priced the same but that
isn't 100% focused on gaming. With that said, I'm not
recommending that anyone run out and buy this exact configuration. Particularly the second
graphics card is gonna benefit very few people and only in some games, but it was a lot of fun to
say okay, we're laser-focused on nothing but maximum gaming
performance and just build up something based on that. Speaking of having a lot of fun, it's fun to segue to
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plan at freshbooks.com/techtips We're gonna have that linked below. Hope you guys enjoyed watching this video. Hey which one did we say
we're gonna throw people to? Ah, if you want to see
something that's not entirely focused on gaming
performance, where we waste a lot of money, but still do
get good gaming performance, check out the AMD Compensator. It's a freakin' crazy machine,
you guys might enjoy it. Like there's popular culture
characters named Linus. - Like who?
- Like Linus. - Like Linus Torvalds.
- From Peanuts. - [Jake] Oh, I didn't watch Peanuts. - [Linus] Oh, you don't watch
Peanuts, it's a comic strip. - [Jake] I didn't read Peanuts. (laughs)
