- I just built a new computer. Which is funny, because I don't
really remember doing that. Maybe I need to retrace my steps. Retrace my steps. Retrace my steps. Let's see here. We've
got a Threadripper CPU. Yep. Aorus Master motherboard. Okay. Fedora Linux? Hey! Wait a minute! I'm the wrong Linus! Oh well. As long as we've got all
these parts together, we might as well assemble them and see what it's like to compute as the one and only Linus. Or Linus. Okay, there's two of
us, but the other one. And today's video is brought to you by our sponsor, Storyblocks Video. Save time and money
with Storyblocks Video, getting studio-quality stock video clips for a fraction of the cost. You can check them out today at the link in the video description. (upbeat music) Funnily enough, I've never actually made a video about the other Linus. He's a Finnish-American
immigrant with U.S. citizenship. Linux is his namesake and brainchild, and he holds the Linux trademark but no longer contributes
much code himself. Most of his personal
contributions since 2012 have been in merging
code written by others. He still does retain the highest authority to decide which new code is incorporated into the official Linux kernal, and he is famously opinionated, saying exactly what is on his mind, and says he is agnostic with
no political affiliation. Linus' law is that given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow. Since we're on a bit of a fun facts roll, how 'bout some fun facts
about the Linux mascot, Tux? Through three logo competitions, Tux was submitted as an entry, but actually won none of them. As a result, Tux is not the logo, but rather the brand character inspired by Linus' love of a picture of a penguin figure he
found on an FTP site. Tux was coined as an
acronym for Torvalds' Unix, and the first and official
drawing of Tux was done on a 486 DX2/50 running Linux and the first public release of GIMP. A defeated contender
was, and I kid you not, a furry with a keyboard. Thank goodness we ended
up with the penguin. (Anthony laughing) Who could very well be a furry. But without a keyboard. About Tux, Linus has said, "Some people have told me they don't think a fat penguin really
embodies the grace of Linux, which just tells me they have never seen an angry penguin charging at them in excess of 100 miles per hour. They'd be a lot more careful about what they say if they had." All right. Fair enough, sir. Enough chitchat. Let's get building. Now, normally, over the course of building a computer like this, I would talk through my rationale behind the various parts
as we install them. But because I didn't
pick any of these parts, I am instead going to lean on
ZDNet's excellent interview of Linus Torvalds explaining why he chose all the parts he did. Now, we've settled on a 3970X 32-core AMD Ryzen
Threadripper processor here, and apparently that was because he had originally planned to
go with a Ryzen 9 3950X but determined that it would've been a small incremental upgrade over the 9900K that he was using previously. Now, Linus normally goes
for regular consumer CPUs because they are typically
the best bang for the buck, and he actually likes the integrated GPUs that Intel puts on their
CPUs because he doesn't like any more fans in a machine
than absolutely necessary. This might make a Threadripper, with its 250-watt-plus power consumption, seem like a bit of a weird choice because that does bring the potential for more or noisier fans. But what's great about
Threadripper is that, for an HEDT platform, if
you need the performance it's actually not a bad bang for the buck. So I think this was a really great choice. Linus' choice of the
Gigabyte Aorus TRX40 Master is probably gonna be
pretty uncontroversial. He looks specifically for motherboards that have good power delivery, believing that there's little more basic than power delivery,
and this is apparently a result of him having systems that were unreliable
due to brownouts, so... It's kind of a funny thing to look for a motherboard that
specifically has features designed for great overclocking and then never overclock them at all. For my part, I like the board's mix of good onboard features,
like five gigabit ethernet and Wi-Fi 6, and expansion. So it's got five PCI
Express expansion slots. Four of them are 16X physical and one of them is 1X physical, meaning you can plug basically
anything you want in it. It's got support for the USB
Type-C internal connector as well as three M.2s, all of which have little heat sinks on them, which admittedly aren't going
to increase their performance and probably won't
increase their longevity, but they can help to soak
up some of the excess heat during short periods of intensive use. But one thing to watch
out for with this guy is case compatibility, because not only is it slightly wider than standard ATX, it has a right-pin 24-pin connector, so you gotta make sure
you have a bit more space available in your case. For cooling, Linus went
with a Noctua NH-U14S, with a second NF-A14 fan in
a push-pull configuration. This was apparently because
he's very sensitive to noise and wants something quiet, and has had good experiences
with Noctua in the past. Truly a man after my own heart. About Noctua's fans, Linus says that even when the fans ramp up under load he doesn't find the noise
particularly annoying, that it's more of a soothing
whoosh white noise sound without the whining or rattling that he associates with lower-end fans. Apparently, despite the noise advantage that a liquid cooler could
provide, Linus is not a fan. He doesn't want to deal with a custom loop and doesn't trust the reliability or even the capabilities of AIO coolers, and especially doesn't wanna deal with any unnecessary gurgling or pump noises. For RAM, Linus actually couldn't find exactly what he was looking
for and ended up settling on some generic DDR4 2666 memory, saying that it was fine memory,
"But I really wanted ECC." The problem was that, because
of parts availability, ECC is not currently priced sanely so he just decided, "You
know what, forget it. This is good enough for
now and should work fine." He actually doesn't even need, apparently, 64 gigs of memory. He just went with it because he wanted to populate all four
of the memory channels, and RAM is cheap right now anyhow. For our part, we chose these
G.Skill Ripjaws V sticks just because they are low-profile
enough to clear our cooler and they're the same speed
that Linus' is using. For storage, there was no question that Linus was going
to choose solid state. It has apparently been over a decade now since he's touched any spinning media, and he even tries to avoid using cables, which is possible thanks to M.2. Anyhoo, after experiencing
some reliability issues early on in the SSD era, Linus apparently found Samsung to be quite reliable and is sticking with what works for him. If Puget's data is anything to go by, I would say this seems like
a pretty darn good choice. So he settled on a
one-terabyte 970 EVO Plus. As I mentioned before, when
it comes to cooling products, Linus does prefer Noctua
over other brands. Unfortunately, Noctua doesn't make cases, so he went with his
second choice, be quiet! This is the Dark Base 700,
a quiet-optimized case, but with plenty of room for hardware and, um, well, Linus did notice when
looking at the front intake, that it looked a little
bit more restrictive compared to the rear exhaust. So what he did was order
an extra Silent Wings 3 fan to go in the front of the chassis. (upbeat music) One thing to watch out for if you were to replicate this build is
you're gonna wanna remove the middle standoff in
the top row because, like many Threadripper boards, this one doesn't actually
have a screw hole there to make more room for power delivery. Very thoughtful preparation
from the manufacturer here. You can see even this fan cable up here has been carefully routed above the I/O so that it doesn't get in your way when you're trying to
install your motherboard. One of the things Linus
said about this case is that with the right fan
control setup in the BIOS, and of course, assuming
that you connected your fans to the correct headers... The paper manual for the motherboard apparently had horrible pictures and he got the CPU and system fan headers the opposite way around
for the first build. What you get is a machine
that is basically silent when it's idling, and then
without any annoying whine, although not silent, under full load. For power supply, Linus
settled for the GX-850. And I do mean settled,
because parts availability due to the pandemic has made it difficult to find some specific parts. In fact, we even had to
switch out to a GX-650 for our build because not even Seasonic could provide us with a GX-850 directly. Now, as with the motherboard, Linus cares a lot about
power delivery basics. He goes, basically, "What's the top potential
power use of this machine? Okay, I'm gonna pick a power
supply with 2X that rating and then look for reviews
and reputable brands." This is a good strategy
for a couple of reasons. Number one, it means that
you are basically guaranteed to not under-buy your power supply, which is an obvious problem. And number two, if you're a silence freak, which we know that he is, it means that your power supply may, in many cases, barely ramp up its fan, if at all, even under heavy load. Hey! Yeah, it's clean! It's clean, boys! That Linus knows how to build a computer. For graphics, Linus
went with, and I quote, "Some random Sapphire
RX 580 graphics card." Thing is, Linus isn't
that interested in gaming and dislikes having to
account for graphics, in fact preferring to
just have something modern built into the CPU, and
I can understand that, how it's more important to
have the correct feature set in the hardware than
it is to actually have the performance if you're not a gamer. This is another quote: It's
overkill for what I do. Fair enough, sir. (snickers) As for why he might choose to
go Team Red versus Team Green, well, it is no secret that Linus has publicly feuded with Nvidia, in fact even one time
going as far as to say, "(beep) you, Nvidia," in the middle of... I think it was a conference
or something, wasn't it? Yeah, it was pretty public so, um... RX 580. We didn't find any pictures
of the actual machine online so I can't verify this,
but given his choices I think it's fair to assume that Linus didn't spend many, many hours on perfect, meticulous cable management, but did at least do a decent job, so that's what we're going for here. It seems like a pretty
well-thought-out machine. The kinda thing you wouldn't just throw all the cables in willy-nilly. With the machine fired up, it's already what I
would describe as quiet, but it's definitely not silent. Fortunately, Gigabyte has
extensive fan tuning options in their BIOS, and we're gonna go ahead and take some guesses as to
what Linus might be using. So first up, we're gonna
set both our CPU fan and our CPU fan OPT, so that's
the optional secondary one, to silent mode, and
we're gonna use our CPU as the fan control temperature input. The other thing that we're gonna do is we're going to change
both of them to Enabled for the OPT Stop mode right here. That allows the fans to
actually turn off completely under very, very light loads,
although there's no guarantee that with a 32-core
processor anything qualifies as low enough thermal output
to completely turn off. SYS_FAN6A, this is the
header that I'm using for my case fans, so
I'm gonna go ahead and, because his graphics card is clearly not going to see heavy
use, I'm gonna tie this one to CPU as the temperature input as well, and once again I'm going
to enable Stop mode. Our RAM has XMP. I'ma go ahead and enable it just so we can lower the latencies a little bit. I doubt his does, but okay. All right. We deviated in one way. After firing up the
machine for the first time I wasn't actually happy
with the level of silence, so what I'm doing is I'm
changing the threshold for the zero-RPM operation to
about 50 degrees on the CPU. And then I'll have the fan
speed ramp up from there. And that is one quiet system. The only thing we could
do now to make it quieter would be to put the panel on. Not only does it look nice, it actually blocks a lotta sound. That is not a shabby-lookin' machine, other than the Fedora Linux installer that we've got sticking
out of the front of it. Yes! That is the daily driver flavor of Linux that Linus Torvalds prefers. So we're gonna ahead and
just boot it live for now. Of course, it's not enough for us to just build Linus' system,
we have to benchmark it, and we can't just use
any old gaming benchmark. So instead we're going to be
compiling the Linux kernel, and this is the kinda thing that he might actually have to do on a
fairly regularly basis. Taking some patch, applying it, booting it for testing purposes. And what our hope is is that we'll be able
to do it very quickly, because otherwise I'm
gonna be standing here for a very long time. You might have we noticed
we had a couple of arguments in the command line there. So one of them was time. That's gonna tell us how long the test took after we're done. And another was the number of threads. So we're using 64
threads to take advantage of the 32-core SMT CPU in our machine here.
(case clangs) It even sounds
high-performance, doesn't it? (case clanging) Strong. You know? Like, bow!
(case clangs) Bow, you know? Bow!
- Stop it! - We are done already. That only took just over 3 1/2 minutes! This is one fast machine. And... Yeah, the fans ramped up a little bit. We got some heat comin' out of the back, but that is very reasonable! You know, I think the thing that stands out to me most about this machine is just how carefully thought-out
everything about it is. Now, you might assume that
an average software developer really takes the time to
get to know the PC hardware, but many of them don't even bother to build their own computer
because they can't be bothered. They're busy writing software. Linus, on the other hand, has
actually done us a huge favor. You guys might've noticed
that over the years we have actually never done a
developer-focused build guide or even build log, and part of it is that we don't really fully understand
the needs of developers as much as a true developer would. Well, thank you, Linus, other Linus, for doing it for us. Because this is not only performant, it looks great, it's quiet, and the only thing that
I look at here and I go, "Ah, that's really not the
way I would've done it," is the memory, which is something that he already acknowledged
was not perfect. I'd have gone with
maybe 3200-megahertz RAM just to get that little
bit of extra snappiness. So thank you, Linus, for helpin' us out, hookin' us up with this
fantastic parts list here for development work,
and thank you to ZDNet for the original interview
that we obviously leaned on for making this video. You're gonna find links to all these parts as well as that interview
in the video description. Finally, thank you to
our sponsor, Storyblocks. With Storyblocks you
can save time and money thanks to their massive library
of high-quality footage, aftereffects templates, music and more. All the content is royalty-free for personal or commercial use. And speaking of commercial use, we use them all the time commercially, especially over on our Techquickie channel where the goal is to make
videos as fast as possible. So we don't always have time to go and get a pickup clip or shoot something, and why bother when you
can just download it? New clips are added regularly, so you don't have to
worry about using clips that are like 10 years old. So go check them out at
storyblocks.com/linustechtips. If you guys enjoyed this
video, maybe check out... Hey, check out my video
on the Dell XPS 13 2-in-1. It's a variant of the XPS 13 that Linus Torvalds has
also spoken very highly of. He says he likes that
machine so much for himself that he ended up buying
one for his daughter when she went away to
school, so there you have it.
Anthony is our sleeper agent.
Turning LTT gradually to the Tux side :-D
Not really gaming related, anyhow it's delightful to see the Linuses acknowledgement.
The kernel compiled before I would have finished a git clone 0_0
I am so grateful for LTT doing this and hope their group genuinely enjoys featuring Linux on their videos.
Not gaming related but still pretty cool :D
I don't really follow his channel, when did he adopt the Obi-Wan look? Cause I'm liking it.
Can't wait for the day I can play r6 on Linux
Yes! This was exactly the Red Green style of content I was hoping LTT would do once Linus grew the proper beard! Embrace your inner duct tape!
Wow that's like 12 different pronounciations of "Linus".