A threadripper build??! in this economy??

Recently, Linus Tech Tips built a system for Linux Tour Vault, creator of the Linux kernel. And the Linux operating system has basically taken over the entire universe for operating systems, except for the desktop. And boy, if Microsoft continues on the trajectory they're on, we've got a fighting chance of the desktop. So, this this is a build video, but it's not for Linus Tovals. It's for Greg Crow Hartman. It's that time again. This isn't the first build I've done for Mr. GKH, but this will be a build that makes some very different choices and also some of the same choices that Linus Tech Tips did. So, let's hang on. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's time. It's time. Let's talk about it. Let's talk about choices. [music] But before getting to that, this video is actually brought to you by serverpartdealss.com. Typically, they have mechanical storage. They also have enterprise SSDs. They have well below market rate enterprise SSDs. And they give you the actual smart statistics for the drives, and they let you see how much wear they have on them before you buy them. And they've generally been really good about the warranty service. You can check the level one community. I've been buying stuff from server part deals for years before they were doing ads, but they're doing ads. And so uh they have supplied some money, some cash money because this doesn't have mechanical storage or anything else that I can use in order to uh help defay the cost of this also. So big thank you to server part deals. Now if you're in a company, I know a lot of you are CIO CTO trajectory in your careers and your company has surplus equipment. You should also check out Server Part Deals because they buy stuff. So you can call Server Part Deals and say, "Hey, I've got 200 of this drive. Uh let's negotiate." They're not interested in your drawer full of old hard drives. They need stuff that's actually modern. Stuff that doesn't have 500,000 hours of power on time. Stuff that is not end of life. It's like, oh, the company pivoted. We're not doing that project anymore. Now is the time to liquidate. You could probably get more out of it than you paid for it because of the storage shortages and everything else. And I think it's probably going to get worse. I've got major FOMO. I'm buying a lot of storage. So, again, thanks to Server Part Deals for sponsoring this video. [snorts] Woo. All right. So, let's do some rambling about my choices for components. And again, it's like this is not the first time that I've chosen this case. This is the Fractal Torrent. That's also the case that Lionus chose for Lionus because Linus going to Linus. This case, three fans in the bottom, two huge fans in the front, and the top is closed. The closed top actually makes a bigger difference for noise dampening than you would expect. And Fractal doesn't sell this as a noise dampening case. There's not even any noise dampening material inside here like they do with their Define 7. And I added a rear exhaust fan, 140 mm, which is Arctic, by the way. The the tower cooler here is the 4UM from Arctic. I love it. It's great. It was a tough choice. We'll talk about that in a second. And then also our 140 mil exhaust fan. [sighs and gasps] It was not an easy choice to choose this case again. I almost chose the ASOS Pro Art case. And it also has two giant fans in the front. ASUS gives you some options for the top part of it. Mesh cooling, all that sort of stuff. That case is bigger than this case. It's bulkier than this case. It is heavier than this case. It is very, very slightly quieter than this case. But the top is mesh. And because it was a little bigger and a little more bulky, and because this has to be shipped uh kind of a long distance, I chose the uh the fractal case. And plus also Mr. GKH already has this exact case but in gray instead of jet black for his dual processor build server and he was okay with that. So I feel like this is fine. There's not anything that dramatically improves on this. Uh I really wish the front IO was a little more rich like considering this versus the Pro Art. The Pro Art has got a lot more USB options at the top. It's got a little place in the back you can hide your Wi-Fi antenna. Some pretty clever features in that case. This is, you know, this is still a $200 case though in 2026, so it's fine. He'll be all right. It's easy to clean. Dust filter. It's still a little louder than I would like, but 64 cores, which by the way, thanks AMD. AMD sent over not just a 64 core Thread Ripper processor, but also a 32 gig Radeon AI Pro R9700. Now, special request from Mr. GKH was AMD graphics. Linus Tvolza, he went Intel. Makes sense. I mean, I I get it. But Mr. GKH, the R9700, the R9700, 32 gigs. Yes, it's a very nice GPU. It's basically a 970 XT, but with 32 gigs of VRAM instead of 16. And big thanks to AMD for sending that. but also um a little bit of a guilty uh adventure with that because not only can it game, it can also do AI stuff. So maybe he'll have a little bit of fun with that and rock them and everything else and like the hardware side of that. So he's going to get the uh Sapphire uh AMD Radeon AI Pro R9700. So that's good. Motherboard. Motherboard is also a tough choice. ASUS is what I went with. I actually went with the the uh TRX50 Sage Wi-Fi A because it has a little different layout and because it has a little different layout and it's a little newer board, it is easier to cool the memory. But if the criteria is only cooling the memory, there's the Gigabyte AI top. These came from Microsenter courtesy of Level One. [laughter] This [snorts] is another Thread Ripper machine with the Gigabyte AI top, but it's not a Thread Ripper Pro. It's just a regular Thread Ripper. We only got four DIMs in there. Eight dim slots. It doesn't magically let you use eight dims on a Thread Ripper nonpro CPU. Thread Ripper is four memory channels. Thread Ripper Pro is eight memory channels. But it is a unique motherboard in that it does give you an upgrade path if you swap from a Thread Ripper to a Thread Ripper Pro later. And also one unique advantage, those DIMs are really far apart. If you got a Thread Ripper CPU, it's a lot easier to cool the memory on that. And this one also has that Silverstone 360 cooler that I really like in a Corsair case. I debated about a layout like this for Greg Crow Hartman and this is an unusual motherboard. It would probably be a good fit for him, but ultimately I decided on the ASUS motherboard. Don't mind the forbidden Huawei GPU there in the bottom. It's uh it's crunching some numbers. We're doing some experiments. want to see how things go with the Huawei GPUs because you know why not. For storage, I'm giving Mr. Crow Hartman one of my beloved P5800X PCIe Gen 4 Optane SSDs. It is PCIe Gen 4, but you will not get a faster mass storage device in terms of latency. Lowest latency ever. And uh Fractal gives us a nice mounting option for that right there. Now, it's only 800 GB. That's the drawback for bulk storage. Kioxia. Kyioxia coming in clutch. Kyioxia is supplying a CM7 for this build. This is the E3 version of the CM7. I don't know if I'm going to send him the E3 version or U.2 version, but it's going to be one of those two. And this is high-speed bulk storage. This is no slouch. It doesn't slow down with rights or anything like that. An M.2 probably would have been fine, but I like to go a little bit overboard. Now the motherboard has another interesting feature and that is dual display port in. So you can go from the graphics card into the motherboard and that will enable the graphics part of the USBC ports. And so that's neat because if he wants to relocate this machine to another room, he could run optical Thunderbolt cables and that would tunnel both display and USB to somewhere else. So he's going to have options. Uh the level one tech store actually has some extender type devices. So maybe I can, you know, throw some of that in and we'll see how it goes. Now for cooling, what I've configured, the two front fans for intake, three fans on the bottom for intake, the rear fan here for exhaust, and then we've got two fans on the CPU tower. Now, this is an Arctic 4M. Now, whether you've got the 24 core CPU, Linus, I see what you did. And the or the 64 core, the power in the TDP is basically the same. It's just the number of chiplets. Number of chiplets. 64. The heat is spread out. It's diffused. This is a tower cooler. An AIO would keep this CPU cooler. And it was very tempting to try the Silverstone XE360. We've covered the Silverstone XE360 in a bunch of other builds. If we had gone with the XE360, I probably would have gone with a different case. I could have mounted the cooler in the front. It probably would have make the most sense to put a cooler in the bottom, but I think the tower cooler, like this machine is probably going to be used for like 10 years. Maybe not continuously, maybe not as the primary machine, but it's probably going to live for a really long time now. Silverstone builds their AIO's to be used in a server context. And I have been using the oldest XE3 24/7 since I got it about four years ago. and it is not showing any signs of degradation, which is, you know, really something for an AIO. But all things being equal here, this is what I chose. I also like this case for the airflow, the front to back air flow. The the DDR5 memory here can get a little warm. You may be wondering why I did not choose Thread Ripper Pro, and it is again air flow and heat generation. Double the dims is double the heat production, is double the amount of air that you're going to have to move. And that historically has been a little problematic. It's also sort of difficult to get memory. In case you're wondering what memory is in here, I have not fully decided yet. Right now, it has four 96 gig dims in it. Those are like $2,500 each. I've only borrowed those. I don't know that I can give those away. So, I got to figure that out. If I can't give those away, chances are he's going to end up with 256 gigs of memory. That's 64 gig BIMs because that's really all there is right now. There's not really another option for memory. I've got the word out to MicroEnter. Maybe MicroEnter will be able to find something, pull something from the back office. Not really sure, but we'll see. And finally, power supply. Power supply. It's hard to go wrong with a name brand quality power supply. CIC, uh, FSP, Cooler Master, Silverstone, 80 Plus, Gold, Platinum, Titanium. You get a lot of options for power supplies with a build like this. Minimum 850 watts. 1,000 watts, 1200 watts would be better. Give you some flexibility for future expansion. I've opted to go for an 850 watt power supply. My recommendation would be FSP. So FSP makes server power supplies in um significant quantity and they are making regular desktop ATX power supplies as well. I would love to put a redundant power supply in here. FSP actually makes a redundant ATX power supply. But uh Greg asked me to make his machines as quiet as possible and redundant power supply and quiet do not go together in his form factor. Fortunately, because it is a standard ATX power supply, if something happens, he'll be able to replace the power supply and everything will be fine. So, there's that option. This build ends up having a 2 and 12 gig nick and a 10 gig nick. Tons of USB connectivity because of the ASUS Sage A motherboard. The front panel connections are fine. We have, you know, the dual 3 and 12 mm. I think he'll be pretty happy with this build. This is really not a lot different than than what he's used to and should perform really well. Arch BTW, but more fun and adventures about that later. And that's pretty much it for this build. I've got one SlimSass port that's free. Our other slim sass port is connected to that Optane drive. I don't want to use SlimSass for our CM7 because those are limited to PCIe Gen 4. I really wish on this refresh board ASUS would have gone for a PCIe Gen 5 MCIO header. You see those on Threader Pro motherboards. ASRock Thread Pro actually has two PCIe Gen 5 MCIO headers. And so like there's a couple little things in this build where it's like, yeah, Thread Pro might have been a better choice, but 64 cores, a lot of cache, it's going to compile the kernel really, really fast and also be decently fast for the Optane and and uh NVME storage and everything else. If you're thinking about building a system like this and you have questions, come hang out in the forum, ask questions, chat. We can run some benchmarks on things. It's always a lot of fun. I would level one. Once again, building a machine for Mr. Greg Crow Hartman, Linux kernel maintainer. And thanks AMD for providing the parts for this build. And thanks to you for tuning in and watching and uh helping pay for the rest of the parts. Yay, community. All right, what this does level one? If you have any questions or I miss anything, uh, hit me up at the forum. I'm signing out and I'll see you there. [music] [music]

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