Hey Apple... Eat your heart out - Threadripper 2970WX + InWin Dubili

Oh, I'm glad I checked that. Phew. Okay. Cool. Now we have audio. That would have been disastrous. And now, to give my creation life! That was easier than I thought. Building a compact gaming PC has never been simple, but thanks to the Fractal Design Terra, it's never been easier to put together the ITX system of your dreams. The vented top and side panels means every bit of your PC gets access to fresh air. Plus the panels are tool-less and removable, providing easy access to the internals from any angle. With room enough inside for even triple-slot graphics cards, you'll be able to turn this 10.4-liter case into a frame-ripping machine. Available in black, white, or my personal favorite, jade green. Stunningly good looks and build quality in the smallest size possible. Check out the Terra ITX from Fractal Design by following the links down in the video description. And thanks again to Fractal Design for sponsoring today's video. Welcome back to Craft Computing, everyone! As always, I'm Geoff, and today is a build that has been a very long time coming. Let's rewind the clock back almost exactly three years, to March of 2021. At that time, I built my really good friend Rhett a workstation for doing video editing and audio editing at his house. But being 2021, there were some massive part shortages going on. From CPUs to GPUs to power supplies to basically anything else you needed to build a brand new PC. It was also a very highly experimental build, as I used an Ant Country Dual X79 motherboard. I am a really good friend, but he also didn't get the cream of the crop. While that wound up being an absolutely fantastic looking build in the Thermaltake AHT200, it wasn't the most performant, even though I was using a pair of Xeon 2687W V2 CPUs. Ivy Bridge just doesn't hold up nearly as well these days as it used to. Fast forward to March of 2023, so again, almost exactly a year ago today, I had Kevin, a fan of the channel, reach out and offer a donation of a Threadripper 2970WX 24 core CPU, as well as an MSI Creation X399 motherboard. This is a fantastic bit of kit, and of course I took him up on it. By the way, links to Kevin's PC parts store is down in the video description if you want to go give him a look. Now when I got this, I was actually fully intending on giving it to Rhett as an upgrade for his X79 workstation. However, graphics cards and memory were also in very short supply a year ago, so this project kind of got put on the back burner. But it wasn't until late 2023 that the bottom of the cryptocurrency boom finally fell out from underneath it and graphics cards were affordable again. Thank you to Ethereum for going to ASIC based mining instead of GPU based mining. And it was at that time I was able to pick up a Radeon 6900XT for about $600. This was a graphics card that I had my eyes on for this exact build. Again, I've said this has been a very long time in the making. I've had pretty much everything that I wanted for about the last six months. But we're doing it now. Now, kind of like my use case for my workstation, Rhett does a lot of professional video and audio work. However, he also does sometimes play games, which is why I wanted a pretty substantial graphics card upgrade for him as well. He's currently using a, I believe he's got a 2070 Super in there right now. The 6900XT should be leaps and bounds more performant than that ever was. For memory, we're going with a 64 gigabyte kit of Oloy DDR4, 3600 megatransfers per second. Now, Threadripper Gen 2 will not actually be able to run the memory that fast, but I am hopeful you'll be able to get somewhere around 3066, maybe even 3200 megatransfers per second running on this system. Now, Rhett's current build does already have a Silicon Power 1TB Gen 3x4 NVMe drive in it, but he also does need some more storage to go along with that. So we're going to load up a Patriot Viper VP4300 2TB Gen 4x4 NVMe drive. Now, this system is still only PCI Express Gen 3, so we're going to have a little future proofing if he ever wanted to move this into another build, probably when I build him his next workstation in another three years. Now, I went back and forth quite a few times on this build over whether I wanted to do air cooling or water cooling. In the end, I think I opted for water cooling, mainly because this is actually only using four CCDs, whereas some of the newer Threadripper chips are using eight CCDs, and the individual chiplets are farther out to the edge of the die. This one, they're all kind of centralized still. There's actually only four CCDs on this unit, so I think a water cooler is actually going to be a fantastic choice. We went with the Gigabyte Aorus II 360 ICE. It's a 360 millimeter AIO water cooler, and it uses the standard Asetek bracket, which is included with most Threadripper chips. And luckily, we are no longer in a global power supply shortage. That sounds so weird to say three years later. So Cooler Master sent out their GX3850 Gold. This is an 850 watt gold rated power supply, and it is completely silent up to 40% power draw. So when this thing is sitting at idle, the power supply is not going to be whirling away. Now, our graphics card is the 6900 XT and still uses dual eight pin PCI Express power connectors. However, this does include a PCI Express 5.0 12 volt high power 450 watt cable native out of the box, and it is a 90 degree connector, which I really do appreciate. And since RET's last PC was kind of a showcase build in the Thermaltake AHT200, I wanted to keep that theme going with another premium case. So today we are going with the Inwin Dubili. I believe is how you pronounce it. It is their latest flat pack case. The cool thing is, is it is a full EATX compatible case that ships in a box that's less than half the size of a case that size should normally be. You'll see what I mean in just a minute when we put it all together. But that is the build. I'm actually really excited to get this one started. So without further ado, let's get this one started. So that took a couple of days longer than I anticipated to finish up this build. Not necessarily because it was extraordinarily difficult, but I wanted it to look right. I spent a little bit of extra time on cable management. I spent a little bit of extra time making sure I had exactly the right parts. Now, you notice I didn't use all the parts that I said I was going to use in the introduction of this video. I'm sure the Aorus Ice 362 is a fantastic cooler, and I fully intended on using that for this build. However, when I was talking to Gigabyte about this build in particular, they said, hey, we have a new cooler we think would be perfect for it. And I said, well, it is a Threadripper build, specifically TR4. Is this TR4 compatible? And they said, absolutely, it is TR4 compatible. And we'll send one over and we'd be happy to, you know, support you in this part of the build. I had assumed it used the Asetek bracket for TR4. But as it turns out, this cooler in no way, shape or form, as far as I can tell, supports Threadripper, either TR4 or TR5. So I don't know if it was a miscommunication in AM4, AM5 when I was talking to my Gigabyte rep. But in any case, I was building this late one night and wound up not being able to use the AIO. So luckily, I had a Noctua NH-U12 handy. But this build is all about color and aesthetics. And I wanted it, again, to be kind of a showcase build. I couldn't just throw the Noctua Brown fans in there. Usually, I'm totally fine with using the Noctua Brown fans. It just was not going to jive with me this time around, though. All around the rest of this case, we have some beautiful white 140mm fans from Asia Horse. And I picked these up on Amazon, fairly reasonably priced. I think the kit of three of them is about $32. They're addressable RGB. They're PWM controlled. They have a max of 2000 RPM. I think they're running at about 750 RPM right now. And that seems to be just about perfect to keep the system cool. So link in the description. But using these nice, beautiful, addressable RGB fans, I couldn't just throw some Noctua Browns on the tower. So I went and picked up... Don't go to sleep. What are you doing? So I jumped onto Amazon and picked up some Thermalright 120mm addressable RGB coolers and replaced the fans with these. So far, these have been fantastic as well. And we'll get into thermals and acoustics here in just a little bit. But let's talk about the Dubaly from Inwin. Holy crap. What a cool case. I have long held the opinion that the PowerMac G5 and 2008 through 2012 Mac Pro are some of the most beautiful pieces of equipment ever made for PC consumers and electronics and enthusiasts. And man, does this ever double down on that kind of aesthetic. This is a Mac Pro case in everything but having an Apple logo somewhere on it. Oh, also the fact that you can take it apart and work on it yourself. Where do you even begin talking about this? Most of this case is held together with these. I believe they are M12 bolts. They are absolutely massive. If that gives you some amount of scale for the quality and type of equipment that is inside of this build. Every single panel on this is overly thick, overly rigid. These aluminum straps that are on the front and the back that make up the top handles for this. God, they are just so gorgeous. The brushing on these is fantastic. If I had to point out one little criticism that I have is I wish the feet were not made of plastic. Underneath these are some standard rubber feet and those do a fantastic job, but it's just such a disparity looking at all of the steel and aluminum and then looking down and it's just ABS on the bottom. I want that to match the rest of the case. And if I can't have this, just give me some nice aluminum pegs, some one or inch and a half aluminum feet for this to stand on. And I think it would just absolutely knock this out of the park. That same build quality continues inside. And let's talk about the backside of the case for just a second. The cable management in here and all of the opportunities that you have for cable ties and zip ties. It's almost everywhere. It's almost perfect. And it's almost perfect because there are so many different fan locations on here. There's three on the front. There's technically three on the top. If you use 120 mil, there's another on the rear. There's another on the bottom. You've got your CPU fans. You've got RGB lights that you can put everywhere. There's so many different places to mount things. The included length of the fan and RGB cables ended up being a little bit short for some of these longer runs, specifically this lower fan in the front of the case. If I wanted to route this fan properly, I would have to go up the back of the case, across the middle, up another section for the main bundle of cables, and then finally into the ARGB and fan hub, which, by the way, there's an eight port hub included in this case for both RGB and fans. Fantastic touch, Inwin. There's not a fan that includes a cable that's a meter long to be able to make that run. A couple of my power supply cables, specifically my EPS cables, ended up being quite a stretch as well. And in fact, if this motherboard had EPS headers in the far top corner, as is very typical of motherboards, I don't know that my EPS cables would have reached all the way to my power supply. I probably would have needed some extensions. As it is, the two EPS headers on this motherboard are directly above the 24 pin in the center of the case, and they're not pulled tight, but there's also no more slack. And I completely forgot a coaster. It's okay. This desk has been here for four years anyway. I think it's almost time to resurface it. Holy crap, I've been in this office four years. And finally, jumping around onto the motherboard side of this case, I thought the Fractal Design North XL was a large case. It has nothing on the size and scale of the Dubli from Inwin. Holy crap, there is room for days. I didn't know it was possible to make a 6900XT look comically small. Now, Rhett does know his way around a computer, but building a workstation for someone I always want to focus on simplicity and longevity and maintenance-free operation for it. And I wanted to keep this thing fairly simple. Obviously, going with an AIO water cooler, there'd be a little bit of dusting every once in a while, but that goes with basically every PC. I didn't want to go with a full water-cooled build because Rhett's never had to maintain a water-cooled build before. But the scale of this PC, the scale of this case in particular, this is begging for a full custom loop. I think we're going to have to revisit this one. I think someone needs to do this case some justice and put a giant reservoir, a couple of rads. This will support a 420 in the front and a 360 on top. The system needs a full custom water loop. It just does. God, what did I just commit myself to? As far as performance goes with this PC, I am very well acquainted with the Radeon 6900XT. I actually used that card primarily in my heavy metal PC, which was my full custom 3 1⁄8 inch steel plate, copper tubing, water-cooled beast that I built just a couple of years ago. If you haven't seen that video, link's in the description. It's worth checking out. Overall, it is a fantastic card and goes blow for blow with an RTX 3090 or an RTX 4070 Super when it comes to gaming performance. So definitely a fantastic option if you're looking for 1440p or even some 4K gaming chops in a gaming PC. The 16 gigs of VRAM isn't a bad touch either. If you have more professional aspirations in mind, like video editing or even professional design work. I'm also very familiar with the Threadripper 2 series of CPUs, having ran a 2950X for close to three years here as my main video editing rig. Now that's the 16 core and 32 thread variant of the Threadripper 2 series. This one is a little bit new to me, though. This is the 24 core 2970WX, a full workstation PC is how AMD marketed this. And so far, I've got to tell you, I am very impressed with the performance of it. Out of the box with absolutely no tweaking whatsoever, we did hit 3200 megatransfers per second on the memory and we're hitting about 4.2 gigahertz on the boost clock. Now, again, this is going to be a massive step up for Rhett as he's currently running a pair of Xeon E5-2687W-V2 CPUs. Those are Ivy Bridge CPUs circa 2012 with 8 cores and 16 threads each with a 3.2 gigahertz base clock and a 4 gigahertz turbo. There are also some inherent disadvantages to running dual CPU Ivy Bridge systems where they don't have a shared front side bus or a shared memory controller. So each CPU kind of operates independently in most tasks. Not that Threadripper 2 solves all of those problems with its four independent NUMA nodes, but with Infinity Fabric, it is a marked improvement. Overall, though, I think this PC turned out absolutely fantastic, even though I think I might have just signed myself up for doing a full custom water cooling loop for Rhett. But what do you guys think of this build? Let me know down in the comments below. And also, again, huge shout out to Kevin for sending over the motherboard and CPU to make this build possible. If you like this video, make sure to hit that thumbs up button and subscribe to Craft Computing if you haven't done so already. Follow me on social media at Craft Computing for daily shenanigans like this. And if you like the content you see on this channel and want to help support me in what I do, head on over to craftcomputing.store, pick up a pint glass, coaster or any other of my drinking accessories and start drinking like a pro. That's going to do it for me in this one. Thank you all so much for watching. And as always, I will see you in the next video. Cheers, everyone. Rum drinks really are dangerous. Today on the channel, we are making an independence swizzle. Now, a swizzle is a classic style rum cocktail that you normally make by filling a Collins glass like this with ice. And then you have what's called a swizzle stick. It's basically a stick with a couple of tines on the end that you rub back and forth in your hands. I don't have a swizzle stick, but we're going to give this my best try. We start out with a half of a lime. I'm actually going to juice that into its own glass here. We're going to do about four dashes of Angostura bitters. And then we're going to do two bar spoons of honey. We'll do we'll do closer to one. This is a fairly large spoon. There we go. And the reason I'm mixing this in a glass before I put it into my Collins glass is because I don't have a swizzle stick. I want to make sure these ingredients are very well integrated and mixed. Now I'm going to pour that into my glass. We're going to add in two ounces of rum. In this case, I've got Sailor Jerry Spiced Rum 92 Proof. It's one of my favorite bottles that I have on hand literally at all times. Pop this the rest of the way up with some crushed ice. And last but not least, we're actually going to add a little bit of granulated sugar to this. Now, if you watched the channel last week, you know that I said, if ever you start a drink by mixing a sugar cube in and then dissolving it into solution, just replace it with simple syrup. In this case, I actually want the sugar kind of floating in solution or suspended. I don't want it actually fully dissolved. Last up, let's spice this thing up. I'm going to garnish with a lime wheel. Toss in some strawberries. And just because I like them, I'm going to toss in a rum barrel aged cherry. And there you have a swizzle. Enjoy. Let me tell you, swizzles are why people think rum drinks are exceedingly dangerous. There's two ounces of rum in here. You'd never know it. Especially now with the strawberries mixed in there. That's a good add. Obviously, the main flavor in this is lime. It's predominantly lime forward. That honey gives it a real earthy and thick sweetness without being overbearing. It's a real balanced but hearty sweet opposite of that super tart citrus of the lime. And I think it would have really finished this thing off if I had actually muddled the strawberry in with that original slurry that I made. I think that would be absolutely a way to go. It stays cold. It's super easy to drink. It's very approachable. It doesn't make you think too much. The rum on the backside is more of a bonus than the main feature. But let me tell you, it's still a pretty good feature.