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Uh today is going to be a very special build video / teardown / why did I make these terrible choices? We're memorializing that so that he can make fun of me later. This is Mr. Eric S. Raymond. Uh he is responsible for quite a lot in the history of all things, but we're building a really nice Threadripper system and we're going to talk about some choices. Hello and welcome. It's good to be here. Woo! Is it I mean, no, but it's fine. All right, so this has become our What is it? Once every 3-year tradition?
Approximately that. Approximately, yeah. Uh we got you on the Threadripper bandwagon pretty early and now I'm pretty excited to get you at least a little bit on the local AI bandwagon Oh, yeah. with our 9700 32 gigs of VRAM. And I really would love like AMD has been very kind. They have been giving me a lot of these. Greg Kroah-Hartman beat you to it. So, his system also 32 gigs of VRAM, very similar build. Uh but actually your motherboard is the same as Linus Torvalds. So, everybody's getting on the Threadripper build. It's It's It's been a lot of fun. It's been very really super interesting.
Threadripper 9970X, um your memory has lore attached to it. have 128 gigs of V-Color memory. They have built-in mechanical heat spreaders. Most modern DDR5 memory does not have modern heat spreaders, but even though this is a desktop class system, it uses server class memory. And I'm the rando that figured out that the platform here was not doing thermal throttling or thermal monitoring the way that it was supposed to and the memory would quietly cook itself. This V-Color memory didn't suffer from that problem because they used heat spreaders. So, you get the good memory because um there's a bit of a memory shortage now and this is literally the memory that I used to find the bug.
I'm impressed. Well, well, it's it's it's fine. It's not It's really just janitorial level things like looking at a clipboard and saying, "Did we actually do the thing that's in the spec?" And the answer was no. [clears throat] So, we've also used a Noctua cooler. I'm going to pop the glass off here to make it a little easier. We've used a Noctua cooler, and it is the heat load design or heat exhaust design is basically pulling fresh air from mostly from the front, a little bit from the bottom, and exhaust it at the top and the back. And so, our Noctua cooler here is turned such that the hot air basically just goes out the top.
Tell them about the scoop. There's a scoop in the front that forces air up through the front, and that's like this is a blower style card. Like gamers don't like this because it can get kind of loud. But, this doesn't get super loud when you've just got the one um for airflow. But, it does flow hot air through the card. So, and you get a hot air out the back as well. So, that's kind of nice in terms of this GPU design. Uh storage, so we had to 3D print storage. Your storage comes courtesy of Kioxia. Kioxia is the leading, if one of the leading, if not the leading flash memory manufacturers. And so, we 3D printed a 120 mm fan to U.2 adapter, and there's a special electrical adapter that gives you a U.2
U.2 connection for your drive to what is normally an M.2 slot on your motherboard. But, this Kioxia drive runs at PCIe Gen 4, so it's 8 GB per second. It is also designed with enterprise endurance in mind. This is a one drive write per day, so you could write 3 TB to it a day, and it won't wear out for 5 years. Excellent. Uh I figured you would be doing a lot of fun stuff with it. But, the reason it's located here at the top is cuz it really needs to take advantage of the air flow. There's three fans in the front and the air flow over the drive is
very important. These drives are like 25 watts, which can be a fair amount of heat production. And these design these drives are really designed for use in a server. This is not a server chassis, but this is a perfectly reasonable way to I like the extra endurance from server grade hardware. Yeah. And it's still fast. Like it's not It used to be in the past that you would choose an enterprise grade drive and you would give up a little bit of speed. It's not really the case here with a lot of the drives that the Kioxia has, which is why they've been really popular in the enterprise. Uh you may have noticed that uh I've added a bit of RGB.
He admitted he was trolling me when he did that. Uh the nice thing is that this actually works under Linux. There's no software. The browser connects to a serial port and then you can just turn it off. You have to set up a Udev rule, but that's not hard. Yeah. The it's like the flat pack is uh such that it's like, "Okay, I've I've toggled it off now. Now we can stop obsessing in the comments.
There's no more RGB." I think this might be your first machine that has RGB. I did I have never had case lights before. I feel so lit now. Well, that's that was the intended effect. Yes. Yeah. You have to convey to normies the uh insanity of your uh pedigree, I guess, for lack of a better way to describe it. We are in horse country. I don't know. The practical reason for this case is that it has really good air flow, but it's also not huge. Um it really was tough. Like we've done some videos lately on Silverstone, like their big giant steel tower cases, and I really like those for workstations, but man, it would be twice
the weight of this thing. And unless you're going to build a four GPU rig, I you're probably fine. This GPU is you know, a 200 to 250 watt GPU. It is not 600 watts. So, you know, your absolute maximum at the wall power draw is on the order of like 7-800 W. So, I think this will be fine. Now, the software aspect of it, you can speak to a little bit more. You're You're running openSUSE Tumbleweed with Cosmic. That's correct, because I wanted a rolling release. I'm I'm tired of waiting 6 months for my development tools to catch up. I had been running Pop!_OS, which is fine. It's an excellent Ubuntu derivative, uh but I wanted a rolling release distro, and uh and openSUSE is what we settled on. And Cosmic on openSUSE is a bit of
a challenge. It's a bit of an uphill battle. Yes, uh a mutual friend of ours had to do some customization work to get that working, but everybody's going to benefit from that. You can check that out and add Cosmic to your own tumble weed installation. If you're scared of the whole AUR debacle, the AUR, the uh you just come on over to Tumbleweed, I guess. I don't know. I don't have a lot of experience with Tumbleweed, so this has been a lot of fun for me setting this up as well. It's like, how do I do this thing? I mean, I know zipper, but like there's more to it than that.
Uh and one of the nice features of this system is that when zipper does a package install, it creates a system snapshot. So, if the package leaves you in a bad state, just go back to the uh the boot list and pick the previous snapshot. Yeah, we've already done the uh the system migration. This is pretty good. Uh the only other piece of hardware that you're going to add to this is a large optane PCIe drive, which we can like even though you've only got 128 GB of memory, for the types of tasks that you're doing, you can use the optane as kind of a spillover, and that'll work fine. Oh, LM Studio. That was a lot of fun. Uh LM Studio's right in the Cosmic store, and also works on, you know, if
it's a flat pack, uh and also works on Cosmic, and that's what we were using for uh GPU uh AI experimentation. So, you're running Quinn 3.6.35b, A3B, that's the mixture of experts version. Um the 6-bit version of this fits entirely on the 32 gig GPU, which means that we can run it at 131 tokens a second. Yeah, that's pretty good speed. And this example, uh, it was like, I don't quite remember how to uh, re- reset or update the Lux recovery key on a logical volume. We just asked and it ran locally and it knew. Yeah, very good. We should talk about Handy, too. Oh, yeah, Handy. Uh, Handy is a is an app that will let you, uh, do voice capture and it uses Parakeet V3. It actually gives you a lot of options. Um,
and that also runs locally on a GPU, so it's absurdly fast. So, you can just talk to it and it'll just do things. Yeah, I wanted to be able to voice type into my machine and have it not care what application I was typing to. Particularly handy for prompting LLMs. Now, there is a bug on the GitHub issue tracker for Handy with Cosmic, because of course there is. You have to bind the, uh, the shortcut listener to call Handy directly as opposed to letting you do it through the GUI. Womp. But, that's okay, we do that.
This is a DOS shareware game that I happen to find out from the very old days. You're fighting a wind-driven forest fire and you can drop water on, uh, on pieces of the forest. Your objective is to keep the houses from burning up. It's, um, it's a fun game, uh, but the interesting thing about it is the technique that I used to recover it. You want me to talk about that? Yeah, yeah, I think this is a non-horrible, you know, society-ending use of AI, because those exist. And actually, those are the preponderance of things that exist, but I there's some people who don't believe that.
I found a copy of fire.com, which was the original DOS game from, uh, from 1985. And it's a block of machine code. Now, I asked the LLM, "Can you decompile this for me?" The LLM looked at it and said, they looked at the way the string literals were stored and said, "Oh, I see this was Borland Pascal originally." Borland Pascal source code, readable source code. It was able to infer from the description of the game and the internal logic flow what the functions and data structures should be named. I mean, it was as good as you might get from a human programmer. Uh and I [clears throat] then said to the LLM, "Okay, but I don't have a Borland Pascal compiler. Would you turn this into Rust, please?"
And it did it. And this whole process took me less than 5 hours. And so, now you can just cargo install this and uh it exists again in a way that people can enjoy in a modern sort of audience configuration. Now, this is just a silly game, but the important factor here is that there's a lot of orphaned ancient software that only exists as binaries, and it's actually practical to recover and modify that stuff now. It lives on GitLab. So, if you'd like to download it and try it, you can check it out there. And that will be a lot of fun.
I uh I'm kind of blown away by this kind of a use case, too, because you like you talk about recovery of things were lost that should not have been lost. Yes. Sort of sound like Tolkien a little bit there. Yes. But uh you can recover it. It's like, "Oh, this is actually a lot of fun." And not an insane number of tokens. Uh another mildly interesting aspect of the story is that I'm now shipping a Rust game. I don't hand code in Rust. I don't really know the language. I mean, if you asked me to sit down and write a Rust program from scratch, I couldn't do it.
That's not one of my languages. But that doesn't matter anymore because it's the robot friend knows how to write Rust. You we I understand the algorithm this needs to be. I understand the fix. Uh there were some changes here um like a monochrome display you were telling me about. Yeah, there uh it was a pretty bad UI, very primitive. It was 1985, what do you want? It used to ask you three separate questions before the main game screen came up, and one of them was monochrome or color display. And those old-fashioned monochrome IBM PC displays don't exist anymore, so I ripped that logic out.
And Robot Friend made that a lot more accessible, and you were a lot more productive in addressing that. You also had some a specific TUI library in mind for handling the update to Rust, I think. Yeah, um I don't remember what it's called, but it's it's a equivalent of the old um uh C curses library, except that it assumes that you have an ANSI compatible terminal, which is a safe assumption to make these days. In 2026, like 50 years later. Oh. Another fun thing. Uh one of the things the library used to I used is capable of doing is it intercepts mouse events. So.
I just moved its focus. I just moved where it will uh drop water or do fire breaks. That wasn't a thing in 1984. No. No, we barely had mice then. What a fun and interesting distraction, but also like kind of a lot of fun. It's fun to see the capabilities of these new tools because I you know, certainly somebody that was working on this in the '80s would never think that it would survive in this way in the modern world, and yet here we are. Yeah, I've contacted the guy who wrote it originally. He's completely fine with it being open source, so it's all good. The tradition continues. That is a that is I mean
it speaks for itself, but also I love to see this kind of thing because the technology must not be permitted to fall into obscurity. Of course, maybe that's just my own hoarder mentality. It's like, "Oh, this can live on a hard drive from now until the end of time." 800 versions of The Oregon Trail. That could be anthropology in and of itself. You have died of dysentery. Yeah. It's the same experience, but it was rewritten at least 50 different times for 100 different platforms. Is it Does Is there a version that runs on Linux?
I think so, yeah. Uh there's a version on Steam of all things. Oh, wow. Yeah. Yeah, it was it's it will exist from uh from now until the end of time. Also, um Carmen Sandiego and that sort of thing. I have a feeling the same thing would happen with SimCity, but Maxis is still sort of around. But there is a SimCity port for Linux. I've played it. Uh there's a lot uh a lot of different versions. There is something I should mention at this point. I read a very interesting article about uh people who study patterns of neurological activation when people are playing computer games. And it turns out these old-fashioned character-oriented
games have a virtue that modern games don't. If you watch what the brain is doing when they game, these old games activate areas of the brain connected with visualization and imagination. They give the brain a pretty comprehensive workout all over the frontal lobe. Modern hyperrealistic games don't. They're not stimulating the brain as much or as well. So, maybe that's a good reason not to forget these games. Well, I can definitely remember some of my own old sessions of playing NetHack. I was definitely getting a mental workout trying to juggle all of the things.
You're welcome. I was a NetHack dev. I know. Oh, I know. So, yes. Yes, that does give you a workout. Those games have virtues. And it's it's NetHack still has a player community. Probably always will. Yeah. Well, it's cuz it's it's genuinely engaging and fun and then I mean, there's the whole genre even endures still like Dwarf Fortress. Dwarf Fortress is probably you have to stay away from that because we'll never see you again. I Yes, there is a certain category of game which I have recognized as an info hazard, which I must not touch or it will eat my brain. Dwarf Fortress is one such, so is Factorio. Facto- the Factorio. I fear these things.
I did turn him on to Stellaris. I thought Stellaris was the most safe dangerous game that you could probably get sucked into a little bit. fair. That's fair. It's a lot of fun. And all Yeah, this even though it does AI, this will happily run games fine. It's roughly equivalent to a 970 XT. So, you're in good hands. Interestingly, Linus Torvalds chose Intel for his GPU, but Greg Kroah-Hartman also chose the R9 700. And actually, Greg Kroah-Hartman's after me to get a second R9 700. AMD, if you're listening, I need more R9 700s to hand out TO THESE FOLKS.
UH YOU CAN DO a lot more with 64 gigs of local VRAM than 32. And you're you're you're almost set up to be able to handle it. Yeah. So, that will be a lot of fun. Uh anything else you want to talk about on your software build or uh you're you're coming from I think a second or third generation Threadripper. It's There's a video about it. It's a System76 Thelio. System76 supplied the system. This system mostly comes from us. Fractal gave us the case.
Uh I bought the memory. I think AMD gave me the CPU. The motherboard came from Micro Center. Uh the power supply came from Micro Center. Kioxia supplied the SSD. Kioxia, thank you because SSD is basically like a three terabyte It's a four terabyte, but it's the endurance configuration of 3.2. But, getting a four TB enterprise-grade NVMe is astronomically expensive at this point in 2026. So, you asked me for anything else about the software build. Should I rave about Cosmic a little? Yeah. Okay. I really like Cosmic Desktop. Um I used to use i3, which was a very austere tiling window manager. And I like tiling because it's
efficient. I'm not wasting screen real estate on decorations uh and stuff. And then 3 years ago, I saw Cosmic and it's like, "Wow, I can have tiling, but it also looks pretty?" I think the we were talking about this a little earlier, and I think a better way to explain the tiling window manager is that the window manager does the right thing 99% of the That's right. And it stays out of your way. Yes, it helps you work more efficiently on the relatively limited number of pixels that you have for what you're trying to juggle.
Yes, that's right. Uh and I used to use i3, and i3 suited me for a long time, but uh from Cosmic, I get better options for integrating tiling, which I usually want, with floating windows, which I sometimes want. It's very seamless the way you can move back and forth between those ways of managing your screen. That's been my experience as well, because you know, I use Steam. I like to play games. Like, I'm okay, I'm done working. I'm going to close all that down. Now, I'd like to play a Steam game. And switching between something or coming from something as rigid as i3 to Cosmic, where it's very easy. Even workspaces, like, here's my tiling window manager workspace. Here is my
uh floating window workspace, and I can just have all the Steam windows go there. It's a very nice user experience. And fair warning, it's not completely done yet. It's got some bugs and some rough edges, but it's quite usable, and it's getting better fast. They're they're um doing a minor release a week at this point. And as evidenced by the setup here, you don't have to have uh pop OS to use it cuz this is running on open source tumbleweed. Yeah. Yeah, they're actually very aggressive about trying to get it on to other distributions than their own. It is nice to see that from System76. It is it is nice to see a modern window manager that has as much taste as they're putting in.
Oh, yeah, it's very it's visually and ergonomically very well designed. Gnome and KDE are really going to have to up their game to compete. And it all lives right here. On a machine on your like the miracle of modern computing. All of this just on your desktop. I don't know. All right. Well, that's been enough for this build video. That's the full parts rundown. If you're looking to do a build like this, we've got a whole user forum and community around the builds like this and it's also amazing to me that this is kind of like the entry-level workstation these days. Like this is what you get started with. You like you sort of start out at 32 cores and 128 gigabytes of memory and then you go on up from there because AMD can't just
stop stuffing cores in the socket. Marketing would have a fit. More. We need features to sell. That was the meme like when AMD was just starting to turn things around somebody made a meme of somebody you know with a clown hat on pointing at a thing and it's like what you know what do we need for strategy? It's like just more cores. The only thing we need is more cores. That turned out to be correct. Who knew? More faster cores. And this thing certainly is. All right. Well, that's enough for this one. I'm Wendell this Level 1. That's Eric Raymond.
This is Eric Raymond's machine. I don't know what to tell you. I'm going to go back to the forum now and do some more janitorial things. So, I'll see you there.
