The Highest PC Build EVER - World Record

Gaming on a plane. Ah, that's been done maybe most famously by the 1999 San Antonio Spurs. But what about building a gaming PC at 40,000 ft? Far as we can tell, it is not. So today, Elijah and I are going to set the world record for the highest PC build ever. Be honest. What? This whole project is just so you have an excuse to tag along on this trip. Yeah, but that doesn't mean that we can just build any random PC and call it a day. If our intention is to use this thing in flight, we need to optimize it for weight and maybe more importantly for power consumption. Now, I know what you're going to say. Couldn't you just stuff a laptop or even a framework desktop into that comfortable, stylish commuter backpack from ltstore.com? Yes. Yes, I could. But that's unboxing PC, not building the highest PC. And now for the highest segue to our sponsor, App Control. Scroll back in time to see which apps spiked your CPU, drained your RAM, maxed out your GPU, or pushed your system temperature just too far, even days later. Grab it for free at appcontrol.com. To start with, taking the Gamer Jet up just to build a PC would be colossally stupid. So, we're taking advantage of Equinex sponsoring a tour of one of their data centers in Virginia. They have all the power they could possibly need. But, we don't, which is why we're starting our PC with a CPU that maybe isn't the fastest, but it is among the most efficient. the Ryzen 5 9600X. An X3D chip with additional cores and especially the extra cache might yield more FPS, but some of those chips draw nearly twice as much power as, you know, this little guy here. And furthermore, this is the screen we're going to be targeting. I don't even know if it's 60 Hz. For our motherboard, we've gone with the Asus RG Strix X870i. And the reason for that is that while I probably could stash a full-size computer somewhere, there's a spot kind of here above the subwoofer like, okay, definitely not in there. Every pound counts, so it was important to keep our system compact. Now, in a perfect world, what I would have liked to do is just like take this keyboard out of here and mount the whole thing inside the drawer, kind of like we did with the IKEA desk PC. But the aviation world is very restrictive when it comes to modifications to planes, which seriously limits our options. Like even say putting a screw into here is a huge no no. Shall we? We shall. We should put a mat down first though. Oh, that's a good idea. Yeah. Get it, sir. I got it. Oh, mod mat. Nope. I'm not acknowledging it yet. Okay. This might give people a hint as to why the modmat is delayed. They made them with this big hole in it. No. Oh, but some samples needed to be cut out of them for testing. Got it. All right. I guess I'm no longer silent on it. Where'd I put the CPU? Oh, right here. I mean, it can't go anywhere. It was definitely in the place. It's got to be here somewhere. Yeah, unlike the case. Okay. Are we really bringing up this early? We were supposed to film this on the way there. Someone I'm convinced I put it in the cargo hold. Huge moment. This is it. Huge moment. There it is. Damn it. It's right there. It's right there along with the sword that we wanted to bring. Captain Lance said no. Someone left our case on the ground. I mean, in fairness, the fractal designed Terra clearly wasn't meant for the sky. Yeah, Fractal, get on it. It's your fault. Yeah, we need the fractal arrow. While you put that in, why don't I talk about our RAM? Another big no no in aviation would be failing to disclose these highv value imports that I'm going to be bringing with me into the United States. At only 6,000 mega transfers per second and CL36, it's not the fastest or the tightest, but it's still miles sorry above what we need. And it was already an earpopping $255. I'm kind of scared to install this. I'm like a little bit of turbulence. Yeah, I really don't want to mess this up. Just strap in. Strap in. We got this. Oh, yeah. My my bad. Here's kind of a fun fact. If you're trying to do a hyperefficient build, you might be surprised by how much power gets drawn by the RGB LEDs. That's right. Now, obviously, in a full tower where you're already drawing like 600, 700 W, get out. 4 watts is not going to make a difference. But we're targeting about 250 W and every little bit counts. So, we'll be disabling that once we boot it up. This is an older bird with very limited 120 volt power, which is to say absolutely none in the cabin at all. In fact, we might want to take a little break from building so that we can show you how we're planning to power this thing. Yeah, it's kind of sketch. Where's the outlet? Okay, listen. Listen. Okay. You see how there's USB ports at a bunch of the seats? Okay. USB type A. That's for two reasons. First is because it was done a long time ago, thankfully on someone else's dime. Second is because replacing them with USBC would be crazy expensive. I found replacement modules. They were either 700 or $900 each for a USBC plug. One. And that assumes that whatever company we get to install them is willing to just use whatever random ones we give them. Most of them won't. Finally, the inverter for this plane has a grand total of 960 W of power. So, as soon as you start doing even 30 W PD at every seat. Oh, sure. That adds up. You just used up half your budget that you need for the galley. So, there's two food warmers. Yeah. There's an outlet for a kettle and there's like this the world's wimpiest microwave oven. All of that has to fit within that power budget along with our PC which the genius plan because this is the only AC outlet in the aircraft is to plug into the kettle outlet and then run past the sleeping man. Why can't we use something like a jacker instead? Well, even a private flight is still subject to FAA regulations. So, aside from the safety issues of having a giant lithium battery on an airplane, you're still limited to that less than 100 W hours. So, you'd have to have like a bunch of them. Am I allowed to bring this? Yes. Turns out that the FAA doesn't care about that. You can bring any size blade you want on your own aircraft. Oh, okay. If you do anything with it, you'll still get in trouble when you land. So, don't get any ideas. Smart guy. Captain Lance said no. Okay, I'll put it away then. The hope is that by drawing as little power as possible with the system, our cabin crew will still be able to operate the warming of it and stuff while we are gaming, but that remains to be seen. For storage, we're starting with a 1 TB drive we had lying around. We might want to upgrade it in the future, though, if we want to actually store more games or any media or any amount we want. Right. While we do have Wi-Fi, downloading or installing games in flight is uh not an option. We we haven't actually done a speed test yet. Do you want to try it? Do you want to Do you want to do the honors? Let's do it. All right, you can do the honors. Hold on. I'm loading the speed tests website. Try again. This kind of inconsistency is just due to how older aviation Wi-Fi works. The service that we're subscribed to is fed by towers on the ground. And we actually hop between them as we move, which means super inconsistent speeds and pretty darn near constant disconnection. Oh, you've got it. Well, no. I'm trying to run the one on Google and even that just goes to testing download and then it stays here forever. Speedtest.net. This did not work. Can you try fast.com? Even though that's Netflix. Our internet. No, our internet is up. So, like it's enough to like load a web page because I mean I was able to search the Google results for speed test, but I couldn't get to the speed test Okay. So, I got an idea. Uh, Steam. Oh, see if we can download something. Do that as a speed test. Oh, boy. I can't wait to play Battro at the end of my 8 hour flight when it's done downloading. Starting download. Yeah. Am I going to spoil my privilege here by saying I don't think I've ever seen a K at the front of my download speed? Sorry. Oh, you dropped your connection. We must be hopping to a different tower. Hey, you got 0% done for now. Maybe some cooling for our computer that we've barely even touched so far. What even is this video? I feel like there's going to be some extras. lg.gg/flatplane. Uh, sorry, the cooler. Oh, that cooler. CPU cooler. Sorry, I thought you meant the cooler in the galley. I just I I spaced. Okay. I'm closer to space, so I No, you're definitely not closer to space. What? Yes, I compared to being on the ground. We're closer to the ground than space. No, no, no. I mean, well, I'm closer to space than I was before. Oh, okay. I thought you meant in comparison to the ground. I'm like, dude, we're not even close, brother. For cooling, we've gone with a Noctua NHL 9AM5. Why? Because even though our CPU defaults to I think it's 95 W 65. Yeah. Yeah. We're going to be turning that down to 45 from our initial testing, we should still be able to get pretty decent performance out of it. So, this is all we need. Ever applied thermal paste at 40,000 ft. No, believe it or not, I have not. And I still haven't cuz you did. Oh, actually, I need a little more. Oh, you want to top me up? Yeah, sure. Nice. Solid. Now I have Oh my lord, dude. Holy cow. What was that? That's some fractal terra packet. Terrible. Five messed the line up. Why did we go with this case? We could have gone with something smaller, but come on. It's the Terra. It looks super nice. It's basically one giant ventilation hole on all sides. Did you actually check if it would fit in there? I didn't. No. Well, it doesn't. I mean, realistically, we were never going to put it in there anyway because there's no ventilation. So, yeah. This is probably something that more realistically we would stash in the cargo hold until we wanted to pull it out and play games. Or more realistically, you know, probably use a framework desktop or something. But we already explained why we didn't do that today. Really awkward doing this in the plane together. Just No, you're good. Okay. No, you're good. You can join the Mile High Club. Oh, yeah. Don't lie, you would. 100%. Yeah. Have you already? No, actually. Are you saying that because the camera's rolling? Nope. I'm not going to lie. It is my intent to join the club before I divest of this asset. So, if you guys ever see like a 30-se secondond flight, that's probably what it was. as if I would need 30 seconds. Are you calling me slow? Okay, this uh panel Mconnect thing, I don't think we actually need it for our build, right? Is that not the front panel stuff or I only need a power button. Oh, then yeah, we're probably fine. Okay, on the subject of power, I will need a power supply. The highest line has drop. It's been It's happened. Well, never letting that one down then. Since we don't need a ton of power, we went with the fully modular CIC Focus SGX 650 watt. It might have been worth picking up something that was higher efficiency. This one is only 80 plus gold. But what we found is most of the higher efficiency ones are much higher wattage units as well. And if you're at the very bottom rated end of your power draw, you can actually end up losing a lot of that efficiency. All right, to get this PC to its final destination, we'll need one more piece too soon. An MSI Ventus RTX 5060 Ti. Now, this is going to raise some Yeah, you lowered your eyebrows, but sure, it's going to do something to some eyebrows, but hear me out. Our main priority is performance per watt. This little guy has a TDP of just 180 W, and with a bit of tuning, we actually managed to undervolt it, so it draws even less. Combine that with DLSS 4.5 upscaling and there really isn't anything even close in terms of FPS per watt. A boop. You ready to fire it up? Yeah, I am. Now, we can't actually hook it up to this thing yet. Technically, it does appear to have digital, whatever that is, analog S video, composite, and SDI. But as you can see, the image is not even centered on the screen. And not only me, but the one and only Hacksmith were here on the plane trying to figure out how to get access to the back of this thing. And between the two of us, we could not. So, that's going to be part of a project for another day. Uh, you brought a monitor, right? I did. It's up near the front. Oh, thank goodness. Because there's no microenter in the air. I'd hate to have to do another trip. Eli, is there a reason you brought a whole ass desktop monitor instead of just one of those like little portable laptop ones? Okay. Did you forget a monitor? Did you just buy this at MicroEnter? No, no, no, no, no. I I brought that from the office. I even booted it at the office and it works. We don't have MicroEnter in Canada. So, his story got a lot of holes in it. Man, is it beautiful out there right now. It's very pretty. It's a shame Sherrod's missing it. Step one, enable expo. Done. Step two, save. Nice. Solid. Step two, go. Or we're on three now. We should play multiplayer. What are we going to play? CS2. Oh, like on your laptop or whatever. No, like on here. No, the internet, dude. There's no way we're going to connect to anything. That says play CS2. Yeah, against bots is what I plan on. You're more than welcome to try. I want to get the first Counter Strike 2 kill from 40,000 ft away. There's no way you're going to Can we download OBS? How is this like so responsive right now? It's doing pretty good actually. Oh my gosh. Uh, no. 30 minutes left. 24 22 20. Are we going to live stream from a like four pixels per frame? Yeah, sure. Well, one for the webcam, one for the alerts whenever when someone subscribes, and then two for gameplay. Why don't we play a single player game? What? You look stressed out. I'm just excited. I This is so stupid. I played Cyberpunk like 70 times in the office. Never played it in the air. Oh, hopefully it'll pull up our cloud save. I get it. We got Cyberpunk on a jet before GTA 6. This is a real good experience though. Like it looks great. Yeah. Say what you want about DLSS. If I was really on a power budget, nothing matches this for frames per watt. I mean, there's definitely some garbage. You see the garbage? I see the garbage. But I'm not focused on that right now. I'm playing the game and it's not bothering me unless I go looking for it. And our goal was FPS per watt. And we can't beat that right now. I don't think I can't even hear these DLSS artifacts. How high I'm flying. Oh, the jet engine is very loud. That's true. Actually, that's one thing we never showed them. Uh, editor, cut any noise dubbing you're doing or noise cancelling. Oh, yeah. Now, let's lower the power profile and have a look at how much of that performance we get to keep once we uh dial back our power consumption a little bit cuz our CPU is at like 80 watts right now. Default low power 45 watt. Apply. All right. And the GPU too. Open MSI after. Sorry. Yep. So, profile one is our default profile 5. And then we apply. Perfect. And basically what we've applied is a custom curve here that's designed to give us most of the default performance at much less power. Let's try Cyber Punk again. Yeah, we're going to be throwing things for a bit of a loop now that we have screen recording running in the background. But still, the main goal is just to bring up hardware info and see if we've managed to hit something resembling our 250 W target. I can't believe we downloaded OBS from a plane. Do you think that's another world record? World's first OBS download on a plane. No, can't be. We're breaking all the records today. Highest PC build. You're going to get highest CS GO kill, highest Linus drop. We're off to a good start. Really, brother? We're definitely getting a little less FPS, I think. Yeah, but you know what's funny is it's mostly the averages. Yeah, the 1% lows are not actually that much lower. Oh, yeah. They're still around that 7580, which is like more important, right? Keeping your 1% low is a bit more consistent instead of having the low hitches. So, this doesn't feel worse. This is still awesome. This is pretty cool, dude. And our CPU is at 70°. Oh, wow. We saved like a lot off that cuz it was 90 plus, right? The GPU, curiously, is pretty much exactly the same. Can't win them all. Yeah. I mean, that's Nvidia for you, right? Let's have a look at what kind of power consumption we're looking at here. So, yeah, CPU is now capped 45 watts. Wait, our GPU power is only like 60. Well, you're not peaked at 125 cuz right now it's 60. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. We have to play Flights in. We have to play. You're not wrong. Wait, 2020. Is that the new That's not the newest one. Well, 2020 is a lot smaller in size and we don't have to stream the assets. Yes. which we should be able to do in the cloud. It's checking for updates. You've got to be kidding me right now. Can we Can we disconnect it? You're not going to get your online CS:GO kill. If we're doing this no. I love modern gaming so much. I can't even play it on my private jet. Dude, this is so frustrating. Can I get you some champagne to go with your problems? I don't drink. You've been switched to offline mode. Yeah, we're fine with it. Ready to fly. Let's go. Oh, in first. Let's go. Here we go. Oh, shoot. Okay, hold on. Where's the runway? You got to find it. Find the runway, Elijah. Feel the force. That This is not This is a river. So, go look somewhere else. I'm trying to feel the force really quick. Oh, is that it? Oh, there a runway would be so obvious. Oh, the sun from the windshield straight in my eye. I just got blinded. Oh, this is like the real flight experience. Go into the light, Elijah. Go into the light. Flight sim's going away. CS2 is coming back. You have 5 minutes. If you don't load into the lobby, we're done. Well, there you go. We gamed at 40,000 ft. It's pretty funny. But what's the plan for this? Are we just going to do like the same thing but on a jet? Uh, no. Uh, well, okay. There will obviously be some of that, but the cooler ideas are going to be the ones that maybe you guys are going to give us in the comments below. Is there somewhere that you'd like to see us go that might not have been practical in the past that would have normally put me out of the office for 2 and 1/2 or 3 days, which is really hard on our production team, but now we could maybe do in a day or a day and a half. There is one thing that I do want to do. We have to recreate that legendary photo. You're talking about the Spurs, Yeah. I don't know if that's a video, but it's certainly something. I was going to say, you know what else? There's something of the segue to our sponsor, App Control. Windows Task Manager is limited in what it can do. But App Control, it's like a task manager on steroids. 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If you guys enjoyed this video, maybe check out the one where we first toured the plane. It was me and Elijah walking around with me explaining why we picked this specific model and getting up close and personal with some parts of a jet that I didn't think I would ever get to be personal with. like the landing gear from the golden sink.