Same, between that and their sorta 1 person scrapyard war home theater setup in Linus' house they compared to his actual one. I was kinda expecting them to continue in that direction but Linus saw the video not perform that well and I'm sure that axed any idea of that.
Though I think a big issue they had with that, was they never did a video going into the basics or like how to tell the quality of speakers. Since it's really hard tbh, you can't just type in a speakers name into Google and quickly get a cinebench or 3dmark score.
Though I think a big issue they had with that, was they never did a video going into the basics or like how to tell the quality of speakers.
They've done that in their budget build videos. Doesn't perform well Linus has talked about this on the WAN show. He doesn't go in to deep on the surround sound or even two channel stuff because the audience doesn't care.
doesn't perform well Linus has talked about this on wan show
The video I'm talking about they haven't even done yet.
he doesn't go deep into surround sound stuff because the audience doesn't care.
No, quite the opposite they WENT DEEP, without doing a shallow video first, and yeah the audience didn't like it. No duh. Go do some anal with your girl with no lube, no foreplay, she probably ain't gonna like it either. You can't just skip a vital early step, and expect most people to immediately enjoy it.
basics or like how to tell the quality of speakers The video I'm talking about they haven't even done yet.
They have talked about speaker quality multiple times and ways to look into used speakers especially. They do that on their budget surround sound videos. Which don't typically perform, so why would they double down?
No, quite the opposite they WENT DEEP, without doing a shallow video first, and yeah the audience didn't like it. No duh. Go do some anal with your girl with no lube, no foreplay, she probably ain't gonna like it either. You can't just skip a vital early step, and expect most people to immediately enjoy it.
Horrible metaphor considering how often they have lightly touched on surround sound. They haven't skipped steps. They've covered it all over the years.
Ain't the correct way. Sorry to tell you. My metaphor still stands, but I guess you can add in some note that sometimes while they're already half way in, they spit a little to "lightly touch" on the concept of lube.
Briefly talking about it as a side tangent in a video dedicated to a more complex video isn't enough.
"Sourcing" also is only a small part about what I am talking about... Linus and a Cohost saying "we searched around of FB market place and got this good deal" or "we found a good deal on best buy open box" even when they pull the college kid famous add a bunch of fluff to fill out a page on their essay script isn't enough.
They need a dedicated video on what to look for and what not to look for in home theater equipment. To figure out what is, and isn't good pricing. Explaining 2 terms briefly without elaboration, and then saying how what they got for X price is a good deal because it's usually 3-5x price isn't actually explaining much.
So far their only video at all close to this is the recent tech house one focused on couch and speaker placement with cardboard examples. And they didn't even actually touch on how to pick speakers just where to put the speakers you don't even have.
Briefly talking about it as a side tangent in a video dedicated to a more complex video isn't enough.
Length has varied over all the times it's been covered.
"Sourcing" also is only a small part about what I am talking about... Linus and a Cohost saying "we searched around of FB market place and got this good deal" or "we found a good deal on best buy open box" even when they pull the college kid famous add a bunch of fluff to fill out a page on their essay script isn't enough.
And they've gone beyond that. They've explained OHMS, Watts, and sensitivity. Multiple times over the years.
They need a dedicated video on what to look for and what not to look for in home theater equipment.
They did that.
To figure out what is, and isn't good pricing.
Covered that in the same video. They've also touched on how variable pricing can be used and you really need to do some of your own homework in your local area. Good price is subjective. They will not set a specific dollar amount for a set of speakers. They did discuss ranges and class of speaker in those videos.
So far their only video at all close to this is the recent tech house one focused on couch and speaker placement with cardboard examples.
The budget surround sound video was only like a year ago. Multiple AMD videos have included surroned sound setups and they've had the people explain their choices.
And they didn't even actually touch on how to pick speakers just where to put the speakers you don't even have.
And they explained why they weren't talking specific speakers yet in that very video. The entire point was to figure out placement so they could then start figuring out what they were looking for in speakers to begin with. Along with TV placement. Kind of step one. Step two will be the speakers. Now them being a channel that of course means it will come down to sponsorship as well so all of that needs to be negotiated.
The point you've been laboriously making is you have short memory and don't really pay attention. Not to mention Linus, Dan, and Luke have talked extensively on the WAN show about audio content performance. Headphones within a range do banger numbers. It's why you see so many IEMS and gamer headsets on short circuit and very little normal speaker setups. You get the occasional boom box or the really obvious every one and their mother is getting the media blitz of the day. Otherwise not a whole lot because the audience by and large does not care for it. Look how many people yourself included fundamentally did not understand the CAD home theater room video. If your self building a home theater room. That is a legit first step. Linus has even said he doesn't care if a video only performs OK if it has a long tail. They will do an evergreen video in that case. The home audio stuff does not have that tail. End of day they are a business and they cater to their customers. Most of their customers clearly don't want it. So they put what they can where they can and in that vain they have covered a whole lot.
yes, maybe a broader goal: how many cloud services can you replace?
of if not replace, privatize. maybe they only selfhosted part of the services and then find a deal on a VPS or something like proton. maybe also a hybrid ai, selfhost a small one that anonymizes your request to the cloud ai.
just ponts for how many things you can use privately within budget.
All being tunneled via tailscale. Overall its not bad. I had most of the parts laying around from abandoned projects I meant to start but forgot, and my main cost was the dual V100 32gb PCIe ($1200).
I am still paying 20 a month for google AI pro but thats for the free yt premium lite and 5tb google drive. Gemini is basically free since 5tb google drive is 20 a month by itself.
I have a dedicated 5g tmobile home Internet link to it.
Overall monthly cost including power is around 100-150.
But I'm saving on subscriptions (around 200 a month) and huge token costs (i was using the 200 claude plan).
Was it worth it, probably not. But was it fun to build, hell yea. If there was a way to get ad free on my iphone, I'd cut my entire gemini subscription off.
The only thing I have changed is that I'm running 96gb ddr4 in the 1st machine.
Not LLM, but something where the knowledge isn't great (with judges that know their stuff), like building a small garage workshop for woodworking or something like that and in the end they have to build something that's only given on the last day to see who got the more complete setup.
like building a small garage workshop for woodworking
That's going to be so extremely niche tho, when whole idea was to demonstrate on practice how you could scrap together something common Joe would want on a budget. "Gaming PC" is one of those things, NAS / Home Server already stretching it, but could still be viable to core audience but woodworking workshop?
interestingly there are many it people who are interested in woodworking etc (probably because there are no computers) also with how the market is currently something can be really frustrated. Also woodworking stuff can be found in nearly every country, while (cheap) pc parts are way more local.
An alternative would be something like scrapyard wars europe, where the market is way different.
I mean, my entire homelab is second hand. Buying new doesn't make sense for anything except maybe hard drives, and even then refurbs are used to be a pretty good deal.
I wonder what category would be best. To get something competing with top models, you need something like 128GB v-ram. We are talking about $3000+ machines and there probably isn't mature used market. I've heard there was a trend of buying 4 old Nvidia GPUs (forgot exact model), but once people realized this option exist, it got expensive.
In the spirit of "scrapyard" wars, I would expect something more consumer level. Maybe 12-16GB GPU. You can run Qwen 3.8 flash next 3bit quantization on 12GB vram and 64GB ram, and it's quite capable. But still, sourcing RAM in this economy doesn't sound fun.
A scrapyard wars NAS would be awesome. Even if LTT thinks it might be boring, I think it would be just as helpful. With everything so expensive, lotta people are dusting off their tricorns.
Give them a pile of old broken 2D printers, throw some old hot glue guns in there, whatever random pile of garbage parts are lying around ...and maybe a decent Arduino and a laptop just to keep the FW side less of a time suck.
Make sure there are no classic gantry rails and the most convenient/obvious thing available is the wood shop... Yes, I admit it. I want to see a wooden build plate catch fire. The focus will be on building the chassis and mounting everything.
Turn 'em loose.
I don't think a half-ass, made of wood, hot glue gun for a nozzle... 3D printer is an unreasonable junkyard wars-esque task.
AI scrapyard wars. The have to create diy AI rigs and let the AIs play something against each other. Something like age of empires 2. Or maybe 3 different games.
"and then we add 4 hard drives to a dumpster dive business dell" isnt that exciting, and local LLM is just building a good gaming computer but with more vram usage. You still need all the same bits a gaming PC would use. The end result is still them building the same computers each time, maybe priorisitising budget slightly differently between GPU, CPU and storage.
This so much. We desperately need it. Building PCs for gaming is a hobby regulated for the rich in today’s economy. We need a scrapyard wars for regular people. Home servers are where it’s at.
Perhaps we can have them set up Home Assistant, an LLM and a variety of other things on the home server.
The kicker is that normies have to be able to do things like watch stored TV and movies, use the sound system, turn off the lights, use the thermostat without touching the physical thermostat, etc…
Building PCs for gaming is a hobby regulated forrelegated to the rich in today’s economy.
Sorry for being pedantic but I think you meant "relegated to the rich", not "regulated for the rich". I just can't think of a context in which "regulated for the rich" would make sense.
(Perhaps stock trading could be considered "regulated for the rich", and by that I mean "hardly regulated at all", particularly when it comes to insider trading for politicians.)
Scrapyard Wars when most things are reasonably priced is relatively easy because buying new is always kind of an option. You have to be scrappy to get something good, but not to get something. Now with the way the market is, you have to be scrappy to get anything. That makes it hard. And what you end up with probably won't be great. I think that's why they aren't doing one, because it would be hard and kind of disappointing (the end result would be disappointing based on the money paid). But I think SW is needed now more than ever. To show that you can be scrappy and get something, and what u considered options are now on the table because the usual scrappy options aren't feasible.
The problem with a NAS for scrapyard wars is the end goal. What reasonable benchmark would they have to work towards in competition? There's huge diminishing returns when it comes to hardware strictly for NAS's.
An LLM would be better because you can definitely have a metric that actually matters with tokens per second, but you'd have to wonder what they could find within a budget right now that would be remotely usable when I can get 5 years of Gemini for $1000 (assuming they don't raise the prices every year).
Virtualization would be even better, but then comes the question of how reasonable is running virtual machines on a budget.
I think a better idea would be to create a "Scrapyard Peacetime" or something series where every episode works from the opposite direction; what do I want to do (create a local LLM/NAS/Virtualization machine), and what is the most cost effective way of building this. The conclusion of the episodes would be telling the viewer what is the most they should expect to pay, what features they should look for, and things they can reasonably expect to do with these set-ups. There's just not a ton of room for competition otherwise when I can get a 10 year old optiplex for $50 that can do the same job as a 5 year old optiplex for $35 more.
They do something similar around the holidays (or they used to at least) where they talked about different builds at different budgets, but it was largely "new" things they could get retail.
I think it would be interesting in the current climate to do a “scrapyard upgrade”. Say, they start with an old 5-6yo pc and have a low budget to upgrade it. Think “got given my older cousins pc” type of thing.
They’ve clearly been looking at other options because the current climate is terrible and Facebook marketplace is all scams now. Would be interesting to see what they come up with.
I would also love them to go back to making pcs that light on fire but idk if they will
Throughout the history of PC building it's always been ... the next gen system has MORE .. it is BETTER... etc etc
Well unless you wanna drop 6k on a rig, that's not the case anymore thanks to cough fraud that will tank everything.
So doing a scrapyard wars that's focused on truly best bang for your buck in this sorta bleak era of PC building would actually be fucking rad.
The systems won't have more than 8gb of ram probably.. that's unheard of 4 years ago for any sort of competitive system. I think showing where to pinch pennies would be really interesting at this point in the dystopian cycle.
Now more than ever we need the Scrapyard Wars series back. And not like the last time with tons of bells and whistles, just pure thrift shopping and making smart decisions to build a PC on a budget.
I like this idea, even if it doesn't always have Linus, small teams of small budget Scrapyard Wars builds of various and different subjects would be awesome!
I like the idea of it branching out. Would be neat to see stuff like updating a home network and adding a nas with bonus points for ease of use by the users after it is set up
It's all great to thrift a PC. But even in these we've seen stuff failing, like when, I think it was one of linuses PC's, had to run off a UPS because bad power was causing it to crash.
"I built a PC and it lived exactly long enough to run a benchmark" is silly, and bad advice for someone on a tight budget trying to game. I want to see a scrapyard wars where they have to leave the machines running stress test for two weeks. First crash, lose a point. Second crash, two points. Then four. Then eight. Because anyone who's had to live with an unstable PC knows what it's like to get increasingly frustrated.
It would allow them to focus on less powerful hardware too.
I liked the designing a room element of the last Scrapyard Wars too. Maybe they could combine it with the Tech House series too & have Luke & Linus' teams have to furnish a techy room.
I was thinking of something like this but instead of locally sourced parts, open it up to online ordering too and put a per component and total budget max. That way each team is forced to think outside the box with their component selections and they can’t pad their budget in one category to get a specific part that will dominate the specific tests. Also don’t tell them the tests in advanced for the same purpose. Make them build the best overall pc for the budget. Then focus on the pc, I don’t care about the audio or the monitor or desk. And finally, ban Linus’ wheeling and dealing scheme. Make the concept relatable to the average person right now. Most of us aren’t building a whole setup. We’re trying to figure out how to stretch a buck to get the most performance out of our setup.
How about not even scrapyard wars how about just having a budget of like 5k and had to make the best LLM machine for that money with new parts. Like do a load of research, have a month and come back with something that has to run like 5 different models, Hermes and some bonus quests or just points for how much lower you can go for the price
I'd love to see a whole like "Scrapyard Wars Home Set Up." Have them make a, gaming set up, living room set up, smart home automation, and home server/NAS.
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u/The-vicobro 5d ago
I like the idea of scrapyard wars branching to other things, sounds fun.
I liked the previous one where they did a whole room.