picture this: the year is 2102. You're sitting down to play some video games when boom! Suddenly, a radioactive bat appears outside your house. And the worst part? The radiation made your computer blue screen right in the middle of a raid with all of your friends. Well, fear not, because Fallout 76 sponsored this video to find a solution, and we spent their money on a pallet of lead to build the radiation Pro gaming PC. Really, Alex? Yes, and the best part? You can play Fallout 76 for free until October 29th. Did that actually tick just now? Yeah, there's background radiation. Good [Music] [Applause] [Music] timing. Radiation surrounds us at all times, and for the most part, that is totally fine. In simple terms, radiation is just energy being moved from one place to another, waves or particles like light from the Sun or the Wi-Fi in your house. Where problems start occurring is when the energy increases enough to become ionizing radiation, knocking electrons out of an atom or molecule. In a video game, say Fallout 76, that could

cause a beneficial mutation, but in the real world, it's far more likely to cause cell damage or cancer. And if that electron happens to be inside your RAM or your CPU, it can cause a bit to flip, turning what should have been a zero into a one or vice versa. In 2024, there aren't too many places where you can go that the levels of background radiation are in immediate danger. But ever since the nuclear apocalypse on October 23rd, 2077, The Fallout Universe has been regularly experiencing unsafe levels of radiation, and it gets worse given that the goal of Fallout 76 is to nuke a radioactive bat. Keeping ourselves protected while we do that is key. Now for players, there's a lot of options: rataway, radex, and even vegetable soup. But for their precious gaming PCs, there's sadly nothing to demonstrate what might happen in this situation. We'll be using our Luma field CT scanner, which is capable of emitting enough ionizing radiation to see through steel. It is entirely possible to kill electronics if you leave them in there.

long enough, and if you put running electronics in here, they'll become pretty unhappy pretty quickly. Allow me to demonstrate. Gerer counter PC one sec. I assume that noise is bad. Yeah, let's see what we can do about that. The first and easiest thing to do to increase your computer stability is to simply accept that sometimes poo happens and account for it. For mission-critical uses like scientific computing, financial systems, or data centers, they use registered ECC memory, which doesn't just send the data from your CPU to your RAM and vice versa, but also extra bits that can be used to validate that data. A super simple example could be if you wanted to make sure that your two twos arrived in one piece, you could instead send two two 4 and then also tell the computer to make sure that 2 + 2 equals 4. If something goes wrong and you got a two and a three, you'd know because it would equal five. In practice, ECC algorithms are much more complex, but they're beyond the scope of this video. If you want to learn more, Derek from

Veritasium has a great explanation in his recent video on QR codes in DDR5. There is some inherent error correction, which some memory vendors will mislabel as on-die ECC. This isn't true ECC, and you can see that the real stuff has extra chips—four for storing data and another for error correcting. But buffered ECC has a different key and cannot be placed in consumer motherboards. Unfortunately, we don't have any unbuffered ECC here today, but realistically, in the radioactive wasteland of Appalachia, just correcting the occasional bit flip wasn't going to cut it anyway. We need to stop it from happening in the first place, and you don't need birth control when you're wearing eight condoms. Bring in the lead. Did you write that, or did I? I wrote that. Okay, 'cause I don't remember approving that in the script, but that's very funny. Here we have spent $1,000 of Bethesda's money on 300 lb of lead, then $600 on shipping that lead, and then $800

on a safety consultant. We gave us this nice booklet on what you need to know to not get harmed by aforementioned lead. Am I supposed to have read it? Uh, this page that I marked is the only important one. Good Lord, this is a classic case of the cure being worse than the disease. You do not want to mess around with this stuff, man. This is freaking heavy. Oh, where the heck do you even buy 300 lbs of lead? Metal supplier, just call them up, ask for it, that's about it. Which is kind of crazy to me because this stuff is way more dangerous than some of the things that chemical suppliers do restrict access to. You have a business address, you can get basically anything you want. They'll just send it to you. I did not know that. Anyway, we need to make sure we don't touch it. Lead is a poisonous neurotoxin that has no safe exposure level whatsoever. It also gets absorbed into your bones and stays in there for decades with a halflife of 46 years.

meaning that people that were alive in the 70s before lead gas and paint were banned are still actively receiving lead poisoning from their own bodies. Explaining Congress lead poisoning can lead to learning difficulties, irritability, mood disorders, poor memory, loss of sex drive, infertility, and many other bad things. Lead use was also estimated to have decreased the IQ of the average American by four points while its use was still commonplace. That was a difficult torch for the new generation to carry, but somehow they managed it. Fun fact, by the way, going to an indoor shooting range even just once or twice a month can expose you to enough lead dust to cause problems. So what you're supposed to do is put on those gloves and then these gloves, those ones are doing the protection, these are for cut protection so that the lead doesn't like cut you. Oh sure, okay. Should we in the bay n probably not the worst thing that we can do is stir up dust which is why we're not in there where the airflow is.

really good, dude. This is hilarious. Yeah, the Safety Committee kept on trying to get us to do other things, but it's just way too funny to have to do all of this. You know, I didn't see anything in the work safe handling stuff about just it being fraking heavy. Wow, it's got a cool bluish hue to it. Yeah, I've never um done this. The thing that you need to be careful of is the lead oxide. So if you look, if you do that. Oh yeah, there is now lead on my finger. This is totally fine as long as I don't now lick my finger or go for a smoke or anything of that sort. Can you pick your nose? I wouldn't recommend it. Theoretically, lead is highly malleable and should therefore be pretty easy to. Oh wow, it is. That's really easy. [Music] Yeah, okay, H. Is that enough to start? I imagine. Do you want to explain these tools to us, professional? This is a leather punch. We can't be drilling into.

the lead because that creates dust, which is bad. So, we're going to try and use this leather punch to make holes in it. I think it's going to be difficult and annoying. We're going to cut the lead, yes, by just punching holes in it. There are other plans. We can, like, put spikes through it, but this, if it works, will be the easiest. So, we'll probably want, like, a 1/4 in, maybe a little bit more of overlap on each side. Okay, we'll kind of take the pieces of lead and, like, overlap them and then tape them. We'll tape them, yeah, we'll tape them. Do we have lead tape? We have aluminum tape, but that's why you overlap it. Okay, okay, wait. Oh, so I don't have to use the stupid leather punch. We have snips. We have snips, Alex. Well, but we still need to put holes in it. I thought you wanted me to perforate the thing and then just, like, bend it. I was like, this is the stupidest plan ever. Okay, there, okay, fine. No, so we're going to metal

yeah, no, it makes way more sense, but we're going to use some bolts to attach it to this. Sure, fine. Yeah, no, that's fine. Just wear the leather. Yeah, yeah, no, I get it. I get it now. I thought you wanted me to cut it with that. That would be awful. Yeah, I know. It would be really bad. Oh, wow, dude, this is somewhat easy. It's like cutting plastic, heavy, heavy plastic. That is one ragged ass line, but uh, progress. Okay, ow. Oh, did you cut yourself? Uh, no, but that does seem like a concern. I have no idea if this splinter could penetrate anything 'cause it's so soft, but um, if it does, I guess that's bad. Dude, it's so heavy, but that's a feature, not a bug. Lead's density is what makes it so effective at blocking radiation. Effectively, nothing can get through it, so making our system radiation-proof is just putting a whole lot of mass between the source of the radiation and our sensitive components. Definitely need to mark out some lines and do a cleaner cut, but

that'll be easier now that I don't have to contend with the entire roll of lead as I'm trying to snip through it. Okay, I think the key is just being willing to bend the crap out of it while you're cutting it, and then bend it back when you're done, 'cause it's really not hard. Just boom flat. Trying to line these up pretty much perfect here, because while good enough would be good enough to protect the computer, it's not going to help us get the actual bolts through, so I want these to be very, very well lined up. Okay, there's your first lead plate. Wow, that's heavy. Like, I know in my head that it's heavy, but like, wow, that's really heavy. It's like the gold controller. Yeah, like cognitively, I understand that there's different densities of materials, but damn. Like, is it a problem that we're going to have just like steel bolts and we're going to have small holes in our plating? Probably. There we go. Oh, this is the outer plate. Okay, that makes sense.

come on, yes, go, yes, with this overlap. What's your plan when the side panel overlaps and the top panel overlaps? We'll just do like overlap, overlap, overlap, overlap, just stack them on top of each other, and probably just whack it with a hammer and add some aluminum tape. I don't think that's going to be as easy as you think that is. I don't think it's going to be easy. Oh well, okay then, we're on the same page. How is this so far off, dude? It's not aligned at all. Okay, yeah, well, that's actually good news. The fact that this isn't wide enough means that our two tall side panels will fold over very nicely. Yeah, so we can just put it over top. That's easy. Yeah, no problem. Done. Our incompetence worked out for a change. Sometimes you can air or stack in the correct direction. Hear me out, strategic overlapping. We take this top piece off. Yeah, we actually cut it flush to the front. Yeah, we do the side panels next, and it like wraps. Then we do the front.

panel huge, and it wraps around the side panels and around the overlapped top, and we use the bendiness. And then for the back, we basically just cut little AR armor pieces for all the parts we don't need access to and glue them on. Sure, double-sided tape. Okay, that last part was where I was testing to see if he was just going along with everything I was saying, 'cause that's terrible. So tell me something, yeah, should I just go for it? Sure, okay, I'm going to shape this then. Do I want a whacker? A, yeah, we need a whacker with the two sides. It's kind of coming together like visually, right, dude? Actually making the PC out of lead may be the best way to make it look like it's from The Fallout Universe. Yeah, we probably should have bolted it before we whacked it. Mhm, shoot, Alex, Andrew called it. Uh, she's not going to go deep enough, not quite. Now under normal circumstances, I would just take my side panel, put a new hole in it that's closer to the edge, but being

contaminated and not being able to touch any of our stuff is pretty freaking inconvenient right about now. Question for you: can we just take a nail and our contaminated hammer and just send a hole through this thing? Probably, yeah. Okay, why don't we just do that then? Contaminate one nail instead of our drill and drill bits, and yeah, okay, okay. Memes aside though, are we expecting this to work? Like, do we know, you know, how much radiation can slip through a small gap? Obviously, this armor is not going to be perfect. Every single time that a radioactive particle hits your PC or yourself, there is a chance that something bad happens. And so by doing this, we might not 100% eliminate the chances of something bad happening, but it's going to be way lower. Like, think of all the areas where theoretically a particle could come through. Yeah, it's basically not. This is one of those projects, man, where like you're in the planning stages and you're just like, I don't know, is this just really dumb?

and we shouldn't do it, or is this really done, and we should totally do it. This is definitely the ladder. Okay, so what did you say? The side panel has to go on before the top panel, right? Right. Whoa, jeez, I almost lost control of it as it was coming down. Okay, did I get it? Oh, dude, she's latched. Nice. Easy. So, we'll bend this back, and then we'll bend it one more final time after. Okay, so we'll fold these over on the front. We fold. Question for you. Yes, the bomb's not going to go off under the computer. Do we need armor on the bottom, or could we have some ventilation? Are you determined to kill this thing? I guess we could just attach a fan on the bottom. That would probably help it a lot. A lot. All right, it's basically done. It needs a little bit of finishing work to look more complete and together, but we can do that on Tuesday after. It's not the weekend. I might have missed out on some of the finishing touches here, but oh, oh.

it's heavy. I guess I get to do the big moment. Have we weighed yet? We have not. We did a weigh, but I have done some trimming and stuff. Dude, she's thonk. Look at her go, like damn. All right, good god, I've gained weight. I'm 174 lbs, and I guess I probably uh shouldn't touch the lead. Actually, let's uh, I mean a little bit of lead is good for you, right? No, it's like iron. A little bit of iron in your diet, a little bit of lead in your diet, little bit of iron, great, a little bit of lead. Oh goodness, your Dy, it, get it, lead in your dye, it, okay, it's F. I got it, I got it. I can do it, I can do it. I've got this, I've got this. Okay, I'm just going to get it to the edge of the table. Okay, what, what did I say that was? 174. Oh my God, I'm at 150 now. I still have my other foot on the ground. Just put it on the scale. Here we go, here we

go oh my God 2642 please don't drop it no no I got it's rolling away I got wo that was 90 lb dead on wasn't it wow is this even safe to put in the Luma field I don't know they still haven't gotten back to me with a maximum allowed on that well they should have thought of that before they sent us a Luma field all right here we we go oh do you want to play games on it or throw it in there first oh we got to play games on it yeah we've got to play we got to prove it's a working computer yeah okay also there is a guer counter in it right now that is on okay I haven't heard it in a long time I I should think not any brilliant ideas for how to turn it on oh my God a nail really yes I mean it's better than what we had for the PCS in the back of my van which was just nothing can really feel the lead you know like it's

got that lead feel like the Ley goodness. Okay, ready. Boom. Oh, it works perfect, dude. It actually works really well. No, it actually works perfect. Why are you not working still? I may be able to reach the onboard HDMI, Alex, which onboard really helpful from a troubleshooting standpoint. I just can't get any pressure on it. Oh, I got it. Okay, okay, so the HDMI is in. Oh, thank goodness that HDMI port was right there. If it was anywhere other than right at the bottom of the iio, I wa. Why did we go on to the BIOS and not windows? I don't know. Oh God, oh God, where's your boot devices? There's no storage, Alex. Oh, there was something, remember, Alex? Yes, the nvme carrier wasn't in quite right, and I thought it was fixed, but maybe it is not. Well, it clearly is not. Well, I guess this is getting finished [Music] tomorrow. Here it is. Big Moment. Does it still game? I couldn't help noticing that it's running great now. Yeah, but um, is there any air in or out? There's a tiny

bit of air that's getting in the bottom, but who cares. We have a reserator. All the heat's coming out of here. Well, all it has to do is run the game. Oh, before we do that, I did scan it in the Luma field. Do you want to take a look? I do. Hello, Mr. camera. Uh, I'm very sorry about this. There's the picture. Oh, so it worked? Yeah, you can see this little bit here where it didn't quite hit it. The rest is the computer. Flawless Victory then? Yeah, nice. Let's see if the computer still works, or realistically more like if it ever worked. I think its problems are nothing to do with radiation exposure and everything to do with the fact that it is in a sealed container. Yeah, do we tell them that we had to take it apart and put it back together 'cause the PCIe bracket fell out? No? Okay, I guess we did. Let's see how the game runs on our machine. Wow, CPU GPU temps not bad. Give me all your stuff. Hey, get me

that rad X hey get go on go on get go go go on get pilgrim. How much more do we need to play to prove that this system actually totally kicks ass? We're not getting a ton of FPS, but that's our older GPU, right? Like, our CPU is at 52° and our GPU is at 43. And if a nuclear bomb goes off, it'll be fine. It totally will unironically survive as long as it isn't in the blast radius. Yeah, we should mention that if you are skill-challenged like Lonus, you can join up with your friends. So maybe one of them is good at the game. I'll Dodge you, I'll Dodge you. Oh yeah, and while you do that, I'll talk about the playable character that's a ghoul. We probably could have worked that in a bit better. Whatever, look at this computer. The ultimate Fallout 76 PC. You've outdone yourself, Alex. I've really done myself on this one. This was so much work. Oh my God, it was awful. It was terrible work, but it has the

world's greatest power button. Yep. If you enjoyed this video because you love seeing me and Alex have things go according to plan, you might enjoy the one where we tried to repair eight dead motherboards that we bought on eBay. It was fun. It was fun.

The Radiation Proof PC

Linus Tech Tips is a passionate team of "professionally curious" experts in consumer technology and video production who aim to educate and entertain.
