We Replaced His Google Home With THIS - AMD $5000 Ultimate Tech Upgrade

TL;DR

AMD funded a $5,000 tech upgrade for LMG benchmarker Nick Harris, replacing his Google Home with an AI assistant and overhauling his home network.

Key Points

• 1.The upgrade centered on a Ubiquiti pro networking overhaul. A USW Pro Max switch with 8 PoE+ gigabit ports, 8 PoE++ 2.5G ports, 10G SFP uplinks, and 400W PoE budget was installed alongside a Cloud Gateway Max to future-proof Nick's 5G ISP connection.
• 2.A UNAS box was added to complete a proper 3-2-1 backup strategy. Nick's existing TrueNAS box with three drives was paired with a new UNNAS unit holding two 8TB IronWolf drives, plus offsite cloud storage as the third copy.
• 3.A Ubiquiti access point was placed in the bathroom — the apartment's weakest Wi-Fi spot. The Wi-Fi Man app identified the bathroom as the dead zone, which Nick uses daily for Wordle.
• 4.Nick's absurdly powerful home lab runs a 7950X, 5600G, 12900K, two RTX 3090s, and a 7800X3D across seven computers. His Proxmox server uses a 16-core 7950X with no GPU, with GPU passthrough for Plex planned for the future.
• 5.A new Linux test bench was built using a Ryzen 5 5800 XT, ASRock Challenger RX 960 XT 16GB, and a salvaged AM4 Ryzen 5 3600. The bench is dedicated to Linux game testing as Bazzite and CachyOS gain traction.
• 6.Nick's desk got a MOTU audio interface replacing a G502 mouse, adding XLR/quarter-inch inputs, MIDI I/O, and monitor outputs — paired with his bass guitar and pedal for a bedroom command-station setup.
• 7.The Google Home was replaced by a Reichi Mini AI assistant running OpenAI for now, with a local LLM planned long-term. It sits beside a pixel weather display, handles voice commands, and can express emotions — the centerpiece of the upgrade.