i'll be the first to admit that a lot of the upgrades we do around here are
completely unnecessary taking perfectly good hardware and replacing it with
state-of-the-art hardware just because we can now i actually upgraded my home
theater pc slash vr gaming rig quite recently replacing the 980 ti with an
rtx 2080 ti but what i didn't upgrade
was the CPU i'm running a core i5 4570
which honestly was fine until the moment
that i tried to game in vr while
streaming at the same time almost immediately i was getting frame
drops and this is with the nvanc new encoder that were causing dizziness and
nausea and basically making it impossible for viewers to enjoy the
stream so today we're going to be doing the thing that we do best
upgrading a computer but this time with a purpose
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the problem with streaming is that even if you're using resources on your GPU to
encode the video the CPU still has to manage that and i'm using a neat little
third-party app called ovr drop in order to embed the twitch chat into my stream
and that ends up using i think it's about another nine or ten percent of my
CPU here so as soon as i start recording
and try to actually play the game you're going to see my CPU spike up near or at
100 utilization
now we are going to take some shortcuts in the upgrade today but while they
aren't ones that i would want to go out there and recommend they are ones that
you can probably get away with if you want to save a little bit of time
and even a little bit of money so you can buy a water bottle on lttstore.com
so rather than unnecessarily replace any of the parts in this machine we're going
to reuse as many of the things that we can including our silverstone case here
which i absolutely love this is their sg13 if
i recall correctly and it strikes a pretty nice balance between
size and accessibility so it's
reasonable to work on and it accepts
full size components including the graphics card uh three and a half inch
hard drive as well as a full-sized atx power supply uh why a hard drive you
might ask well because the hard drive is actually going through its
either third or fourth upgrade cycle at this point and i use it for my game
library because most of the games on this system get launched once every blue
moon and it's just not worth investing in solid-state storage for something
like that of course it's got a boot SSD as for the power supply we don't want to
replace that i just put this focus plus gold 750 watt power supply in when i
upgraded to the rtx 2080 ti a little while ago um because the old one that i
had in here did not have enough pci express connectors and
it was not something that you want to hook a brand new top of the line
graphics card up to the graphics card stays because
what would you upgrade an rtx 2080 ti to
it's all good okay i did say this case is
relatively work-on-able you do have to take off the front panel in order to get
at the uh the graphics card
there we go and once you do it just slides out like that though
by the way if you guys are enjoying this hydro dipped rtx 2080 ti we did a video
about that recently and we're probably going to do some more arts and crafts
later so make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss that we're not even going to bother to
reinstall our operating system which again is not really recommended but
sometimes you can get away with it so we're going to give it a shot leading us
to the things that we are going to replace
so that right there is this is not actually passively cooled so this is
kind of a clever arrangement if i do say so myself where i use the fan on my
power supply to draw air through the heatsink and then exhaust it actually
works surprisingly well even if it probably is going to hurt the long term
longevity of the power supply and then we've got our motherboard and our i
think it's 16 gigs of ddr3 if i recall
correctly so that definitely needs an upgrade also i might replace this
silence fan that i've owned for 15 years and
modded by painting uv green
about a decade ago i don't know it's pretty brutal look at these like flakes
of paint coming off it i gotta say one thing i'm really noticing as i'm taking
this apart is i've never really pushed it that hard before like even most
modern games they're using a couple threads at a time we were talking full
four core load and spiking as high as a
hundred percent while streaming it was even pinned at 100 at times so this
thing was working freaking hard which is not necessarily the best thing for a
system that's running in a really confined space like this one which is
where the upgrade component choices come in so
it's a little overkill i mean i did say i needed the upgrade i didn't say we
wouldn't still be going overkill we're going to be using an rog crosshair 8
impact so this is a mini dtx motherboard
that i am sincerely hoping is going to fit in our mini itx case we've got a
ryzen 7 3800x so we are doubling our
core count as well as improving our per core performance we've got a 16 gig i
think yep 16 gig kit of ddr4 3200 memory
and a new cooler that is hopefully going
to be low profile enough that i will also be able to fit its fan on it
otherwise we're gonna have a bit of a hard time with a nearly 100 watt CPU in
here you can see that in spite of my best efforts to keep dust out of that
compartment with the dust filters that are built into the bottom of it clearly
a lot of dust still makes its way to the pc and even past the fan filter so i've
treated myself to a knocked to a industrial ppc 2000 RPM fan
man i gotta say i've got some wrongs to write in this build cable management was
terrible i only had three screws
in my fan i can do better than this
i mean on a radiator yeah i'd probably use two but try and do some decent cable
management this time around ah realistically it's not gonna happen is
it first up is installing our CPU in the
socket so we just need the golden triangle to the triangle bippity boppity
and we are done it looks pretty straightforward we throw
the back plate on got a nice heavy duty back plate
although i'm not 100 sure why AMD does include their own back plate put some
thermal paste on our CPU chuck this bad boy onto here oh i really
hope this fits oh we're good okay
then we just put in these four screws from the back
man i gotta say this is a cool little board it's incredible how many features
they packed onto this thing you got sure super robust vrm including two cooling
fans though i do have my concerns about them being loud you've got their sodim.2
so that's how it handles m.2 installation a lot of the time you'd see
that on the back of these little compact boards but it's really hard to get
cooling back there so i like this approach and this thing not only supports two NVMe drives it's even got
two more fan headers and another five volt addressable RGB header on it pci
express 16x gen 4 a separate daughter
board for the onboard sound that's pretty sick so there's your front panel
audio connector front usb built-in buttons which is pretty sweet for SATA
ports usb 3 and the new type c usb 3
front panel connector and a couple dimm slots but
all of that comes at a cost it's not strictly speaking itx which is square
it's the same with this itx but it's actually a little bit taller so as long
as your itx case has an extra pci slot to accommodate a
dual slot graphics card there's a very good chance that it'll fit but i have
not actually tested that yet this is where i find out if i'm going AMD
oh it's perfect we're going AMD
in goes our memory oh yeah i never even talked about the rear i o
BIOS reset clear cmos audio wi-fi 6 a
bunch of usb 3 ports freaking awesome and spit if you're still into that sort
of thing is it multi-gigabit lan that would be sweet
it's not
especially on itx boards it makes the biggest difference because realistically
you can't install a 10 gig lan card if you want because
where would you put it i mean if i really wanted to
i could use the sodium.2 and then one of
those m.2 slots and i could take that out to a pci express card expander and i
could like put it somewhere i'm not that desperate though
okay so with that in there now we're just building a computer
it's the thing about small form factor machines it's like everything looks so
clean and compact then you gotta wire everything up
the whole day ruined like why did silverstone put cables this long
on the usb 3 connector why
it needs to go this far
does this even have front audio did i cut it off or something
now i'm breaking one of my own cardinal rules here and i'm installing the graphics card now oh shoot i went and i
put the front panel on before the graphics card in this case the graphics
card goes in quite early dang it
of course i put in all four screws
now one funny idiosyncrasy of this build is that it uses an internal fan header
to run the fans that are in the cabinet
around the computer so i just need to run these out the top
of the pci slot cover here before i put the power supply in
not the most elegant thing ever you know in fairness to me this is
actually pretty darn tidy for a compact build let's go ahead and run our power
supply cables then we'll install the power supply i usually find that's a
little bit easier and this is where the cable management all goes completely to
hell that is really tight
sorry fan cables what did we do to deserve this no
no help us please
i don't understand why this power supply won't go in
i am legitimately super confused right now i have no idea what's going on
certainly not the glamiest machine we've ever done but look at that clearance in
here as long as it cools okay i guess we're in pretty good shape and there's
lots of room for the fan so hopefully we're not restricting airflow too much i
mean i wish this 24 pin wasn't right across here there's nothing we can
really do about that
this is stupid
oh boy this would slow us down a lot if this machine wasn't booting
i don't even have any way of looking at the post oh maybe i could use a mirror
oh i always say it's bad luck to close up the panels
before you test to make sure the system works
um okay well i can see postcodes now
wait what you got to be kidding me all i did was take the panel off
you got to be kidding me look afraid to put this on now
so we've turned our memory to its faster profile
i am setting it to boot to our SSD
uh where are my drives
okay why are our boot devices not showing up let's go to easy mode maybe
i'm just maybe it's too advanced for me the system cannot find any bootable
devices but it's right there csm is disabled by default on this thing
so i think it's just a matter of going in and setting it to legacy support hey
there it is all right we good
let's get booted into Windows all the devices are detected
our CPU is turboing up to 4.2 gigahertz in spite of our wimpy cooler that we've
got on it we'll see how it holds up when we're actually gaming let's find out how
it handles it so theoretically
i should be able to record gameplay
with absolutely no compromises in terms
of performance now
well i'm happy
feels good looks good
the recording is wait the recording's not going
that's it for the excuses if i ever screw up during my stream i'm
gonna have no one to blame but myself
which isn't to say i won't still try and find something and i am super happy
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oh that is so much better way more comfortable just in time for us to rip
this whole thing out stay tuned guys make sure you're subscribed one of our upcoming projects going to be super cool
we're going to move all this compute up into my server room and use fiber optics
to bring it back down here it's going to be sick we'll see you there oh for those curious
about the encoding settings that i'm using we're at 60fps 1080 6000 kilobit per
second and i'm using NVIDIA inbank new