as you guys know ltx is coming up and this year we've teamed up with dreamhack
so there's gonna be a giant byoc or bring your own computer lan party
pretty sweet but how can you safely be
your c well today we're gonna show you guys and really anyone else who wants to
move their computer around how to safely transport a gaming rig whether you're
driving flying or even just shipping it
to yourself separately speaking of tips you might want to
consider using an origin pc you can customize your origin pc desktop with an
NVIDIA GeForce rtx graphics card and pair it with a g-sync monitor for fast
refresh rates learn more at the link below
first things first packing up a computer is a little bit different than other
objects because not only do you have to protect the outside don't want to dent
in the top of your case but you also have to protect the insides and that's
where we're going to start today inside your pc some parts are at much higher
risk than others take for example the CPU cooler
while a lower profile cooler with a robust metal mounting mechanism might
not cause much trouble a tall top heavy
cooler like this one or a cooler that uses plastic push pins even if it's not
that heavy is liable to either put a lot
of torque on the motherboard potentially bending or breaking it or worse yet
come detached from the motherboard in shipping and bang around inside your
system i have seen this it is not pretty
so there's a few ways that you can deal with the cooler first is to avoid this
situation altogether by using an aio water cooling kit
yes they can be expensive and they don't always even cool your system better
but they are a safer solution when it comes to transporting your machine
because most of their weight is spread out and mounted to the case rather than
hanging off your CPU socket option number two is to remove your
cooler all together before you transport it now this is labor intensive and
remember you're going to have to reapply your thermal paste when you put it all
back together but it definitely improves the safety
the third option is to keep the cooler in place but to pack extra material
around it so that it can't move under any circumstances and if it comes off it
won't be able to hit anything i'll show you guys how to do that in just a moment
our next usual suspect is
the hard drive now these are actually pretty freaking fragile because a lot of
the assemblies like the discs or the spindle rely on highly precise
alignments where a deviation of even a thousandth of an inch can kill your
drive not only that but shocks and vibrations
can actually cause the recording heads to rattle against the discs possibly
scratching them if mounted properly inside your case
which will then be in a box it's probably okay to leave it in however if
you want to be extra cautious it can be a good idea to take your hard drives out
and carry them with you or at the very least make sure that you've backed up
your important data before leaving home other vulnerable components in your
tower include really anything with an edge connector
but not all of them are equally at risk with
your RAM you can usually feel pretty safe just by putting a couple of zip
ties around the outside of the slot for it and for something like a network card
yes it fits into a PCIe slot and it has the same number of anchor points as a
graphics card but because it's light there's very little risk of it coming
out on the subject of graphics cards these are a problem and the reason is
because they're heavy they've got just two anchor points the screw at the back
and the slot on the motherboard so as you can imagine it's possible for these
to even rip the socket apart when the case gets dropped like a courier is apt
to do so the safest course of action is to
take it out before transporting your rig but
if you're gonna do this and this applies to your hard drive too you should really
put it in an anti-static bag this will prevent electric charges from
building up on your device and potentially damaging the circuitry now
if you've still got the static shielding bag that came with your GPU or your hard
drive these are the best alternatively
you can use a polyethylene antistatic bag these ones are usually pink just
keep in mind that these are dissipative rather than static shielding meaning
that yes they're effective at preventing the buildup of static electricity as
they can't create or hold a charge but they will not protect your electronics
from a direct static discharge like a
shock from rubbing your feet around on the carpet also if you do remove some
parts from your rig be sure to tie down any loose cables so they aren't banging
around or scratching anything inside while they're flailing around but by
this point you're probably thinking most system builders like main gear or origin
pc obviously they don't remove all the components before shipping so how can we
do what they do safely well you basically just need to stuff the inside
of the system with enough material that nothing inside of it can shift
so one thing that can help you do that is these expanding foam packs that once
activated will expand to fill your particular case
they're pretty cool but they're not the easiest to use and
they're definitely not the cheapest option because most systems will require
more than one of them alternatively you can scrounge for
packing materials that that hit the hard drive
alternatively you can scrounge around your house for any anti-static foam or
bubble wrap or other packing materials it's certainly
better than nothing another pro tip is to cut up something like a polyethylene
pool noodle or take really nice packing materials like
this that you can find and cut them up to size this was actually a super pro
tip that we used to use at ncix where we'd kind of cut them to size and then
wedge them in so that nothing could really move the idea is that even if the
system gets drop kicked you don't want things shifting too much because once
they gain momentum they can start to gain leverage and wrench things apart so
for now we're done with the inside so if you're
driving to your next lan packing up the inside plus attaching a
neato carrying harness or something like that might be all that you need to do
but if your pc is flying as checked luggage or getting shipped on its own
you'll also need to protect the outside now the most common recommendation is to
ship your pc in the box that the case came with it's the right size and you
probably still have the original packing foam that came with it but there are a
couple of things to keep in mind one is that this box was designed to
protect a case not a case that was loaded up with an
extra 15 to 25 pounds of components so
it's definitely a good idea to put this box inside another box
two if your case was shipped with soft foam
like this that could be reusable but
if it was shipped with a harder rigid style foam like this stuff
it could have been spent by its original journey and like bike helmets this stuff
is designed to take an impact not a bunch of impacts
now we've got to solve our last problem you might have noticed in all of this
that there's no room for the monitor so for that
you'll either have to one use a different outer box a larger one
although i don't necessarily recommend that because your monitor just banging
around in there is not going to be a good time or two
you'll have to ship it in a separate box and once again here we recommend using
the original one wherever possible with the same caveat that depending on the
type of foam that was used it might not have its original structural rigidity
another fun option is a lot of these kinds of events actually have the option
to rent a monitor when you get to your destination for example dreamhack and
quakecon usually have both pcs and monitors for rent
but that's not an option at ltx 2019 so
if you're choosing one large box and you want to kind of pack everything in there
the most important thing is to make sure that it's big enough for all of your
stuff plus your padding but not so big that you're paying for
unnecessary size and weight you also want to make sure that you have
enough packing material because if there's any space for things to slide
around just like with the inside of the pc
you're going to have a pretty bad time now for the inside of an outer box you
can use whatever cheapo packing material
you can find crumpled up newspaper anything that you can pull out of the
garbage that'll help absorb impacts without adding too much weight taping up
your box you want to use two strips of packing tape across the opening two
perpendicular to that and then a loop around the edge just for added stability
repeat that on the other side and you're set now the big question
do you write fragile this side up or
computer on the side well
it's probably not going to help you since most of the people who handle
boxes are moving so fast that they don't have time to give your package any
special treatment and much of the logistics chain is actually
automated so that unsympathetic robots who can't read will likely be the ones
giving your box most of the abuse it's worth a try
we're just not going to tell you to get your hopes up
speaking of getting your hopes up i've got my hopes up that with pia
my true ip address will be hidden and i
will be able to bypass geo restrictions and censorship it's not just hopes
that's how it works with pia you appear as though you are some anonymous person
connecting from someplace else you can use pia with up to five devices at once
it's got an internet kill switch if your vpn gets disconnected involuntarily so
you won't accidentally leak any personal information it includes mace pia's built-in malware
blocker and it offers a variety of levels of encryption that you can
fine-tune to your heart's content they've got apps for Windows mac Android
iOS and even a chrome extension and you can check it out at lng.gigi
pia linus2 so thanks for watching guys if this video sucked
you know what to do but if it was awesome get subscribed hit that like
button or check out the link to where to buy the stuff we featured in the video
description i don't know we put the expanding foam thing in there yeah sure
okay cool also link in the description is our merch store which has cool shirts
like the one i'm wearing and cool hoodies like the one i'm wearing
and our community forum which you should totally join