4k displays just got affordable and i'm not talking about those 4k tvs with the 30 hertz
inputs i'm talking about single tile 4k desktop monitors that offer fast enough response times
and low enough input lag that pc enthusiasts and gamers are going to want to take a serious
look at them but the upgrade particularly the budget allocation part of it is not as simple
as grabbing that new monitor plopping it on your desk and expecting you to get the best gaming
experience on it right off the bat unless you're already living on like the bleeding edge of
available pc hardware it's very unlikely that you'll be running modern games at that massive
3840 by 2160 native resolution without making some changes so you'll be stuck with one of two
solutions run at native resolution with significantly reduced frame rates remember
this is four times as many pixels as 1080p and well over twice as many
of the same resolution as the 2080p and the 2080p and the 2080p and the 2080p and the 2080p and the
2080p is 1440p or run at a lower resolution and deal with the blurriness and artifacting
that exists when running a monitor at anything other than the native res or upgrade so prepare
your wallets and prepare your minds for our 4k gaming rig ultimate build guide
we need like an explosion effect in the back like all of our build guides it all starts with a safe
static free workstation and anti-static strap i actually like to keep mine on my
ankle to keep it out of the way all we really need for assembly is a multi-bit screwdriver but
a pair of side cutters can be handy for cable management and you never know when some little
needle nose pliers will come in handy before you begin i always recommend plugging all the
components in and powering the system up once outside of the case to ensure everything works
while it's nice and easy to reach the motherboard box makes a handy
non-conductive test bench but for now let's just get into it with all the noise getting
made about proper multi-core support in games with mantle like battlefield 4 and thief 2014
and directx 12 and upcoming games in 2015 it's as good a time as any to pick up a CPU that supports
more threads our choice was the Intel core i7 4930k and while it does have plenty of pci express 3.0
lanes for high bandwidth graphics cards and other future expansion cards and support for 64 gigs of
ddr3 memory with relatively inexpensive in-game storage and a lot of storage space and a lot of
storage space and a lot of storage space and a lot of storage space and a lot of storage space
and a lot of storage space and a lot of storage space and a lot of storage space and a lot of storage space
8 gig unbuffer dims it simply came down to the fact that it's Intel's least expensive 6 core 12
thread CPU and we really wanted all them cores so lift up both retention arms one on each side
of the socket then pull up the hold down plate orient the CPU by matching the corner of your
CPU with a triangle with the corresponding triangle corner on the socket then insert it
gently ensuring that the little plastic nubbins in the socket align with the ones that are on the
CPU itself i usually give the CPU a slight wiggle to ensure that it is seated correctly
the whole process should not require any force up to this point next lower the hold down plate
and lower first the retention ARM that locks down the hold down plate
then the second one and the little cover will pop off just like that our memory selection won't
surprise anyone who watched my overview of g skills rip jaw z quad channel ddr3 2400 megahertz RAM we
went with high speed memory because it's becoming more affordable and some games are actually
starting to benefit from it and we threw in overkill for gaming 32 gigs of it in here for
content creators who also want to do some media work with large files when they're not gaming say
for example recording and editing game streams start by identifying the color matched slots on
your motherboard and opening up the retention clips on either side i recommend using the ones
furthest away from the CPU socket first for a lot of games that don't come with a CPU socket so i'm
going to go ahead and do that first for marginally better airflow around the socket area align each
dim according to the plastic key in the slot and the notch in the bottom of the memory module
then it first insert one side into the side without the clips then the other side with the
clips do a quick double check to make sure it's aligned correctly then press down firmly on both
sides of the module until the retention clip snaps back into place on its own repeat for the
second slot on this side then move over to the other side and put in the additional
two modules. Four matched sticks are recommended for LGA 2011 CPUs for extra memory bandwidth.
Now when I first laid eyes on the Corsair
760T at CES 2014, this 4k build guide was still a twinkle in my eye,
but I decided at that moment that this case, with its ample airflow,
solid build quality, and out-of-this-world looks, was gonna be the case for it. True story.
It's available in black or this version, and I suppose it's obvious at this point which one I like better.
Prepare your case by lifting both of the uniquely designed acrylic side panels off their hinges and
stashing them somewhere safe where they won't get scratched.
We're gonna be replacing the stock fans later on with some Bitfenix Spectre Pro green LED fans,
so now is a good time to remove the ones that come with the case.
Just press on the front fan filter to pop it off and
undo the four screws holding these down.
Then put them aside for now.
Next, take out the four screws at the back that hold in the rear fan. This one we're gonna replace right away.
So just align the fan with the three pin lead coming out as close to the motherboard tray as you can for easy cable management
later. Then put the anti-vibration mounts that come with the fan in like so.
Make sure you put the hardware, the screws that came with the original fan,
safely in a tray with all of your other screws that were included with your case, so you're less likely to lose them.
That way, well, okay, well, that is to say unless you lose the whole tray, but either way, if that happens,
there's nothing I can do for you. So this should help most people.
The motherboard is often a complicated choice even for experienced techies.
There are the useful features that matter, and then there are many others that are just pure marketing.
Fortunately for us, this choice was made relatively simple because ASUS only released three motherboards that were truly optimized for Intel's Ivy Bridge E,
LGA 2011 CPUs, and only one of them is less than $500. So we went with the X79 Deluxe.
It's got all the stuff that matters, like AC, Wi-Fi,
multi-graphics support, strong CPU, and RAM overclocking support, automated fan control, and robust build quality
without having to spend a fortune on stuff that doesn't really help your system run better. From the box,
you'll need the I.O. shield, the board itself, Wi-Fi antennas, a couple straight-ended SATA cables, the two-way SLI bridge, and the
manual. Everything else you can pretty much leave in the box until you need it another time.
Correctly orient the I.O. shield at the back of the case, then press firmly on each of the four corners until they snap into place.
Corsair kindly pre-installs the standoffs in their cases.
So just poke the back of the board through the I.O. shield, then lower it into place. Corsair also kindly
replaces the screw threads of the middle standoff with a little post that holds the motherboard there for you while you do
up the eight screws around it here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.
For the front panel I.O., power and reset are not affected by orientation,
so just check the spots for them in the motherboard manual and plug them in. The power and drive activity LEDs do need the positive
pin to correspond to the correct wire, however, so if they're not working, just try flipping them around. Don't worry,
you won't damage anything.
Front USB 3 only goes in one way, thanks to the keyed connector, while front USB 2 and
audio are a little bit trickier. Just look closely for the blocked-off pin on the cable and the missing pin on the header.
The wire for that fan that we installed at the back can be either managed behind the fan frame or
looped up to be shorter, then plugged into the nearest fan header.
Don't worry that there are four pin fan headers on the board. Three pin fans will work just fine on them. Now,
I'll be the first to admit that I don't know enough about electrical engineering to properly evaluate a power supply
on
that level, and even if I did, I don't have anything resembling the necessary equipment to do it anyway.
But, what I do know is where to find the best power supply reviews on the internet, johnnyguru.com.
So, why did I choose the Cooler Master V850 power supply? Well, because I want rock-solid efficiency, a nice sexy ID,
nice cables on a modular interface, and one more thing,
I want the power supply that had absolutely nothing listed in the cons section at the end of a Johnny Guru review. End of story.
850 watts will be enough for
our rig, but if we wanted some growing room, the V1000 is an option as well.
We're using a modular power supply, so rather than worrying about cables right off the bat,
we're just going to slide the PSU into its position,
fan side down at the bottom of the case, where there's a filtered intake.
Then, use the four screws included in the box to secure it at the back.
Next, grab the 24 pin cable, 8 pin EPS cable, two PCI Express power cables, a couple SATA power cables, and a 4 pin
Molex cable. This should be enough for us to power the whole system.
Plug the 24 pin and 8 pin EPS connectors into your motherboard, then route them behind the motherboard tray through the nearest holes.
Put the others aside for now. We won't need them until later.
Strictly speaking, SSDs don't affect the frame rate at which your games will run,
so my choice of a couple Intel 730 series SSDs in RAID 0 might seem a little strange to some,
but it's not a purely practical thing for this rig.
The reason I actually did this is that a while ago, when I did my personal rig update,
I had a lot of people asking me about running SSDs in RAID 0 for extra performance, and I've had to say,
well, hold on, no, don't do it the way that I was doing it with eight refurbished drives and all that,
and then the inevitable follow-up question is, okay then, what way would you recommend doing it?
So to which I would reply, well, if you must have RAID 0, then this is how I would do it. Intel SSDs are
legendarily reliable, and the 730 series
specifically offers outstanding performance consistency, something that's very important for RAID operation,
where the entire array will slow down to the speed of the slowest drive at any given moment.
Corsair includes handy-dandy spring-loaded SSD mounts in the front of the case near the right side panel,
so installing our SSDs is literally a snap.
Pop them in there, route the SATA data cables as neatly as we can to the motherboard, and then double-check the manual to ensure
that you're using a SATA 3 6 gigabit per second connector that's running off of the Intel chipset. On this particular board,
it's going to be the top ones. Then grab a SATA power cable from earlier,
carefully plug that into each drive without putting unnecessary tension on the connector, and route that back to the power supply.
Now our GPU choice of dual GTX 780 TIs for a 4K gaming rig is likely to raise some eyebrows,
but bear with me here for a minute while I explain the choice. First up,
is why two cards? I'm just still not a strong believer in three- and four-way configurations.
I don't think the scaling justifies the extra cost, heat, and power consumption.
This dual card config will be able to run even the most demanding games today at medium to high settings at 4K, and
while I can, you know, compare screenshots side-by-side and tell the difference between
high and ultra game settings, when things are actually in motion, I don't really find it that easy to tell,
so I'm not going to spend a ton more money
just to turn that dial a little bit higher.
Another dial, again, because we're only using two cards that we won't be cranking for lack of necessary horsepower, is anti-aliasing,
but again, justification for that is I don't really find it useful beyond 2 to 4x max at this kind of pixel density anyway.
Next up is the 3 gig frame buffer limitation. If you need more,
you're not alone, and for you, there are other options available, such as dual R9 290Xs or dual
Titan Blacks. I went with this config because nothing that I'm playing
requires more video memory at the moment, and I'm willing to trade a little bit of future-proofness
for an exclusive NVIDIA feature that I use a lot. Now, many GPU features are mostly fluff to me.
I don't use ShadowPlay or Mantle, but one that I do use, and a lot, is Gamestream.
I have an NVIDIA Shield, and I actually do a ton of my PC gaming in bed with my Shield.
I'm not willing to give that up by going over to the red team,
and I'm not willing to spend a bunch more money on Titan Blacks just to get that feature and to have more memory,
especially if the games I'm using don't need the extra VRAM.
So given that these perform the same if you don't need it, 780Ti's it is.
Lastly, and this is a probably half serious and a half joke at this point,
I am a dad now, and dads everywhere know that you don't waste power.
The performance is similar between two 290Xs and two 780Ti's,
but the difference in load power consumption is over a hundred percent.
And on top of that, much of that extra power will be wasted as heat,
which has to go somewhere, and my gaming den is on the second floor of the south side of my house,
where it's warm enough in the summer without the extra heat.
So I hope the takeaway was this.
It's a personal choice, not a condemnation of the other available options that I went with 780Ti SLI.
If you don't have a Shield, and you live in the Arctic Circle, then dual 290Xs might be a better option for you,
and that's totally just fine.
Let's all just not fanboy out and respect that different solutions work better for different people.
With that out of the way, remove two PCI slot covers that each correspond to one of the PCIe 16x physical and electrical slots on the motherboard,
and stash those somewhere safe in case you ever need to take a card out and need something to fill the gap.
Position each card over the PCI Express slot, and when it's aligned, firmly push it into place.
Replace the screws that you took out
of the slot covers, then grab the PCIe power cables from before, and plug them into your GPUs before routing them back to the power
supply behind the motherboard tray.
Put the proverbial cherry on top by installing your SLI bridge, and now it's time to move on to cable management.
The thing I like about the H110 from Corsair is that unlike other all-in-one liquid coolers,
it is purely performance oriented.
You give up better mounting and software control compared to other options,
but our 6-core CPU needs
all the help it can get, especially if you plan to do any overclocking.
So I paired this cooler and positioned it at the front intake. This has two effects.
Number one is it allows the CPU to be cooled by nice fresh air coming right into the case, and number two is that it
lets me leave the clean-looking top on the 760T versus taking it off for mesh in order to do a top radiator install.
We do sacrifice slightly higher temperatures for the rest of the components in the case, but it's really not that big of a deal.
Start by locating the correct mounting hardware for LGA2011 in the box.
If you've got good eyes,
you can do this pretty easily by looking for the ones with the more coarse threading. If you need some help, check the manual.
Orient the plastic fillers so the hole is closer to the outside of the hold-down bracket and put the screws through.
They should stay in place.
The cooler includes thermal compounds, so you won't need to apply your own.
So all you need to do is secure the hold-down plate with the included plastic ring,
then
screw in all four of the mounting holes into the back plate that is included on all LGA2011 boards.
Corners lightly, then all the way to avoid applying uneven pressure to your CPU.
Next, we need to clear space at the front of the case by removing the front three and a half inch drive cage.
Undo the two screws on the bottom of the case, then just pop it out.
We are only using SSDs in this build, so we could remove the second cage if we wanted,
but if we leave that in, it gives us
three bays for future drive expansion.
Position the front 140 millimeter fans using the long screws included with your radiator,
then, being careful not to accidentally put any strain on your memory modules or anything else,
position the radiator carefully behind them and start threading the screws in.
If it takes a couple of tries to get it aligned, don't worry.
It's a bit tricky. Just be gentle and be patient.
Plug the fan connectors into the nearest ports available on the motherboard,
then plug the pump connector on the CPU block
into the CPU header on your motherboard.
Moving on to some last-minute cable management,
it's just a matter of laying everything down flat enough that we can close the side panels easily without any interference.
Something that's a little bit more difficult on this case than it is on some other ones
due to that plexi back panel that will easily flex and bow out if you have anything that's stacked up too high.
The good news is that you've got almost a full inch of clearance back here,
so even things like this can be easily removed.
Even things like a 24-pin connector are easy to hold in place.
I recommend using twist ties instead of zip ties.
And if you just built a computer, which you just did, you should have some.
They come wrapped around things like your power supply cables in the box.
Then use those to tie down to the little cable management loops on the back of the case because they're reusable and
a little bit more convenient to remove because you don't have to use snippers to get them off.
I think that's pretty much it.
Stash the unneeded ones.
We've got two wires for the fan controller up in the top left.
We didn't end up using that because we're going to be using our motherboard's onboard fan control,
so that means we don't even have to plug in the SATA power for it.
And...
Looks not bad, hey?
So the tower is pretty much done now,
but we still need some things before this bad boy will fire up.
Now when it comes to peripherals, there's a lot of personal taste involved.
So take all of these recommendations with a grain of salt.
The one thing I think we can all agree on though is that
when it comes to a 4K gaming rig, you are going to need a 4K monitor.
There aren't a ton of options out there.
I mean, up until very recently, for a high-quality, color-accurate, you know,
reasonably gaming capable monitor, the PQ321Q that's like
$3,000 was pretty much all there was, or one of the other ones using the same panel.
But just recently,
Samsung released a value-priced TN-based, but still using a pretty decent panel,
U28D2.
so that's a 4K monitor that came in and basically went
Okay. Yeah, it's only a single tile so it's
you're not gonna have to contend with any, you know multiple tile
you know
stuttering issues or anything like that.
But the bad news about that one and it
was a deal-breaker for a lot of people was that it has no
VESA mount and the included stand is really not that great.
But there's good news two days before we finished filming the segment right here.
here ASUS's pb287q based on the same panel but with a better height adjustable pivotable you
know everythingable stand and a vase amount is now in our hands and holy crap this is pretty much
the one to go for right now for a 4k gamer that well wants to game at 4k for our mouse we went
with the Corsair m45 it's the one that i'm using now personally it's got what's known as a perfect
sensor that is to say there's no forced acceleration or other weirdness and the dpi is high enough for
it to perform well at 4k something you do have to consider because with such a high resolution
monitor you're going to want to have faster mouse movements in order to have it seem like a normal
speed for our keyboard choice we went with a ducky shine 3 it's something that i've recommended quite
a few times before it uses cherry mx switches whatever
you're going to want to have a ducky shine 3 it's something that i've recommended quite a few
colors that you like and comes with a variety of different colors of backlight as well as some
really cool lighting effects this will hold out for us as long as we're still waiting for Corsair's
RGB backlit cherry mx keyboard for our gaming headset we're going with the audio technica
ath ag1 it's basically a high quality closed back headphone with very good noise isolation
with an absolutely outstanding microphone attached to it with the elastic band mod
It's comfortable, lightweight, and aside from being extremely expensive, basically the ideal headset.
Although, since I scripted this video, we actually had the ModMic 4.0 land in our studio,
and I've spent a little bit of time with it, and holy crap, guys,
the whole option of just buying headphones and attaching a ModMic to it
might be a lot more feasible in the future with that new microphone.
So, guys, peripherals are changing all the time, but at least this hopefully gives you a starting point.
Press Delete while booting up the system for the first time to go into the UEFI BIOS,
load optimized defaults to just get everything kind of mostly set up,
change your memory to XMP mode, set your fans to quiet mode one by one,
then configure your onboard SATA controller to RAID mode.
That's the basics, but there's lots of other stuff in here you can play with if you want to tweak and tune.
I'd recommend starting at Linus-techtips.com if you want to get some help from our fantastic community.
For now, press F10 to reboot.
Then press F6 when prompted to configure your two drives in RAID.
We're using RAID 0 for maximum speed with all of the default settings.
Then put the system aside for now.
Use the guide that we made a while ago to create a bootable USB drive,
then reboot while mashing F8 repeatedly to get into the boot device selection menu where you'll pick your USB drive.
Once the setup process for Windows has begun,
it's basically a matter of clicking Next until you land on the Windows desktop.
At the desktop, grab the latest drivers off the manufacturer websites for each of your components,
rather than relying on the ones that are on the disks in the boxes.
Then, hit up ninite.com for your essential free software.
You can choose from all kinds of useful stuff, including antivirus installers, alternative web browsers, and great system utilities.
Just select all the things you want, and it'll install them all automagically without the bloatware that can sometimes be included with these kinds of apps.
You might also want to run some basic software.
There are some basic utilities to make sure your system is running correctly.
I recommend AIDA64, Memtest86, Prime95, and some good old-fashioned gaming to ensure that everything is hunky-dory.
With all that done, it's time to fire up some games and benchmark the system.
So we took some of the most demanding games in our test suite and ran them at the highest settings that we could,
while still achieving smooth, playable frame rates at 4K.
Absolutely fantastic.
Everything is running at a nice, comfortable temperature, and we stayed within the limits of our 850-watt power supply.
I consider this machine a huge success.
But the journey is not over.
It'll be another product generation or two before IPS 4K displays with better color accuracy reach affordable levels,
and reasonably-priced graphics cards are able to drive modern games at 4K.
But, if nothing else, what we achieved today was a glimpse into the future of PC games.
And let me tell you guys, the future looks pretty darn good.
While you guys enjoy some glamour footage of our finished system that we worked really hard on,
I want to take another opportunity to extend a huge thank you to Intel for making this video possible.
These build guides are incredibly time-consuming for us to produce,
and without sponsors like Intel to foot the bill, we wouldn't be able to set aside the week-plus that it takes for my team to script, film, and edit them.
So thanks, Intel, for supporting the DIY folks who want high-quality guides
that enable them to confidently build their own PCs.
I hope you guys enjoyed this video as much as we enjoyed making it.
Hit that subscribe button now if you haven't already, and until next time, peace out.