whenu Falls
all will build it once again
AMD's new cavar architecture apus
feature not only a quadcore CPU on board
but 47% of the die area is actually
taken up by a seriously powerful direct X11 graphics processor that uses a
scaled down version of the same gcn architecture that you'll find on their
desktop Radeon series graphics cards now you might be asking yourself um why does
it matter that I have a powerful graphics processor on my CPU why do I
need an APU to which I would reply in this case HSA or heterogeneous system
architecture this is in a nutshell the ability of the processor to treat both
its CPU cores and integrated Graphics
processing cores as equals that can work
together rather than two separate things that basically work independently and
communicate with each other over the relatively slow PCI Express bus now with
HSA those two processors can even access
the same system memory in order to achieve perfect collaboration and while
we'll need software to play catchup a little bit before the majority of your
programs are optimized for HSA the performance benefits that can be
realized are very significant and with
all of that in mind it is time for a build guide featuring this exciting
processor that marks the first availability of HSA Hardware so let's
start off our rationale with the Apu just as a reminder an APU contains both
a CPU component and a GPU component so
I'll start with the CPU part with its Steamroller cores cavar doesn't
dramatically improve raw CPU performance
over AMD's last generation Richland products but what it does do is it
delivers much lower power consumption without losing any performance and while
adding some very important technologies that establish AMD's leadership position
in HSA Hardware I mean I guess when you're the first one to actually deliver
something to the market that sets you up pretty well for that leader title moving
on to the GPU the onboard Graphics this
is not your grandpa's onboard Graphics though I mean I mean well if your
grandpa had onboard Graphics then maybe there were something pretty special
actually since your grandpa's obviously the doctor but but see seriously the gcn
architecture of Cav's integrated GPU means that you get access to some
serious performance and features aside from directx11 which I mentioned already
is AMD's mantle API that actually allows
game developers to better optimize their games to make the most of the CPU power
they have available with a well optimized game we can expect to unlock
some serious performance improvements over direct X11 with mantle stay tuned
for The Benchmark section next next up is AMD's true audio DSP or digital sound
processor a piece of technology that could revolutionize the way in-game
audio is handled by game engines in the long term in games rather than relying
on cheap software tricks to achieve echos and other spatial effects true
audio allows sound to bounce realistically off of objects accurately
according to the player surroundings and outside of games the applications of
this technology include things like cleaning background noise out of voice
recordings and much much more and all of this is without using up valuable CPU
Cycles then finally there's dual Graphics or the ability to basically run
your onboard Graphics in crossfire with a supported desktop graphics card for
tangible performance improvements we'll be showing you this one running in
tandem with an r7250 later on in the
video which leads us to memory in AMD's
internal testing they found that 8 gigs
is the sweet spot where most people unless you're doing content creation or
some other kind of serious usage are not using more than that and I will agree
with that up front but they also found that in addition to dual Channel DDR
3600 MHz they are finding a benefit all
the way up to 2400 mahz dual Channel
DDR3 memory so I went with G skills
Aries 2400 megahertz uh 2x4 gig kit for
this particular build not because I necessarily believe them right off the
bat but because I want to take this system when we're done and do a little
bit of validation and find out if it's worth the extra couple bucks as for why
we went with g-skill RAM um on our test benches we found that it just plain
Works across a very wide variety of motherboards to an extent that we don't
see from any other manufacturers so I've
never actually showcased them on the channel before I figured we might as well do that because it's something that
we do use intern and having RAM that just plane operates
as intended is pretty
invaluable for the motherboard we went with an ASRock fm2 a88x Extreme 6 Plus
and honestly there's not much of a rationale here I wasn't particularly
picky about the motherboard for this build the most important thing was to
make sure I was getting one that is fm2
plus as opposed to fm2 fm2 plus CPUs are
not backwards compatible with fm2 boards
whereas fm2 plus boards will work just fine with fm2 CPUs so make sure that
your retailer has fm2 versus fm2 plus boards clearly marked and if you're not
sure double check the manufacturer's website now there's a wide variety
available from all the usual subects and you'll find fancy features on some of
the boards versus other ones but fm2 Bloss boards will have at least the
following features in common number one trim support on ssds running in raid
zero that's a nice little performance feature right there number two is
support for DDR3 up to 2400 MHz
operating in dual Channel mode although overclocking might get you a little bit
more this particular one supports up to 2600 MHz with overclocking number three
is support for up to four displays off the onboard graphics on that cavar Apu
that you've got and number four again
powered by the onboard Graphics is support for 4K video output for cooling
we went with the Cooler Master hyper T4
which is actually AMD optimized out of the box which is kind of unusual these
days there were no awkward adapters or anything like that and it's got a nice
large fan all at a very aggressive price
we could use the Box CPU Cooler but this
one will give us some cooling head room for the overclocking tests later on and
it's going to run quieter as a whole now storage is always so personal normally I
say get a wd blue or a Kingston v300 but
I actually have to leave off my traditional v300 recommendation since
Kingston recently changed the flash that they're using on that drive so crucial's
M500 series and Samsung's 840 Evo series
are both fantastic value oriented options as a replacement for my usual
v300 recommendation I think most people
in this price range will choose the capacity of a hard drive over the speed
of an SSD when it comes to storage but another alternative is always grabbing
an SSD now and kind of living with the small storage for a while then adding a
hard drive for bulk storage later it's all just going to depend on your budget
and your upgrade schedule now the graphics card is a very optional part of
this build and something that I would consider more like an upgrade later
because we were going for a very value optimized system when we put together
the initial list but this r7250 is capable of running in dual
Graphics mode with the onboard GPU so that's effectively like like Crossfire
between your dedicated and your integrated graphics and we will show you
what you can achieve by doing this particular upgrade later on in the
future by running some benchmarks for you in the conclusion of the video our
case is the source 210 Elite from NZXT
it doesn't have many Frills but it looks pretty nice and it acts as a solid
enclosure for our power supply we've gone with a cic ss400 ET which in my
mind is pretty much the only power supply that matters for the entry level
I mean okay it comes in a couple of different you know wattages but it's
it's all basically the same thing they're quiet they have 80 plus bronze
certification and seic as a manufacturer
has a fantastic reputation not to mention they're very inexpensive for our
OSS we're going with Windows 8 because Windows 8 so now it's time for the
actual building first step is to start with a safe static free workstation and
an anti-static strap I like to keep mine on my ankle so that it stays out of my
way while I'm trying to work all we really need for assembly of a modern
computer is a multi-bit screwdriver I like to use a magnetic one because it
doesn't do any damage to the components and if you drop a screw somewhere or
whatever else it allows you to dig it out of there without being more
difficult than it has to be now I always recommend putting the system together
once outside of the case to ensure that
everything works while it's nice and easy to get at the motherboard BL makes
a handy non-conductive test bench don't
use the antistatic bag that's in the motherboard on top of it though once you
power on the board some of these bags have conductive outer Coatings and can
actually short out your motherboard so we'll start with CPU installation
carefully remove both the the CPU and the stock heat sink from the box the
pins on the CPU are very very fragile so
be extremely careful especially with those next lift up the retention ARM on
your motherboard align the triangle on
the corner of the CPU with the triangle on the corner of the socket place the
CPU into the socket don't push on it and
then push down the retention ARM that's pretty much it grab the thermal compound
that is incl uted with your hyper T4 cooler if you were using the stock heat
sink you could just use the thermal compound that is pre-applied to that
then put a line down the middle of the heat spreader it's a bit bigger for AMD
CPUs than it is for their competitor CPUs because their heat spreaders are a
little bit larger next up what you're going to do is grab all the mounting
hardware comes in a big bag like this from your CPU Heat snc box and grab your
memory you'll need both of those for this step well one of them anyway your
memory goes in now because the hyper T4
overhangs the memory slots to the point where you won't be able to install
memory in all the slots once you've installed your cooler so for dual
Channel operation consult the manual of your motherboard but go ahead and
install them in what would normally be colorcoded slots but in the case of this
particular ASRock board is just going to be the ones that are spaced out from
each other whenever installing DDR3 memory open up the tabs align the memory
being careful of The Notches carefully place it in then once
it's positioned correctly push down firmly on both sides until The Notches
click back into place on their own once that's done this big bag of Hardware
that I said you'd need H you don't actually need it I'm sorry I lied to you
guys all you need because this cooler mounts natively on AMD is this hold down
ARM that's it so we're going to position our fan so that it is blowing air up
towards the top of the case then we're going to go ahead and run this through
the bottom position it in the little sort of
mini heat sink at the bottom with the slot in the middle accepting the little
notch in the retention bar place it onto the CPU latch on the
one side that doesn't have a plastic retention clip then latch it onto the
other side there we go and and tension it boom
just like that next up last step here is
take that lead for the CPU fan go ahead and tie it into a nice little knot or
tuck it away somewhere in a corner preferably both and then plug that four
pin connector into the four pin pwm fan
connector on the motherboard itself labeled CPU fan
one your CPU RAM and heat sink they're
all done when you take your case out of the the box I recommend taking the
packing materials and putting them safely away in the box that way if you
ever have to ship your system somewhere or otherwise transport it you're going
to know where those packing materials are and your case box is a great place
to put the boxes for your other components like your motherboard CPU Etc
just in case you have to send any of them back for a warranty exchange at any
point you can pour store them all in there put them in the Attic or whatever else so the first step is to open up the
side panel this case uses thumb screws so you can go ahead and take those out
with your fingers if not there are of course screw slots in the back for a
Phillips head screwdriver you can use your screwdriver instead take off that
left side panel go ahead put
that in the case box as well that way it'll stay safe and it won't get knocked
over or scratched when you're in the process of building your machine I
recommend doing the same thing with the other side panel the first step whenever
you open up any case is to do a quick sanity check have a look is the manual
there good as long as manuals there you can check and find out what other
Hardware was supposed to be included Your Case should come with all of the
hardware that you need to install all of your components inside of it installing
the io shield in a modern case is pretty simple you just go ahead and make sure
that you've got the top side up and you'll be able to tell on this one
because the PS2 and USB ports are going to be at the top and this is true of
most of them the audio ports will be at the bottom go ahead and position it
approximately correctly then press on all four Four
Corners until they have all snapped into place and it doesn't come out anymore
now retail power supplies will come with a bunch of extras like installation
screws and some cable management stuff but even though our power supply is
completely o it comes in a little baggy we have that stuff anyway because it
comes with your case so this one comes with some zip ties as well as the four
hex screws we're going to need to install our power supply so next up we
just need to choose our orientation you can either have the fan up so it's
drawing air away from the inside of the system and exhausting it out the back or
you can have fan side down because in this case there's a ventilation hole
down there so the fan actually keeps its own heat and the Heat of the other
components completely separate making it its own little Thermal Zone and the
other advantage of this orientation is that usually the cables come out this
side and that puts it closer to the motherboard tray for easier Cable
Management so we're going to go fan side down the one thing to watch out for if
you have your fan down is that you put your case onto a hard surface such as a
hardwood or laminate floor because if you put it on a carpet and the feet at
the bottom of the case sink in you could be suffocating your power supply and
causing it to overheat from lack of air flow once it's positioned go ahead and
screw in the four screws in the only spots where they
go and you have successfully installed the power supply my
friend and it's already time to mount the motherboard in the case first first
things first you're going to want to find your standoffs ncxt has done
something here that I actually haven't seen before and they've got some steel
content in their standoffs meaning that when you use their little tool which is
an adapter from a Phillips head screwdriver to a socket for your
standoffs you don't actually lose the magnetic effect of your screwdriver so
normally cases include brass standoffs so the adapter's magnetic but the
standoffs themselves fall out when you try to use them but NZXT doesn't do that
so we're going to install the standoffs in the nine locations required for a
standard ATX board here on the back of the motherboard tray then to make our
lives a little bit easier we're going to lay down our
case position the motherboard carefully
above the standoffs making sure not to scrape it I recommend holding the
motherboard by the heat sink that you've already
installed slide it back towards the io
shield and then once you have positioned it carefully above the standoffs go
ahead and put in the one Middle Screw so that it doesn't shift around then you
can let go and put in the rest of the screws hard drive installation for that
you're going to need two of the utility screws that come in the bag full of lots
of screws with your case I mean that's that's sort of the bulk of them they use
the same threading as a standard case screw but they just have a slightly
different head then all you do is grab your hard drive now okay this is a 500
gig one that was all our props Department was able to find but we really do recommend the terabyte one for
its better uh capacity to price ratio go
ahead and pop one of the toolless hard drive mounting pieces off of the case by
turning it counter clockwise Slide the hard drive into basically whichever Bay
you would like uh it's best to have it next to somewhere that a fan is mounted
if there are any fans in your case but this one doesn't come with any and we haven't invested in any additional fans
so it doesn't really matter the one thing I would think about is how close
the connectors are to the SATA ports on your motherboard as well as how you're
going to out your power cable to the back of the drive itself go ahead and
take your toolless mounting mechanism pop that back into the holes on the
drive turn it clockwise then if you're
concerned about the drive going anywhere even though the tooless mounting
mechanism is enough if your power is just going to sit next to your table I
usually recommend throwing a couple screws into the other side just in
case and once you're finished that your hard drive is mounted so with most of
the hardware for the system actually installed at this point we're ready to
plug in our front panel connectors we're going to start with USB 3 the pins are
very fragile so don't force it but good news it's keyed on the one side so it
only goes in one way next up we have our
front connectors for the power reset power LED and drive activity LED for
power and reset the orientation doesn't matter just make sure you get the uh the
leads on the correct pins but but for the hard drive LED as well as the power
led the positive pin has to correspond to the positive lead so double check
your manual if you're not 100% sure for front USB 2 you can plug into any of the
three connectors that are labeled front USB 2 and there is one blacked out pin
or empty pin that goes into the place where there is an empty Block in the
connector itself and you're actually going to see the same thing with the
front panel audio where it's not in the same position so you can't accidentally
plug those into the wrong ones but there is one blanked out one so you go ahead
and plug that in in the bottom left corner of your board this motherboard
has lots of fan headers so you can go ahead and run those two included fans
the 140 mm at the top and the 120 mm at
the back pretty much wherever you want now there are labels on them like power
fan or chassis fan or CPU fan but it doesn't really matter as long as you
remember where you've plugged it in or I mean you can always play around with it after the fact the only time it'll ever
make a difference what type of fan it is is when you look in the BIOS and you see
the labels and you're adjusting the profile for it or whatever else so go
ahead and plug those in they're both three pin fans but you can plug them
into either a four pin or a three pin connector just like we did and one
little trick that I used is I cut off the Molex connectors that are on these
fans by default these are here just in case you don't have enough spare headers
on your motherboard so that you can power the fans directly off the power
supply the advantage of which which being you can plug in as many as you
want the disadvantage of which being that you will not be able to control
them through your motherboard's UEFI or BIOS in order to turn the fan speeds
down and up dynamically when your system is under higher or lower levels of
stress next up is our main power connectors for the motherboard so we've
got the a pin which goes in the top corner now if I'd been a little bit
smarter I might have pre cable managed this one before I put the motherboard
into the case but have no fear there is
a cable management hole up at the top of the case that allows us to run that wire
up the back there are also Cable Management Loops back here so we can
strap it down and make sure it's nice and tight so we're not going to have any difficulty closing that side panel then
bring the connector up through the front and plug it into the a pin spot above
the CPU socket for the 24 pin it's actually even simpler so we're going to
run that through the cable management hole down at the bottom of the case and
then it's going to go a very short distance also using the cable management
Loops at the back of the case to hold it securely in place and then plug into the
24 pin connector along the right hand edge of the motherboard our motherboard
is now powered to plug in the hard drive all we
have to do is plug our SATA cable into the motherboard any of the SATA ports
will do there's no Master Slave relationship like there used to be with
IDE then plug that data cable into the
back of the drive and find finally a power cable into the back of the drive
as well one thing that I usually like to do is instead of using the last SATA
connector in the chain use the second last one or third last one because that
will leave the additional ones free as kind of a courtesy connector for next
time you want to install a hard drive so you don't have to reroute another SATA
cable of our two last steps one is optional and one is well I guess it's
optional but please tidy up your cables so first we're going to remove the two
PCI brackets that correspond to our top PCI Express 16x slot then we are going
to position our graphics card above the slot plug it in basically just by
pushing evenly on it on both sides once it is locked into place you can go ahead
and put the two screws that you took out to remove those brackets back into the
top of the card and where normally I'd be telling people to find the PCI
Express connector on your power supply and plug it in that's not necessary with
the R7 250 because it is entirely powered by the PCI Express slot once
we're done with that we can go ahead and do any last minute Cable Management so
you can take that bundle of wires and you can tie them down nice and tight
down at the bottom of the case or as another option you can throw them behind
the drive cages here if you want to go for a little bit of a tidier look but
maybe impede access to some of the screw holes at the back if you ever wanted to
fill this baby up with hard drives you're also going to want to you know
grab a pair of scissors and cut off any extra nubbins on the end of your zip
ties and all that good stuff and your system is physically complete now that
the system is mostly set up physically it's time for software setup so in the
BIOS there's only a couple of things we're going to have to do double check
and make sure ahci is enabled for your SATA ports and ensure that all your
components are detected then dial in
that 2400 MHz memory to the correct
speed if you're ever not 100% sure about
the timings the voltage and the frequency you can find that either on
the manufacturer website or actually usually on the modules themselves just
make sure you power down your system before you go yanking your memory
modules out of it to like read the side of them or anything like that next up is
Windows installation which is super simple if you know how don't worry about
the lack of a disc drive in this machine we can grab all that stuff off a disc on
another system copy it to a USB drive then boot from that it's faster and more
convenient we've actually done a guide on this before so go ahead and check out
the video annotation link here if you want to check that out in a simple
system like this there's only one drive so installing Windows on the default
Drive is just the way to go it'll come completely unformatted and by default
it'll fill your entire drive with your Windows installation and then all the
spare area you need in order to install all your applications and all that good
stuff your system will automatically reboot a couple times and you will be
dumped at the desktop now drivers are
something that many people struggle with but it's not too overwhelming if you
break it down install the drivers off of
the disc for things like your network because you're obviously not going to be
able to get on the internet unless you have a network driver then go to the
manufacturer website for things like your video card which is AMD whether you
put in the discrete graphics or you're running the onboard Graphics as well as
your board which is ASRock and just grab
all of the stuff for your particular component and install it if there's
anything missing don't worry too much about it
because all you have to do is use this little simple trick go to device manager
rightclick the component in question usually it'll have a little exclamation
mark with a yellow triangle around it then go to details use the drop- down
box to go to Hardware ID Google the venore number number number and Devore
number number number string and it will tell you exactly what that thing happens
to be and then you're golden now it's time to test our system now I promised a
couple of benchmarks showing some of the benefits of HSA and Now's the Time
Carell Aftershock Pro was run side by side on just a CPU and with HSA enabled
to take advantage of our entire Apu and
then we followed up with a couple runs of PC Mark 8 huge thanks to Future Mark
by the way for providing us with a professional copy which is also HSA
aware and demonstrates a very significant increase in overall system
performance especially in the work and creation Suites our first Graphics test
takes advantage of the mantle API the star swarm Benchmark which we've run in
both directex mode and mantle mode to see what kind of performance
improvements we can get with an APU seems to validate that mantle is going
to have some wings to fly on in the future even though right now there
aren't a ton of games that support it to validate the operation of dual Graphics
we've run BioShock Infinite and Far Cry 3 with just the integrated GPU just the
r7250 utilizing only the CPU part of our Apu and then finally with the Apu
running in dual graphics with the GPU to
show you guys that there is a tangible
performance Improvement now there is still a strong argument for more
powerful discrete graphics but as a proof of concept dual Graphics looks
like a promising technology for the future especially on notebooks where the
discrete graphics card can be turned off entirely when it's not needed to save
power other than that something like an
r7260x is the kind of upgrade that I would look for for a system like this to
take a look at the performance improvements that we can gain from
increasing our memory frequency our gskill kit is clocked at 2400 MHz by
default but we tried underclocking it to 2133 1866 and 1600 MHz to see what you
get for the extra couple of bucks looks pretty worthwhile to give that onboard
Graphics some extra memory bandwidth when you're gaming hey for our last
performance test we take our star swarm Benchmark and then run it at stock speed
and then with the CPU and the GPU on our
Apu both substantially overclocked looks like there's some fun
to be had for tuners and Tweakers who want to try to squeeze the most out of
this value oriented onboard solution I
hope you guys enjoyed this video and learned a little something about HSA and
the kinds of performance leaps it will enable in the future along with the
other AMD Technologies showcased in this build guide one that I actually didn't
mention before is 4K media playback HSA
accelerated media play ERS will allow your GPU to handle 4K video playback
without taxing your CPU over much and remember both of those things are part
of the Apu this is the kind of future
proofness that isn't necessarily about
some you know greasy car salesman telling you that you'll be playing the
latest games at 4K in 5 years if you buy this one because that kind of future
proofness really doesn't exist rather it's about making sure that the system
maintains its base functionality over a nice long per period of time by
unlocking additional performance with improved software over the time that you
own your system it's the sort of thing that we're already used to seeing with
gaming consoles for example but now with a PC so that's what we built today maybe
the exact parts list isn't what you're going to buy but it's a great starting
point for a system that's good today and great tomorrow thanks for watching this
build guide thanks to AMD for making it possible and just in case you aren't
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