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fully private click now to learn more so our main video editor is actually
getting a new editing machine so it's
more of a frankenstein together of some existing things and
uh you know get some new things and we're kinda we're gonna end up with
what's a very strange rig so for people who are sitting there
thinking oh well this will be the optimal video editing workstation no no
no this is not necessarily what we're going for here his machine is built for
a very specific usage model which is what he exactly does and that's that's
pretty much it so i'm going to run through a quick parts list here
starting off with an Intel core i7 3960x
this is where the whole this isn't necessarily stuff i would
recommend thing comes into play because normally for a video editing workstation
i'd probably recommend a 3930k as opposed to a 3960x because extreme
editions don't really offer a great price to performance ratio we're going
to have 32 gigs of kingston value RAM
ddr3 1600 absolutely nothing special just because it happens to be validated
for the board that's more important to us than necessarily squeezing an extra
two three percent of performance out of whatever it is we're doing i'm going to
be using an ASUS rampage for jean
motherboard okay it's not a workstation board
however it should be noted that even ASUS's gaming or channel boards go
through very a significant amount of validation
in terms of sort of weird obscure card operation and stuff like that and he'll
be running a 10 gigabit nick also it should be noted that rog boards have
very high end vrm solutions we're going to be building this inside a small
enclosure that's not going to have a whole lot of space so we're going to need something that runs as coolly and
as efficiently as possible and in addition to that basically it's just uh
as sweet as it gets in terms of micro
atx lga 2011 motherboards because we want
more cores we're running six cores in this machine six cores twelve threads
because we need wicked CPU performance with that said we also need wicked GPU
performance we need lots of pci express slots so we're going to have two
graphics cards in this system one of them is going to be i'm just going to
reach over here one of them is going to be a quadro 4000 and we used to use this
for all the cuda acceleration as well as
getting 10 bit color depth capabilities however we are going to be changing that
up a little bit because this is based on a gtx 470 it's based on an ancient GPU
at this point so it's kind of gotta go
which means that we still want it for the better color depth output but we
need something a little bit beefier when it comes to cuda acceleration and that's
why we're adding a secondary graphics card to the system so we're going to be
throwing in the GeForce gtx 780 wind force from Gigabyte
this should be able to stay cooled adequately because of its massive cooler
even though it's in a very small matx case and should give us lots of cuda
acceleration performance for applications like davinci resolve or
outputting using the built-in h.264 encoding
feature in kepler um diesel found a what
what was it it's a plug-in yeah a plug-in that is allows it to use
that to be much much faster than relying just on the CPU but of course we still
need a beefy CPU because there are lots of things we're going to be doing that will be CPU bound as well for the power
supply i don't know how borderline this is going to be but i've got a dark power
pro 550 watt uh we're going to find out
if that ends up sort of reaching the max or not once we finish
the build so if it does then i'll swap it out for something else but i went
with a dark power power supply because they're very very quiet and one of the
things that happens a lot of the time with particularly diesel's rig because
he's got it running balls to the walls and maxed out all the time is that it
runs really really loud so i'm hoping this will help a little bit although
the CPU cooler is going to be a big part of that equation as well now i needed
something low profile and this is again part of the ghetto-ness of this rig in
spite of how awesome it's going to be is that this was the only low prior profile
CPU cooler i had lying around so this is a phanteks phtc 90 ls which is extremely
low profile like honestly this could probably go in like a 1u almost no
probably like a 2u but it's got this little tiny fan it claims to be lga 2011
compatible and capable of dissipating the massive amount of heat that these
chips output however i don't think we'll be doing any overclocking with a heat
sink this size um so there you go i guess we'll we'll find
out what happens we might end up swapping this out as well but if their
marketing claims are accurate then we may end up using it anyway i think
that's most of the components oh yeah we're using a crucial m4 SSD just
because they're reliable we trust them it's not the best performing SSD on the
market by any stretch but we're not really doing anything performance sensitive with it
we've got a velociraptor one terabyte that's going to go in there that just
acts as a random scratch disc or sort of
temporary storage but mostly we're going to be storing
things off of the machine itself on our 10 gigabit capable nas server so that's
why we need that 10 gigabit nic card so
that means we've got a single slot quadro a 10 gigabit single slot nic as
well as a dual slot gtx 780 all in this
machine now i ended up with a silverstone sg01 i was actually going to
use what is that thing i was going to use an sg09 but what i realized is that
it doesn't have a five and a quarter inch bay and i wanted a built-in card
reader because as you can imagine doing video production reading off of memory
cards comes up a fair bit it also has built-in fan control and he's one of the
few people i've ever met who actually tunes his fans according to what he's
doing so i'll set that up for him as well
and i think that pretty much wraps it up so here we go
so the first step for me is usually CPU installation it should be noted that lga
2011 cpus never come with a stock heatsink i believe you can actually buy
an Intel oem heatsink although the cost
of it and the performance of it makes like basically don't buy it please
yeah it makes no sense whatsoever just get a nice aftermarket one or
any aftermarket one and you'll be better off with that so you can see the lga
2011 chip is quite large but installs in much the same way that you would have
come to expect if you've ever installed an Intel CPU before in an lga socket so
there's a little golden triangle on that corner of the CPU right there
and then there's a corresponding triangle on the socket itself now it is
a little bit different in that it has two retention arms so you lift up the
one okay basically you can't take out the wrong one because if you pull on it
it's it's stuck so you take out the one with the with the hook then you take out
the one with the kink in the middle of it then once that's done you can lift
out the entire hold down plate position the CPU inside the socket
okay make sure it's in there then put this down put them back down in
the order that they were originally removed in and remove the cover i only
recommend removing the cover once you are done
doing the things that you're doing all right so we've got some included thermal compound
and i do put a little bit more on lga 2011 CPU simply because they're larger
and the dyes under the heat spreader are
larger than the lga lga 1155 1156 or 1150 cpus now here goes
this cooler so you can see we've got a nice shiny surface on the bottom it's
all brand new it's still never a bad idea to clean things off with alcohol
but we're not gonna worry too much about that in this case
for mounting hardware at least this uh this cooler has an extremely
straightforward mounting system this is one of the things i like about lga 2011
it's uh it's got a back plate built in which means that
many coolers are just a matter of aligning the lga 2011 screw with the
built-in back plate and screwing them in you can see the springs on there are
going to make sure that the tension is correct so you should be able to go all
the way to the end of the stopper tightening in a cross pattern not
tightening any of the screws fully until you are
until you have all of them mostly tight so here we go
okay we're back so diesel has seen fit to actually help me with this since it's
his machine that i'm building right now so all we got to do is go ahead and
put these under the little
oh hold on did i do that right
oh boy okay this is this is pretty finicky uh
after careful consultation of the manual we realized we had the fan upside down
so we flipped it around installed everything completely the opposite way
and now it makes an awful lot more sense we should also
you know since the whole point of this is we don't want it to be super loud
install the little rubber strips that are included so those should keep some
of the vibrations from the fans from being passed to the heatsink itself
so there we go and by fans i mean fan there's only one singular
grammar is important even though the world today doesn't seem
to think so i really am getting old
just go ahead and hook those on so it should be noted that many heat sinks
have this whole feature where there's a groove here that you can hook the wire
clip into however most of them have some leeway and flexibility in terms of where
you can hook them onto not this heat sink so these ones are straight these
ones are grooved the wire only goes where the wire goes and that is it
so i usually tie the CPU fan cable into a bit of a little knot so that it
doesn't get in the way of anything before plugging it into the fan header
so here's diesel's x79 shuttle pc which was actually really hot at the back here
because he was just editing on it so the CPU sockets right under there quite
toasty this was serving us perfectly well
except that limited expansion so there's that quadro
there's that 10 gigabit nick how do we add something that augments the cuda
capabilities of the system well we can't because it only has the two expansion
slots so that's really the only reason why we're changing this out
for something else so here's the uh here's the guts i'm actually pulling the
RAM right now more than anything else and slick took my screwdriver
so i can only take out thumb screws at the moment you're almost done
almost all right so there we'll do a tour of this to stall for time so
there's that single slot quadro 4000 that gives us up to 10 bit 10 bit output
right yeah mind you we only have an 8 bit panel at best we have a pa246 here
it's 10 bit i thought it was 8 bit
oh okay well there you go apparently we have a 10 bit panel so that's where
diesel does all of his uh all of his color work let me go ahead and pull
these out there's that 10 gigabit nick that gives him pretty much
un bottlenecked access to our raid array
oh man this thing's hot holy cow
ow it says right on it it's hot don't touch
it so now we know
all right so here's our RAM guys please do note that even though it might not
seem like it i am grounding myself before i touch sensitive components so
you'll usually ground yourself on chassis or power supply or some large piece of
metal is usually adequate if you were going to do things properly you'd want
to use an anti-static wrist strap whether you put it around your wrist or your ankle is totally up to you
so here's our quad channel kingston value RAM memory i really don't
on our internal machines here we can install this in the rampage i really
don't believe in spending a ton of money on fancy memory because i have not
observed a huge performance difference however there are environments where you
will see better performance from better memory
ecc would probably be a recommended upgrade for this machine
or well for a rendering workstation i don't know that the rampage board
supports ecc memory but ecc memory wouldn't be a bad idea for long renders
where you don't want any errors you know causing it to stop working
you know if you're running a lot of virtualized
if you're doing a lot of virtualization faster memory can definitely benefit you
but i mean for most of these workloads more memory is still kind of king
more than anything else so here are the drives i just had dummy ones before that
i was using as placeholders so these are going to come out and this machine is actually going to be
inherited by b-roll so we're going to find some lesser RAM and
lesser graphics card to put in there and then b-roll can make do with the on-board
networking haha b-roll now he's got his headphones
on he can't hear me so this case is really uh
very frankenstein it's been used a lot of times for a lot
of different builds and uh i don't have half of the screws so it's
just like random screws that are just jammed into places but i always end up
back with this case because it's extremely versatile it fits long
graphics cards they're reasonably long graphics cards i hope all the graphics
cards fit oh man this would be a good time to find that out as opposed to
later on down the line so we'll pull up the win force card i
don't know that i would have necessarily chosen a wind force card for this
particular rig if if given a choice but
i mean i'm not gonna i'm not gonna discard the winforce card and then like
go buy another one separately oh wow yeah that isn't even close so we're
gonna have to pull out the drive cages i guess
in order to have that card fit what i would i normally probably would have
rather done well there's intakes on the side but i
would have rather gone with a blower style cooler that exhausts everything out of the case
but you know we make do with what you have i guess
you know if we have to use that gtx 780
then we can but usually i recommend wind force cards
for more of an open case design where there's a lot more space i don't need
the front firewire cable still so i had disconnected that during a previous
build and for that matter i don't need the front audio either because the five
and a quarter inch bay here this is what often irks me about these things is
they're like yeah we want you to have all the i o in the front of your case like why would i need a nut what case
doesn't have front audio and what motherboard has you know two hookups for
it so why are you giving me this i don't need this i want a card reader usb 3
esata's fine but stuff where it's like a
hundred percent going to replicate something that your case already had
just kind of kind of irks me so anyway we don't need
the front audio there so we're just going to use the hook up the front usb 2
and the front um
sort of power reset all that good stuff so the next stage now that we've
stripped everything out of the case is probably to install the i o shield
so just get all four sides just like that
all the standoffs are already in this case so i don't really have to worry about
moving them around or anything like that microatx is quite a bit more
well more standard than atx in terms of where the standoffs go some atx boards
particularly a few years ago had you know standoffs missing or standoffs
added compared to other ones so you had to be a little bit careful
to make sure that you don't short out your board by accidentally having a standoff installed somewhere where you
don't need one it's actually a lot less important
to have all the standoffs installed versus not having any extras installed
extras are really really terrible
so once the i o shields in all we got to do is grab that their motherboard so
this you guys are going to see why i needed to have a low profile CPU
cooler there is not going to be a lot of space once we install our power supply
which i have misplaced there it is there's not going to be a
lot of space once we have our power supply installed
under there so even the even that stock lga 2011
cooler i don't think is going to fit in this config
so now we screw in the motherboard i don't remember which uh which type of
screws it uses so the trick that i usually use
is start with a small one so those are the ones that are threaded
for optical drives often motherboard standoffs and then if
those ones don't stay in then switch to a coarser thread one which are the ones
that are threaded for hard drives for example so we'll go with
this guy and you can see that that is indeed holding so it looks like this
motherboard uses the smaller threads or this case uses smaller threads
so i'm trying to figure out how to get the drives in here um
because i have to take out the drive mounting cage i'm stuck with one of a
few different options so i can either just like bolt the volt i mean the SSD
i'm not worried about that one could just kind of hang out inside the case as
long as it's like velcroed to something but hard drives i tend to prefer a more
stable mount so i was thinking what i could do is i could grab some silicone
isolators that i salvaged from another case and maybe just mounted in the
bottom here by drilling some holes through the bottom of the case
or another option would be to mount it in the five and a quarter inch bay in a
similar fashion in fact i think
that might actually work best because then i could just take the SSD
and this one chuck them in there
and hopefully i would actually still even be it yeah i
think so i think i can even still fit my five and a quarter inch card reader
thing if i run all these through here man
there's gonna be a lot of cables in here it's a good thing we're using a modular
power supply what is that oh
apparently i owe diesel like 500 because
my camera broke his lenses or something so he's
quietly sneaking that onto my desk before he goes
it's like awesome all right so there we go yep it looks
like i'm going to be able to fit all that stuff in there
without too much trouble i really don't like how little room there is for air
flow around that velociraptor though so i still might opt to put it down here this
is kind of ridiculous i've uh i've never seen anything like this before but this
multi-uh multi-function front panel thing actually comes with
its own self-tapping like plastic screws
that go into some special
holes that are just plastic and are not threaded at all
it apparently uses a little tiny phillips head bit so i'm going to have
to grab a different bit unbelievable
sometimes you just encounter like the weirdest stuff that just has no right to
exist and you just kind of go okay well whatever when i'm building machines for my own my
own personal use or for internal use here at Linus media group
it's very rare that you'll catch me putting all the screws in especially for
things like you know a front panel card reader
two screws is fine you know you don't have to
you don't have to attach every you don't have to weld everything to the case
unless it's something where there's like a you know a safety reason or a
reliability reason that it needs to be attached incredibly well so i'll just
put in on the corners although it could be argued that i should probably put in
all four of these because they're like these weird special custom screws that
i'll probably never encounter ever again so if i were to lose them then i would
never be able to do a proper installation of this thing with all four screws so there you go
i'll at least put them in a little bit so that they'll stay there
and not come out um i do have some new ideas for how to
mount the hard drive well not really new ideas but i've went i've gone and obtained the hardware
so i grabbed some uh some screws so these are hard drive
screws that have a non-threaded portion in the middle so i don't even know if
you guys can see that at all but whatever anyway and some uh silicone or
rubber isolators so i'm gonna put some holes in the bottom of the case and i am
going to mount that hard drive down here in the bottom i am going to end up with a ridiculous
amount of front panel i o stuff connected so hd audio goes into the aafp
over here that's one of the things i also like about this board it has a
great onboard audio solution so when he's um working on audio
stuff which evidently he does apparently some point in time um
you know the the quality of it isn't going to be just so horrible that it's
unusable i mean a lot of the time the issue with onboard audio solutions is
less to do with even that the quality is terrible which it usually is but often
more to do with that the drivers are terrible and i would have higher
expectations than that from something like an rog
supreme fx3 audio solution so there you go that's one of the reasons to justify
a high-end board if you really need to do that for yourself i mean really the
reason for us going with the high-end board for this is more to do with just
um we want the utmost in terms of
reliability i could kind of considered overclocking it and so that was that was
one of the reasons why we'd gone with an rog board but i mean particularly on a higher end socket like lga 2011 you're
going to expect to get better overclocking headroom out of out of a
better board with the consumer grade platforms it's less less of a factor
from what i've seen in the last couple gens
um yeah i don't know not much else to say at the moment so i'm just plugging in
all the front panel stuff so that was my front panel connectors they're labeled
on the board i mean those little things high-end boards those convenient
creature and comfort features that you don't really get on the low end stuff
where normally you'd have to go look in the manual or something like that
because of the unique configuration with our five and a quarter inch bay device
and the fact that this board has four or this case has four front panel usb 2
ports we're going to end up with a total of six front usb ports which is great
because he really uses a lot of them so we'll go ahead and plug those in down
here and i've got a phone call so i'm going to go ahead and take that
oh how disappointing i miscounted the uh
the number of front usb plug-in devices that i had versus headers so actually
two of the ports on the front will be dead so that the card reader can get the
usb connection that it needs
that's a shame and it comes on its own full block here even though actually
only four of the pins are populated so it could have in theory supported at
least one more port but oh well cable management here is going
to be a bit of a bit of a trick just because all those cards have to be
installed somehow i usually cut these off these days these this is the old
ac97 um
onboard audio pins or wires or whatever you want to call them so
if you're not going to use them which you're not unless you're going to
install like
on like a pentium 3 computer or something and just you can just cut them
off because otherwise they can be in the way of things just make sure you don't cut them off in such a way that they're
going to short out on each other or anything like that so this gives us a
lot less room for
that brilliant hard drive mounting strategy that i'd come up with
which could make things a little bit challenging maybe what we can do is we can take all these wires
and we can actually manage them up here off of off of sort of ground level
so that we don't get in the way of everything so if we just kind of tuck
everything over here we should still have space for that long card which i've
decided is going to go in the third pci express slot so that's
a full 16x slot so full bandwidth yeah yeah
and there we go so we should have room for
that and the quadro should fit just fine
where there's a little bit less room so that one will go right there
like that yep should be just dandy okay so here i'm
eyeballing approximately where on the bottom i want to drill the holes for the
hard drive i don't know off the top of my head what the spacing is so what i
did is i marked approximately where i want one of them to go with sort of
landmarks of junk that goes through and just making sure that things like
this that are poking through aren't going to be interfering with anything so it apparently will sit about there then
what i'll do is i'll measure this out and drill holes so wish me luck with that i
don't recommend drilling holes in a system with components already installed
in it but there are things you can do to prevent it from being as much of a
problem so you can put masking tape over it so that the shavings don't go flying
all over the place orient it so that they fall away from the components and
all that but really please don't do that in general all right so hopefully these
are approximately right i hope yeah i still have audio here we go
oh i went through the mother no i'm just kidding all right next hole
okay number two and i was only able to put in three
because one of them ended up under this foot so we'll just see how this goes
okay no idea if these are going to align or
not but the only way to find out for certain
is to measure before you i mean
just try things all right
here we go
where are the holes where do they go
there's one sort of it's hard to see here
oh wait wait for it no
no that's not a hole
that's interesting ah yes i see the problem now right i moved it
further down because i didn't want to interfere with the SATA ports other than
that there's nothing hanging off the right hand edge of the board that would interfere with
plugging things into the hard drive that the hard drive would prevent from
operating correctly all right so
there's one of them so one of them definitely lined up with
something
all right so the idea being that
huh that's a shame that's the biggest drill bit in slick's kit so uh that's
not big enough to put these through without the threading unfortunately
which means that i might have to go back to the uh
back to my own house to get my own kit
to do that okay well we'll continue this when we're
ready oh look at that that one almost lines up
so that should be good enough for our purposes here so i did wuss out and
remove the motherboard so yeah the mess of all the filings around
here is less of an issue i was able to find another wider bit
so i did end up being able to drill the holes that i need so my brilliant plan
is screws through here
okay i've only got three still just because
that foot was in the way then i'm going to put the rubber isolators on the other
side then i'm going to attempt to screw in the drive so this is going to be a
bit of a balancing act here
i've gone ahead and put the board back in off camera now
so that's done oh wow yeah because all of
these have to go on i hope you guys can see this
yeah all of these have to go on and they all have to kind of stay in place at the
same time which isn't going to be easy
it's okay these are the challenges that make pc building fun
as opposed to you know just buying things that all work together in the
first place yeah that's for noobs
or something no actually this just makes it more
stressful but whatever all right so we're going to go ahead and put that
drive on there now
wow it worked okay i don't need to mush the crap out
of those isolators just got to make sure that it's reasonably firmly mounted
and there we have it the hard drive
is now mounted actually pretty darn securely i don't have as much clearance
over on this side if i as i had hoped
for the connectors but that's okay i'll just go find a left angle connector for
the SATA port and then we'll figure out power can't be that complicated
and there you have it all right so i did manage to get
just regular straight SATA connectors in there although it's extremely tight so
we'll add this to the long list of things i wouldn't recommend doing about
this build i got my industrial strength velcro
so i'm going to go ahead and attach the SSD i decided rather than using up a
five and a quarter inch bay i mean the whole the whole you know notion of
drives must go where the manufacturer says they should go to me that really uh
that really that really bothers me drive should go wherever is most convenient
and awesome so i'm going to go ahead and put some velcro on the back of this
drive so that'll give me the option to add an optical drive later should i
should i choose to um by doing this this way so i'm adding
sticking the velcro side to here and then i'm going to go ahead and i'm going to put this SSD kind of here ish
kind of here-ish no i'm going to put it here there we go so the SSD will go there
that separates it enough from that velociraptor that i don't have to worry
about heat or anything like that because i had
thought about just sticking it straight to the top of the velociraptor but then i changed my mind about that i don't
want the SSD to have its lifespan affected by its
neighbor like i do can you guys believe i have to
sit like right across from diesel my desk here at work right across from
him i mean the music he listens to he listens to bieber
so for all those of you who think he's cool
now i guess that is pretty cool oh wait
um so all of our front panel connectors are all attached i'm starting i've wired
up the drives uh now it's pretty much time to get the expansion cards in here
i said no no no see now you've got that song stuck in my
head wow this uh this case is uh
not has seen better days let's just say that the spacing of like the pci bracket
isn't even right anymore that's the thing about aluminum cases is they often
uh they often bend in pretty spectacular ways
so oh this is a pci okay well here's a good tip for you guys PCIe 8x cards can be
installed in PCIe 4x slots you might get
slightly less overall bandwidth available to the card i don't remember
on these 10 gigabit cards whether they actually needed all of the available
bandwidth i think each PCIe
2x lane or PCIe 2.0 lane is around 250
megabytes per second so we should be pretty close to all that it can consume
actually but there you go if i ideally i would
put it in another slot but in order to get all my cards in here that's not going to work so this case has
a kind of a unique fan arrangement here which i actually had turned around
before so i had this as exhaust and this is intake but i'm going to put those
back in the default configuration so i can bring nice fresh air down to
particularly these ones there's vents in the side the wind force can take
advantage of but particularly these ones i want this fan to get nice fresh air
and i want this heatsink to get some incidental cooling as well so
last but not least the windforce gtx 780
for cuda i can see diesel
drooling over there about the fast output times
you're not drooling are you it's okay because i can't see you either
so everything i said was a lie
everything i said was a lie
except the part about installing this graphics card there we go so one screw i
actually only had three screws in there so i'm just gonna find another random
one there we go and let's put that in there
all right so that my friends is one
monkey jam-packed card configuration
love it all right so i turned the fans around
you can see right here is where the power supply sits on the other side so
this piece of steel and this piece is aluminum since it doesn't really do anything other than hold a couple of
fans there's no actual structural integrity of the case that's
being taken care of i'm pretty sure this isn't
how you're supposed to put it in but yeah
i'm pretty sure a lot of the stuff we've done with this build isn't how you're
supposed to put it in now this bracket uses those weird countersunk screws that
only silverstone and like some other sort of weird
manufacturers seem to use and i only have like two of them so i'm gonna put
this in as best as i can without having to use too many of them
if you don't use the countersunk ones though then the
uh the case cover doesn't sit right so
you you just kind of have to you kind of have to use them maybe this one will
work i'll try this one so that's pretty low profile
so there we go now we have our cooling fans in place i just got to find
somewhere to tuck these this is a uh this is a working machine
not a show machine so cable management is a bit of a secondary
concern as long as it's out of the way of airflow i don't get too uptight about
it and stuff like this so there we go yeah we've got nice
unrestricted airflow from our intakes to our graphics cards
and it's pretty much time to get the power supply in here now with these
smaller form factor systems i often find it's easier to install the modular
cables first and then actually install the power
supply so i'm going to start with i really wish these would stay under that
usb 3 cable that is supposed to be kind of anchoring them i mean i could cable
tie them down which would be a better way to do this but i'm trying to get
this done so that diesel can get back to work because it is now the next day
wow this 780 takes two eight pins do they all do that
i can't even remember all right so i'm going to run this through over here
then over here because once we've got the power supply
in this case it's going to be a total nightmare to get my hands in anywhere
so just get it all done now
make life easy for ourselves i mean as easy as it can be when you're
just making your own drive mounts as you go and uh
sort of playing by no one's rules except your own
not even your own
all right i think there's that yeah so this powerful this is one of the
things i like about be quiet! power supplies is they tend to come with sort
of a bunch of different options in terms of the modular cables so it comes with a
dual PCIe and a single PCIe on a 550
watt power supply i think the manufacturer's expectation is that
you're using one of those two options but we're going to go ahead and use both
i mean they give you the modular connections on the power supply for it
so you know they asked for it i guess
my expectation for a dark power power supply is also that it's going to be
able to handle pretty much near its peak output at any given time so i'm not
worried about blowing it up or anything like that next up we've got our wow that's a long
cable this is where those short cable kits that guys like silverstone sell
come in handy because this is an awfully long cable and the only real way to
cable management is going to be to chuck it back here or something
or potentially actually we could throw it over here with all these other cables
near the hard drive that'll probably work
but it if we were relying on any airflow from
the front of the case which this case doesn't have then this isn't really
something that i would want to do too much so there's that one and finally the
24 pin connector is pre-attached to the power supply so we're pretty much ready
to put the power supply in and find out if this system
works at all i think it comes with its own special
screws so i'll find those and
right at exactly the moment where i had found some other thumb screws that also
had nice long threads on them diesel found the be quiet! thumb screws that
have even longer threads so that you can really
you know put them on there and get that power supply installed i like the noise
isolating strip i wish that it didn't reduce compatibility with other screws
but you know sometimes that's the sacrifice you have
to make so there you go so those are installed
which brings us back to the inside wow this is starting to get heavy with those
graphics cards in there so that brings us to the inside so we're
going to tuck our 24 pin actually no we're going to plug in the modular
cables that we have here first so i'll try and get you guys a decent
view of that so pci express we have four
different pci express plug options here
again the thing with the whole like options on the be quiet! power supplies
that i uh that i quite like next we've got one for drives
all right oh actually let's do oh cool it has fan
plugs too so we could actually we're using manual fan control in the front of
the case but if we weren't using that then we can have the power supply
control our fans which is kind of neat
actually all right so the CPU connector goes over here most modular power
supplies these days use the same plugs for the
p4 connector or p8 connector or whatever you want to call it and pci express but
this one doesn't it has a specific spot for it i wonder if it has to do with the
way that the rails are distributed because it is not a single rail power
supply it is a multi-rail power supply so we've got that
we can tuck our 24 pin up here in the five and a quarter inch bay at least
until we wanted to install a five and a quarter inch drive maybe at some point
in the future and then what i'm going to do this is
something that i often do with builds is i use cables to cable manage so i'm
going to use the 24 pin to hold all that other stuff out of the way of the CPU
fan so that there's nothing interfering with it so if i can just get in there
a little bit better i should have plugged this in just like
i did with all the other cables first before i actually installed the power
supply fully because the cable's so long i could have gotten away with that
even though it's pre-attached this is one of the reasons why full modular can
be nice even if it's not a necessity because it does allow you to fully wire
up your system before you actually have
to put the power supply in it or if your rma in your system or your
power supply for example it can be a great way to not have to actually rewire
anything when the new one arrives back which is neat as well
i'm having a little bit of difficulty here yep
having some difficulty a little trick guys if you plug the four pin in first
then the 20 pin will often sit on top of it and lock it
into place depending on how the cable is
designed and that is how this one is designed so that's in there now and then
the last thing we need is it would be just like be quiet! to
include something like this but i need like a single molex
oh they got a single SATA all right so i was close
and a single molex look at that i love
it because i don't need any more than that so i'm just going to plug in my
dual SATA connector for the drives down there
oh i'm trying to get you guys a view of this but it's not working too well
so that's going to go into drives number five and then my other my molex
connector is going to go into drives number four and i'll be using that to
power my front panel five and a quarter inch bay device which
is going to power my fans and my built-in card reader
and evidently all the other things one thing i didn't show you guys is i did plug in
the SATA connector for the esata in the front panel
so all the i o options will be had with
this particular machine very cool
there we go not the greatest cable management i've ever done but lots of
clearance around the CPU cooler which hopefully works otherwise we're gonna
have to pull the power supply out and swap that out for something a little bit
taller perhaps and uh
hopefully ample cooling for those graphics cards and hopefully enough
power so there's a lot of things to test once we fire this bad boy up
so it's moment of truth time we're going to find out if she boots up
i really hope we get into the os because we don't have time to reformat before
pax so
yeah if there's any kind of hardware conflicts or anything like that oh we've
got an rog logo that's a good sign
uh there's our 10 gigabit nick so that's
detected
fan control
seems to be working all right so we've got that going here
new CPU installed press f1 to run setup 32 gigs of RAM
both of our hard drives are detected this is all looking
pretty uh pretty solid so far
f1 to run setup let's make sure we don't have any sort of completely weird this
is something i really recommend doing right oh that CPU is at that 57 degrees
already that is a big that is a big problem at idle we should be not sitting
at 57 degrees
that i'm not happy about i wonder if there's anything we could do
fan wise to uh to be a bit more aggressive although
often a very high idle temperature actually indicates a bad amount so we
may want to take it right off and then put it back on and see if see
if that alleviates the problem well let's find out if
she'll boot either way i mean 60 degrees is hot but it's not um
it's not it'll break immediately if we go into an os hot so
oh that's a shame
let's find out your boots i guess you guys can come along for the ride if you
want we're pretty much done here i was just thinking uh because diesel and i
were having a conversation about the irony of amy winehouse making a hit song
this is actually his observation not mine i can't take credit for this or
blame or whichever making a hit song about not going to
rehab and then dying of drug related complications and
i was actually thinking so this is my contribution to the to the discussion
that the the name irony should actually be
different because irony has iron in it which rusts
and deteriorates over time but irony i believe will be just as delicious a
thousand years from now as it was a thousand years ago
when dinosaurs and their hubris okay i think we're done
now so rendering oh okay we gotta wait well
either way we're into the os so i'm not too worried about it at this point so
that's great the upgrade worked we just got to diagnose our CPU
uh oh yeah and we've got to find out about power consumption as well
so we're sitting at 160 watts idle
right now so
we'll be back so this is a bit of a public service announcement on why ps2 keyboards are
still important and ps2 ports are still important because they don't require any
drivers so we've booted up again and we're still not getting our keyboard and
mouse drivers loaded now ps2 doesn't support hot uh hot swap on many
or hot plugging or whatever you would call it on many motherboards so we're gonna reboot this and then we should be
able to use the ps2 keyboard to at least navigate into the os
where the drivers are more likely to be picked up and installed
all right so i'm pretty sure at this point that it's not a bad mount just
because it doesn't really seem to be behaving like one but there's only one
way to know for sure what i did determine is that there is enough room
in here for the stock cooler that we happen to have one
of so we're going to go ahead and install that but once we pull it off
we'll be able to tell for sure if it was a bad mount or if it's just uh
not quite up to the task of an extreme edition
on lga 2011 here now i think i have some
bad news i think i can get this one out but i don't think i'm going to be able
to get that stock cooler in without removing this
brace here so i really really hope that that doesn't end up being the case but
you gotta work with what you got yeah see that that's a perfectly fine thermal
paste application there so i really don't think that was the
issue it's not too much not too little just right as papa bear would say or
goldilocks or whoever it was that uh
it was goldilocks apparently okay well whatever man so i'm gonna
you know speaking of perfect thermal paste applications i'm gonna commit a
sin here and i'm going to just kind of plunk this
on top of the old thermal paste once i can find something to
wipe it off with do you have any teepee
really i stole it
uh i call rubbish on that you brought it downstairs
okay that does sound like me all right time to put a beefier cooler in here so
i've at least cleaned off the base so we're going to go ahead and
yeah i guess we'll install it first i really hope this fits
or well the screwdriver fits and i'm able to get in there and screw it in
come on come on come on gill
oh i think we got this nice
oh except that wire that's under the uh heatsink that'll be a problem
at some point in the future here in like four minutes
okay same thing cross pattern
this side first remember going in at an angle is okay as
long as you're careful and gentle
as long as you don't cross thread the screw what did you guys think i was talking about
okay one two three
and four there we go
so we have a slightly better cooler in there now it's
still a stock cooler still nothing special about it but at least it should
work at stock speeds without sort of running too hot or
anything like that so we're going to fire this bad boy up back up once i've
closed it up again and take a baseline reading of the
temperatures and the BIOS again to make sure that it's running all right
okay so our CPU is still running a little bit on the
toasty side but the funny thing is it was showing up as lower in real temp
than it is in the BIOS here so maybe it's some weird rog feature i've
never heard of either way i'm going to just kind of go for gold here and we're
going to go use CPU level up which is ASUS super simple overclocking utility
thing and we're going to go for 4.25 gigahertz just to see what happens so
wish us luck with that and as long as as long as she's stable and doesn't exceed
the maximum power we can draw from the wall which is going to be around 600
watts because we're looking at about 90
efficiency on this power supply then uh we should be okay let's see if
it even like boots now fans ramping up we set it to turbo mode
for the automatic fan speed control
save at the os all right so we're finally done the rig
upgrade overclocking was a complete no-go so we're trying to figure out how
to liquid cool this thing at some point here uh that stock cooler no just
no just know we might be able to turn clock speed up a little bit but we're not able to use any of uh ASUS's CPU
level up stuff so now to make sure that it can handle fully loading all the
components inside we're running prime95 in place whatever it is the one that
does a lot of CPU and some memory so we're sitting at around 320 watts at the
wall now we're going to run the arion bench 64
to load up both of our graphics cards with a cuda benchmark here to find out
what our absolute max power consumption is going to be with this system
so there you have it guys i knew it was
going to be borderline uh this isn't the first time we've run this so that 504
watts we're seeing right now is not quite the peak the highest i saw was
around 560 watts which means when you factor in that the power supply is
probably only around 83 to 88
efficient at this kind of a load uh means that we are actually nowhere near
the maximum load of the power supply with that said you should allow for a
power supply to age a little bit and become less
efficient and less capable over time but particularly with very high quality
units it's a much less of an issue so a dark power pro should be just fine for
that so we're calling that good on the power supply side we got to figure out
better CPU cooling at some point but other than that
the new workstation is ready to rock so don't forget to subscribe to Linus tech
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