Some would say that it's a discouraging time to build your own PC. And that
makes sense when $2,000 will get you a gaming GPU or a single kit of DDR5
memory. But if we shop smart, we can still buy a pretty rocking full PC for
that price and assemble it ourselves. So CIC sponsored this video to help us show
you that it's not all doom and gloom.
I SAID NOT ALL DOOM AND GLOOM.
THANK YOU. Kind of need all the help I can get to find the bright side here
because looking at the direction pricing's been going for the past few
months, it's hard to be sure that this stuff isn't going to be even more
expensive by the time you watch this video.
I SAID NOT ALL DOOM AND GLOOM.
Are you tired of boring screwdrivers? Boom. Four new colors of the brand new
LTT transparent screwdriver. Plasma purple, cryo teal, molten orange, and
carbon black. They're see-through. They're awesome. And they're probably
going to sell out because for a limited time only if you buy through YouTube
Shopping at the link in the video description, you will get 20% off your
driver, but only until December 30th. Collect them all or maybe pair them with
our brand new bid case and all over print hoodie.
Starting at the beginning, a Starting at the beginning, a great way
to save a dollar is to buy a last generation CPU. In this case, the tried
andrue AMD Ryzen 77800X3T.
Furthermore, by opting for an OEM CPU, which uh [clears throat] didn't actually
come with a box, we saved another $10, making this chip almost $100 cheaper
than buying the newer 9800 X3D. And the
best part is that according to our Labs testing, in the real world, gaming at
1440p or 4K, we're really not giving up
that much, if anything, compared to the latest and greatest. There is one
downside to going with OEM, though. Your warranty will not be through AMD
directly, so make sure that you check the terms and choose a reputable seller.
Now, to find a reputable motherboard to keep this little guy cozy in, we felt
that Gigabytes B850 Gaming X Wi-Fi ATX
was a great choice. We got it on sale for 150 bucks, which is a fine price for
a full-sized ATX board that comes packed with features like high-speed onboard
networking, three M.2 two slots, one of which running at Gen 5 speeds and solid
IO with both HDMI and DisplayPort for your integrated graphics solution if you
ever need to use that. Now, before we mash these boys together, it's probably
time [music] to prepare our work surface. I strongly recommend an ESD
safe mat and an ESD strap, and I enjoy
using my motherboard box as a handy little work platform.
For tools, you don't really need much to build a PC. A screwdriver should be all
that you need, but your life will be a little easier with a magnetic parts
tray, zip ties, some side cutters, and then occasionally my needle-nose pliers
will pull me out of a sticky situation. With everything laid out, installing
your CPU should take no more than about 30 seconds. Open up the CPU socket, line
up the old golden triangle or the notches on the side of the CPU, and then
place it gently into the LGA socket. Once you think it's in there, give it
just a tiny little wiggle to make sure it's seated properly. Now, we lower the
hold down, followed by the lever. Now, I've said this before and I'm going to
say it again. This takes more force than you might expect. Don't worry about
that. Toss this into your motherboard box for safekeeping. And instead, worry
about all the amazing memories that our new little friend here is going to make
in his new home. And worry about how expensive memories are. Memory prices
have gone through the roof in recent months. Against that backdrop, our $300
2x6 gig kit from GSkill seems downright reasonable. I mean, at least it's 6,000
mega transfer per second CL30, which is a great sweet spot for AMD. And I mean,
hey, we didn't want fancy heat spreaders or RGB anyway. Right.
Right. Hopefully by the time this video comes out, you'll still be able to find
a kit like this for around this price. And if you can't, well, hey, here's a
convenient dartboard design that you can download, print, and enjoy instead of
playing video games. Anyway, if you manage to get your hands on some memory,
just go ahead and pop them into slots A2 and B2 by opening up the latches, lining
up the central key, and pressing firmly on both sides of each dim until you hear
a distinct [music] click. By the way, if you have just about any weird issues
when you first try to fire up your system later, an easy troubleshooting
step that works way more often than it should is to take your memory out and
receat it >> and then receat the RAM. >> There. Now, our 7800 X3D is cozy and no
longer suffering from short-term memory loss. But long term long term, well,
that's a whole other story. That is where our two TBTE PCIe Gen 4 NVMe
storage drive comes in. This gives [music] us plenty of space for both our
operating system and whatever games or files we want quick access to. It also
features a DRAM cache to help aid with both performance and longevity. What
drive did we order, you ask? Well, the one we ordered and paid $150 for was a
Gigabyte Aoris 7300, but the Amazon
seller shipped us a Samsung 990 Pro. So,
uh, thanks for the unfraud.
Let's get our armor removed from our motherboard. This handy toolless little
latch right here. And now we're presented with three options for our
slots. A, B, and C. We chose B. Why, you
ask? Well, slot C is not connected directly to our CPU, which can
occasionally lead to bottlenecks. And as for A, it runs at Gen 5 speeds. This is
not a Gen 5 drive, so we might as well leave that free for potentially a future
faster drive that we want to install down the line. If you've ever put in an
M.2 to NVMe drive before. They all install basically the same way. Push the
SSD into this slot here at a little bit of an angle. Then secure it to the post
on the other end. This used to be mostly done with tiny little screws that are
lots of fun to lose, but many modern motherboards use newfangled toolless
mechanisms like this one. Then just go ahead and remove any protective covering
over the thermal pad that's on the bottom of your motherboard armor. Slot
it back into place. And Bob's your uncle. Hi, Uncle Bob.
Now it's time to keep Mr. CPU cool with yet another recommendation for the only
heat sink company that seems to matter right now. Thermal right. The Phantom
Spirit 120SE is a dual tower 7 heat pipe
[music] beast that includes two fans, quality thermal compound, and a robust
mounting mechanism. How is this thing only $40? I'm not mad. I just I don't
get it. Step the first. Remove the stock mounting bracket from your motherboard.
Step the second, grab the AM4 and also AM5 mounting brackets, red spacers, and
associated screws. Step the third, do
all of this stuff.
It's worth noting, by the way, if you buy a different cooler, these steps may
[music] vary. The manual is your friend. Now it's time to apply some thermal
paste. If you're not sure if you're using enough, there's an easy way to
check. Just put your cooler on, tighten it down usually until the screws bottom
out, then take it back off. You'll be able to see if you've got good coverage
of your CPU. At this point, it's fine to either top up or just leave it and put
the cooler back on. With our hunk of metal strapped on, next we're going to
attach our fans with these spring clips. Make sure that your cables are coming
out the side nearest to your motherboard power header. This is going to make it a
little bit easier to manage later. Our unit came with a PWM fan splitter so we
can plug both of our fans into one header. We're going to go ahead and use
that. And we're also going to daisy chain together our RGB leads before
plugging both of those into the motherboard and then tucking all of the cables away
under the heat sink. Make sure that they don't stick out into your fan blades,
though. Then you're going to have a pretty bad time. Next up, if a motherboard's a home, then a case is a
community.
>> [snorts and laughter] >> This metaphor is spread thinner than thermal compound at this point. But
anywh who, doesn't matter. The point is, what better community for a kuck like me
than the Fractal North? With Fractal focused on promoting their new epoch
line, the North can sometimes be found on sale, and there's no shame in saving
a few bucks on a lastg beauty like this one. It comes in white or black with
either a tempered glass or mesh side panel and is delightfully easy to build
in with modern features like rubber grommets around the cable cutouts, cable
management channels and tie downs and front USBC.
Let's remove the side panels by loosening the captive thumb screws and
pulling the panels back and away. This
gives us access to the case accessories box that Fractal cleverly stores in one
of the 3 and 1/2 in hard drive sleds. The first thing that we're going to need
from here is eight of these more coarsely threaded 632 mounting screws
for our motherboard. We're going to pop the top mesh off to make our wiring job
a little bit easier later. Then we're going to lay our case down flat with the
pre-installed ATX standoffs facing up.
Next, grab your motherboard either by the cooler or the edges of the PCB and
ease it gently onto the standoffs. I like to go in at a bit of an angle like
this, lining up the IO shield first. Whatever you do, make sure never to
scratch or scrape the back of the board against the standoffs. That is one of
the most common ways that people can damage their hardware. With your
screwdriver, perhaps a colored transparent one from ltstore.com,
tighten down the eight screws that we grabbed earlier. With our motherboard in
place, we can plug in our USBC header here, our USB 3 type A header here, our
front audio here, and the rest of our front panel headers down here. If you
think you're going to hook up any SATA SSDs or hard drives in the future, this
is a great time to run any SATA data cables that you might need for them.
Just plug them into your motherboard right here and then run them either to
those drive sleds where we got our accessories box or to these 2 and 1/2 in
caddies on the back. Future you is going to thank you. The last things we need to
plug in are our case fans. Now, mostly
doesn't matter what it says on the label next to the header. The speed curve and
the temperature can usually be reconfigured in the UFI BIOS, but to
make life simpler, I usually try to use case or system headers for my case fans.
These ones right here will do nicely. Nice looking build, eh? Time to add some
juice to our community. We're committed
at this point. Let's call it the power station. CIC's Focus GXV4 750 watt gold
power supply is a great choice for this build. We've been partnering with CSIC
for almost as long as their 10-year transferable warranty. A warranty they
can stand behind thanks in part to the fluid dynamic fan bearing in their fans,
which are extremely reliable and generate less noise and heat than
traditional ball bearings. That combined with their patented hybrid silent fan
control means you can trust a C-SI power supply to stay both cool and quiet.
Also, thanks to our Labs testing on power supply circuit, I can personally
promise you this is a fantastic unit. Check them out at the link down below.
We really can't recommend Conic enough. As for the capacity that we chose, the
750 W unit stood out because like so
many of our choices today, it's more than enough for an efficient gaming CPU
and a solid GPU. And also, we were on a budget and it was on sale. Our case
gives us a flexible mounting plate, so we can install this puppy whichever way
we want. I'm going to go with the fan intaking from the bottom, but if you
have a high pile carpet that risks suffocating it that way, you may want to
flip it around. Attach the mounting plate to the power supply. Then plug in
all of the cables you're going to need. Two 8 pin EPS connectors, although
technically one will do. One 24 pin ATX power connector, a single 12vt 2x6
connector for our GPU, and a string of SATA power connectors for the future.
Bundle up all of those cables and pull them and your power supply through the
back of [music] the case like so. The SATA power we're just going to tuck
underneath, but everything else can be pulled through our cable management channels and cutouts like so. The 24 pin
is keyed, so there is no way to install it backwards. Oh, okay. It can be done,
but please don't position it like so and press down firmly until it's seated. You
should hear a subtle click as the little latch slips into place. Next up is our
CPU power. These can go around the side and then up through these cutouts at the
top. This can be a little bit tricky to do after the fact with big air coolers
though. So, a cool hack if you have a modular power supply is to install those
earlier, but I forgot to do that. I did
forget to do that. As I noted before, a single 8 pin here would be totally fine
if we're not extreme overclocking. But the second four pin won't hurt anything
and the extra pins can just hang over the side. Finally, we're at the 12vt
2x6, which we're going to put here
because first we need our GPU. You can think of the GPU as kind of like the
community's entertainment center. And we've gone with NVIDIA's RTX 5070 Ti, a
16 gig card that is unfortunately the
best option at this price point. It wasn't an easy choice, to be honest. You
might have noticed this is the same GPU from our $1,600 build just a couple of
months ago. But with the way that pricing has gone lately, particularly on
memory, by the time we speced out the rest of a balanced system, we felt like
leveling up to an RTX 5080 would result in compromises elsewhere that just
weren't worth the trade-off. But what about AMD? Well, unfortunately, AMD kind
of skipped doing an enthusiast tier GPU this generation. You could go back a gen
and buy a seen XTX if you want the extra VRAM, but those are going for $8 or $900
at the time of writing. Performance is pretty similar to the 5070 Ti that we're
using. And AMD just announced that their machine learning accelerated upscaling
FSR4 Redstone will not be coming to the
7900 series. So, if you like the latest technologies like ray tracing and
upscaling, team green kind of has the market cornered at this price point.
With our rationale out of the way, let's remove the appropriate PCIe slot covers,
these two. Then line up the gold teeth with the top PCIe x16 slot. Once you
think it's in place, give a firm little push. You might hear a click or you
might not. So do a quick visual inspection of the lock at the back of
the slot and the bottom of the rear PCI
bracket to make sure that everything is seated. Then screw it down. Our last
step is to grab that power cable we left hanging and plug it into our graphics
card like so. Time to fire it up. She
booted. So finishing touch.
I love the way Fractal does a light tinting on their glass. It looks so
classy. You want to start at 1440p or should we go right to 4K? We can game at
4K on this card. Why don't we do that? Oh, we have the new Ano. I haven't tried
this yet. Ah, Ubisoft connect. Curse
you. All right. Press any key to start the game. Oh, dude. Upscaling off. Wow.
Defaults to just like max everything. Cool. Now, I heard these are AI and this
looks [ __ ] terrible.
This one looks okay. That last one looked like garbage.
All right. Oh, sick. Oh, dude. Ruinous dice hall.
Sanctuary of 71. Honestly, doesn't look
that much better than 1800. Actually,
maybe environment's a little richer. Yeah. Ooh, lighting a little better.
We're getting anywhere from 30 to 40 FPS, which at 4K absolutely cranked in
this game. She's a bit of a heavy mama. Very
comfortable with that. And more importantly,
super reasonable noise level. That's
what a giant dual tower cooler will do for you. Honestly, I think we could even
turn the fans down a little bit. Our GPU is at 66° and our CPU is at just 76. Wo
wo [ __ ] diagonal roads. What is this
black magic [ __ ] >> Okay, >> wait. What the
[ __ ] is this? Three [ __ ] roads with one intersection.
>> My brain is broken. Okay, I'm turning it off. I'm turning it off. They want me to
try a different game. I don't know how to deal with this right now. Okay, let's
play some Cyberpunk. I haven't looked at DLSS that closely in a while, and I got
to say, I um if you didn't tell me it was on, I probably wouldn't know it was
on right now. With that said, quality is already rendering at a pretty decent
resolution, and I'm only getting about 37 FPS, which is fine for me while I'm
cruising around the city in my stolen cop car, but not ideal if I was going to
be in a firefight. So, let's go ahead and tune our settings a little bit here. Let's turn off rate tracing and see what
it looks like. And solved.
Now, we're above 50 FPS, which using variable refresh rate is a very playable
frame rate for a non-competitive title. And I don't know, rate tracing is cool,
but also like man, what a nice little machine. Like
nice quick game launches and like yeah, $2,000 is a lot of money, but like this
is a sick computer. I'll be the meat
shield for my helper guy here. Uh, okay.
There's smoke. Smoke is good, right? Oh, dude. No, I I recognize this map. This
is old map, right? What map is this? Oh [ __ ] Oh [ __ ] Oh [ __ ] Oh [ __ ] Oh,
hey, I helped. I helped. Hey, I gave 170
damage and I'm getting 250 FPS at 4K,
probably completely maxed out. What a great gaming rig. As I mentioned in the
intro, yeah, the PC industry is in a pretty rough spot right now, but as you
can see, if you build your own system, you can still get a lot of computer for
this budget. And if you're spending your money wisely, you'll be gaming at high
settings for many Steam summer sales to come. If you've made it this far and
you're not sure if building a system is right for you, we did happen to find a
similarly spec pre-built over on Newegg for about the same price. You might miss
out on some creature comforts like a really nice case like this one and a
DRAM cache on the SSD, but that's also a perfectly chromulent choice. Thanks
again to CIC for sponsoring this video. We're going to have a link to their
power supplies as well as all the parts that we used today down in the video
description. If you guys enjoyed this video, why not check out the last
firsterson view build guide we did? The parts are a little different. It's a
little older, but it's a great way to familiarize yourself with the steps from
the same perspective that you'll have when you're actually building.
Oh, I'm gaming. I forgot. See you later.