w you guys have asked for it and we are
delivering it this is our very first value oriented system build guide and
our very first AMD build guide so we're
going to be going through the usual stuff so that is best practices when
choosing your components best practices when building your system and of course
because we're going with an APU from AMD we're going to explain some of the
benefits of an APU versus a more traditional CPU as always our
configuration starts at the heart with the CPU actually this is an APU so a
traditional CPU has General processing cores built into it that communicate
with your system memory and do most of the things that your PC needs to do now
over time this has begun to change and what an APU does is it integrates Radeon
graphics course and what AMD is really calling direct X11 discret grade
Graphics into what would normally be a traditional CPU so in addition to the
four traditional CPU cores in here we've got a bunch of radon cores that are
great for running games and for other
applications as well so for example
rather than just being good for games integrated Graphics can now be used to
accelerate open CL compatible applications and in the transition
towards HSA or heterogeneous system
architecture which is a way of saying that all of the processors are not going
to be differentiated the same way that they use to so okay well this is a CPU
and this does this and this is a GPU and this does that instead they'll be able
to work together to reach a goal at the same time rather than you know say for
example waiting around for each other to do work until it becomes their turn to
work on the same task it's going to amount to better performance for your
system overall although it was a little
bit complicated to get the whole thing going because we needed Hardware support
and software support and it's all got to kind of happen at the same time now for
our system we chose the A10 6790 K which
is a new model we chose this because of its great balance between price and
performance and the fact that it includes very powerful Radeon graphics
so lower-end apus will tend to have less powerful Graphics in addition to less
powerful CPU cores so for some of the open CL demos that we're going to show
you this is going to be quite important for your Apu system you may find some
other very interesting choices with either lower prices or even better
performance than this one so don't feel like this is the only option it's just
what we went with to demo this platform for memory our usual considerations
pretty much come down to well the size how much RAM we need and then how many
channels we need it to run in whether it's dual triple or quad Channel however
for an APU there are some special considerations speed becomes much more
important because Graphics course that is the the radon cores built into the
Apu require higher bandwidth for Optimal
Performance than traditional CPU cores do so we went with 8 gigs of AMD's radon
series memory in a dual Channel configuration for our value optimized
config but another option if we were willing to sacrifice some performance
particularly in gaming and opencl applications now for better
upgradability in the future would be to get a single 8 gig stick and then throw
another 8 gig stick in later on down the line and run it in dual Channel then
because our motherboard only has two slots now why did we go with AMD memory
frankly there is no difference in terms of performance between AMD memory and
some other memory that's running at pretty much the same speed and timings
the key difference here is compatibility because AMD is the one building the
memory controller that's on the chip itself and they're the ones validating
the memory for it you know that it's going to work with that said there are
many other reliable memory Brands out there and if you buy something from you
know Kingston or Corsair or who whoever else there's I mean there's a very very
slim chance that it's not going to work it's just what you're comfortable with
they have several series of memory including their entertainment performance and gamer series modules and
you can find a capacity and speed that's going to work for you pretty much
regardless of your needs and your budget we went with a very value oriented
option for our motherboard in order to demonstrate the potential well cost
effectiveness of an APU based system with some of the lower cost apus and a
motherboard like this if you don't need want much in the way of expansion and
you just want performance for your dollar it's pretty hard to beat it I
mean this one right here this is the fm2 a55m dgsr 2.0 from ASRock doesn't have
many Frills it doesn't even have USB 3 for example but it only costs about 50
bucks you can take small steps up in terms of features and robustness you can
add USB 3 here and better audio there all the way to fully featured gaming
grade boards like this one but I guess the point of all this is that the
choices up to you so this is a G1 sniper a88x it's a fully overclocking ready
gaming ready Crossfire supporting motherboard on the fm2 plus socket which
is going to have support for upcoming cavar apus and so everything in between
this and this totally exists so let's be clear about the power
supply and case choices we made here there are much less expensive options
you can spend about a third of what we did on a case that has a bundled power
supply that will fit all this stuff and it'll probably work just fine at least
in the short term it's just that that's not
necessarily the only way to go about it so we wanted to show off what you can get in terms of a case with great
ventilation great compactness and very reasonable build quality for about 40
bucks with the fractal design core 1000 But ultimately the choice will be up to
you with a value oriented build a lot of the time the difference between 20 bucks
and 40 bucks is a lot so it'll come down to whether you're going to be doing any
upgrading in the future and you want that expandability whether it's worth
the additional investment as for the Standalone power supply you
versus using the bundled power supply that might come with a case um we never
recommend using that bundled power supply even if it came with your case
throw it away and get a real power supply you never know what's inside them
and just because it says 400 watts on the outside doesn't mean that it's
actually capable of outputting 400 watts only use bundled power supplies if
they're from a reputable brand like antech for example for our PSU we went
with a seic 400 wat OEM unit seic is
great they build quiet reli power supplies and are often available for
less than other brands this one right here has nothing special about it on the
outside with non sleeved cables and like
an ugly metal housing but it's like the Millennium Falcon it's got it where it
counts nice quiet 120 mm fan nice solid
weight to it which is usually a good sign for a power supply because it means
there's actual components inside versus it just being a metal box and of course
80 plus bronze efficiency is still something we care about because it can
be an indicator of the quality of the components inside storage is always a
tricky one for us to talk about and there are a couple of options here so
for 60 bucks you can get a wd blue one
tbte drive which has mediocre performance and decent capacity it's one
tbte but you could also spend a bit more
and get something else so you could either get a wd black one TB which will
give you better performance and still good capacity
or you can get a Kingston v310 gig SSD
if you don't mind planning for a quick upgrade to your storage because that
will give you Lightning Fast performance but only 120 gigs of storage which isn't
going to be enough for you know massive video collections or a bunch of games or
anything like that so we opted for the blue drive just because we wanted this
to be a pretty inexpensive rig but I wanted to talk about those other options
as well talking about graphics with a computer like this is another tough one
because we set out to build a good allround performer and to do an APU
build guide here and because an APU has decent onboard Graphics there's no
compelling reason to add a dedicated graphics card unless we were serious
about gaming now if we were serious about gaming there are some fantastic
options out there in terms of Graphics so for example we've got the r7260x that
is fully supported by our motherboard by
our power supply and by our case thank
goodness for custom rigs right the actual ability to be able to upgrade
them is awesome and adding something like this will take our gaming
experience to the next level there are however a couple of reasons I can think
of to go with an APU out of the gate even if you do intend to upgrade to a
graphics card later because remember guys there are AMD CPUs on the fmx
platform that are a little bit less expensive so if you were to put a graphics card right in you might not
want to do that okay so number one reason is maybe you're not sure how much
you're going to gain the Apu this one right here will handle Battlefield 4 at
720p with medium details so at least this gives you the opportunity to play
it and make a decision later on down the road about whether or not you want to
have a graphics card and it is less expensive to go for an APU versus a CPU
than it is to just buy the graphics card outright number two is maybe you just
plain old don't have the budget right now with an APU you can get the system
up and running and decide later so that's tied in very closely to reason
number one reason number three is maybe
the gaming aspect of the PC just isn't even for you you can still benefit from
the Apu from a compute perspective more on that later and the system will at
least be capable of having a little bit of oomph when you know the grandkids
come to stay for the weekend and they bring a couple of their games with them
for example the last thing you want is a situation where it just flat out doesn't
run the Apu is not going to give you nearly the gaming experience as a
dedicated graphics card like this but at least it brings the system to within
gaming capability range without costing a whole lot more onto our peripherals
choices we went with the h236 lb for our
Monitor and the mk120 for our keyboard
and mouse I mean the Logitech mk120 is nothing special it's very inexpensive
but a cheap mouse and keyboard we can kind of live with especially if we're
not gaming and especially when you consider how much more you really need
to spend to to get a great keyboard and mouse so we'd be spending probably
another you know 10% of our total budget
on something like a k 30 from Corsair
and an M40 from Corsair which would deliver a great gaming experience and
actually most of the performance of even higher cost Solutions than those ones
but just is a little bit more than we're willing to spend if we're not gaming but
now if you're serious about gaming and you do opt for the GPU upgrade for
example then maybe you can add something like that later on down road for the
monitor though I really believe that you should purchase a monitor more like a
piece of furniture everyone benefits from a better monitor it's less
fatiguing on your eyes and things just plain look better they look like the
content creator wanted them to look like
the the great thing about monitors is that unlike something like a graphics
card where you buy it now and it runs all the games really great and then two years down the road it's doesn't run
anything very well anymore a monitor performs as well as it does pretty much
throughout its lifetime so if if you buy a good monitor you'll be looking at a
good image 5 years from now and if you buy a lousy monitor you'll still be
looking at a lousy monitor 5 years from now so we went with an IPS monitor
because the experience is so much better
it looks better and it really just doesn't cost that much more when you
consider how long you might keep it but this is a very personal thing look at
your desk how long have you had that monitor if it's more than 3 to 5 years
and it's lived through a couple of full system upgrades and you skim last time
maybe think about getting something a little nicer for yourself this time
around on the other hand if it doesn't bother you at all then that's great but
I personally find it very frustrating particularly with uh for example low-end
TN panels when you're in something like an email application even and the red
versus unread messages are difficult to distinguish from each other because you
can't tell the difference between pale yellow and white that that drives me
crazy and a better monitor makes that a non-issue for our OS Windows 8 is the
obvious choice for a machine like this because it actually provides better
performance on an APU versus Windows 7
this is getting fairly well documented and I'm interested to see how things
continue to progress in this direction in the future well it's time for the
actual building now so start with a safe
static free workstation as always an anti-static strap I like to keep mine on
my ankle to keep it out of the way cuz I find when it's on my wrist it just get
caught on things and I'm more likely to make a mistake and then beyond that all
we really need for assembly is a multi-bit screwdriver now I always
recommend building the system outside of the case to ensure that there are no
issues with something getting shorted out and to make sure that everything is
already working before it's all jammed
into a case and it's difficult to swap things in and out and troubleshoot it
the motherboard box makes for a very handy non-conductive test bench however
this is a very very comp mistake don't use the antistatic bag that's on the
outside of your motherboard on top of the box okay once the power is actually
applied to the board some of these bags have conductive outer Coatings and can
actually short out the board if it's powered on so guys just to be very very
very clear when the board is not powered on
on top of static bag okay when the board is powered on on top of rather on top of
anti-static bag not optimal I would rather have it on something like a piece
of cardboard like the top of the box so we're going to start with CPU
installation first carefully remove the CPU and heat sink from the box the pins
on the CPU are extremely fragile AMD has
the pins on the processor not in the socket versus their competitor so we're
going to leave the CPU inside the plastic shell while we determine the
correct orientation next we're going to lift up the retention ARM on the socket
then align the small Golden Triangle on the corner of the CPU with the small
plastic triangle on the corner of the socket finally we're going to place the
CPU down onto the socket until it falls in on its own we don't push the CPU into
the socket with any kind of force just give it a little wiggle to make sure
it's in there okay and once that's done you can lower the retention ARM and your
CPU is installed in the socket just a couple things to consider when you're
putting the heat sink down on the CPU number one is to make sure that the
metal Clips on either side of the heat sink are positioned correctly to hook
over the bracket around the CPU socket and number two is make sure your fan
wire is as close as possible to the CPU fan header that is usually labeled on
your motherboard so first now that it's in position is to take the clip that's
on the side that does not have a plastic
ARM on the heat sink and put it over the bracket around the CPU socket then turn
it around and this metal clip does have a plastic retention ARM so we're going
to go ahead and put the metal clip onto the CPU bracket then take the ARM and
turn it pretty much a full 180° this
requires a little bit of force until it locks into place finally guys take your
fan wire and I recommend twisting it up a little bit here so that the wires
don't spread out and get into the way of everything and then plug that into the
fan header which should be again clearly labeled now please note guys that I
recommend better CPU cooling than the
Box cooler that's included if your objective is to have an extremely silent
computer or to run Beyond stock speeds by overclocking your processor neither
of those things are very appropriate with our config here and a better
motherboard would be required in addition to better cooling to make that
possible DDR3 installation is simple
especially in a motherboard that only has two slots so you don't have to worry
about which ones are right for dual Channel operation or color coding or
anything like that all you do is take the modules and align the notch in the
module with the little notch in the socket open up the
clips position the module in the socket then push down firmly on both sides it
should be noted guys that we're installing gamer Edition memory from AMD
and we had talked about using more value optimized memory in this system don't
worry the way high-end memory works is it's just rated at being able to operate
at a higher speed what we're going to be doing for performance numbers later on
in the video is turning it down manually to simulate what you'd be able to get
with entertainment class modules hey now
we're ready to start putting stuff in the case so first we're going to remove the two side panels by using the handy
dandy thumb screws that come included on this case then we're going to take those
side panels and put them somewhere safe where they're not going to get lost
speaking of keeping things safe and not losing them a really handy trick that I
use all the time is when you take out a screw put it back where you got it so
that you're not going to lose it so all those thumb screws can go back into the
case once we've taken off the side panels just don't get confused when
you're trying to put the side panel back on you're going like oh why doesn't it fit back on oh there's a thumb screw in
the way so I've I've definitely done that before uh next thing just another
sanity check type item is take your IO shield and make sure that it matches the
motherboard and that it is oriented correctly before you go ahead and
install it into the back of the case by aligning it and then firmly pushing in
all four corners until it is poking through a little bit and sits in place
without falling out so the thing about a power supply with no packaging is that
it doesn't have any screws included or anything like that don't worry guys it
doesn't matter in spite of the fact that the handy dandy box full of mounting
hardware that comes with your case doesn't list power supply screws on the
back of it they are indeed included and they look a little something like this
the next step is to take your power supply and decide on the orientation
when you put it into the oh wait no because we have a top mounted power
supply in this case we only have one orientation that it goes in with you can
actually see that there's only one set of screw holes so the reason for that is
that while on a bottom mounted power supply case you can decide to pull air
away from your graphics card area or to pull air through what is normally a
filtered intake on the bottom of the case with a top mounted case if we flip
this power supply around it would have no where to draw air from because the
top of the case is completely solid so it's for the safety of the power supply
itself that it only has one option another handy thing about this
orientation is that our cables are now at the back of the chassis where it's a
little bit easier to Route them and manage them behind the motherboard tray
so all that's left is to slide it into position and then do up the four screws
that we pulled out of that unlabeled box and that's pretty much it the power
supply is in to install the motherboard in our case we're going to need the
little brass standof as well as the little black screws with the tight
threads on them that are required to actually secure the motherboard to the
standoffs now before you put the standoffs onto the motherboard tray in
the case you're going to want to make sure you're putting them in the right place because there are some options
depending on the kind of motherboard you have so we have a fulllength matx board
but it is narrow so we only actually require six standoffs all we got to do
is hold the motherboard up and we can see which holes the motherboard
standoffs need to go into so once we've determined that there are a couple of
different ways to install them number one is if you happen to have one of
these handy dandy little screwdrivers you can go ahead and install them with
one of those but unfortunately this case doesn't come with one of them the other
option is to install them by hand and then tighten them the last little bit
with a pair of pliers or something along those lines once all the standoffs are
in carefully position the motherboard over them but not touching them because
you don't want to scratch the back of it I usually hold the motherboard by the
heat sink itself cuz it gives me some something firm to grip onto that won't
damage anything then inserting at an angle to ensure that we're not scraping
the board across the standoffs as we put it in we go ahead and put the io through
the back of the case then lay it down flat and put in at least one screw right
away so that the board's not going to slip anywhere and slide around all over
the place again we don't want to damage it finally finish up by installing all
six of the screws that secure the board in place and that's pretty much it your
motherboard is now installed with the motherboard physically installed now
it's time to install all the wires and cables and connections because this is
the point in the build where it's easiest to get at the allall so we're
going to start with the 24 pin connector this is the large thick connector with
well 24 pins it only goes in one way so if it doesn't seem like it's fitting
turn that baby around and put her in followed by the what would normally be
eight pin connector on a high-end board but this board really doesn't need that
much power for the CPU it's very efficient so we can break away four of
the pins and plug in the four pin connector above the CPU socket here that
is followed by the front panel connectors so this is our power switch
our reset switch our power LED and then our drive indicator led the power switch
and reset switch the orientation is not important as long as you get them on the
correct pins which are often labeled on the board but if not you can check out
the motherboard manual that's in the Box whereas the power LED and the drive
activity led the orientation does matter so make sure that the colored wires
correspond to the positive pins on the motherboard the last one is the speaker
this one the orientation is important as well so same thing colored wire to
positive terminal and if you get any of those wrong in the first place and the
lights or the speaker don't seem to be working don't worry about it just flip
them around it's not going to damage anything next up we've got our front USB
this case supports a single front USB 3 connector but unfortunately our board
doesn't so we weren't able to plug that one in but it does support front USB 2
so we just want to know where the pin is missing on the connector where the pin
is missing on the header and then go ahead and plug that in front panel audio
is installed in much the same way there's a missing pin in the brick and a missing pin on the board just like that
you go ahead and plug that in and you're pretty much ready to rock the last thing
now is the fan so there's a front fan in
this case that gives us positive air flow inside or probably about neutral
when you factor in that the power supply is going to be exhausting some air as
well which is lots of air flow as long as we're running um you know integrated
Graphics or a low-end graphics card otherwise I would recommend installing
maybe a rear exhaust fan or something like that but since we don't have a rear
exhaust fan we're going to use that space right there to manage some of our
wires so because there's no room on the back of the motherboard tray on this
case for cable management we are going to just kind of secure these wires to
each other most important of all is getting them out of the way of the CPU
socket area and the vrm area which is that area to the left of the socket so
that you don't have any overheating in those areas and then making sure there's
a little bit of clearance between them and the power supply so that there's no
interference with the air flow that needs to happen there and then finally
we're going to do a little bit of you know strapping together of these wires
at the front to make sure that that front fan has an unobstructed airflow
path to the inside of the case for the hard drives we need very specific screws
ones that have threads on part of them and then just a straight part that
actually goes through the rubber grommets that are pre-installed in the
hard drive mounting plate that is positioned vertically in kind of a
unique way so you can either put two three and 1/2 in drives on the rubber
mounts or you can position three 2 and
1/2 in drives such as ssds if you space
them out correctly and you don't already have a 3 and 1/2 in Drive installed
otherwise you can do 1 3 and 1/2 in and one 2 and 1/2 in it should be noted that
there's also a converter up in one of the 5 and 1/4 inch Bays that can support
either 3 and 1/2 or 2 and 1/2 in dries now one of the things I like about this
case is how clever the hard drive mounting system is most people buying a $40 case don't need half a dozen hard
drives so it's designed to not only well
be targeted towards the right people yeah they're probably just going to have a couple drives but also deliver a great
experience for those people by allowing much more air flow over the drives in
order to keep them very very cool compared to most cases in this price
bracket which are just going to have your typical standard hard drive cage in
the entire front of the case that really obstructs air flow a lot so it's a it's
a smart design that I quite like now in terms of actually hooking up the drive
once we've screwed it into the plate we've just got our single 3 and 1/2 in
Drive we're going to run a SATA cable directly from the motherboard over to
the hard drive there's not a whole lot of cable management to be done given we've only got one drive then we're
going to run a SATA power cable from our power supply down to the drive and then
we'll do a little bit of cable management with them to get them mostly
out of the way and that's it
now I can't emphasize enough how optional this particular step is it's
more of the kind of thing where after you build the system if you realize it's
time for a graphics card go ahead and do this so all you got to do to install a
graphics card again because this case and power supply and motherboard all
support this kind of an upgrade is pull out the top two PCI slot covers by just
uninstalling the two thumb screws then position the graphics card in this case
it's an r7260x over the PCI Express slot that's
a 60 next slot push down firmly until it
locks into place then screw the two thumb screws back into place and finally
plug the PCI Express power cable into
the back of the card now you will have noted probably that this card only has a
single six pin PCI Express connector required in order for it to function but
because this 400 W power supply is a good quality one and comes with two six
plus TW pin PCI Express connectors we could actually go ahead and install even
much higher higher end cards without any difficulty because we have that
flexibility that we built into our initial
system with the side panels back in place our system is pretty much ready to
be well fired up but there's still some software stuff that we're going to have
to do so we'll start with BIOS configuration go ahead and mash on
delete to get into the BIOS and there's a couple things to double check so let's
make sure that ahci mode is enabled for our SATA ports and also ensure that our
components are all detected and our memory is running out the correct speed
in this case we're simulating DDR3 16600
cuz that's sort of what would fit within our budget next up Windows installation
is a snap if you know how don't worry about the lack of a disc drive in this
machine installing off of a USB is as simple as finding a friend with an
optical drive copying all the files directly off your dis onto your USB
drive and then throwing that into the system booting from it and you're ready to install in a simple system like this
there's only one drive to install Windows to so it's pretty much click
click click click click name your PC click click click click and you're done
the system will automatically reboot a couple times and you'll be dumped at the desktop now drivers are something that
many people struggle with once we're at the Windows desktop but it's not too
overwhelming if you break it down even devices that already have drivers
installed automatically from Windows update I would still recommend checking
the to make sure you have the latest ones from the manufacturer or website um
asrock's website should have the latest AMD chipset drivers land drivers and
sound drivers but it's never a bad idea
to double check by going directly to AMD site real Tech site or whoever else is
the actual manufacturer of the chip of the component that's on your motherboard
if you're having trouble finding a driver for something here's a trick that I use go to device manager rightclick
the component in question then go to details and use the drop-down box to go
to Hardware ID Google the venore number
Dore number string and it will usually tell you exactly what it is and often
there's a link to where to download the driver so the conclusion of this video
is not so much about the system but more about the future of the Apu on the
desktop moving forward okay so amds made it very clear that AP is sticking around
and the evidence is starting to really increase to indicate that we don't
necessarily need the best CPUs to have a
great Computing experience if we can augment it in other ways so let's have a
look at how our system system actually performs starting with gaming in
Battlefield 4 at 720p with medium details it's as advertised it works it's
playable and of course we can add our 260x graphics card to it and all of a
sudden it's a great 1080p capable gaming machine but at least it functions out of
the box other applications that can take advantage of the GPU that is built onto
the CPU the Apu so to speak are things like wiip or batch filter processing
scripts for Photoshop for example these were able to perform much better with
the Apu using open CL acceleration versus just relying on the CPU all of
this sounds particularly awesome and promising when we compare it to other
options available in the market like older PCS that are not able to leverage
their GPU compute in order to improve performance or things like gaming
consoles that are a little bit locked down in terms of their functionality the
value of a of a value PC I guess we we call it value PC but we don't often
think about it that way is you know the additional functionality web browsing uh
a vast number of supported apps um
upgradeability and all the things that we can change about the way we use it in
the future speaking of the future AMD's got some pretty exciting things coming
for the Apu platform including support for True audio better graphics and
compute performance with their upcoming cavar apus and the continuing evolution
of the processor technology that's on them towards HSA which is the equivalent
of having your CPU and GPU working together on a Google doc at the same
time to get work done versus them like making revisions to a Word document and
then emailing it back and forth to each other then waiting for replies I I know
I actually already talked a little bit about HSA earlier in the video but they wanted me to use that analogy but I
liked my construction versus rowing one better so I compromised by putting them
both in whichever works best for you let me know in the comments and until next
time peace out guys and don't forget to subscribe here's some Glam footage of
our value AMD Apu system really hope you
you guys enjoyed the video like it if you liked it dislike it if you disliked
it leave a comment if you know something you know compels you to leave a comment
and as always don't forget to subscribe I think I already said that but I'm just
basically buying time here while you guys check out some of the Glam footage
of the system yay I'm now credits
a