well guys the lab coat's on which means it's time for another ultimate build
guide this time it's going to be the ultimate video editing workstation so
we're going to be walking you through the mechanic of putting this system together but more
importantly we're going to be talking about the rationale behind each of the
parts we chose as well as giving a couple of other options cuz for
professional use there are often at least a half a dozen options that would
all be valid for any given part depending on your particular needs like
most rigs a professional video editing machine starts at the CPU now our CPU
choice is not the only choice we went with the 493 K on the LGA 2011 platform
and we did this for a number of reasons we found the 4930k to be a good sweet
spot it's the lowest end six core processor that's available from the core
i7 family we could step down to a 4820k
but then we'd be losing a couple of cores even though it is less expensive
or we could step up to a 4960x extreme Edition but we wouldn't be getting a lot
more performance and we'd be paying quite a bit more for it zons are also
options but from a price to Performance standpoint we didn't find that for car
rig bearing in mind that adobe can be easily offloaded without even buying
additional licenses to a render Farm we didn't find we needed even more
processing cores or more than 64 gigs of RAM which would be another benefit of a
Zeon processor support for ECC memory now benefit number two beyond having
more cores of choosing the LGA 2011 platform is more PCI Express Lanes these
are PCIe 3.0 lanes and it has about
double the lane support of the consumer grade platform meaning that as you add
in bandwidth hungry expansion cards like
accelerator cards and raid cards and nit cards and graphics cards and anything
that you want compute cards whatever kind of crazy stuff you might want to put on here you need to make sure that
bandwidth is available and only a professional grade platform will have
that benefit number three is more RAM support even using consumer grade
modules such as these Corsair Dominator platinums these are clocked at 2133 MHz
we can get up to 64 gigs of RAM in this
board which is more than we need for our application although it'll be up to you
guys to decide whether you need more than that but you might end up with something like a dual socket board with
even more memory slots or highdensity ECC modules now let's talk a little bit
more about the memory we went with DDR3 2133 modules so remember we did a
showcase a little while ago where we demonstrated that anything of around
1333 or higher doesn't benefit gaming applications however with Pro
applications where you're swapping massive amounts of data in and out of the memory that can be a bit of a
different scenario with that said you still want to find a sweet spot and you
don't necessarily want to spring for DDR3 3,000 MHz or anything like that so
we found 2133 was a good balance now why
did we go with this particular kit and really a big part of the answer is not
all memory kits are available in eight-way configurations so first of all
you have to be able to get a quad Channel kit of whatever memory it is
there's a chance that two dual Channel kits will work together in Quad Channel
but if you want maximum compatibility buying quad Channel kits is the way to
go remember LGA 2011 not only supports more memory but also about double the
theoretical bandwidth of LGA 1150 so we had to find a quad Channel kit then we
wanted to find a quad Channel kit that actually has all eight modules in one
kit all validated together because this
again improves compatibility with your motherboard and CPU and is makes it less
likely that you're going to run into any issues down the road you want a six core
processor and 64 gigs of RAM you're going to need a board that supports it
this is the p9x 79e Ws from ASUS and
don't let the Ws fool you it's not just suitable for workstation use guys so if
you want to overclock or game on this board yeah that'll be just fine don't
worry but what makes it WS well number one is there's the pure quality of the
components it is an an extremely well-built board it is designed to be
used in a professional environment and yes those components do cost more and
they do last longer next up is the expansion so check this out seven PCI
Express 16x physical slots three of them are wired for 8X four of them are wired
for PCIe 16x 3.0 that's supported by
that IV brid e processor wow lots of
expansion you've also got8 DDR3 module slots so that'll support up to 64 gigs
of regular non-cc memory with a normal
Core Series processor or you can support
even more if you step up to a Zeon processor which will cost you a little
bit more and then you'll spend a little bit more on the memory as well to get
even more Rock Solid stability and even better performance now it's got other
workstation oriented features as well such as the Dual Intel NYX at the back
that increases throughput and decreases CPU utilization when you're working off
of network resources but that is not actually where it really shows its value
compatibility is where this board shows its value could spend half as much less
than half as much on a motherboard that would give you the same performance yes
I'm going to let that sink in for a moment less than half as much so why
doesn't everyone just do that because when you're buying a professional grade
product you expect zero downtime when you buy a new red rocket accelerator
card and throw it into your board you expect it to work you don't expect to
find out that there's a compatibility issue and you've got to pull that
motherboard eBay it flip it somehow buy a new one and replace it you can't
afford that if you want something something that you know is going to work this is it friends WS series boards are
validated to a much higher standard with aftermarket parts than other boards
whether it is the aforementioned red rocket card raid cards multi- Channel
Nicks or whatever else you can fill up these PCI Express slots Zeon F cuadros
Teslas it's all validated in this board
so if you can't afford the downtime and you're willing to pay an extra premium
for that and you just want what I generally consider to be the best single
socket board on the market p9x 79 ews my
friends we went with a prograde product for the motherboard but for the power
supply we're going with a bit of more of a gaming branded product why would that
be well for one thing the Corsair axi series comes with a seven-year warranty
so if you had any doubts as to how wellb built they are there's that you can also
check out the reviews on Johnny guru.com these are extremely well-built power
supplies right up there with a workstation grade power supply and they
come with a seven-year warranty and they come with Corsair link which allows you
to monitor its usage as well as its efficiency as well as your voltage
levels and all that crazy stuff so we kind of went well what's the real
difference between this and a workstation power supply well there's the brand name on the front which isn't
terribly important to us and there's the fact that it doesn't look like an
industrial piece of equipment and sound like an industrial piece of equipment
it's very very quiet to go along with that 80 plus Platinum efficiency so
there doesn't appear to be a downside we went with the ax860i
now there's a million different options in terms of storage there really are
literally a million but we're going to walk you through what we went with SSD
boot Drive I still feel is the most important thing to have in any machine
gaming workstation doesn't really matter and for us we went with the Intel 530
series 240 gig drive it's got a 5-year
warranty so they're standing behind it in terms of the reliability the
durability of The Flash you could spend a lot more and get something like a$
3500 series drive that would be an option but because we're not going to be
using this drive for any of the real work we're not using it as a scratch
disc we're not using it to actually store any HD footage on it we're just
basically reading off of it we did not feel it was necessary to go with a
prograde component in this case when
working with HD video files or even Ultra HD video files you will need a ton
of space we wanted to try and keep our
storage internal to make this workstation as as portable as possible
without tying us down to an external storage array so we went with four WD
black 4 tbte drives we're going to be running them in RAID 10 we're going to
be running them off the onboard raid these are not necessarily the only
options Available to You adding in a high-end raid card so that you can run
something like raid five very quickly or some kind of an unraid or some kind of a
raid six these are definitely options but by the time you buy a raid card
that's capable of running those types of raid fast enough for professional usage
you're probably looking at adding another 500 to ,000 to the cost of the
build so I wanted to present that option but that's not something that we went
with RAID 10 allows us to take our four four terabyte drives and get a total of
8 terabytes of fast safe storage we get
the benefits of raid zero so that is double the sequential throughput and we
get the benefits of raid one which means that we can have any one of the drives
in the system fail and up to two of the drives in the system fail before any
data losses incurred this is so important for for professional work
whether you're running a raid card whether you're running raid off of your
onboard or whether you're running uh some kind of an external enclosure
whether that's Network or USB 3 or ESAT or whatever the case may be redundancy
is key it is not a substitute for backing up preferably offsite but
redundancy will save you from a hardware failure choosing a graphics card for a
professional rig is a very personal choice and I just want you guys to maybe
be able to make a better educated one even if I can't tell you exactly what's
right for you now graphics cards in general have always had the hardware
oomph to be great for applications like video editing but the software is still
catching up so prior to Adobe CS5 for example if you're a premier editor
anyone telling you you needed a great workstation graphics card for better
video editing performance was probably trying to sell you a great workstation
graphics card that ultimately wasn't going to be doing a whole lot for you in
terms of performance anyway with CS5 that all changed so we're able to
leverage that highly parallelized processor the onboard memory the fast
interconnects to the rest of the system for wholesale changes to individual
pixels imagine a graphics card being good for that such as uh color
correction scaling or compositing so that was with CS5 now we're actually
continuing to improve so for example in After Effects in CS6 the Optics Ray
tracing engine was added that's GPU accelerated as well so that instead of
fake cluggy 3D effects and after effects now editors can work in real 3D with
real depth values now on the NVIDIA side
alone you've actually got options in terms of you got two whole different
lines of graphics cards to choose from so there's quadros which I was waving
around before the workstation grade cards and then there's also the consumer
grade GeForce cards now what GeForce cards do is they offer a great price to
Performance ratio if you're looking for sheer Cuda cores and Cuda performance if
the application that you're running doesn't call for a specifically
validated GPU where there's no easy hack GeForce cards offer great bang for the
buck now with that said they don't undergo the same degree of validation
because there's a whole lot of variety in the implementations from different
manufacturers so that means that you've got to make a pretty careful choice for
which one you going want to go with the the ASUS direct cu2 GTX 780 that we've
got for our rig is an overbuilt card it's overclocked but you know not crazy
like it's going to die immediately or anything like that and it has a
fantastic cooler on it so we'd expect it to have a very long life cycle even
though it's not rated for 24/7 operation
the same way that something like a Quadro is with Quadro cards on the other
hand performance takes a definite backseat to validation and reliability
the things that workstation users value the most these cards are all built by NVIDIA with
exactly the same components every time allowing large corporations to validate
particular workloads and particular machines with this particular card and
know that it's going to be available in exactly that configuration over a long
period of time this is important in a corporate environment but not
necessarily something that individual users value now that goes for software
makers as well this is less of an issue with Adobe software where they actually
do validate some G4 uh chips and configurations in addition
to Quadro configurations but AVID for example only certifies workstation grade
cards for their Avid software now with that said there are hacks there are text
file hacks for both Adobe applications and for Avid that allow you to you know
cludge in GeForce cards and and allow them to be recognized as validated cards
but this is a very a very home brew way of approaching it and not everyone's
comfortable with that now for the multi talented video editor who also does some
3D rendering work as well you'll probably just plain old need a Quadro
card professional 3D rendering applications such as 3ds Max and Maya
are often only going to work with GPU
acceleration with Quadro cards this is because of the way that the quadro
driver is architected to specifically enable performance profiles and
compatibility settings even down to if
that particular rendering application is the active window on the screen it's
making optimization in the background for the utmost compatibility and the
gForce drivers just aren't tuned to operate that way they're going for Balls
to the walls performance rather than that stability and validation that
Quadro brings to the table so basically if it it comes down to choices if you're
a tinkerer and you're willing to spend the time you know hacking things a
little bit and you don't mind if if a card isn't validated for 24/7 operation
and if it dies you kind of go to yourself well I spent half as much on
this card as I would have on the workstation one I'll just buy another one and it'll probably be higher
performance by that time anyway if you're one of those kinds of folks
GeForce can be a great option if you're building workstations that just need to
work and you don't want to ever touch them again then maybe there's a value to
you for the additional stability that something like a Quadro brings to the
table I mean another example is if you're building a system for someone else where frankly it's not your money
anyway and you want them to have a great experience with your system maybe you
just go for the hassle-free solution that doesn't have the hack that you
implemented and validated by a driver update that comes down through GeForce
experience and you're kind of sitting there going well I wouldn't be dealing with that if it was a Quadro then you
might find that to be a better option as well now with that said you can't just
swap out quadros for gfor and get all of the same functionality some of it is
just plain Hardware so if you're doing any kind of stereo 3D video editing and
you want to use a prograde 3D solution that runs off of a D connector Quadro is
going to be the way to go if you wanted to take advantage of ah yes deep color
so 10bit panels more on this pa279q in a
moment for any kind of serious color work during your video editing process
you are going to need a Quadro because that's the only thing that is going to
support the 10bit output that that monitor can then interpret and finally
they come in form factors that GeForce cards just don't come in this Quadro
k4000 is a single slot card giving you a ton of flexibility in systems where you
might also have you know a red rocket accelerator and all those other things
where you can run out of expansion cards pretty quickly and I mean for us it's
great because we were able to put a two slot GeForce card in sneak a single slot
Quadro card in and still have a lot of expansion for other things as well so
that's yet another advantage of Quadro for peripherals particularly for
keyboards and mice we've moved almost completely towards gaming peripherals
not because gaming peripherals are you know more professionall looking in fact
they're not but because the functionality and the build quality of
them tends to be well designed for more wear and tear than your typical mouse or
keyboard so this right here my friends is the g602 and this gets my
recommendation it lasts for weeks in performance mode and much longer than
that in its endurance mode it has very
good precision and it has a ton of fully
programmable buttons which can be great not just for gaming and binding to your
voice chat application or whatever else but also for programming in things like
keyboard shortcuts it's comfortable it's wireless it's hard to go wrong for our
keyboard same thing we've started moving towards gaming keyboards because
features like lighting up in the dark having programmable keys on the sides
having built-in media controls and a volume wheel well these are useful for
professionals as well as for gamers so the g710 plus gets my vote it has
excellent software it comes with Cherry MX Brown key switches with O-rings
meaning that it's not that loud so you're not going to be bugging your neighbor again the loud system thing and
it's Logitech so it's extremely wellb built and if anything goes wrong with it
you will definitely get a replacement it's also very well priced for a
mechanical keyboard with those features now when it comes to audio that's where
the gaming thing goes completely out the window most of our guys here use Im so
something like sennheiser's i8s would be an excellent option although any kind of
closed monitoring or reference sounding
headphones from the likes of AKG be Dynamics heer or Den would be great
choices ASUS originally told us they were going to send us a new PB 27in
monitor for this showcase and I kind of went okay um yeah I can dig it PB is uh
is a good value option if you want you know great monitors that are not Factory
pre-calibrated like the PA series the proart series is um and if you want me a
little bit more value uh that's not what they sent they ended up sending a pa279q
which is one that I can wholeheartedly recommend for use with this video
editing rig or pretty much any video editing rig yeah it's expensive if you
look at it from like a gamer's perspective you go oh Pro art monitors
those are really expensive but when you look at it from a professional user's
perspective and you consider the features you're getting you compare it to something like an HP dream color and
it starts to look a lot more attractive this right here is a 27in 2560x1440
monitor it has a 10 bit Ah IPS panel so
for those of you who understand what that means great for those of you who
don't that means a much much tighter
level of granularity in the colors that it can display so on your monitor when
you see blocking or banding between similar colors that will not be present
on this monitor as long as you are using a supported graphics card so in our case
a Quadro with a supported driver Quadro and a supported application such as
Adobe Premiere now you are taking full
advantage of deep color it also has a 14bit lookup table so it can actually
understand even more than it can actually display to you giving it an
even better approx ability to approximate those colors and it's got
more features as well so it's a professional monitor meaning that the onscreen display has an updated
navigation menu with a little four-way switch it's highly ergonomic so you got
your height adjust your tilt your swivel your pivot all that stuff that you could
possibly want it comes pre-calibrated like all PA monitors and this time ASUS
is going for gold because they're promising a Delta e of less than two and
they actually ship a little certificate inside the box that shows you how your
individual monitor tested it supports six AIS individual color adjustments so
that's on RGB s magenta and yellow so
you can adjust individual colors without affecting the other ones it has
uniformity compensation which is one of the big issues with even many prograde
monitors and that is to say that the back leg isn't always uniform so as much
as the color reproduction might be perfect you might still have issues with
this corner being a little bit different looking than this corner and you want it
to be as uniform as possible comes with compensation for that of course with you
know a 10B bit panel and all of these fancy features it has 99% Adobe RGB
color support and 100% srgb color space
support and 120% ntsc color space
support and I think I've probably gushed about it in enough but guys this is a
fantastic choice if you're looking for a great monitor for color work and you
don't necessarily want to spend several thousand dollars on it choosing a case
for this was actually a bit of a challenge because what's a professional
case I mean you don't want to go and spend $300 on a case for a video editing
rig unless there's some kind of a compelling reason like you need support
for 12 hard drives or something like that you want something that's
reasonably portable if you ever had to move it around or you know take it
somewhere else in order to work on it I mean we do that from time to time when
we go to shows for example you don't want it to be like you know covered in
like flames and plastic or all that unless you you don't mind people seeing
that when they come into your office for a meeting or whatever else um so we
ended up with the Silverstone tj4 e it's clean looking metal construction it has
great features it's around $150 which is reasonable although it's certainly not
inexpensive and it's easy to build in I like this
case I've been using it for years actually back to the old tj4 model I
don't think Silverstone gets enough attention for how high quality their
products are and how reasonably priced they are especially can when you
consider how much better built they are than some of the other really really
popular options that are out there now if I didn't want to spend 150 bucks and
I didn't mind stepping down to something that has a little bit more of a plastic construction the fractal designed Define
R4 is a great option one of the reasons we didn't go with the Define R4 for this
build guide is that we've already done a build guide in the Define R4 so I didn't
really see much of a value to doing another build guide in the Define R4 the
first step as always is to prepare yourself at an anti-static workstation
not working on a carpet preferably using an antistatic strap whether it's on your
wrist or like I prefer to wear it on my ankle you're also going to need a
Phillips head screwdriver which should be pretty much all we need in terms of
tools for this particular I build I always start with building the system
outside of the box as much as possible
and by box I of course being the case not the box but I'm not going to kill
the shot just for that so I've got the motherboard the CPU the CPU Cooler on
previous build guides when we've used liquid cooling installing the CPU Cooler
prior to putting the board into the case has not been an option but this time
we're going to do that and if UPS would hurry up and bring the RAM to us I would
have the RAM here as well Intel uses simple eco-friendly packaging for their
2011 processors it does not come with a heat sink so it's a good thing we have
an aftermarket heat sink to use they expect professional and Enthusiast users
to have their own cooling solution we open up the plastic clamshell and find
the little Golden Triangle on the corner of the CPU that's important so we're
going to put it down on our motherboard oriented correctly relative to the
little triangle on the corner of the socket itself then with LGA 2011 there
are two retention arms first we lift the one with the hook at the end then we
lift the one with the kink in the middle and the straight end once that's done we
can lift up the hold down plate position the CPU carefully in the socket without
putting any force on it while we're putting it down if you bend those pins
you will likely be so guys because no
motherboard manufacturer will warranty physical damage and they're extremely
difficult to repair now we lower the hold down
plate lower the k ARM and lower the
hooked ARM then pull off the plastic plate and the CPU is installed if you
follow Noz instructions carefully mounting the nhu1 14s isn't going to be
too complicated you'll need all the hardware from inside the Intel mounting
hardware box other than the back plate for LGA 2011 that's not needed and then
you'll need some stuff from the accessories box so it does come with a
screwdriver which is pretty handy you'll also need the extra fan Clips the extra
fan grommets as well as the thermal compound the the only thing we're not
going to use from inside here is the case badge which is totally optional and
the low noise adapter because this motherboard includes excellent software
fan control now that we've got everything together it's pretty
straightforward get the four little pieces with threads on either side and
the thicker thread goes into the four holes around the LGA 2011 socket next up
take the two mounting bars and position them on either side just like this
you've got four more nuts that then go go over top I recommend using a
screwdriver to tighten these ones into place because this is what's giving you
the security and firmness for that large heat sink next up is applying thermal
compound I recommend the line method on LGA 2011 processors use a little bit
more than you'd use on a smaller LGA 1150 processor now you have to pull the
original fan which comes pre-mounted to your heat sink off because otherwise you
won't actually be able to mount it then position it centered on top of the CP
you so that both of the pre-installed tensioned screws are positioned over top
of the threads that are on that mounting plate now alternating sides make sure
first that the threads catch then switch
back and forth until they stop and you can't screw them in any further put the
original fan back on then for your secondary fan which is totally optional
and is only if you buy an additional fan what you're going to want to do is take
the thick ER spacers that are included in the box with your heat sink swap off
the four spacers that are on the side where okay that are on the side that is
pulling air into the fan so you can tell from the label of the fan guys so here
you go the label should be facing away from the CPU heat sink on that other
side then swap on the thicker spacers that are included it's a little bit
tricky you got to kind of pull the little Nubs through the corners but this
will generate a little bit less turbulence when the air is passing first
from the push fan through the heat sink and then is being drawn away by the pull
positioned fan when you're done it should look a little something like this
nice massive heat sink lots of cooling fans plenty of space for 64 gigs of RAM
now something you might have noticed about this board is in order to achieve
its massive seven PCI Express slots
there wasn't a lot of clearance between the RAM slots and the PCI E slot so Aus
has done the only natural thing which is to remove the movable clips from one
side so you can see here on the one side we have clips that snap forwards and
back and on the other side we have no clips due to the fact that there's no
clearance there so this makes installing RAM a little bit different in this board
from most also if you were installing only four modules please note that you
would install them in the blue slots because we're installing eight modules
we're just going to go to town fill them up on one side fill them up on the other
side now you might have noticed that on the side where we put in the additional
spacer on the fan that is a very tight
fit for that first memory module so it's up to you whether you want to opt for
the slightly less turbulence and slightly lower noise operation or if you
want to opt for having a little bit more clearance for your
memory so the first thing is to open up the case by removing the two thumb
screws then getting the insides basically prepared so we're going to
remove that SSD mounting bracket that's
down here in the bottom of the case we're also going to put our power supply
right in so if you look at these These are the types of screws that we use for
power supply mounting for screws there's a bit of a decision to be made when
you're deciding whether to have your fan mounted up or down for your power supply
fan up has the benefit of pulling air away from your graphics cards and
helping cool your graphics cards but the drawback of drawing hot air into your
power supply making your power supplies cooling less efficient so we opted
instead to go for drawing air in through the bottom of the case this case can
conveniently has an air filter down here that you can easily remove and clean
whenever you need to this isolates the heat from your graphics cards away from
your power supply and will make it run cooler in the long term when installing
the io shield into the case do a quick sanity check and make sure you're
putting it in right side up just align the io shield with the back of the
motherboard make sure all the ports stick through then align it with the
back of the case and press firmly on all
four corners this might require some pressure in order to get it to work
properly and it's not incorrectly until it snaps into place and you can put some
pressure on it from behind without it falling back inside the case now to
continue preparing the case we're going to replace those stock fans and fill her
all up with better fans for awesome cooling so Silverstone includes okay
fans with their cases but that's exactly what they are they're okay in the back
we're going to take that okay fan we're going to take out all four screws and
replace it with an NF F12 now we don't have to use use the same stock screws to
install that n12 back there because premium fans also come with some premium
mounting options so instead we're going to use these little rubber isolators to
have what is what is a very vibration resistant Mount so the way that it's
done is you position the fan then push
the little rubber spacers through as much as you can you won't be able to
completely Mount them this way then if you have room for your fingers you can
pull them through to the point where the fan now is locked into place and if you
don't have room for your fingers then you can make your life a lot easier by
using a pair of needle nose pliers once you're done with that check it out very
little vibration if any can be passed now from the fan with its spinning
blades to the case on the top there's a
top piece that actually acts as both an aesthetic cover for our fans and as an
easily removable and cleanable fan filter we have a bit of a unique
configuration for the top of this case it accepts 1 140 mm fan and 1 120 mm fan
in the top there is not enough room for us to use those rubber spacers unless we
were really determined so in this case we just went for the old hard mount with
screws it should be noted that again premium fan features these fans have
little rubber isolators built into them as well so they're still not making
direct plastic to metal contact with the case which will reduce vibration we want
to pay special attention when installing all case fans to the position of the
cables that are coming out of them with respect to where we expect them to plug
into the motherboard or any other kind of power solution that we have planned
in this case because we're one motherboard fan header short on this
board for the number of fans we're going to have in the system I'm going to be
using a splitter off of this top connector right here into these two top
fans so I want them positioned near the back so I can route them cleanly up
there without any additional wire clutter the last fans that we're going
to swap out are going to require us to take off the other side panel and there
we go two more nf12 these are going to be used to directly cool our hard drive
RAID 10 array now I want to take a moment here okay so yeah we use slightly
different Hardware here it includes more of it but just to save time because
we're just doing a build guide here this isn't a permanent build I'm just doing
two screws per fan and at diagonals okay
so maintain the cable management that's there and I want to take a moment to
talk about why I love N1 12s and other
pressure optimized fans um manufacturers
will often make the argument you should use an air flow optimized fan for
something like a case intake or rear exhaust or whatever else the negligible
performance Improvement that you get with an air flow optimized fan versus a
pressure optimized fan I feel is offset by the versatility of pressure optimized
fans because you can do all the planning in the world and if you go and buy an
airflow optimized fan that's going to end up being a case intake that sits
next to hard drives pulls air through a honeycomb mesh and pulls air through a
fine mesh fan filter I would make the argument that's more of a static
pressure optimized application anyway and you run into that a whole lot so I
love the versatility of pressure optimized fans I find them more useful
in a wider variety of scenarios every manufacturer takes a
slightly different approach to which motherboard standoffs come pre-installed
Silverstone has opted for the skinny but fulllength ATX configuration so that is
six screws two at the top two in the middle and two at the bottom in order to
put a standard ATX motherboard or in this case a slightly eatx motherboard so
it uses standard holes but it is a little bit wider we're going to need
three more screws or standoffs rather so standoffs look a little something like
this and they screw into the back of the motherboard tray you're going to also
find another piece that has a Phillips head on one side and then a socket on
the other side you can use that piece to screw your standoffs into the
motherboard tray so we're going to install three more one in line with the
two bottom ones one in line with the two middle ones and one in line with the two
top ones so we end up with a total of nine here here here here here here here
here and here now positioning the motherboard
it's important to be extremely careful the last thing you want to do is scratch
the back of your board on those fancy new standoffs that you just put into the
motherboard tray so what I recommend is going in at a bit of an angle and
positioning the rear IO so that it sticks through the back of your IO
Shield back here before you actually lay
the mother board down flat on the standoffs now holding the motherboard in
place put in at least one screw in this
case we're using the same coarsely threaded screws that we used for the
power supply although this varies from manufacturer to manufacturer and even
from case to case so always do a test fit before you start installing screws
into your standoffs or you might cross thread something then proceed to tighten in the other
eight screws now once you've done that
it's easier to install your motherboard connectors before we move on so we're
going to start with the front panel connectors for the power reset and as as
well as our LEDs so first up is power and reset for these ones the orientation
doesn't matter so just follow the clearly labeled connectors and clearly
labeled pins on the motherboard itself if you have a little bit of trouble
reading those grab out the old magnifying glass or better yet just
consult the manual because it'll tell you exactly where they are next up are
your power LED and your hard drive activity LED for these ones the
orientation of the cables does matter you want the colored wires towards the
back of the motherboard or where the io and the PCI Express slots are on all
ASUS motherboards that way you're going to have your positive and negative wires
in the right place if you do get them wrong don't stress out about it it's not
going to break anything just switch them around around when you realize that the
light isn't working next up we've got our front USB 3 for this one be really
careful to install it in the correct orientation there is a key on the USB
connector itself as well as on the socket so you shouldn't be able to
install it incorrectly but if you did you would likely Bend all those very
fragile pins the usb3 connector is very
large but the pins themselves are quite small and delicate finally we have our
front HD audio this has been simplified so much since 10 years ago and now all
you got to do is figure out which block doesn't have a pin in it align that with
the one on the motherboard that doesn't have a pin in it and plug the whole
thing in finally fans we actually have
an opportunity here to show you a multitude of different ways that you
might install fans our rear fan we have a little bit of extra slack on that wire
so we're going to do my signature Knot Before we plug it into the motherboard
fan header next up we've got our top fans I needed to use a splitter for
these because I don't have enough stand or enough headers on the motherboard in
order to install all of my fans so the splitter plugs directly into the
motherboard this came with my fans another benefit of buying premium
quality fans then runs around to the back of the motherboard tray where
because I was thinking Cable Management as I was building my motherboard fan
cables are already running so I can plug those in tuck them away and I'm good to
go which leaves us finally with the front fans these ones are both different
so one of them is perfect it's a perfect run to one of the remaining plugs on the
motherboard that's the top one the second one the bottom one actually has a
cable that's too short Noctua includes
very short cables built onto their fans to allow for shorter cleater cable runs
without having a lot of extra wires to tuck away so what they also include is
extension cables so I'm going to use one of those extensions in order to make
this wire long enough to reach my final fan header which is down in the bottom
of the chassis next up we're going to install our SSD and our hard drivve so
in order to do any drives we're going to have to take out that entire hard drive
cage assembly so four screws two up at
the top and then two up at the bottom this handle comes out and then you can
pull the whole assembly out of the case now this is a very strange hard drive
mounting system I've never seen anything quite like it before but it's also very
versatile so first things the first things first we're going to install our
SSD in the very very bottom here we got
to use screws that are counter sunk screws so that is to say they don't have
a head sticking up above them so we're going to use anywhere from two to four
of those depending what you prefer it's an SSD so it's you know not going to be
moving or anything so I usually use just two screws on them so we're going to go
ahead and mount that down in the bottom where it's nice and hidden then we're
going to have a look at this hard drive cage it can accept up to eight drives if
you're willing to stack them right up next to each other but the way we're going to install them is we're going to
do four WD black drives and we're going to stagger them out so we're going to
leave spaces in between them for more air flow in between the drives however
how necessary this is I don't know so we're going to install one screw into
each of them on this side then flip the whole cage over and install two more
screws on the other side but wait we're not done yet this is a very unique
feature of this case that's the kind of thing that I would expect to see as like
a weird aftermarket option for most cases but Silverstone instead includes
what's probably a couple bucks worth of aluminum in heat sinks for your hard
drives so you can actually Mount these directly to up to eight drives on the
other side they're going to be taking air flow directly from those nf12 that
are coming in on the side keeping your hard drives much cooler than they'd be
able to be if you didn't have heat sinks on them if you wanted to go crazy you
could get some thermal pads and install those in there or even some thermal
paste if you think you've got a nice tight Mount although you have to check and make sure it's actually mounted
right up against there but this is a very unique way to keep your hard drives
cool and very unexpected to see as a stock option on a case so we can go
ahead and put a couple more screws into each drive with the heat sinks there
then put the whole assembly together it's quite heavy now and slide it back
into the case this is where Silverstone shows yet another great Innovation and
that is with these SATA cable Splitters so you can see we're able to wire things
up quite cleanly now we weren't quite
able to reach that 2 and2 in SSD down in the bottom however if this was my own
rig I would either stretch it and see if I could just barely get there or what
I'd do is I'd move that SSD take the screws out of it mount it with
double-sided tape to get it a little bit closer and then I'd be able to use those
SATA splitters for all of my drives and I'd only need two SATA connectors to
power all the drives in my case very very nice thinking now I've been using a
new technique lately where instead of pre-attached
modular power supply and then running them to where they need to go I've been
pre-attached I'd never built in this case before but check this out behind
the power supply there is a whack ton of space where you could put all the cables
you need to that you're not using from a nonmodular power supply Silverstone has
then put the power supply right up against the side panel which doesn't
matter cuz it's not like it needs any extra space on this side very unique
approach I really like this anyway we started with the 24 pin plugging that
into the motherboard and then running it behind the motherboard tray next up is
the eight pin for the CPU up at the top left this is a No Frills no gimmicks
professional grade board so there's only one eight pin because the reality of it
is guys you only need one eight pin unless you're going like crazy Wicked
liquid nitrogen which you're not doing with a board like this now in order to
Cable Management those cables we're going to want to install the rest of the
the power supply cabl so we'll need to install our graphics cards first the
first stage in installing a graphics card in this case is to remove this
little cover back here that gives you access to all the screws that allow you
to remove the PCI slot covers which have extra ventilation in them very nice
silver Stone so we're going to go ahead take those two screws off and remove
that now it is time to consult the manual because regardless of how
experienced you are technically and regardless of how much you wish you
could do things without the manual this one's important so the PCI Express slots
on this board they're all 16x physical
okay but that doesn't mean that you just take any card and install it into any
slot and you're going to get Optimal Performance it doesn't necessarily work
that way you want to check the manual where it will give you recommendations
for how many cards you have installed and which ones you should use so that
you can best take advantage of native PCI Express Lanes versus ones that are
relying on a plx chip for example so in
this case we wanted our cards installed in PCI Express slot one and five so
we're going to go ahead and remove move those slot covers then we can install
the quadro into the very top one we're going to be using this for our display
out the reason for using the quadro here was that with the back plate on the GTX
780 it was too tight of a fit with this cooler up here even the quadro was very
very tight and normally I would recommend using even something like a
non any kind of non-conductive very thin material in between this heat sink and
this graphics card but in this case there's a a chip on the back that is
non-conductive that is causing it to not short out but anyway I would still
recommend slipping something in there to make sure it doesn't short out cu they're very very close to these fan
Clips in particular right here so we installed the quadro then next up is the
GTX 780 so once that's done we go ahead
and put the screws back into each of these cards so it's one screw for the
quadro two screws for the 780 then we can go ahead and put that back cover
back in place and now we are pretty much
done with those so now we can do the same thing we did last time where we are
installing our PCI Express cables backwards so this power supply the
ax860i comes with harnesses that have two plugs and ones that have an
individual plug so we're going to use an individual plug one for the quadro and
then we're going to use a dual plug one for the GTX 780 so we only actually have
to run two cables finally we're going to use a single four port SATA harness to
plug in our 2 and 1/2 in SSD and then those two Splitters that we were using
for power to our hard drives remember guys we now easily add additional hard
drives without running any additional cables due to those Splitters we can
fill this bad boy right up now that we
have everything run I usually find it's easiest to take everything that isn't a
power supply cable and tie all that down because they tend to be relatively low
profile so we'll spend a little bit of time uh tucking things into nooks and
crannies and tying cables down you don't necessarily have to have an anchor point
in order to get a cable tied down satisfactorily you can just take a zip
tie even and you know tie it to another cable that happens to be running
somewhere useful or tie it to itself in such a way that you fold it so that it's
not visible anymore but either way I find that it's uh you know worth the
time to just kind of play around with those ones then get started on the power
supply cables so now that everything's installed we can plug the power supply
cables into the power supply so first the 24 pin then the eight pin and the 2
PCI Express ones those all go into the same spots and finally the one lone
peripheral harness that we ended up using this is one of the benefits of a modular power supply not having all
those extra cables plugged in and finally we can take those power supply
cables and now add them to our cable management system at the back making
sure that we don't stack things up on each other so much that we're not going
to be able to close the side panel there is lots of cable management room in this
case but that doesn't mean that we should you know take it for granted
necessarily either admittedly if I'd been thinking straight I would have done
this earlier in the assembly process probably before I installed graphics
cards but SATA data we have to install
our SATA cables that actually deliver data to the drives so in this case this
motherboard has some interesting options for how we can plug in the drives the
SSD for sure we needed a straight SATA
cable so unfortunately the board doesn't come with any of those so we had to go
scr one but we plugged in a straight SATA cable and we're going to plug that
into the Intel controller SATA 3 6 GB
per second ports so that's the very top SATA 3 ports all right next we've got
four Intel SATA 2 3 gbit per second ports or four Marvel SATA 3 6 gbit per
second ports so we could plug these drives these WD black drives into either
of them they both support the raid 10 that we're going for and it's just a
matter of whether we feel like we need SATA 360 gbit per second or whether we
want the compatibility of Intel RAID because if our board ever did die or for
some reason we needed to grab all these drives and migrate the data off of them
by putting them into another system if you use Intel RAID you'll get better
compatibility however we might see slightly better performance particularly
in burst operations using the Marvel controller so we opted for the Marvel
controller but you might opt instead for the Intel one and that's uh that's
definitely a good option as well in terms of cable management we weren't
able to move them back around the back of the motherboard tray so we just ran
them up the drives cable tied them off and then plugged them into into the
ports where they belonged well there you have it guys we're done and the Mystery
of whether or not we can put that six 2 and 1/2 in Drive cage back in when we're
done is has been answered the answer is yes however I think you'd be hardpressed
to uh cable manage six more drives into that spot on top of being able to have
another eight drives here and you would definitely need to add some kind of SATA
or SAS controller card to even be able to plug in all of those drives which
which I mean it's very cool the amount of capability this case has when you
consider its size so without further Ado
I'm going to hand it off to Slick to walk you guys through some of the
performance we were able to get out of the machine as well as sort of his
impressions of the overall configuration all right so we're going
to jump into the BIOS here and our mission is to change to XMP profiles and
to change the boot drive so first thing we're going to go to is Advan mode and
then jump into AI overclock to and change it to
XMP once that's done we're going to jump over to the boot menu over here go down
14 times which is ridiculous down to
hard drive BBS priorities don't worry I know it's not a hard drive just jump in
here change boot option one to your SSD ours is an Intel
520 press F10 to save you can review your changes and then just press enter
for yes and you're good to go so once we get into the controller we just jump
directly into the configuration wizard and go down and select all of our drives
by pressing space bar and down once you've done that press enter change to
raid 10 which is just raid 1 and zero keep
64k stripe size as it's a little bit faster and then name it something that
probably isn't default and once you've done that just go next and you are done
that's all it has to do just press y to confirm that you actually want to do
this and you'll see right there under virtual diss that what you've named is
now an actual raid so we wanted to talk
about the PA 279 but instead of just talking about it and how ridiculously
good it looks we wanted to show it off so this is a 10 bit image sample that
we're showing on a 10bit p279 panel and
an 8bit panel you can see on the 10-bit panel that it is extremely smooth and
when when you move it over to the 8bit panel you can see vertical lines running
through it so while we can talk about how good it looks this actually shows
how good it looks so we want to show off the raw power of this system so what
we're running is Da Vinci resolve using a source file that was filmed by Brandon
and then heavily eded by edited by edzel we are currently rendering it using Cuda
although with this system you can use CPU encoding Cuda accelerated encoding
or even h264 encoders because of all the options that you have as you can see
we're using both of our gpus the quadro is at fairly low usage and is actually
just being used for guy for dentally resolve and the rest of the general
Monitor and then GPU 2 G the GTX 780 is
actually being used for its Cuda performance so it's actually pushing pretty hard along with the CPU you can
see temps in here right now both the gpus are sitting right around 50° which
is totally fine and the CPU is only going around 40 to 50° tops which is
also totally fine and great for this system as you can see the CPU is
actually running fairly hard bouncing between 60 and 70% so with all of that
out of the way a big thanks to you guys for sitting through this entire video a
huge thanks to Intel for making this video possible these are extremely
timeconsuming for us to produce and with their sponsorship we are able to bring
you guys Guys these fantastic build guides in the ultimate build Guide
Series and as always guys like the video if you liked it dislike it if you
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