normally I'm the guy who makes the guide for how to build a PC but today
we're shaking things up we're doing something different I will be following
the guide to how to build a PC but not just any guide the most infamous guide
in PC Building history the one created by the verge
I don't know if I'm ready no I'm ready it's dangerous to go alone
take this
PC with custom colored sleeved cables try out their configurator and build
your cables exactly how you want them with their realistic cable preview at
the link down below
oh this is hilarious I actually need the
tweezers no now now we're done with them step one
find the guide unfortunately the original upload is no longer there
what's the story behind that there were some lawyers involved someone wanted to
do a takedown notice of it I didn't green light that and apparently that
just made people angry but the original guide you're on the verge that's gone
now um the written portion is still up there yeah is it yeah yeah yeah
essentially that's the script that was supposed to be turned into an hour-long
video maybe around three o'clock they're like you think we can finish up at four
so we can hit out early I did not get to see it until 48 hours before it went
live and that's on the next Friday so I can't tell my editors I can't call nili
I can't tell anybody that this is crap it goes up on Monday at 8 A.M that's it
all right let's do it first you need a tape first you need a table all right
a table we got a table yeah I'm not gonna lie I built my first computer on
the floor yeah I did I did I actually did the first computer I ever upgraded
when I was four was Windows 2000 to XP and that was done on the floor on the
carpet with my Dad yeah okay so you don't need a table
that's fine a thermal paste applicator okay an allen wrench some tweezers to
tight up the wires a Swiss army knife which hopefully has a Phillips head
screwdriver now this is much better unfortunately doesn't have a Phillips
screwdriver on it right so but it cuts things but it'll cut it'll cut things
it'll cut things it'll work you looked really nervous yeah at that point that
was my fourth machine it was my first time doing it on camera but these are
not tweezers they are not tweezers those are cable ties these are cable ties he
does know guys last but not least an anti-static bracelet okay now this seems
like it was just one of those things where you had a misunderstanding at some
point or another yeah but those bracelets have no anti-static
functionality have to be yeah so here give us the demo how do you use an
actual anti-static bracelet this housing is grounded as part of the design of
this table so now we are grounded also
we did a video recently with Electro boom where we demonstrated that actually
it's very difficult to kill your Hardware oh ah bottom line then what tools do you
need to build a PC screwdriver cable ties a knife or a sharp edge some kind
of cutting Implement of some sort you might need an allen key yeah but odds
are if you do it'll be included with whatever part requires it Place items
into the case and make sure that they all fit and then start working okay now
we've jumped ahead a little bit here yeah so they were like can you do all of
this stuff top down and then the portions where we're facing in front of
you like we'll do it normally but we're going to do our best today to follow the
guide cool so oh apparently we need our
case right and our power supply right so let's get that just trying to match the
state of preparation of the case here I've got this panel off I've got yeah I
pulled my accessory boxes removed but the sleds are back in there I couldn't
understand who it was geared towards we had this baby simple explanation of what
a computer is at the beginning and then the guide portion all of a sudden I'm
going whoa whoa hey whoa now hold on complex yeah what we're doing right now
should have been in the original video that's all cut out yeah this is an rm850
rather than an hx-850 but hey close enough close enough close enough yeah
all right and then in terms of fan placement now you did take some Flack
over this I'm not sure if it was entirely fair but I would recommend in a
case like this that the fan be oriented to the outside of the case that way it's
drawing in nice fresh air and then exhausting it out the back as kind of
its own isolated Thermal Zone right oh you know what we might just need that
Swiss army knife here okay you know what nice
okay gorgeous and now we're really going to start
building okay then we got this continuity error the power supplies
around the table Yeah and screw in with confidence but also don't screw in too
hard otherwise you could crack the board now the odds of cracking the board are
pretty slim unless you're really going ham in which case it's actually true
that can happen the most common instances of cracking the motherboard
though are when you've made another mistake say for example you didn't
install one of your motherboard standoffs and I've seen this happen even
with people who have built PCS before if you keep screwing when one of the
standoffs is missing and there's no support a lot of the time that screw
thread is actually the same as the threading on the motherboard tray itself
and you can crank the motherboard down and crack it and also it has support for
NVMe ssds meaning you can get really fast ssds that are really easy to
install now that that part's a little awkward let's get our power supply
screwed in real quick here and then we'll go from there by the way that's
our new screwdriver that we're coming out with oh sweet so it's it's LTT uh it
is this is a magnetic tip also of course nice only the finest for the LTT viewers
it's not actually out yet but it will be on lttstore.com
looks good now Stefan
did you study up at all for the build today yes I watched a couple of years
you did watch you did watch a couple of our videos and do you do you kind of
realize now at this point that like
there were definitely some things you could have done better yeah in the video
okay this is definitely one of them like the back plate for that motherboard is
one yeah when I realized that I didn't
put it on and I'd already screwed in the motherboard not cracking it though thankfully so I took it apart from this
point that's why there's a continuity there right yeah the reason I never did
a react video was because most of the mistakes that you made here were ones
that I have made at some point or another including this one right if
we're being honest with ourselves if you've built more than a dozen or a
couple dozen PCS you might have accidentally put the motherboard into
the case without installing the i o Shield before and truthfully the way
Stefan is correcting his error here you can actually see what he's doing with
his hands he's unscrewed the motherboard slid it back he's installing the i o
shield and then obviously in order for
the finished shots of the build to be completed the motherboard has been slid
back into place and screwed in it's not
wrong but it's not helpful to a beginner yeah
is the issue here yeah wait what the oh
don't include that you know what actually
I put this in upside down oh this is even though I have built probably
hundreds of computers on camera so something people don't realize is when
you're doing something for yourself you would turn it around and you would be
looking at it like this while you're working on it so it's a lot easier to
line up where the holes are but when you're doing something to present to
camera especially if you're not used to it it can be very easy to make these
sorts of mistakes and it's not worth crucifying people over them although if
I can speak frankly of course I think you probably could have avoided at least
some of the uh backlash by just kind of
going you know what I screwed up in the first place yeah so why didn't I why
didn't you know everyone at The Verge is looking to me to lead that situation and
it's sort of like either you back down and you let all these people steamroll you or you keep it up there and my
original advice was to keep it up there and then now lawyers get involved and
then it gets taken down I can tell you the advice you got was really bad it was
really bad yeah that was bad advice I would not have given that advice I mean
internally when we upload something that is clearly problematic
um rectified we we fix it yeah once and
for all this is your Redemption story Stefan
go for it cool cool cool yeah there we go
there we go okay thank you this corner wants a little bit more I can see you
have been watching some of my guides he's holding the motherboard by the heat
sink yeah you think yeah as someone who's built a lot of computers on camera
I could at least relate to almost not
all of the mistakes yeah um but a lot of the ones that were made in the video
yeah basically everything is twice as hard on camera as it is yeah it takes
three times as long that's it I think we're in you always want to do a sanity
check for where your standoffs are located sometimes the case manufacturer
installs them for you but your motherboard manufacturer had other ideas
so make sure all of them are visible through the holes there's an empty one
Yep this is the kind of thing that I
would catch if I'm taking my time doing it properly Stefan and I have set aside
about three and a half hours to shoot this build for you guys but it's
something that can be easily missed if you're under pressure and you're being
rushed and this can be a killer this right here can short out the traces on
the back of the board and fry it so let's go ahead and get that removed now
you guys see me kind of standing here supervising that's one of the reasons
that again I didn't get personal about what went up in that video and that's
because to me it looked more like a systemic problem someone especially who
has never done something before on camera should have an experienced
supervisor making sure that they don't say or do anything dumb because
it happens right and that's the role
that I'm playing here that was clearly completely absent at The Verge how the
did that video ever get uploaded after after they told me that that would be
their new policy well I
how helpful is that for you right all right let's get this screwed in actually
hold on we should be following the guide yeah we should be following the guy doesn't screw in the motherboard yet
yeah pay close attention to the brace that goes at the okay you called it a
break it's an i o Shield yeah because there's no screw it really just has to
go outside of the case in class okay
yeah that was done from outside Cuban that was another one should be from the
inside but I can see your hands you
wouldn't have gotten it in if you were putting it in from the outside it's just yeah you know it's the verbal equivalent
of fat fingerings yeah you know yeah and this is very important because otherwise
you can't align the motherboard correctly with the holes the reason it's
important is because it acts as an Emi Shield strictly speaking the computer
will completely function fine without it it's a bit of an outdated
um way of thinking now that we have so many computer cases that have glass or
acrylic side panels like how silly is it to think that these little gaps are
where all the Emi is going to get out but that is their original purpose
ah those aren't the right screws nope so this is the Redemption moment show me
the correct screws for the motherboard another thing that can be tricky for
inexperienced Builders is that you can actually have multiple types of screws
with the same threading included with your parts for example I'm holding an M3
button head that would be intended for something like screwing your motherboard
into your standoffs as well as an M3
countersunk screw that would be intended for installing an SSD onto a tray so
that the button head wouldn't stick out and cause interference as you slide it
in and out and in many cases these could be used interchangeably they're just not
supposed to I noticed you were using a countersunk screw and that's one of the
things people got very mad about it's pretty fast RAM it's 266 megahertz I
believe people were really mad about the speed of the RAM 26 66 megahertz being
not not fast enough I don't entirely disagree though with the choice of the
RAM at that time I I think the Gaming
Community was just coming around again to the idea of fast memory being really
important for gaming performance the main thing is that you were a little
behind the times I see why people were mad I also see how the mistake happened
it also had to do with the budget of the build but yeah I get it where did the
budget come from um the budget was not my idea that was
an editorial idea they were like let's make this approachable for most people
let's set a budget and I was like okay three thousand dollars they're like no
that's too high I was like well then it's gonna have to be two and that's
where that came from got it so it was just kind of arbitrary it's arbitrary it
was it had nothing to do with anything if I wanted to use the best parts I
could have opened the slots first and just aligning the stick with the middle
of the strip not with the end and just lining that up with the logo that is not
the best explanation I've ever heard for how to align memory why don't you take
another crack at this one for me let's do it we found some Vengeance RGB 266
cl-16 okay um why don't we grab those ballistics
so you want to keep these slots open otherwise you can't put the RAM stick in
and you want to align that with the center partition so that once you press
down you'll hear a click turn around yeah
this is the reality of building a computer in front of a camera ever tried
to put in a USB port while you're you know not facing it it's kind of like
that there we go oh I see there was actually another error here you were installing
your sticks in the slots closest to the CPU which almost always are the less
preferred slots so once you hear that solid clasp and
you don't see the gold connectors on the siding now that's interesting here it's
in the correct slot what happened there probably like photos not paying
attention in that moment we're going to install the hard drive or in this case
the NVMe SSD using hard drive colloquially to describe an SSD is about
like calling a tower a CPU it's kind of Boomer terminology and it's only held
down by one screw and the latch so it's really simple and really straightforward
I'm gonna get you to install this SSD the way you did it there yeah okay
where'd our little screw go good question in a better place here it
is okay sweet all right one of the big problems with this portion of the video
is that while Stefan is actually
installing the m.2 drive correctly you can't see a thing that he's doing
because it's often not practical to
lower the table enough that the camera operator can see down into the case so
that's why sometimes they got to get a little bit
High when you're installing an m.2 SSD
usually either on the box or on the drive itself you'll see a little code
says m.22 and then some other number
this one says 22.80 so that tells us where to install the threaded standoff
so that we can correctly install the drive you can actually see it labeled
right on the drive you can see it labeled right on the motherboard see
that verbal slip up I said see it labeled right on the drive it's holding
a drive now something you could point at as an error in today's video is that
we've put a PCI Express gen 3 Drive in a
PCI Express Gen 4 capable slot but if
we're not spending the extra for a Gen 4 Drive I would still recommend doing it
this way and then if you upgrade to a Gen 4 drive down the road you can always
move this down to one of the one of the beta slots nothing prevents you from
doing that step 4 we're going to install the graphics card okay
this is very out of order because so far we've got not a whole lot of actual
computer built yet and we're going to go put the graphics card in it's going to
get in our way yeah it's huge do you want to go for the 1080 again or do you
want to upgrade it um I want to upgrade it because about the time that the 20
series came out I upgraded it and that's how I benchmarked and did the whole
review but no one knew it was built on that computer so you want me to install
it now I mean yeah okay I guess that's what you said to do right now which lane
you choose depends entirely on what other parts you're going to put in the
system I'm just going to pick the top one because the SSD is at the bottom and
I don't want to cover it I just think it looks nice click down take your
remaining brackets and just put them in the spots that you haven't used I think
what probably happened is you pulled off all the brackets at some point during
the preparation for the video and then forgot that they're all included and you
don't have to take them out and put them back in the oven
whoops show us how it's done then
as for which PCI Express slot to install it in Stefan got it right but for the
wrong reason wrong reasons the top one is correct but not because it looks nice
it's because that slot has its full complement of 16 Lanes connected
directly to the CPU so your graphics card being one of the most bandwidth
hungry components in your system wants as many lanes as it can get this bracket
has been bent a little bit yeah just yeah just gonna reform it yeah yeah in
there yeah this is an old PC Builder trick what's up if you've only got a
fraction of a hole exposed what you do is you get the screw on there as long as
you have a nice magnetic screwdriver to work you just kind of you just kind of
lever it over right and then you can screw it in screw it in gotcha I'm
geeking out more about this and the PC yeah it's good because it's just really
really useful what not a Swiss army knife nope I would once ask for food
recommendations and then I would lead with I already tried the thermal paste it does not taste good by the way don't
don't eat dirt it's in the same category as Tide Pods don't do do it now that
we've challenged them you no no no no no no no no no
always be sure to try to place it in the
system first before you install it because you can see it takes up a lot of
space that's a fair point but in this case no pun intended it fits in
perfectly and we're gonna start screwing it in and there's nothing special about
this screening process they're just really long screws because they go
through the entire frame of the cooler
so what happens if you do that well you
could possibly puncture the lines and that would be pretty bad yeah the cause
of leak especially in a case where the radiator is above the motherboard and
above the GPU most modern radiators are actually designed so that the tubes
these flattened tubes that's where the water actually passes through it our
offset from the screw holes so many people have made this mistake over the
years that they've changed the way they design radiators to account for in fact
confession time I have an old therm chill PA 120.3 that has a punctured tube
although I fixed it still works to this day oh or a little wide actually I'm
gonna try to squeeze it in from an angle maybe oh did we misconfigure the system
hmm this is the kind of thing we'd normally
like to gloss over in the edit now in the old days cases used to come apart
and it made it a lot easier to do stuff like you know what you might be able to
take that top apart oh I think the top panel actually comes off this case The
Verge guide has not yet told us to plug in the eight pin CPU power connector but
I'm gonna do that now because that thing is going to be darn near impossible to
get at once we have this radiator installed we made another significant
mistake oh boy we didn't put our CPU
mounting plate uh back plate yeah yeah
we didn't put the back plate on this is the perfect merging of the verge's PC
Building skills and Linus Tech tips PC Building skills where I'm going to show
you guys how to jakely undo the mistakes you made because you use the verge's
guides you can see that once you've undone three of the screws
actually a fair bit of play in the motherboard here um fits the thing in my Uber there and
I'm just gonna bend the motherboard a little bit Yeah you got it threaded in
yep okay great I'll try to line up the rest of them see I told him we were
gonna do like you know a totally right one I let the team down the difference
is I'm out here sharing the bullet you know what I need what's up
tweezers get some tweezers in there oh
yeah Stefan is that lined up yes it is yeah it is oh my gosh
what are the odds that following The Verge PC build guide would result in and
result in errors and errors and go down this way that might actually
be how they intended for you to do uh tight squeeze that's really tight gosh
every power supply is gonna come with a big bag of velcro cables more like
braided yeah braided sleeving yeah and
only modular power supplies come with a bag of cables next step is we're
connecting the power supply to the motherboard with the 24-pin cable all
right wanna get us a 24 pin here see
where oh there you go so our 24 pin end
goes here and then I'll get Stefan to show you the other end on the other side
right the next few additions will be for the GPU for any specific ports that the
case has for any lighting that the case has the CPU Cooler we already did our
eight pin for the CPU that's up here
so next what we're going to do is let's get our case front panel headers
connected this is made a little bit more difficult by the fact that we have
already installed our GPU and we're going to start with our USB 3. so can
you pull this through for me on the other end the flat one you gotta watch
out for this guy very fragile but it only goes in one way
so as long as you're gentle shouldn't be a problem there we go all right sweet
all right usb2 right there boom uh front
audio I'm not even gonna try to doing
much better than that you know I gotta say I'm actually pretty surprised that
not only did you agree to come and do this with me but that you reached out to
me the reason why I didn't get to talk to you at all was contract stuff so I
was like if it's not going to be done right the first time it's got to be done
right at some point now we're gonna do our front panel switches and LEDs so the
power switch goes you know what let's do the power switch last
power LED this one positive negative does matter because your LED won't work
if you do it wrong but you won't actually damage anything by putting it
on the wrong way so we're going to go ahead and plug it in oh wow this case
has two different spots to put the Power LED on that's a little bit confusing for
first time builders so it's at the top left corner here with
the positive one at the very top left then we're going to take our reset
switch we're going to put it in the next two pins over on the bottom
and then we're going to do our power switch right above the reset switch and
then I'm going to get you to pull the extra slack for all of these through to
the other side Roger that perfect sweet that looks great now we can use a single
cable for this one with two eight pin connectors with a little kind of daisy
chain loop but some Builders are preferring these days especially with
higher powered gpus to put two separate
eight pins in it's not likely to cause any sort of problem to plug both of
these in but particularly if you have a power supply that is a multi-rail design
you can overwhelm the over current protection on a single port especially
if you have a super power hungry graphics card and the efficiency of
using separate cables because they won't heat up as much is marginally higher so
here you go I'm passing these through to you Roger that I want them under the 24
pin the amount of backlash and the
number of memes that were generated from that original video probably actually
taught more people from your mistakes
yeah than if the video had just gone up and been correct the last thing our
wonderful guide asked us to plug in all at once uh is here we go the RGB and
power connectors for our fans and we're gonna go number four
all right and number oop hello number four right
we gotta do these two SATA power connectors for our Fan Hub as well as
our RGB Hub this just goes anywhere it fits
just like the rest of the power supply connectors these you just gotta watch
out they got the little L shape on the end there make sure they go in such as
they go in let's continue shall we oh core i7 hexa core CPU yeah we've got one
we've got one too okay you won't have seen one of these before these are
little 3D printed holders that we make for rcps okay
whoa and this just flies right off just comes
right off and this will make it easier for us to apply it to the motherboard yeah and then apply a CPU and they're on
top yeah not really and we're just going to carefully lean it down into the
system and make sure that everything lines up and we're going to clasp down
on it and we'll be good to go
all right so we're about to put in our thermal paste to the CPU every CPU
Cooler actually comes with a bit of thermal paste already neatly applied
okay not everyone but many do and if you
have it pre-applied it's enough that's enough practice to
have a little bit extra and layer it on top of it that's way too much with that
said Stephen Gamer's Nexus actually did a video proving that you cannot put too
much thermal paste on a CPU the worst you can do is make a mess so you're
going to see that there are four brackets or rather like screws and I can
tell this is attempt number two by the fact that the paste is already kind of
spread out now our cooler because it's been used before does not have any
pre-applied thermal compound so Stefan
yes we do need to apply thermal paste on you show us how it's done I'm just
trying to make sure it doesn't all come out at once there we go there they go
that's all we need so now we take our cooler and oh no I didn't
think of this beforehand well that's
probably appropriate that the Corsair logo is upside upside down this is the
distressed PC all right now
this is another order of operations thing it might have been a little bit nicer to do this
earlier in the process that's not the end of the world though you know what
I've got an idea this is one of my favorite little tips undo one screw on
the motherboard to cram something under it they can just kind of tuck in there
okay I'm a talking expert nice there we
go whoa not my finest cable management work
but no one will ever see it now ever see it it is bad GBS to close up the side
panel of a computer yeah they're good we're ready to go yeah
let's freaking do it let's try to post where's PC build 2.0 test 1.0
oh crap you need to turn on the power supply a very build 2.0 test 2.0
got lights we got lights but do we have we have camera we have action come on
action it wouldn't be funny if they sabotaged us gave us some broken Hardware right now we're good core i7 11
700k we've got 16 gigs memory two
keyboards two minus two hubs ladies and gentlemen
that's right we've got it
thanks a lot man no thank you this was this was an
absolute blast thank you for coming and putting up with my with my jokes thank
you for coming out and just owning it no problem I mean yeah I love it that's uh
that's a Redemption story if I have ever seen one so where can they find you if
they want to get tips on maybe not building PCS but if you want to keep up
with anything I'm writing on anything I'm working on as Stefan etn on Twitter
which I'm sure a lot of you already know where to find me and laptopmimo.com the
tech blog I ran since I was like 12. I update that every so often with cool
stuff that I find like grow lights or like grow boxes or Tech like this and
computers cool and you guys know where to find our sponsor Ting mobile has new
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to your other savings I hope you guys enjoyed this video if you did maybe
check out I don't know Linus reacts to xqc's PC build it was actually more
cringe-worthy than this one for sure that ended up looking pretty pretty fly
that looks pretty good