Can I start by saying this is the greatest welcome mat of all time? Riley
and his wife Lauren bought this apartment back in August 2019 with the
intention of renovating it to reflect their minimalistic style. And just 2
weeks before their we boy arrived, they
completed it with the help of their friends and family. As for the tech side
of things, well, between budgetary and time constraints, they didn't really get
it done, which is where Intel comes in. In episode two of Intel's extreme tech
upgrade, we're going to be equipping Riley with 5 grand US worth of tech to
take his minimalistic space and
do something.
Minimalism is about having not very many
things. And the few things that you do have have to be small and white or or
gray or or black except when you can have a big thing that is very colorful.
But most importantly, minimalism is about looking down on people who have
lots of things and saying, "Ew, you have
so many things. That's disgusting." So then you didn't buy any stuff.
Oh, no. I bought stuff. Yep. I'm getting a new PC. I'm getting an ultrawide
monitor for that PC because I wanted that for a long time. I'm getting a TV,
Lionus. Can you imagine? Finally, I'm getting a digital piano because I don't
know if you know, that's why my nickname was Keys.
Really? I've never seen you play a piano. Tinkling the Ivaries.
First of all, do I understand this correctly? No, this was just here when we got here.
You did not have a TV. No. Uh, and I've been I've been made fun
of it uh relentlessly on Carpal Critics's movie podcast. Subscribe
today. Um because I've been watching movies on a laptop. Well, it's safe to
say that this is going to be a gigantic upgrade.
Yes, gigantic. It doesn't matter. All right.
And then this I don't get it. This this is your PC nook. Now, I
realize you're you have really gone out of your way to stage this place so
beautifully, minimalistically. Did you have to remove your old computer?
Why is it not here? My computer's right there. Oh, that's awesome.
Yeah. Oh, what a reveal. She ran the the cable management through the thing
and with a really cool Wi-Fi adapter. Oh,
but here's the deal. I had an office, but now the office is the baby room
because I just had a baby. And so, you know, you have to make sacrifices.
They take everything from you. So, so this is this is where I'm going to be
just like next to the kitchen and I'm happy with it. But, uh, we made it we
and I'm happy with it. We made it just wide enough so that I can fit an ultra
wide monitor. You know, your son's going to watch this in like 10 years. He's going to be like,
"Wow, thanks, Dad." If the world hasn't exploded by then.
But that's not the whole setup in this corner, right? No. In this corner, we're also going to
have a digital piano. And you might be
asking, "Where's the piano?" It's It's not It's not here yet. Um because it's
sold out everywhere in Canada. Oh, bummer. Okay. Well, where's it going to go? Uh, it's going to go right here.
So, I got these folding brackets. Pause.
So, I got these folding brackets on Amazon for I think they're like, you
know, 19 bucks each or something. I think there's going to be a way to mount
the keyboard onto them so that once they're on the wall, hit the little
switch and then it'll fold down so the
keyboard goes flat against the wall. And guess what color the keyboard is,
Lionus? White. That's correct.
Did you wall mount your like cable
modem? Yep, it's mounted. And then you guys have actually already
drilled pilot holes and got your wire fishing wire here for the TV. So, you
guys are going to do a totally wirefree Yes. like installation here
because it wouldn't be minimalistic if we didn't do that.
Fantastic. Well, what are we waiting for? Let's get started. What are you wait I don't know.
I'm I'm going to build this PC, right? You're going to build a PC? I'm going to
build a PC to with me. Let's build a PC. Where are we building
it? I mean, I'm good with the coffee table. Are you sure that Oh, I guess we could
sit and do it. I guess we could move the decorations.
No. For the heart of the system, this is an interesting choice. You've gone with
a B460 Pro Wi-Fi. I get the Wi-Fi
because cables are not minimalistic at all. Okay.
And then you've gone with a 10600 K. Now, I guess the K is just cuz it's a
little faster than the nonK. That's right. Yeah, I was thinking about going with the 10600, but the K does
have a higher base level performance. So, why would you go with a Core i5?
Uh, because I didn't necessarily need the raw horsepower of a Core i7. I'm not
doing like 8K crazy high-end editing, you know, so I will be doing some video
editing and I want to do some music production. So, the six cores will come in handy for that. Yeah. I mean, most
games don't need more than six cores these days anyway. So, this is a really
great choice if there are other parts of your system that you want to beef up.
So, I noticed you've gone with a pretty freaking crazy graphics card and monitor
combo. I have. The priority for me there was having that 3440x440
ultrawide because I've been using it at work. I'm tired of coming home to my 24
in 1080p. You know, that's why you game on your lunch break.
I get it now. Yeah, because it's like high-end. It's like, wo, I can't get this at home.
One of the other areas where you've gone extremely practical is cooling
with the Noctua NHU12A.
Yeah, this is just such a great choice. Like, it's not too much. It's definitely
going to give you nice quiet operation, which is important. And I also uh tend to record some
voiceovers in here. It's not the best room for that, but it's been working.
Okay. You guys might not know this, but Riley actually does some voice acting work.
He's been on My Little Pony just a little bit. Of course, one of the
biggest minimalism choices for our system is the case, the Corsair 275R
Carbide series. So, why don't I get started on getting everything mounted to
the motherboard and then do you want to start putting the uh TV mount on the
wall? I will do this. Honestly, one of the big trends in gaming motherboards over the
last few years has been away from necessarily using the highestend
chipsets because from a gaming standpoint, unless you're overclocking,
the motherboard doesn't really make a big difference to performance. Now, one
area where Riley will not be able to maximize his 10600 K is in terms of
memory frequency, but Riley's only gone with 2666 MHz RAM anyway from GSkill.
So, that wasn't going to be a concern. At least the latencies are quite low on
these, though. CL15. You know, Riley, I'm surprised you went with red memory.
Is that an accent piece? Kind of like the orange chair David's sitting on.
Yeah, exactly. Is it? No, that was an accident. I'm not going
to see inside the PC cuz it's going to be in there the whole time. So, I didn't
really think lots about the aesthetics of the inside. Got it.
Yeah. For storage, I guess you're not planning to have a ton of games installed at any
given moment. I noticed you've gone with a single 500 gig M.2 drive. So, that's
going to give you great speed for your operating system and everything, but
you've only got 500 gigs of storage. I do, and that's because I already have
three SSDs in my system and a hard drive. I'm good for storage, but I did
want to get an upgrade just to get that fast boot times. I've never had an NVMe
SSD. I just, you know, I want to know what it feels like. The mount I'm using
is a Kanto PDX 650. And they were nice
enough to send it to us. And it's really strong. And you might notice
white. Oh my god. It doesn't matter. You're not going to see the mount cuz
it's behind the TV. I put this on upside down. In my in my
defense, I've never owned a TV before. I don't know how they work. Any setup is
going to be huge upgrade. So rather than going with a big giant home theater
setup with multiple speakers, also because that's not minimalist, went with
a Sonos Beam because it's basically a
pretty good bang for your buck while still looking really nice and well, I
hope it will and uh with the whole setup. So here we go.
This was actually a steal because I got it used. It's an ASUS PG348
Q, but the Q isn't on there. 3440x440
Hz, so it's not like the ballingest
gaming monitor. But the thing is that I mostly play single player games, and
occasionally I might jump on a multiplayer game in order for David to
show me how to get head shot cuz, you know, I I don't know. I don't know how
you do it. Let's see. Let's just double check that it fits. Oh yeah, lots of
room. And we got vasa mounts. Because my
desk is so tiny, I really don't want to
screw around with taking up space with the with the stand for this monitor,
which is especially large. I'm discovering that this mount maybe is not
great for this monitor. Mostly because of this little ridge here.
Uhhuh. Yes. What's What's this here? Originally, it's not very minimalistic to have two
mounts for one monitor. It's not. But originally, I purchased
this one uh that says it only supports
up to 32 inch TVs. Oh,
the weight limit is fine, though. Oh, come on. Look at this thing.
What? It's fine. It's metal. Well, sure, but it's got 30 lb carrying
capacity. Look at it. And the monitor's 25.
Exactly. What do you mean? The monitor's less than 30 lb.
Yeah, that's only five That's only 5 lb. Yeah, but they I like having some
leeway. There's a buffer built into it. This You don't think that could carry
buffers? You know, of course. Oh, wow. I didn't know that about this.
Riley. Riley, are you planning to carry the
drives over now? Like, should I rip that computer out and put all the drives in
here? Rip it out. Yeah, let's do that. All right. When you saw this setup, did you have
concerns about thermals? Yes. Well, there's vents.
Oh, boy. That's not enough. Wow, that's
a lot of SSDs. just kind of like a double-sided taped onto the thing. So,
this case is kind of an amalgamation. The original case, which is a bit
Phoenix Merc, which is like one of the cheapest cases you could get back in the
day, and uh some cannibalized parts from
other random cases that were sitting around at NCX. That dust filter on the
side, cannibalized. When if you take off the front, you'll also find another
cannibalized dust filter that has no business being in there. Wow. Wonderful.
So, I was really excited to get a new PC. There's bandits in these hills. What
are we? What? What is this bit? I don't know. What are you talking about? You
know that one of my eyes droops down, but you can't even tell cuz I wear
glasses. It's camouflage. That's not what it is. Disguise. What? Riley's off
looking for a square. But we're just going to use his side panel. Corsair
quality. It's probably square. Oh, look at that. How dead center is that puppy?
So, what height do you want it at? Oh, uh, carefully. This is a like
there's a gap. I'm holding it. I can't right there. My hand is on it right now.
Pretend you're you're gaming or whatever. Yeah. No.
Huh? Well, where's the intensity? This is like you you got to be gaming.
Can you G first? Okay. So, don't worry
about don't worry about the left and right for now. I just want to know the height.
Uh, higher. Yeah, I think so. Higher. Yeah. Uh, higher. Why don't I hold it
now and you take a look? No, it's your monitor. Well, it doesn't matter what I think.
You're screwing it up. Oh, jeez. That's perfect.
Okay, there's our Did you just punch my wall?
What the hell is a pipeline hard drive? Pro pipeline over here.
Pro pipeline. Pro pipeline. Riley, the environment can save itself. Here I
go. About to mutilate my wall. Hopefully, it works. It'll work to mutilate for sure.
At the very least, what we're doing right now is mutilating the wall.
So, half of this is the drywall and half is the stud. Well, we'll see how that
works. It's crying now. Now that I've got all
of my storage on a NAS, it's been a long time since I've wired up this many SATA
drives in a system. He's got five SATA drives. Okay, this isn't quite the best
I could do for cable management, but it's all I'm going to do. Yeah, I mean,
realistically, it's better than the cable management you had. So, absolutely, which is none.
Minimalist. Minimal cable management.
Yeah, it is super. It's a 2080 Super from ASUS. Look at how thick this cooler
is. The thick boy thick boy cooler. We're going to need it because there's
no ventilation in Riley's cabinet there.
Hey, let's just settle down here. That's okay. He's going to put fans in later.
We're going to add a fan. You're going to add more than one. Never take a
minimalistic approach to cooling. This is a free tech tip for you guys. So, if
you are building a PC for a buddy and
they're just honestly not worth the effort of proper cable management, you
kind of jam everything down like that. You take this here side panel and you
give it a little like city sit, you know.
Oh. Oh jeez. Then you just kind of bum slide it
forward like that. Oh my gosh. Are you still mounting that?
I've never done it before. Oh boy.
I'm doing it, David. I mean, Lionus, I'm
ready. What do you guys think? Peel time.
Yeah. Look at that rig. Did you check the height of this?
Uh, no. But we can move the shelves.
Wow. How white is that? Is this on here? It
is. All right. Good luck.
Wow. You did a great job, Riley. Did you really put a piece of paper there to
catch the drywall? See, here's a here's a piece of handyman
tip for you, Lionus. Drywall screws up regular vacuums. You need a shop vac.
I did not know that. I know something about this stuff.
Did your father-in-law tell you that? Yes. And we experienced it oursel
because we ruined our vacuum filter with drywall.
Hey. Okay, let's settle down. So, this is it.
Let's do it. This is it. So, why did you choose this TV?
Well, okay. So, this is the LG Nano90
uh 65 in version. Yeah, it's not an OLED, but it has a
great uh bright room performance, right?
And this is nothing if not a bright room. Yes. And that was the ma really the main
thing that I was looking at uh was just like finding a TV that would be good for
this really bright room with lots of sunlight coming in. Good reflection
handling and viewing angles. HDR.
HDR. It's got that. It's got pretty good local dimming. Does it do 120 Hz?
Yes. Nice. And it's got HDMI 2.1. Oh, wait. Riley, you're not one of those
horrible people that leaves the plastic on, are you? Cuz now I have removed some
of it. Oh, I was going to Is that minimalistic? I was going to
pres use it to preserve it for future generations.
Yeah. Okay, good. Do you want to put the hole in the wall now? Nope.
Do you trust me? Here's my pitch. Let's not.
This looks awesome. I know. Thank you so much. This is
amazing. You got that hole in there and run those cables down. You're not even going to
You're not going to see any of the It's like it's floating there.
I love it. Am I allowed to put my feet on your table? Is your table Is this a
foot table? It's for you. It is. No. No. for you.
Sure. Yeah. Yeah, why not? No. Well, I don't know. Surely this is
not the right place for these, though. These have to go like these are table
books. Oh, well, we let those guys go wherever they want. Yeah. Otherwise, they might molest you.
Apparently, it's art, Lionus. Should they be evenly stacked or should
they be like intentionally unevenly stacked? Like,
this is looking pretty good actually. Show how little you give us. I like the I like the kind of sense of
aesthetics here. This is cool. And then maybe like maybe one.
Well, cuz this one should this one be open? Oh, now we're talking. How do you
like the magic remote? It's really nice, actually. I feel like
I'm using a Wii. It's great. Does this have built-in bowling or
No. Your internet is so bad. This is at
like 480. Guys, you don't understand. This looks great to me.
You know what? For how bright this room is, it is handling the glare really
well. Like, this is not bothering me. I can I can't even see the glare from that
window over there. When we were in the menus and it was dark, I could see it. And now with the content on, it looks
great. You want to hear the sound? Oh, yeah. How's the soundar?
Honestly, my expectations are pretty low given how small it is. But
uh yeah, that is not good. But I also think that
that sounds great. No, it doesn't. That's the TV speakers. Oh,
could you shill less hard, please? which he promptly acted upon.
That sounds pretty good.
Man, okay. Look, look, look, look, look,
look, look, look. You guys got your fancy 77 86 in TVs.
Okay, you got your big giant Zono, you got your big giant sound bars, home
theater, 7.1 blah blah blah setups. This
is amazing to me. This is great. I'm loving this.
I mean, look at this. That's that pink suit really pops in the minimalistic
room. Oh, yeah. More pink suits.
All right. So, you don't play Rocket League like this,
dude. Where's your controller? Nope. I'm a mouse keyboard player.
You are not. I am. I am. Shut up.
I'm not even joking. What? It is. How's the How's the monitor height?
It's amazing. Oh my gosh.
This is so This is fantastic.
Uh, I'm going to be a bad teammate and go to here. Or what do you want?
Vync off. Yeah, there you go. All right.
90 100 120 150 100 200 248 FPS.
Riley, you're embarrassing. That guy ran into me. No, you ran into him.
No, I don't think uh I'm pretty sure you did.
Thought you were good at this. Yeah, Riley, what's going on? Oh my gosh, the heckling. I can't do it.
So, you tend to take a more passive approach. I like uh
Oh, how's the gaming experience?
Oh, man. Is that enough FPS for buttery smooth?
Yeah. Nice. That's That's a good 248.
Woo! Guys, this is amazing
and totally minimalist. Rocket League. I might get back into
Rocket League now. You know what's funny is I actually had a gaming setup like
this when I was in high school. I put my whole computer and monitor in my closet
so that I could close the closet.
I screwed it up. I actually really like your machine.
It's like high performance enough.
Very well paired for the resolution you're running on that monitor, but you didn't overkill anything.
Got the Core i5, got the RTX 2080 Super.
You got a ton of storage now.
Oh, someone's blowed up right now.
Oh, your teammate. Come on.
Come on. Oh my gosh.
You're good. You're good. You're good. You're good. Nice. Come on, boy. Come
on. No. No. After all that,
we had the highest score on the team. The highest score on fine. It's fine.
Both teams. All right. Way to go, Riley. This dude, you know, the problem is your
ping. You got 80 ping there. You got to got to get that get that power line in.
That's probably the one upgrade left, but but the highest score in the game. Who
needs a less than 80 ping? No, I think power line is probably a
great idea. I definitely uh want to look into that. Quick update. Got the final piece of the
puzzle installed. The piano. It's the Casio Privia
PXs1000. So, it's installed on these brackets I
got on Amazon with the latch release.
Couple cool things about this model. It's the slimmest digital piano in its
class. And it can run on six AA
batteries, so it's not plugged in or anything. Look, it's free floating.
And it turns on. The reason I got those crazy Amazon folding brackets is so I
could do this.
Plug in a pedal and you're good to go.
Other than that, this setup is pretty much the bee's knees for a minimalistic,
not just gaming setup, but also movie watching setup. you really made the most
out of your budget and made the most out of Intel's sponsorship. Massive thanks
to Intel for sponsoring not just this video, but this series. Guys, check out
their 10enth gen processors for your gaming rig at the link down in the video
description. And not just processors, SSDs, networking chipsets, all that good
stuff, we're going to have it linked down below. If you guys enjoyed this
video and you're looking for another one to watch, we actually just completed
Anony's Intel Extreme Tech upgrade just one month ago, and he took a very
different approach to Riley for sure. His is more of like a VR ccentric
upgrade, right? Wireless.