whether it's you or a member of your circle if you're a gamer it's pretty
much a guarantee that you've seen the effects of the ongoing shortage of key
computer components like power supplies processors and especially gpus i've seen
countless stories from gamers who have saved for months or even years to buy
their dream machine only to have it pulled out of reach thanks to scalpers
and commercial crypto miners not to mention unprecedented demand thankfully
we have a solution a diy gaming rig that
is readily available today and at a reasonable price and this video is
brought to you by MSI
we'll kick things off with the heart of our build one that perfectly
encapsulates its underlying theme an Intel rocket lake core i7 11700k
now its eight cores might be a little low by today's standards and it might
not be the fastest or the most power efficient but it's got a really
important ace up its sleeve that we're going to talk about later and gosh darn
it it's tough to walk into a computer store where they've managed to run out
of stock of these puppies now we just need to install it in our
motherboard open the latch line up the old golden triangle and seat
the CPU into the socket give it a little wiggle to make sure
it's in correctly close the latch and make sure you hold on to the socket
cover in case you ever need to rma your motherboard now for our board we've chosen MSI's
tomahawk z590 wi-fi it's got a built-in
i o shield so you'll never forget to install it a six layer pcb two and a
half gig lan for lightning fast local file transfers without having to replace
your cat5e cabling wi-fi 6e if cables
aren't your thing and pci express gen4 support that's right ladies and
gentlemen Intel finally got there
not that it matters for us today some of the best m.2 ssds on the market are
still enjoying lower power consumption and lower prices thanks to their use of
slower but still really good gen 3
controllers like the Intel 670p and
crucials p5 which uses tlc nand for better longevity but is priced only a
little higher than some qlc drives to install this puppy all we've got to do
is remove the armor grab a standoff and m.2 screw from the motherboard
accessories pack add the standoff slot the drive in screw it down and replace
the armor for memory we've chosen two 8 gig modules from crucial rated for 3200
megahertz cl 16. they're not overly expensive but their compatibility is
excellent and RGB is always a nice bonus
just open the dimm slot clips line up the notches with your modules and push
them down into place making sure that you hear a distinctive click on each
side and if you've got just two sticks like we do today use slots a2 and b2 for
dual channel operation for optimal performance by the way if you guys are
enjoying this video make sure you get subscribed so you can check out our
upcoming Intel charity build stream where i build you yes you a computer
now let's get to the case we're using a phanteks p500a because it's got plenty
of room to build in a tempered glass side panel and some great cable
management runs with straps built into the back really it's just a fantastic
case with tons of features for a reasonable price
bringing us perfectly then actually to our second product from our sponsor MSI
the meg core liquid k360
now we actually complained a little bit about the mounting system of this cooler
in our recent RGB build guide but it seems like MSI has been hard at work
ironing out the kings since then this one looks a lot simpler and with a 360
millimeter radiator we'll be sure to be able to keep even a rocket leg CPU cool
of course before we worry about that we need to get our motherboard installed in the case and fantex does such a great
job of making this more intuitive for new users so inside their accessory
package you actually find all the screws you're going to need in a nice handy
dandy little plastic compartmentalized doohickey to install your motherboard
you'll need nine of the short m3s with the circular skirt that's the easiest
way to identify them thankfully the Intel bracket comes pre-installed so
just grab your lga 1200 back plate mounting bolts and thumb nuts then align
the back plate and push it into place screw in the mounting bolts remove the
plastic cover from your block and then mount it with the thumb nuts
now fewer wires coming out of this thing
would definitely make cable management a little easier but if you run them all
together it's actually not too bad so
just pull everything coming from the block over the top of the motherboard
bring it around to the back of the case there we go
and that gives you easy access out of the way so you don't have to look at any
of it to get it all wired up but we'll talk about that later first now is an
excellent time to grab the 8-pin CPU power connector out of your power supply
box and run it up around the motherboard
tray here and plug it into the top left of the motherboard before that area of
the case gets too crowded later on
now this next part's a little tricky but the best way to mount your fans and rad
is in the top of the case with the long screws going through the fans as they
pull air through the fins and then exhaust it to the outside
now push versus pull doesn't affect performance but pull is so much easier
to clean so i prefer it it like does not
come off once you've got all 12 fan screws in
hopefully you oriented your fan so the cables come out toward the back of the
case here you can go ahead and plug them into those cables that we routed away
from the CPU block before conveniently MSI provides nice little labels on these
things so fan one but wait i haven't even done the most
important part yet included with the CPU cooler is this one to three addressable
RGB splitter so we're going to use that to go off of the
male connector off of the block and plug into all three of the female connectors
for our fans while power supplies are in
somewhat short supply right now most of the issues are actually with a thousand
watt and up power supplies which coincidentally is the range that is
typically targeted by crypto miners so you shouldn't actually have any trouble
getting your hands on our third and final MSI component the mpg a650g power
supply it's 80 plus gold rated it's modular and this lineup is available
with up to 850 watts which is plenty of juice for what we're doing speaking of
juice our circuit board water bottles will hold up to 40 ounces lttstore.com
before we put this in though i'm going to go ahead and pre-attach the handful
of modular cables that i'm going to need this right here is my
pin motherboard connector this one here is a pci express
dual six plus two pin so we'll plug that into vga1
this one right here is a quad SATA connector and then
finally there's the eight pin that we actually ran before
right just like so
i'm gonna have my fan down and i'm gonna just
gently put all these through the thing
and then realize that i have done screwed up
and i needed to take this back bracket off first
ah that's better with the power supply installed all that
remains is to run our cables to where they will ultimately live our 24 pin atx
goes somewhere kind of around there our SATA
connectors go kind of down there in the bottom there
and our six plus two pin pci express
but we don't need no stinking pci express connectors getting in the way of
this ultra clean build right here
but just in case we need them later we're going to go ahead and run them
just under here so we can grab them and plug them into a graphics card
later finally we pull around our cables for
front panel audio front usb 3 front usb 3.1 our front panel switches and leds
and then we just need to plug in the last two connectors for our aio the SATA
power that i alluded to before which is just down in the bottom and the front
panel usb 2 that is going to allow us to control the RGB that is built into this
i love that this still amuses me
i just like magnets you know
and after some beautiful cable management and making sure the thing
actually freaking boots up all that remains is to throw our side panel back
on and address the elephant in the room we
didn't need our pci express power cables because it is so freaking hard to buy a
graphics card for a reasonable price right now unless you get one as part of
a pre-built system but from our point of view that's no reason
to miss out on the joy of pc building which we scientifically proved is a real
thing truly it was worth it so as crazy as it sounds
this is not a terrible recommendation for today if you go rocket lake you can
game on a combination of its xc graphics and cloud services like GeForce now
while you sit on a wait list or try to snag a GPU from our verified actual
gamer program so let's see how well it handles that shall
we to be clear i'm not saying Intel integrated graphics are perfect by any
stretch of the imagination we plugged in via HDMI and got a bug where
Windows was reporting that it was running at one hertz when it was clearly
running at like 60-ish so we're going to switch over to
displayport and see if that sorts it out we going to get away with medium what do
you think
GeForce now it is we're on a wired connection now which is
going to make a big difference for GeForce now you want to be on wired
connection and seeing all those pictures especially
of like half finished ryzen machines
that had no gpus in them when we did the uh roast my setup video you don't have a
graphics card because of the shortages and he doesn't even know if the rest of
his computer works very sad because at least if you go Intel you've
got the onboard graphics to be clear it's not like i wouldn't go ryzen if i
had a choice but if you got no GPU you got no you got no
options with that said AMD is finally bringing their 5000 series apus to north
america they're in pre-built like almost immediately and then they're coming to
the channel i think later in the year so at least we'll have another option
okay having the extra latency with GeForce
now it's not the best thing
fortunately more sightseeing type games like witcher 3 which we're looking at
right now don't rely on the same kind of twitch reflexes that counter-strike
global offensive does and are very easy
to enjoy using a service like GeForce now so thanks MSI we know this machine
isn't exactly ideal but you gotta make the most of the situation okay and MSI
has got basically everything you need to make the most of your next pc from power
supplies to aio coolers to motherboards and even graphics cards usually some of
which they actually generously already contributed to the verified actual gamer
program so again thank you MSI now the
question for you guys is how many of you have caved and overpaid for our graphics
card recently let us know in the comments below and if you haven't yet
check out our more detailed video on how to game without a GPU where we checked
out not just GeForce now but most of the major streaming services