Welcome to the first full build guide that we've ever done on Linus Tech Tips
powered by Intel. Today we're going to be showing you guys step by step how to
build your very own gaming system in the better class. So that means we're
spending around $1,500 on the tower. Sort of if you subscribe to that good,
better, best way of thinking, which means we're not really compromising any
features and any performance and we're not spending so much that it's sort of
just for bling and bragging rights either. We're going to be installing
Windows 8. We're going to talk about some of the benefits you get from Windows 8, including in some games
better performance. and we're going to be pairing it with a touchcreen and
talking about some of the ways that touch really makes Windows 8 come to
life, whereas the mouse and keyboard do not. Part of getting the best bang for
your buck is overclocking. So, everything we've got in front of us here
is overclocking optimized in some way or another. Now, I want you to think about
your gaming experience kind of like Pi because the two most important things
for Pi are crust and filling. So, I'm
going to go ahead and say the CPU is kind of like the crust. It supports the
rest of the system. And if it's not fast enough, you're going to end up with
bottlenecks. So if you spent like $1,000 on a graphics card and a hundred bucks
on a CPU, that graphics card would never reach its full potential anyway. So in
this case, for our crust, we've gone with a 3570K. It performs just slightly
less than the 3770K in gaming
applications because it doesn't have hyperthreading. It's a Core i5, but
because it's a K series skew, you can overclock it to really squeeze the most
performance possible out of the architecture. We're going to be aiming
for anywhere from around 4.4 to 4.5 GHz
on our CPU. The graphics card is kind of like the fruity filling. It doesn't work
at all without the crust, but it really makes the experience, particularly from
a gaming standpoint, enjoyable. This is what enables all those visual effects.
And we've gone with the GeForce GTX 660Ti Power Edition from MSI. It's an
overclocking optimized card with a dual fan cooler. And I mean, it performs
great at stock, too. So, if you're not comfortable overclocking, you can always
run it that way. If the CPU and graphics card are kind of like Pi, then I guess
the rest of this stuff is sort of like ice cream because it definitely makes the experience better. And you can't
really have Pi without ice cream, and you can't have a computer without all
this other stuff. So, I think that's where the analogy sort of breaks down.
But for our motherboard, we went with the Z77A G45 from MSI. This is for a
couple of reasons. is extremely inexpensive. It's Z77, so it's
overclocking ready, and it is Crossfire and SLI ready, meaning we are able to
have a ton of flexibility in terms of graphics upgrade options. Speaking of
flexible graphics upgrade options, the GS700 from Corsair has a three-year
warranty, a single strong 12volt rail, meaning you can hook up whatever you
want to it without worrying about it having an overcurren protection shut
down because you connected everything to the wrong connectors. Don't worry about
any of that. It looks great and you can change the colors from red to blue to
white to completely off to match your build depending on what route you want
to go. The memory choice might seem a little bit weird because you probably
know that more than 8 gigs isn't really necessary for memory and we've gone with
16 gigs of Corsair Vengeance DDR3600 memory. So, the reason for that
is pretty simple. If you buy a dual channel kit, you're going to buy two
sticks to get the most out of the bandwidth available to your CPU. Okay?
If you buy two 4 gig sticks, then you're going to be limited to a total of 16
gigs for upgrading, unless you want to remove those sticks and add in a
completely new set. So, the reason we've done this is because it gives you the
potential to upgrade to 32 gigs without running into compatibility issues by
mixing and matching dims down the road or being stuck at a maximum of 16 gigs.
Now, you might think that the computer case is all about aesthetics, but the CM
Storm Scout 2 from Cooler Master does more than that. It's got great cooling.
It's very rugged. The durability of it that the build quality of it is
outstanding considering the price, and it's very portable. It has a handle in
the top that's so strong that when I did my unboxing of this case, I was able to
hold the entire case up by the handle and shake it around without any flex and
without it breaking. It means you can haul your rig around to land parties without worrying too much about it. And
it looks really good. So yes, there there's aesthetics as well. It is a
factor. For cooling, we've gone with SP120 quiet edition fans from Corsair. I
personally find that static pressure is more important than sheer air flow when
it comes to getting the most out of your system. So I do prefer SPS in almost all
scenarios. And for the CPU, we've gone with a Hydro Series H100i liquid cooler.
This is going to allow us to reach that overclock that we wanted. And because it
comes with Corsair's link software, we can monitor things like fluid
temperatures, system temperatures, and fan RPMs using software, keeping close
close tabs on our system to make sure it's running at peak efficiency. The
storage subsystem really comes down to personal choice, but what I'll do is
I'll explain why we went with what we did. So, we've gone with an Intel 300
series 180 gig SSD. We didn't have a big enough budget for a 240 gig SSD. And
rather than going for a 520 series, we sacrificed a little bit of performance
to get a bit more capacity because I personally find that 120 gigs is not
quite enough these days if you're running a pure SSD boot drive for all of
your OS, application, and gaming needs. We also added a Seagate Barracuda 3 TBTE
drive for mass storage because, let's face it, SSDs aren't at the point yet
where they're inexpensive enough that you can store everything on them. This
gives us a couple of interesting options. We can go with a 180 gig drive
and 3 TB for storage. Or if you find that 120 gigs is enough, you can go with
a 120 gig boot drive, partition away 60 gigs of it, use it as a cache using
Intel Smart Response technology, which is built into your Z77 board, and you
can have a super speedy boot drive with a few key applications. Then a cache SSD
accelerated mass storage drive where you can install things like games. So, your
most frequently used applications will be much faster than if they were just
stored purely on a mechanical drive. When it comes to peripherals, things get
real personal real fast. For our monitor, we went with an Acer
T232HL. This is a 10point multi-touch touchscreen monitor. Remember, we're
talking about the Windows 8 experience and how touch really makes it come to
life. It's also an IPS screen, which means better viewing angles and better
color reproduction, which I personally will prefer to the faster response times
but lower color depth of a TN panel. Not everyone will agree with me on that one,
and that's fine. Uh, for our headset, we went with the Vengeance 1300 from
Corsair because they're relatively inexpensive, they sound pretty good, and
they're lightweight and comfortable. However, there are more premium options
out there such as the Siberia V2 from Steeleries. This one in particular also
matches our build pretty well with a white and blue color scheme. For the
keyboard, again, this is personal choice. Not everyone believes that you
even have to spend a lot of money on a keyboard for gaming, but I personally
find that a mechanical keyboard really enhances the typing experience, and I
prefer it for gaming. And this is the Quickfire Pro from CM Storm. This
particular one has Cherry MX Brown switches, but you can choose almost any
switch under the sun you want. And what I like about the Quickfire Pro is it has
great build quality and it comes in at a very very reasonable price point
considering the budget of the rest of the components we're looking at here.
For our mouse, we went with the Vengeance M65. You could go with the M95
if you play more MMO games than FPS games. It has more buttons and stuff,
but what we liked about the M65 is it's got the latest laser sensor offering up
to 8200 DPI. It's from Corsair, so, you
know, can't really go wrong. and it's white which matched the rest of our
build without being overpriced. For our mouse pad, so last but not least, we
went with a Steeler QCK. This is just the standard sized one. You don't have
to get a huge mouse pad unless you're a low sensitivity gamer. And it's
available not only in the plain black one you see here, but also any number of
different configurations with cool game gaming artwork and all that kind of cool
stuff like that. The actual tools you need to build a computer are pretty
straightforward. I use a big Phillips screwdriver and a small Phillips
screwdriver for when I can't get access to those hard-to-reach areas. The most
important thing really is a static free workstation. That means no carpets, no
cats. Hi. And most importantly, no
clothes. Actually, wait, no, sorry. Clothes are okay, but no carpets and no
cats. Now, techs who do a lot of
workh might have a dedicated staticresistant test platform for making
sure that components work before you install them in the case where some
issues can occur. But let's face it, you
guys are watching this video. You probably don't have one of those. So, in a pinch, a motherboard box is an optimal
place to test the components before you actually install them into the chassis.
Before we can assemble our ghetto test bench, we got to remove the motherboard
from the box.
Now, the only pieces I need are the IO shield and the SATA cables. Other than
that, we're going to leave everything inside. If we were running SLI, for
example, we would also take out the SLI
bridge. Next is the motherboard itself. We remove that from the ESD bag. This
protects it during transport. Put that inside the box. And
being careful not to touch any of the sensitive electronics. You can see I'm
actually holding it by the heat sink and the back plate here. We put that onto
our makeshift test bench. Installing
CPUs is so easy. Now, lift up the retention ARM. Lift up the hold down
plate. No need to remove the protective plastic cover yet. Align the little gold
triangle on the top of your CPU with the triangle on your motherboard itself.
Like
so. Close down the hold down plate. Close down the retention ARM. Little bit
of strength required here. And check that out. The plastic cover will pop off
and your CPU socket pins were never exposed. In order to make use of dual
channel memory, take your two memory sticks. Remember, we're using two so
that we have expandability for later and install them in the color-coded memory
slots by pushing down firmly on both sides after opening up the tabs on the
side. Now, I personally prefer to install them in the slots furthest away
from the CPU socket. However, because we're using a liquid cooler, we don't
have to worry about any clearance issues, but if you were using an air
cooler, then this is definitely the recommended way to do
it. We're only going to need this for the out of the testing, but I do
recommend installing that stock heat sink that came with your CPU. The pins
are already in the correct position out of the box. The only thing to watch out for is make sure you've got enough
length on the four pin connector to reach the CPU fan header on your
motherboard. Push them down in a cross pattern.
One. Two. Waiting for the click. Then
plug it in. We're going to use this to make sure that the system posts before
we proceed. Now, don't worry guys. I'll show you all of these steps in detail
once we do the proper assembly of the computer. But basically all I've
connected here is 24 pin power, eight pin power, two six pin power adapters to
the video card. I've connected a DVI cable so we can find out if the system
boots. And I have plugged in a keyboard just in case we have to press anything
in order to confirm that yes indeed we do want to boot up. So let's go ahead.
And this board does not have onboard switches. So we can use a key, a
screwdriver or anything else metallic to short out the power switch. And now
we'll find out if our components are working. So, press F1 to run
setup. And we have at least basic functionality. Time to proceed with the
full build. Preamble's over,
folks. Time to actually build this thing. So, you can follow along step by
step, and I guarantee you anyone will be able to build the exact computer that
we're building here today. And most of the principles can be applied to pretty
much any custom machine that you would build at any time. Step one, inspect
your case for any damage because you're going to want to let the retailer or the manufacturer know if anything bad
happened to it during transit. Step two is to take off the side panels. Even
though many cases ship with thumb screws, often they're too tight from the
factory to remove by hand, so you have to loosen them with a screwdriver. Put
all the screws you take out somewhere safe, such as in a little tray. And I
recommend putting the side panel somewhere safe because you guys wouldn't believe how many times I've put a side
paddle down somewhere and tripped over it as I go to do something else,
scratching it. So, the place I recommend keeping it is in the box that your case
came in with the styrofoam pieces in between the two side panels so that they
don't get damaged. A lot of people ask me, uh, what screws and adapters do I
need in order to build my computer? The simple answer is your case comes with
all of that stuff. Most cases come with either a box or a baggie inside that
contains the screws you need to completely outfit that case with
whatever hardware it happens to support. So, in this
case, in this case, we've got a cardboard box that was mounted in one of
the 3 and 1/2 in hard drive cages that has, here we go, all the drive rails and
speakers and zip ties even that you'll need to assemble your computer. In most
highquality cases, the cables inside that are pre-wired are going to be tied
up in some way to keep them from scratching up the inside of the computer. So, you can free all of them.
Free them all. Don't worry, we'll do cable management later so that you can
make sure that they're all going to reach the places where they need to plug into. Now, I don't like to have my
motherboard lying around, so it's the first thing that I'm going to put in my case when I'm building the new computer.
You need nine motherboard standoffs. These are the little golden guys with
the hex shape. And Cooler Master includes a convenient little tool that
allows you to drive them into the motherboard tray with a Phillips head
screwdriver. So, you're going to install them, assuming you're using an ATX
board, that is a fulllength board. You're going to be installing them in
holes A, B, C, D, E, F, J, KL. The other
holes on the motherboard tray are for different sizes of motherboards. You can
consult the manual if you're not sure which one is right for yours. Putting in
IO shields can be a little bit tricky. Just make sure that you press on all
four corners firmly to ensure that it's
actually in place before you try to install the motherboard. Before putting
the motherboard in, make sure you've got the right screws by doing a quick test
fit to ensure that the threads match up with the threads of the standoffs that
you just installed. Hold the motherboard by something that's not going to damage
it. This is why I recommend having the stock heat sink on there. We're going to
remove it later to install our liquid cooler. and approaching at an angle,
line up the IO ports at the
back. Then hold the motherboard in
place while installing at least one screw so that it doesn't move around
because that can scratch up the back of it. You don't have to wrench it super
tight. It just has to not move.
Are you powered up? Actually, you're not powered up at all yet because you don't
have a power supply in your computer yet. When you install your power supply,
you have two main options for a bottom- mounted power supply. You can either
mount it with the fan on top, which will draw air from inside the case and
exhaust it out the back. The advantage is that you're drawing more air through
the case and out the back. The disadvantage is that you can be more
likely to accumulate dust because you don't have any dust filter right next to
it, which you would if you mounted it the other way. And the other disadvantage is that you're using warmer
air to cool the power supply. The other option is flipping it fanside down. So
in this case, our Storm Scout 2 has a filter on the bottom, which should keep
the insides clean. But the disadvantage is if you put your case down on a plush
carpet, it might suffocate the power supply and it might not get enough fresh
air. So, think carefully about how you're planning to deploy your computer
before installing the power supply. I generally go fan up because particularly
with our graphics card, we're going to draw some of that heat away from the
graphics card and out the back of the case using this additional fan for
cooling. Line it up with the back of the case. Install the four screws.
And it actually takes less time to install a power supply than it takes to
think about how to install a power supply. At this stage of the game,
although building a computer is no game, I recommend plugging in whatever
connectors you can because as you fill the computer up with more components,
it'll get hard to get at some of those little finicky ones. So, we're going to
start with the main connectors that go into the motherboard. The Scout 2 has
built-in cable management. So, we can run our 24 pin through this gap right
here and then bring it up right next to the connector on the motherboard, making
it so that you don't even see the wires really.
The eight pin connector can be routed in much the same way, going through that
cable management hole in the
bottom, up behind the motherboard
tray, through the little hole, and then into the eight pin connector up at the
very top left corner of the motherboard.
Guys, if at this point you break open the user manual or the quick start guide
for your motherboard, there is no shame because installing these front panel
connectors can be a little tricky. And while many motherboards have labels
directly on the board for what's what, often they're actually not very clear.
So, feel free to check it out in there. We're going to start with USB. USB 3 is
an easy connector to plug in, and it's easy to find because it's very distinctive looking. Also, it's keyed,
so it only goes in one way. On our motherboard, we have a right angle USB3
connector, so there won't really be any strain on the cable or on the fragile
pins inside, but not all motherboards have that. So, make sure that you don't
have it wrenching on the connector
itself. USB 2 is a smaller connector, and the way this one works is there's a
blocked off pin on the bottom of the lead coming from your case, and there's
a missing pin on the motherboard itself.
As long as the blocked off pin corresponds to the missing pin, you
won't have any issues. Just make sure you're actually plugging it into a USB
header because it looks quite similar to some other
headers. Next is front panel audio. Usually this is located on sort of the
left hand side of the board near the bottom left corner. This
one has a blocked off pin, but it's in a different position than USB 2. So, as
long as you make sure that that corresponds to the missing pin on the connector, you won't have any difficulty
with that one in either. Plug in HD audio if you have the option. Only very
old motherboards rely on the AC97
standard. Which brings us to the trickiest part. Power switch, reset
switch, power LED, and hard drive LED.
For the power switch and the reset switch, the orientation is not
important. It doesn't matter. Don't worry about positive and negative. Just
plug them in. And this is what I mean about some
motherboards not being clearly labeled. The power and hard drive LEDs do rely on
being plugged in a certain way. And on this particular board, the positive and
negative terminals aren't labeled, so I'll have to consult the manual to make
sure I get them right. Don't worry though, if you plug them in wrong, it's
not going to damage anything. Your LEDs just won't light up. So, you can crack
it back open, reverse them, and they'll work just
fine. Okay, we could have used the fans included with the H100i, but they
wouldn't be so sexy like these ones with the little white mod rings on them. Of
course, there includes white, blue, and red rings in the box, so you can pick
whatever you want for your color scheme. We went with white to go with our white
case. Now, not everyone would want to use an H100i in this case because it's a
bit of a weird mounting situation where what you do is you remove the top
plastic plate here and you mount the radiator a little bit externally. Now,
if you're into the sort of modded hot rod look, then you might like that. If
you're not into that, go with an H8I instead. It doesn't perform quite as
well because it's a single 120 mm radiator, but it still supports Corsair
Link. It's a thick radiator, so it performs about as well as a single rad,
and it's going to keep all the components inside. So, what we're going
to do is we're going to start by removing the stock Intel cooler. Now,
that we don't need that anymore. We're going to pop out that top piece of
plastic on the case using the tabs inside. We're going to get the radiator
in position, screw the fans in from the inside. Then it's time to mount the CPU
block and pump combo unit to the processor itself. The trick with
mounting the fans to the rad with the H100i is making sure that you get the
right screws. So, there's a lot of screws in the box. You can consult the
manual if you're not sure. Otherwise, find the one that looks like what I'm holding up because we're going to go
through the fan, through the top of the case, and into the rad. Make sure as
you're positioning it, you leave the leads, the three pin fan connectors,
somewhere near the back of the case so you can hide them and not have unsightly
wires cluttering up your build. The other thing is this is where you decide
whether you want to push air through the radiator or pull air through the
radiator. I prefer pull because it allows you to clean it more easily
without removing the fans first. Lining
up the screws and the fans and the radiator can be a little bit tricky. And
to avoid the risk of cross threading, I recommend starting them with your hands
to make sure that you're not putting it in wrong before you tighten them up with
the screwdriver. The last benefit of the SP
fans that I didn't mention before compared to the stock ones that come with the H100i is the fact that they
have rubber noise isolating mounts, meaning they'll pass fewer vibrations to
your computer, meaning less noise.
Because we mounted a stock cooler, we will need to remove the thermal compound
that's left on the CPU. However, we don't need to replace it. The thermal
compound that comes on our H100i is extremely high quality. So, if you ever
do need to remove thermal compound, use a lint-free cloth for the final stage,
but you can clean the bulk of it off with toilet paper and 99% isopropyl
alcohol. The higher percentage for the alcohol, the better and the more clean
it's going to be. Now, the hardware you need is extremely sturdy. This is why I
like the H80i and the H100i, but there are a lot of pieces. So, we need the
Intel magnetic hold down. See, this is why I love it. It's
brilliant. You just click it on like that. We need the Intel back plate for
everything but LGA 2011. We need the four mounting posts that are going to
hold the back plate onto the motherboard. And then we need the four
thumb nuts which are going to hold the magnetic mounting plate down to the
mounting posts which are attached to the back plate. That's what makes it secure.
And that's what makes it once you've done it a couple times pretty darn easy
to do. Now, believe me when I say guys, I'm as happy as you that we're getting
close to the end of the little tricky parts, but we're not quite there. In
order to control the fans in the system using Corsair Link, we use the included
adapters that come with the H100i to plug into the CPU block and pump unit.
Then what we'll do is we'll connect all of our fans to these. And in this case,
we had to get one additional splitter in order to hook up the front fans on the
case. There we go. Then we can use software for our controls. Next up,
we'll have to plug the USB connector into the side of the CPU block and then
into a header on the motherboard, just like we did before with the front USB 2
connectors. And last but not least, we're going to plug in the leads that
are built directly into the CPU block, which is the fan RPM monitor or or pump
RPM monitor and a SATA power connector
that we can run through the back so that it actually powers the pump itself.
Throughout any kind of system build, it's important to think about cable
management if you want to have a chance of having it look tidy when you get to
the end. So, this is the first time we're plugging in a power connector
other than to the motherboard from the power supply. So, it's important to make
sure that we route it somewhere that we're going to be able to tie it up
tidily later on after the fact. It's great that we're using Corsair Link and
the H100i in order to plug in all of our fans, but we have to actually plug in
that SATA connector that I showed you before. So, we're going to route this
sort of on this side of the 24, but on this side of the A pin in order to make
it so that we're going to be able to close our case easily once we're
finished. So, now by plugging this in, we have provided power for all five of
the fans in our case. We're going to leave the front fans. They're white LED
fans. They're wired into the case in such a way that you can turn them on and
off with the push of a button, which is very cool. But we're going to replace
this last rear fan with one of our SP fans so we have a more consistent look
to the inside of our build. All you got to do is remove the four fan screws from
the back. It's probably going to like fall out here. There we go. That wasn't so
bad. Keep those four screws because they're the same kinds for pretty much
all fans. We're going to take our SP fan. Again, making sure to orient the
connector so that we can easily route it behind the motherboard tray for maximum
tidiness and software control. Then we're going to put those four screws
back in. And now we have a nice consistent look to the inside of the
system. Look at this. We're getting there. It's time to put in our storage
devices. So, we've got our SSD for which we will need I just use two screws
because uh I'm lazy and it's an SSD.
It's not like it's going to get damaged if it, you know, falls around or
whatever else. And because the CM Storm Scout 2 supports SSDs natively, all we
have to do is grab one of these 2 and 1/2 in drive sleds, screw it in on the
bottom with two of the included screws that come with the
case. There we go. There we go. Just
like that. Looks good. Pop that back
in. and our SSD is installed except for
the power and SATA connectors at the back. For the hard drive, things are a
little bit different. We're going to use the sleds, so the rails that were
included in that cardboard box. We're going to plug these in with the tabs
towards the front. That is where the connectors are not on the drive. And
then the short ends where the connectors are at the back. We take that whole
assembly with the two sled rails and the drive itself and we slide that
in until we hear a nice satisfying
click. So, let's get all those fans connected. Now, we used one splitter on
one of our four fans that we can plug directly into the Corsair Link module.
So, those ones are going to be our two front fans. We're going to plug those
directly into that splitter. We're going to control them at the same time and
we're not going to be able to monitor the RPMs of both of them. So, that's
okay because if one of those fans fails, it's really not the end of the world.
Whereas, we're going to dedicate a full connector to each of the fans on the
H100i because if one of those fails, it could be a problem for us in terms of
CPU overheating, especially if we've overclocked it really far. for our rear
120 millimeter fan. That one gets its own fan header as well, so that we can
control each of the zones of the case separately using the software. We're
also going to plug in our front drives. So, power is routed with another one of
our two SATA harnesses that we have on this power supply, giving us four SATA
connectors. So, we can easily plug in
our hard drive right here.
Then we can use the next connector for our SSD, which is right
here. This gives us two more connectors that we could use for additional drives
without using any adapters. Now, we need those two SATA cables that came with our
motherboard, both of which are right angle cables, which is fine because we
can use the angled side on the back of the drives. Then we
can use the straight side to go directly into the already angled connectors on
the motherboard. The only real thing to watch out for is, as you can see on this
board, it clearly states, "Use SSDs in
the top two ports as opposed to the other ones." Don't worry, it's not going
to break anything if you use a different drive, but you'll get the best
performance if you plug your SSDs into the native Intel serial ATA 3 or 6 GB
per second ports. Now, it's really no secret. I'm not the
master of cable management by any stretch of the imagination, but I want
it to at least look decent from the front. So, we're going to take our Molex
harnesses, which we didn't end up using a single four pin Molex connector. We're
going to hide those on the other side of the motherboard tray. What's great about
this case is there's lots of room for hiding unneeded cables. So, we're going
to turn this around so you guys can actually see what I'm doing. There we
go. We're going to hide this in the front. Just like that. Just find
somewhere to tuck it. It doesn't really matter. Then what we're going to do is we're going to take some of those zip
ties that came with both our power supply and our case and we're just going
to organize these cables on the back so that they're not in the way of anything
when we try to close the side panel. I'm not worried too much again about them
being super gorgeous. So, I'm going to take this bundle and I'm going to kind
of tie it up like this. Then I'm going to take this bundle and I'm going to
kind of tie it up like this with the objective being to keep things flat so
that the side panel closes without any difficulty. You don't want to tie things
too tight because then you're going to end up with undo strain on the
connectors which can damage them over
time. If you've hung with us this long, you're almost at the end. All that's
left now is to install the graphics card. So, the first thing we're going to
do is remove the two thumb screws that correspond to the PCI Express 16X slot.
Now, PCI Express 16X slots are not all
made equally. There's physical and
electrical specifications. So, if you're not sure which one's the right one to
get the most performance out of your graphics card, it's usually the top one.
If you're still not sure, consult the user's manual and it'll tell you what
each of them is wired up for. So once we've removed those two screws and the
two PCI slot covers that are in there, all we have to do is align the PCI
Express 16X interface at the bottom of the card with the PCI Express 16X slot
on the motherboard. Push down firmly until the
connector locks into place. Then put the thumb screws back in. And then it's time
to connect the power cables. We're going to route these much the same way we've
done before along the back of the motherboard tray, which now looks a
little better than it did before with some of the zip ties that we've put in place. These are going to come out right
near the graphics card itself, which is what's so great about these modern cases
with cable management. I remember back in the old days, we didn't have that and
we walked to school both ways uphill and it was snowing and there was fire and
brimstone all over the place. And anyway, I think I'm off on a bit of a
tangent here. So, this particular graphics card requires two PCI Express
six pin connectors which we will plug in. And our build is
now almost complete. Still got to power it on, make sure she works, and close up
the side panels. Now, I'm about to do something
that's incredibly bad luck. I haven't booted up the machine yet, and I am
going to close one of the side panels.
Usually when I close the side panel before I make sure it works, it doesn't
work on the first crack. And there's one small thing I have to fix. But I'm
hoping that since we've, you know, gone to great lengths to make sure that this
is an awesome build that you guys can follow along with that we haven't
actually made any mistakes. So, our right side panel is
on our left side panel. Check out what that looks like. Isn't that a gaming rig
that you'd be proud to call your own? All right, we're going to remove the
little plastic cover on the Windows inside here. At least we're going to
try. It's on there pretty good. Hey,
there we go. There's the one. We'll take off the outside one once we're done
putting it on. Helps to have it oriented the right way there, folks. Do recommend
doing that. And she is closed. This is
what our $1,500 gaming machine looks
like. And it's time to fire her up.
Don't forget your thumb screws. And everything's working. Or is
it? Now that we've got the system booted up, it's really important to run a
couple basic utilities to ensure that it's firing on all cylinders before you
call your system done. because the last thing you want is to find out that
there's a slight instability somewhere down the line in the middle of doing
something critical only to have it go and turn off, power down, reset, have
corrupted data, anything like that. So, we're going to walk you through the
basic stuff that we run to ensure the system is working at peak efficiency.
Now, the first three utilities are mostly for your CPU and they kind of go
hand in hand in face or other hand. If you had three hands, then that's what
they would do. And they're mostly important if you're overclocking. In our
case, we overvolted our CPU to 1.32 volts and turned the multiplier up to 44
MHz because it's unlocked. So overclocking is that simple these days.
More voltage, more megahertz until it stops working. So in our case, we got to
make sure that it's working. And how do you know? Well, CPUZ tells you if the
overclock actually took. So you can see right here we're running at 4,400 MHz,
which is 4.4 GHz. So that's awesome. That's working. Next up is Prime 95. So
you go into options, torture test, small
FFT, and then press okay. And it'll run
this test for at least, I would recommend, 24 hours to ensure that your
CPU is not making any calculation errors. That tells you that it's
actually working correctly, even though you've amped the frequency way up. The
last one that you want to use is right here, Realtemp GT. And as long as your
CPU is staying at around, I'd say 85 degrees tops. And this is under load.
This is under an intensive artificial load. You'll never see a load like this
in the real world unless you're doing some pretty intensive stuff like folding
at home, for example. So, you want that to stay under around 85° to make sure
your CPU doesn't throttle. Thermal throttling is when the CPU slows itself
down. It's like, whoa, I can't handle this. I got to slow myself down to keep
myself cool enough that I can, you know, handle it and not die. So, we're not
reaching that point, which means our overclock is good to go and our Prime 95
is stable. There are other applications you can use instead of Prime 95, but
it's the one that we've always been using and we just kind of like it. So,
there you go. There's my tech tip. Now, speaking of the importance of
temperatures, graphics card temperatures are huge. What if something went wrong
with your graphics card? a fan failed, for example, or it wasn't mounted
correctly, it got jiggled loose in shipping or something like that when you
got your graphics card. So, you want to make sure your graphics card's running
right before you start firing up games on it as well. So, we use a couple of
programs called MSI's Afterburner and Combuster. And Combuster is spelled very
uniquely, so don't mind that. But, we use these to make sure that the graphics
card is running correctly. So, we can load it up with Combuster. Then, we can
monitor temperatures. We can see that it's running at about 76°, which is more
than okay for these graphics cards. Anything up to about 90 to 95° is
actually okay for a modern graphics card. And that tells us again, so
besides our CPU, our graphics subsystem
is running correctly as well. The last thing that I'd really recommend running,
but I can't show you in Windows here, is Memest 86. You load that onto a USB
drive, throw that in your system, and that'll test your memory to ensure that
nowhere within your system are any errors being made. That way, you know
you can trust it to be 100% stable.
Here's another software tip for you guys. Head to nite
nit.com as the first thing you do with your system once you've made sure it's
working correctly. Select all the stuff you want to install. You want web
browsers, Chrome, Opera, Firefox. You want iTunes, Skype, uh, Java.net, Air,
Shockwave, Dropbox, Google Drive, all that good stuff. All you got to do is
select all the things you want, get installer. It avoids all the bloatware
that comes with the programs and it does an automated install of all of them with
default options without you touching it at all. And there's one really important
one you Windows 8 users might want to check out. Under utilities, get classic
start because it is a fantastic start menu that adds Tada, the start menu to
Windows 8. Not only that, but you can decide which kind of start menu you want
and there are a ton of settings that you can change and reconfigure and make the
start menu not only there in Windows 8, but better than it ever was before and
more customizable. That way you get the benefits of all the touch features of
Windows 8 like swiping in in order to do a search or multitasking between
applications like this with all the benefits of previous editions of
Windows. So you guys saw me fire up Angry Birds there. Yes, Windows 8 is
great as a casual gaming experience. You can get games from the Windows Store.
You can install regular games that run in touchscreen. But it's not just about
the casual gaming experience that your kids are going to want to enjoy or
whatever else. I mean, it's cool having a big touchcreen like this basically
means you've got like a gigantic tablet that lives on your desk. Very neat. But
you can use the other multitasking feature here. So, we're going to open up the desktop. All the major online gaming
store platforms, Steam, Play, and Origin all run just fine on Windows 8. And not
only that, but we observed some tangible performance differences between Windows
7 and Windows 8 due in part to the fact that Windows 8 uses less resources than
Windows 7 on your system and actually handles the way that core scheduling
works on the CPU a little bit more efficiently in some cases as well. So
Battlefield 3 was an example where it ran about the same in our lab, 3%
improvement over Windows 7 for Windows 8, but we'll call that margin of error.
We'll call that the same. Dirt 3 was one example where we found that Windows 8
performed 10% less than Windows 7. However, in Far Cry 3, Windows 8
performed 32% better than Windows 7 and
in The Elder Scrolls 5, it was about 3% better. So, in general, we saw more
improvements than we saw performance decreases, or it's the same. So, while
Windows 8 might be criticized by some gamers as not optimal for hardcore
gaming necessarily, that is actually not the experience we had at all. Once you
get around a couple of little finicky things, make sure Games for Windows Live
is installed before you try to run any of your games and make sure you got the
latest drivers. I mean, it's pretty basic stuff beyond that games for
Windows Live tip. So whether or not you feel that touch belongs on the desktop
or whether it should stick to tablets and notebooks and phones and all those
other devices, you got to admit the idea that you can go between playing Jetack
Joyide on your 23in 1080p screen and
then switching out and enjoying content
on said screen or even going and playing a quote unquote real game is pretty darn
cool. I hope you guys have really enjoyed this ultimate build guide for
our $1,500 recommended system. And I'd love to hear your feedback. Post under
the video and let us know what did you think you could have improved with a
$1,500 budget? And do you really think
that with a touchscreen, you still need to be investing in high-end gaming grade
peripherals such as the ones that we've chosen here today. We're going to close
out the video with some glamour footage of our finished system. And I hope to
see you guys next time in our Yes, there will be more of these next build
guide.
Heat. Heat.