I love a good comeback story and Intel
is the kind of guy that just keeps getting back up. Not only are we about
to recommend their graphics card for a $1,000 budget build, we're about to
recommend a Core i5 12600K.
Am I disappointed? We're going to put a 5-year-old processor in a brand new
computer? Yes, but unfortunately, that's just
things sometimes. Truly the wildest of times. So wild in
fact that I'm going to be showing you how to build a PC.
Hello, old friend. It's been a while.
Nearly 7 years since I was at the helm
guiding you, young viewer, on your 1440p
capable gaming rig journey. And Linus
was there, too, I guess. Now it's time for my comeback story. So take my hand.
Hold on tight. It looks a little scary out there, but
hey, things are going to be all right. Yeah.
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up to $25 a month. Check them out using our link down below. We're starting with
our CPU, Team Blue's Core i5 12600K.
True, AMD's more popular these days, but their latest socket AM5 is only
compatible with DDR5 memory, which is out of our reach.
Thanks to how things are. And their previous generation AM4 X3D chips are
being scalped. Very cool. Luckily for us, our 1440p resolution target means
that our GPU will be doing a bit more of the work than the CPU, which may not be
the case at lower resolutions. And that means we don't need something as beefy
as a 9800 X3D. Would it be nice?
Yeah, but this little guy right here with six P cores and four E cores offers
solid bang for the buck right now and a decent upgrade path later. Next.
Wow, delivery. Motherboard. Upgrading should be easy thanks to our reasonably
beefy motherboard. ASUS's sleekly titled
B760M A Y W Wi-Fi D4 II. These days, 100
bucks is about as cheap as decent boards get. It's got competent VRMs. Just maybe
don't try to run a 14900K in this thing. A PCIe Gen 5 expansion slot and 2 and
1/2 gig LAN. Look, I'm going to level with you guys. I would have loved a
USB-C port on the rear IO or an internal header. But $100 is $100. Now, before we
get to assembly, let's make sure we've got the usual suspects of PC building
supplies. You will need some kind of screwdriver. I'm partial to this one
from lttstore.com. And you'll want some extra help in the
form of a magnetic parts tray, zip ties, side cutters, and sometimes a set of
needle-nose pliers come in handy, too. Last but not least, wear an ESD wrist or
ankle strap that's properly grounded. To install our CPU, we're going to start by
putting our motherboard on top of the box that it came in. This works as a
great little work platform that eases any fears of scraping the back of the
board by accident. Next is one of the only steps where you can kind of easily
wreck your motherboard. We're going to unlatch our socket cover like so, take
our CPU, and line up the golden triangle with the bottom left corner. It's pretty
small and hard to see, so sometimes I like to just line up the top and bottom
notches here and here. Once you're ready, gently place the CPU
into the socket. Don't force it. If it's not dropping in nicely, carefully pick
it up and try again. It's okay. Once it
looks like it's in properly, give it a little wiggle to make sure it's seated.
Just a little one. Then push the cover down and close the latch. This does take
a little bit more force than you might expect, but don't worry. You're doing
fine. Don't be alarmed when the cover pops off. That's supposed to happen.
Throw it into your motherboard box. You will need this if you ever have to RMA
your board. Now, let's talk memory. This 2 by 8 gig kit of DDR4 from G.Skill cost
us about 150 bucks. That's bad, but at
least they're high-speed, low-latency modules. So, unless you need more
capacity, you shouldn't need to upgrade for quite a while. You can save a buck
here and get this kit from Crucial, but we felt this was a pretty reasonable
spot to spend an extra 25 bucks for better performance. We are going to use
this very similar kit from Patriot today because we don't want to buy more DDR4
that could go into someone's hands who needs it. This kit has got slightly
tighter timings, but performance should be relatively the same. The nice thing
about mATX sized motherboards like the one we're going with is they often just
have two DIMM slots, so you won't be confused about in which slot your DIMM
should go. And we've only got two DIMMs. So, we'll just undo the clips at the
top, line up the key like so, then push
the module into the slot firmly with your thumbs until you hear a click.
Repeat for module two, and that's RAM installed. Easy. By the way, if you run
into trouble later, I can't stress enough how often unseated RAM is the
issue. So, remove these and try again for one of your first potential
troubleshooting steps. Next,
cooler. Y'all's need something to take the heat away from the CPU, and it's
hard to go wrong with Thermalright these days. The Peerless Assassin 90 SE should
be plenty for our CPU today and probably
enough for most chips we might upgrade to tomorrow as long as it's not a Core
i9. Coolers typically have different mounting instructions depending on the
brand or model of cooler and the motherboard socket it's being strapped
to. If you have a different cooler than the one we're using today, then follow
those instructions. Otherwise, follow mine. Start by grabbing the LGA 1700
hardware. Our back plate already has the sliders installed, so adjust them as
needed to fit these four holes around the CPU socket. Peel the sticky strips,
install the back plate right way up, then put down these plastic spacers over
the mounting posts. Next, take the two straight brackets and
put them over the spacers with this mounting post facing up, then screw them
down with the included screws. Make sure to apply thermal paste. A little dab'll
do ya, but you can't ruin performance by overdoing it, so feel free to use
whatever style you prefer. I'm partial to one big line down the middle. Now,
before installing the cooler, don't forget the peel. It's fun and also
important. Remove the sticker from the bottom of your cooler, place it down on
the CPU, and screw it down onto the brackets. As for the fan, orient the
cable so it's in the bottom right corner, slide it into the middle, and
then pull the clips back over the heat sink like so. Lastly, plug this into
your CPU fan header up here, and you can feel free to tuck the excess cabling
underneath. Well, where are we going to put all this hardware? Well, there are
many cases like the Sama SVO2,
but this one is mine. And for just $60 on sale, it's pretty tough to beat.
There's plenty of space for big coolers or graphics cards, comes with a few ARGB
fans, has a Type-C port on the front IO, and it looks a lot like the more upscale
Height x 60. Okay. To To clear, our board doesn't
have a Type-C header, so that top IO port is just for show right now. Uh if
you want, you can get a Type-C adapter add-in card for pretty cheap, but we
won't be covering that in this video. All right.
Let's pop our motherboard in there. Start by removing the front and side
glass panels. This may take some force, and you might need a plastic prying
tool, but they just pop off and slide out like so. Put the case on its side
and confirm the standoffs match the motherboard. Ours started out ready for
ATX, so use the standoff removal tool and move the two bottom posts to here
and here. We're going to make sure the IO shield is installed on our motherboard, then
pick the board up by the cooler and install it gently onto the standoffs.
You really don't want to scrape the board against the posts. So, if it's not
seated right, just lift it up and try again.
Next, screw it down with these six screws like so.
Hey. Nice. Now, at this point, you're
probably screaming at me, "RILEY! YOU
DIDN'T INSTALL AN NVMe SSD yet!"
And you're right, because guess what? Now SSDs and hard drives are expensive,
too. So, that means we're opting for a good old-fashioned 1 TB SATA SSD. Sure,
DirectStorage is slowly happening, and a few games will benefit from a faster
drive, but for the most part, we're talking about waiting maybe a few extra
seconds in the lengthiest of loading screens.
>> Welcome to Rust, or as I like to call it, welcome to hell. We wanted
to make sure a 1 TB drive fit in our budget, and adding a faster drive later
is one of the easiest upgrades you can do. Now, who knows what'll happen, but
at the time of filming, prices are starting to stabilize a little bit. This
Crucial drive is no longer on sale, but maybe check out this 1 TB Samsung 990
Evo if you're willing to pay a little bit extra for a more modern drive. And
your motherboard should include some SATA data cables that we're going to
need. We like to plug into the board first and then route the cable out the
back. We'll mount our drive to the case on the back where it's labeled SSD by
taking the mounting tray off, screwing it down with these four screws, and then
reattaching the tray to the case. Then attach the data cable. It's just that
easy. This is also a good time to grab the tiny M.2 standoff and screw from
your motherboard box and install that on the board for a future upgrade. These
are really easy to lose and this will keep it safe. We're so close to being
done, I can't wait. But first, the power supply. We bought this 650 watt 80 plus
bronze unit from MSI for just 60 bucks.
You can find cheaper options, but we've had good test experiences at the lab
with these MSI MAG ABN units and 80 plus
actually rates this guy as silver efficiency. The only issue we found with
some poor performance with power brownouts. So, if you live somewhere
with unreliable power, maybe check out the lab's website and pick something
else that we've reviewed positively that fits your budget. The nice thing about
non-modular power supplies is you can't really install the cables wrong because
they're already plugged in. With the cables pulled out of the way, stick it
into the basement, line it up with the screw holes, then screw it down. If your
case, like ours, has a filter on the bottom, you can feel free to install the
PSU in either orientation. Even if it's
intaking air from the bottom, pet hair shouldn't be an issue. The annoying
thing about non-modular units is we don't need all of these cables, but we
do need most of them. Take your 24-pin ATX power connector and route it up
through the side and to the board. Make sure it's keyed the right way before
pressing down. Now, this is another moment that requires a little more force, but you can do it. I believe in
you. Next, let's get our CPU power routed up through here and into our
little 8-pin header. If there's not enough space for your hands, feel free
to remove the cooler and just move it to the side. As long as you don't wipe that
paste anywhere, you can just put it back on after no reapplication necessary.
After that's in place, we'll route a pigtail eight-pin PCIe power cable out
of the side and just leave it dangling here for later. We'll need both the
eight-pin and the six-pin from that for the GPU. Finally, we need our SATA power
cable. Now, this can stay in the back since all we need it for is our SSD and
fan hub. Plug it in wherever you want along the chain and tuck the rest of the
cable into the basement along with everything else we're not using. Now, we
are at the moment you've all been waiting for, the Intel Arc B580,
specifically the ASRock Steel Legend version with a little bit of overclock
right out of the box. For $300, this is about as good as it
gets with 12 gigs of VRAM and much improved driver support. It took Intel a
little bit of time, okay? But, these little cards are great for
1080p, good for 1440p, and
capable of 4K gaming if you're willing to run everything on low and enable
XeSS, okay? Typically, for a gaming PC, we recommend taking half of your budget
and putting it towards the GPU, but uh you know, things are a little weird
right now with memory and storage at all-time high prices and hard to obtain.
Sure, graphics cards have gone up in price, but at least you can still buy
them, making this a part you can easily upgrade in the future.
Knock on a lot of that. Let's get our PCIe slot covers out of the way first by
taking off the slot cover cover. You heard me. Once those are removed,
eyeball the PCIe slot and do your best to line up the gold teeth with the slot.
Once you're ready, give it a solid push to seat it into place. Screw it down
where you removed the slot covers, then plug in our eight- and six-pin power
connectors. We are so close, you guys. Okay, just got to wire everything else
up. Plug in HD audio at the bottom left over here. Plug in our USB 3.0 slot near
the ATX power connector over here. And then, let's get our fan hub plugged into
any of our PWM fan headers. I'm going to
use this one. I like its vibe. We're going to plug in our pre-daisy-chained
ARGB cable to this header on the board up here. And last but not least, plug in
your front panel header. Conveniently enough, this case has just one solid
unit instead of a few individual pins. So, as long as it's oriented the right
way, it just plugs right into your F panel header like so. Now, contrary to
popular opinion, this next step is technically optional. For cable
management, pull them all just a little bit taut to get rid of excess slack, and
then we're going to use those zip ties to attach them to some of these handy
tie-down points. It doesn't take a lot of time, and it looks much nicer after.
Everything else, like those extra cables on our non-modular PSU, stuff them into
the basement and never think about them again.
Heck, yeah.
All right, we're all done. This build is ready to game. Let's see
how she goes. Ooh. The colors.
Now, this is a hardware-focused video, so we're not going to get too into
software tuning and all that, but I will just check that we are running at 1440p
on this monitor, 240 hertz. Uh the RAM,
uh as seen in the task manager, running at 3600 megatransfers per second. That's
as it's supposed to be. We've got a fairly up-to-date driver on the Arc
B580, and it's helpfully showing us that
Resizable Bar is enabled. I'm, you know, I'm happy. But, leave a comment if you
want us to do a video on how to tune your PC after you build it. I feel like
that's a whole video in itself. With that out of the way, let's get into some
games, okay? What What do we got installed locally here? Marathon, I
haven't had a chance to play Marathon yet. So, we're going to do it on this
brand new squeaky clean build. Who's that guy? I want to know. What's the
lore? I do want to start with Marathon because it is a competitive shooter, but
it is fairly new and as far as I understand the graphics are
interesting to look at. I don't know if it's very intensive or not, but I'm
going to give you my subjective experience. Wow.
Now, that's what I call graphics. That's what you get when you get Riley house to
LTT video. This is my the first time I've loaded in.
It's beautiful. Look at those rocks. Uh
We got a lot of weather effects and wind and rain. Okay, I'm at medium preset now
getting about 100 FPS. Although, I'm not
in a intensive combat situation. I don't
like how it they all like load in so slowly like that. Are they like
generating as you go? Survey drone cartridge. My backpack's full.
Okay. I'm shooting people now. We got effects going. 86 FPS. Bam bam bam. Bam.
Woah. Those are little missiles. Okay, 95 FPS for like some crazy, you
know. BAM BAM BAM. OH.
SO, THEN I CAN'T DO ANYTHING except give up. I'm going to give up. You won't turn
me into a different kind of cybernetic Android
thing. Okay, I'm not super happy with how that run went, but overall I'm kind
of happy with the performance so far. I mean, we were at started in at highest
settings. And you know, we're getting around 60-ish. That you probably want a
bit more than that for a competitive shooter. So, we dropped down to medium.
We're hovering around 100. You know, for a brand new game that's probably got
some optimization yet to do. I'm happy with it and that's what's important.
Marathon, that's a fast-paced competitive shooter, you know, a lot of
jerky action. Now, we're in Resident Evil which is very calm and as I
understand I haven't played a single one of the franchise, but as I understand it's a kind of a relaxing game, right?
That's right. Why is it so dark in here though? That's my question. But in this
dark room with almost nothing going on we got 71 FPS average.
Oh, you can run. If I run am I going to run headfirst into a zombie?
There's one. Has anyone tried healing them though? But I want action.
Gosh. Oh, space is Jeez Louise. Why?
Why isn't he dead? I shot him. Jeez. Guys in Resident Evil can just
kind of take a couple zombie bites and you're fine? >> Yeah, you eat some herbs after. What
kind of game is this? 71 FPS. Grenade.
Give me some explosion effects. Whoa, we dropped down to 66. Plouffe fiddled
around with the settings and some are medium, some are high. So it's kind of a mix of how he likes it. But you know, I
think with a build like this it's not the kind of build where you're
absolutely just going to be able to drop in at the highest settings. You are going to you know, you will you want to
tune things especially for like more modern titles. But like even in this
this game just came out 70 FPS or so
it'll do especially for a kind of like a cozy GAME LIKE THIS.
WELL, THERE YOU HAVE IT FOLKS. WE SPENT A little over a thousand dollars, but
we're here and we're gaming. And at 1440p no less. Who could have
guessed a few years ago that Intel would be a budget option not only for CPUs,
but for graphics cards too. If you're interested in any of the parts we used
in this build, we'll have those linked in the video description. Hey, why don't
you head down there and leave a comment. Let me, Riley, the host of this video,
know if you think we should have fit a beefier GPU in there, you know? What
would you have sacrificed to make it all work?
I'm pretty happy with it. Almost as happy as I am with this segue to our
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Thanks for watching. If you liked this video, make sure to check out the last
time I helped Linus build a PC. Now, I'm doing it all by myself. I'm grown, papa.