hello welcome to dennis tech tips this
is happening today i'm doing a build guide that i invent a new thermal paste
that i i can actually use it to apply
directly to the socket let's see
so you just do this very very gently
and just put the CPU on the what's going on
you doing a build guide yeah i'm doing yoga
you know Linus said those were dead right you know atlantis is dead right
you sure you want to go with that one uh it's
dennis tick tips okay never mind near my i'll go i'll go
but please subscribe if you want dennis take tips more
yeah okay i guess with Linus out of the picture
everybody wants to get on front of the camera but you know it has been over a
year since our last pc build guide and i know you guys really want them the
problem is that we had sponsors before but guess what Linus isn't here today
i've got the company credit card and it's high time we fixed that so let's
get cracking to build the best bang for buck 1440p 60fps gaming experience we
can muster without triggering the fraud alert he won't know what hit him
and once he's done freaking out other statement he can think about saving money on his it infrastructure with
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now before we get our hands dirty we should first make sure that our hands are clean
and static free we can do the form with some soap but the latter will require
being grounded now some veteran builders will tell you that if your environment is humid esd
isn't a great danger especially with today's thicker pcbs and protection
circuitry and this is true to some extent so in a pinch simply touching
something metallic that's got to pass the ground regularly will do
but if you're building a pc you're going to want to invest in an esd solution now
they aren't expensive and we don't recommend continuing without them
when you do use an esd strap or esd mat bear in mind that they must be connected
to ground via an outlet or something metallic with a path to ground
in order to be effective noticing a pattern it's all about the path to
ground no ground then there's no esd safety as for our
other tools our handy-dandy multi-bit screwdriver
is our best friend we'll use this magnetic parts tray for screw management
magnetic project mats also work great here and you can even use a pill sorted a
pretty good effect that takes care of the pre-built prep and tools but for
cable management and you are going to manage your cables right
the most useful tools we have are velcro ties like these handy dandy Linus
tech tips brand ones a pair of side cutters
like these and
a handful of tweezers oh sorry i mean zip ties
needle nose pliers can help when using these in tight spaces but you know
they're not strictly necessary because as you'll see most of our zip ties are going to be
quite accessible now as always it's a good idea to plug in all of your
components for a dry run before you fully assemble your build now this is a
good way to troubleshoot any issues that may arise
such as an incompatibility or a doa component so you use your motherboard
box as a case it's non-conductive and usually sturdy enough to handle the
weight of the board cooler and GPU so if your machine powers on and
transmits to the display you're ready to move on when it comes to cpus we're
spoiled for choice thanks to AMD and Intel playing tit for tat over the last
year or so for us the best value for our money is the ryzen 5 2600 non-x from AMD
which unlike Intel's price competitors the core i5 8400 or 9400 f can be
overclocked it also has twice the number of threads which newer games like apex
legends can take full advantage of so with that in mind AMD steals the show at
this price compared to their own previous gen ryzen 5 1600x the 2600 is
slightly faster on average thanks to precision boost 2 and typically has more
overclocking headroom for a price difference of just about 6 retail to
install the CPU lift up the retention ARM on your motherboard
line up the triangle on the chip
which is right about there with the triangle on the motherboard
and gently yeah there we go place it into the socket it should just
drop in if the pins are aligned correctly so just visually make sure that the CPU is flush
with the socket before pushing the retention ARM down to lock it in place you may also want to gently press down
on the chip while you do this to ensure it doesn't shift around but gravity
really should do the job now our CPU comes with its own cooler AMD's own
wraith stealth and we'll be using it here to save money for more than a mild
overclock we'll want to replace it but for now we can go ahead and install it
by first removing these two plastic clips on the motherboard which helpfully
just use standard phillips head screws once that's done remove the cooler's
plastic shield covering the thermal compound if necessary this one just kind of fell off
line up with the socket like so the thinner
gauge here should go towards the top and then we just screw it into place where
those plastic clips used to be now you don't want to immediately tighten these
screws because if you do then it'll make uh screwing the other ones in more
difficult for one and two you're going to want to try and
use an x pattern to evenly distribute the uh
thermal compound here from here all we need to do is plug its
fan cable into the CPU fan header on our motherboard
like so and our CPU and cooler are now fully installed onto the memory now fast
memory is something that ryzen like me loves to chew on
but because fast memory gets expensive quickly we're primarily focused on
gaming performance there are diminishing returns at the time of writing g skills ages
ddr4 3000 16 Gigabyte kit is the sweet
spot based on what's available as it's priced in around the range you typically
find 2133 or 2400 kits unfortunately
since it was oh boy
okay that's going to make it in unfortunately since it was backordered
when we went to buy it and we had to get the parts in time for this video we had
to settle for this g-skill rip shots 5 at a similar price
if we wanted to grab a 3200 megahertz kit though we'd be paying around 25 for
the privilege for not much real world gain if you've never installed RAM
before then good news it's super easy but there's one thing you want to keep
in mind if you want to take advantage of dual channel and with ryzen you probably will
you'll need to make sure that you install your memory in alternating slots so two and four
just pull these tabs back line up the little notch
on the memory with the notch in the slot
and insert now you'll need to push down a little bit
until you hear a little click and on the other side as well
it'll take a little bit of force but not a whole lot um you don't really need to
worry about breaking anything but you might feel like you're putting too much
force in so let's do that with the other stick
and just visually inspect that we can't see the pins
and that everything is flush now we've been plugging stuff into this
thing but we haven't really gone over what it is yet we've gone with the
asrock b450m pro4 an inexpensive micro
atx AMD motherboard with four RAM slots and crucially the ability to overclock
our CPU now because the b450m pro 4 happens to
have decent vrms for power delivery we should be able to obtain reasonable
results with our ryzen 5 2600 otherwise it's actually pretty
unremarkable with no official support for sli just crossfire
and a fine array of i o that includes a vga port
dvi port and HDMI port that are only useful for an apu
not for us now to be clear we could have gotten away with a 50 board instead of a 70 one
if we didn't care about overclocking support but where's the fun in that
we are gonna use this guy
we literally chose the cheapest case available
okay fine i'll talk about it this is the rosewill srm-01 a micro atx
case that's about what you'd expect for its common sale price of 20
difficult to open box for one
it doesn't weigh anything uh what is going on here so for twenty
dollars you get a case that weighs nothing with very data aesthetics it's
got a single underside dust filter limited cable management a single
front usb 3.0 port on the side with the rest
being 2.0 this thing is not going to be easy or
fun to build in but that's not the point of this build is it the point is to get the best bang
for the buck and if it doesn't improve performance we're just going to have to
live with it thankfully we do have thumb screws one thing that it does have is
this drive tray and yes that is what it is so if we take out these two screws here
one on the bottom and one towards the top
like so
haha it swings out of place so yeah we can get a GPU in here if you
want to which we'll have too so this gives us all the room we'll need
although just barely now before we move on we need to get the case ready to
actually work in first we'll need to use these thumb
screws to take up both side panels yes the rare one too and yes they actually
gave us some screws on the rear with that done we'll remove the front
panel so we need to grip this little slot down here and just pull outward
there's no latch it should just pop right off
and from here all we need to do is just pull these cables through gently
they aren't held in with anything they're just routed right through
now there's not much in the way of cable management on this front panel there's
nothing particularly special about it but it does have these screws with wide rims
that hold everything into place so
we're going to want to take this one off next to the leds
and that'll free them up but we don't want to remove them what we want to do
is take these for the power and reset switch and route them down with them and
from here we'll want to take the led wires and pull them through here until
they're about the same length and loop the slack like that what we can do from
here is replace that screw and that has all of our front panel connections at
pretty much the perfect length to reach our motherboard
as for the usb 2.0 front panel audio and
usb 3.0 cables these are relatively easy to figure out
what we can do is just push them through here
and then out through this cable management port
for the power supply can be a little bit tricky because these
wires are thick but once we get it through
we'll route our front panel back through
close it back up should just snap on once you get the
posts aligned
and there we go so why did we go through the effort of doing that so doing it this way means
that our cables have just enough slack to go where they need to go
without having any extraneous length that we need to deal with later on for
cable management which will be a chore
speaking of the motherboard we can't celebrate yet because we still need to
install that this is where we run into our first real
problem with cheaping out on the case if we look in this baggie here there are
actually only six brass standoffs included there are no other standoffs
and our motherboard has eight mount points that means we're going to have to choose
where we need the most support so
we need to determine where
and this is why people don't like wearing esd straps
in this case it looks like we're going to need the most support in the top left
the top right everything in the middle because that's
where our GPU is going to go and probably the bottom middle here
where our front panel connects in and unfortunately that means the rest of
it is going to have to hang loose which means
the bottom right here bottom left
and the top middle are going to sag a little bit if you try
to put any pressure on them so with that mapped out
in the standoffs go now if you do decide to use a screwdriver for these um
be very careful because these are made of cheap brass
and this is very thin steel it will strip and you're going to have a bad
time better to just use your fingers to tighten them
you know what i probably should do this with a screwdriver
once we're done with that nonsense we won't forget our i o shield
which snaps into place from the inside but we want to make sure that it's
oriented correctly in this case the audio ports will be on the bottom
now we can finally get our motherboard installed for realsies now a pro tip for
anyone building in an older design case like this install your front panel
connectors now while the motherboard is still outside
the case this little lip down here is going to cause so many problems if you
try to do it afterwards now you'll want to check your motherboard's manual just
to see where everything plugs in but typically
the power switch is going to go into the top right
the reset switch will go right beneath that
and then hard drive power that'll go
next to the reset switch to the left uh positive usually is to the left which
i believe yep that's what the silk screen says
and we'll do the same for the power switch or power led all right so with
our front panel installed let's get our motherboard in
so we'll get it down under here hold this out of the way so it doesn't get
trapped underneath and line it up with our i o shields so if we align this
laterally you'll see the brass standoff show through which
will tell you that you have all of your standoffs in the right positions so
since we can see them we can count them to make sure we have them all in the
right spots so we have one two three
four five six so with the standoffs aligned to the
screw holes we'll take these fine threaded screws
and screw it down starting with the center to keep
everything aligned don't mind me i'm just gonna keep
screwing these in for the rest of time
yeah i done up
this is such a pain do you remember how i said you should
plug in the front panel before you you
put the board in did you forget to i forgot to put in these front panel
connectors oh yeah
and then i forgot my own advice about lifting this stupid cable
out of the way there we go now let's get
those screws back in okay
that was a lot of work just to get the motherboard in
but the phone's only just begun because we haven't gotten to the power supply
yet
just rethinking my life decisions right now
anyway you might expect that we cheaped out on the power supply too
but it's actually quite important for a variety of reasons the most important of
which being the longevity and stability of your computer's components for that
reason we set a stipulation that the power supply we chose would be 80 plus
bronze or better capable of 500 watts or higher continuous output and come with a
five-year warranty at minimum the least expensive power supply that
takes all of these boxes is the Corsair cx-550 which given the lack of modular
connections means our case choice is about to kick our proverbial butts
because unlike most modern cases the srm-01 from roswell mounts the power
supply up top which means not only do we have to line it up manually but uh even
though it does have a lip for the power supply to rest on
we still need to hold it in place while we screw it in or it could fall i want
to go home it's probably obvious but we can't
actually get this power supply in here until
we get these cables routed so let's do that
this little hole in the back here is quite convenient
for routing our power supply cables
oh and uh by the way because this power supply uh mounts up
here it acts as an exhaust that's actually what it's designed for back in
the day so we're gonna want the fan on the bottom
there we go yeah so you just gotta screw
it in then power supplies in so this mess is why we
couldn't install the power supply lying flat and it's also why we couldn't
install the 12 volt dps connector while the motherboard was outside of the case
like we normally recommend
we could have maybe installed the power supply first but that wouldn't really
have made our lives much easier so
let's go about routing these things shall we the uh
atx cable it's pretty easy just go into this little hole here
thankfully the 24 pin just uh has these extra four pins here
it's the 20 plus four atx connector which helps in managing
these cables just make sure to clip together
and push it down until it clicks all right so now for the 12 volt eps
connector and that's going to go through this little hole here
once it's through snap it together
then line it up
which can be a little bit tricky but thankfully we've got plenty of clearance
so with it in the slot just push down until you
hear the click now the next thing we're going to want to do is pull all of the
slack from inside the case to this side of the case
and that will leave as little as possible for us to deal
with on the inside uh we'll also
probably never need these uh cables here at least not right now
so we can push those back through if i had been thinking ahead i would
have just not routed them through but uh yeah that's not what we're doing
today so since we'll basically never need these
we can tie them off and leave them in this conveniently
located five and a quarter inch bay that we'll also never use because
who owns an optical drive anymore so into this little drive bay these go
and we never had to look at them again speaking of storage we chose the wd blue
250 Gigabyte m.2 module for its low
profile and low cost now i know you can get cheaper ssds but
this was the cheapest that included a dram cache which is extremely important
for performance as we've seen in the past now to install the module we're going to
have to find the m.2 slot on the motherboard for our drive the problem is
that the one in the center of the board here labeled ultra m.2 is only for NVMe
meaning that our SATA SSD needs to go in the other slot
which is conveniently located down at the bottom right of the board so we'll
line up the notches on the end of the module with the
key on the slot
and it should go right in we won't see any more pins
so we can then take this retaining screw
screw it down and we're nice and secure
you'll notice that it covers up the bottom middle motherboard screw which is
why we didn't install it before now 250 gigabytes of solid state storage isn't
enough for everything we want to run on this machine i mean individual games
commonly can be up to 50 gigabytes or larger these days i've seen some that
are like closer to 100 and that's why we've got this two terabyte seagate barracuda which uh
critically is a 7200 RPM drive meaning that while
it's more power hungry than the slower 5400 RPM options we'll be loading our
games more quickly plus since it's an older model it's just as cheap
now we've got a couple of options for mounting the drive and neither are very
good the first option is to just install it in the bottom of the five and a quarter
inch bay where the guide rail is provided but unless you have a long neck
screwdriver you're just not going to get a solid mount with that in mind we'll be
mounting to
this yes i am serious now the manual says to
mount the drives here with their connectors facing the rear of the case
like this but
we'll get much cleaner cable management if we mount it like this with the
connectors facing the front we can hide those cables through the front panel or
via the five and a quarter inch bay in case you're wondering yes we could mount
the drive or second drive to this bottom half here but that would interfere with
our GPU's pci express connectors when we go to install them as you'll see
speaking of connectors now it's time to cable manage this thing
we've been kind of doing that the whole time but uh now that the drive is securely
mounted it's time to tidy up the cabling in preparation for the GPU which will be
the last thing that we install here and of course we need to get the drive
wired up and uh yeah
you know if i were thinking more clearly i probably would have done the cable
management before the drive the drive but uh you know what
since our velcro ties are actually too
big for the loops that are provided here on the case
i'll go ahead and run these now and then cable management afterwards
just to tidy things up thankfully we only have the one that we
need to run i don't need this to be hanging out here
either i'm not very good at this
remember that uh SATA cable chain that we left out
at this point this is where we need it
i'm going to cross it over like this with one of my handy dandy tweezers
clip this off or not there we go and now
we've got just enough length
that hurt to feed it down through
this hole here it's a little difficult to see
there we go as a bonus we can fish this
up through that same hole and we can send it out through here
but then we can go back down here with the rest of the front panel cables
and plug directly into the motherboard
then we can close it back up
now we have a fully connected drive with basically no mess
so taking care not to cross over any cables we'll slide our usb 3.0
header into here
and plug it directly into the board
like so i kind of hate those connectors but
we will have to pull the slack back out
but gently because these connectors have a tendency to either break or pull loose
with very little force so with that done now we can start tying these up now this
step isn't terribly important but it's important to me flatten out a little bit
all right so we need both of these but we only need one of them to have all of
their connectors so we can tie one of these back just for the sake of neatness
so we can fish both of these through here
then i can tie this down like so now i
need to figure out what to do with this guy that'll at least keep it in place
more or less
although i would really like another cable management point now one thing you might notice is that
it actually isn't flush with the sides of the case but that's not actually a
bad thing because our panel
has this nice big bump on it
which lets us just slide it on
okay and the front looks pretty clean too which is a good thing because now
we need to install our graphics card our goal for this build is a 1440p 60
capable machine so for that we're turning to the GeForce rtx 2070 gaming
oc card from Gigabyte it's about twelve dollars or three
percent more than the uh standard gaming card but it's clocked a
good seven percent higher which means it's a trade-off worth making in the
pursuit of absolute best price to performance at this budget anyway
and uh yeah let's get this in to install
our GPU we're first going to need to break off these tabs that cover the pci
express slots now this is a hallmark of cheaper cases
and nothing to be concerned about you can just gently stick a screwdriver in
here like so to kind of get it out of
position and then you can just kind of
bend it up and down a few times like this
and they just break right off now we already have most of ours free
because i did do a test fit in this but for you guys you're going to have to pry
these free so once the slots are free it's time for the main event now the
first thing we should do is make sure that the tab on the back of the slot is in the
down position it was already there but
if it's up just push it down that will unlock the retention clip
for our GPU which can go in
like so now one more thing to note
this case has basically no
room back here install your pci express power
connectors first before you do anything else now angling this in is a little bit
tricky in a case like this but
once you have it aligned all you need to do is give it a little
press until you hear the click now we need to do is screw in our retention
screws now
once you've tidied up the pci express cables and gotten everything
nice and organized
it's time to take a step back and admire your work
it's been rough but we're almost done
it's time to go ahead and slide the side panels back on
and secure them into place with the thumb screws
like so so now we'll plug everything in
and wait the longest few seconds of our lives
it's powered on
will it post
oh keyboard lit up hey asrock
helpfully asrock shows you exactly which key to match so we just match delete or
you can hit f2 now most of this stuff in the BIOS
we'll probably want to leave at defaults for now but primarily what we want to do
here is enable xmp which can be done by going over to the oc tweaker
then going down to xmp setting
and choosing xmp 2.0 profile one and we should see that uh our RAM is now
running at the proper speed which is great so we will go ahead
and do save changes and exit
all right looks like Windows is installed i won't go into the step by
step on how to do that but for those of you who are stuck and do
want to install Windows grab an 8 Gigabyte or larger usb key and put it
into another computer that's already running Windows from here you can download the media creation tool from
microsoft which can automatically set up a Windows installer on your usb key once
that's done just plug it in reboot it should automagically start the Windows
setup process and once that's done you should already have all of your drivers
installed out of the box but you'll want the latest NVIDIA driver along with the
AMD chipset driver which you can grab from their respective websites now as
for how this thing performs well i've already loaded up the drive with a bunch
of tools and games to test drive so let's give it from spin shall we
let's do cinebench i guess
okay yeah that's about what i'd expect Linus likes doom let's do a shadow of the tomb
raider and run the benchmark yeah that's pretty good
high 60s 1440p highest
up above 70 now probably dropped down to like the low 60s at minimum
yeah wow okay that's actually more impressive
than i thought it would be so there you have it an unassuming box well wired
and filled with nothing but the best bang for buck components you can get for
a thousand dollars or less absolutely no fluff
this plate makes magnet mounted metal prints that are durable and don't
require any power tools in order to hang them they've got over a quarter million
different artworks spanning a bunch of different styles and influences and with
their easy magnetic mounting there's no holes in the wall and you can easily
replace them they plant 10 trees for every display purchased and you can use
code LTT to save 15 through the link in
the video description thanks for watching guys if this video
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kind of combination of the best of both worlds
no more Linus yeah we win
Linus is retiring forcibly