We Overclocked EVERYTHING - Even the FANS!
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2019-05-06
·
2,098 words · ~10 min read
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yeah there you go
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today we are gonna take this pc
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and overclock overvolt or otherwise
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run beyond the manufacturer's specifications every single part of it
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that we can some of the stuff we're gonna do will seriously improve
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performance and some of it definitely won't big shout out to sonic
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by the way for sponsoring this craziness
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let's get started
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so it shouldn't be news to most of you that the first thing you need when you're overclocking is a solid power
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supply inadequate or unstable power can
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adversely affect stability so we chose the seasonic prime titanium fanless a
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seriously cool unit that is literally silent because it has
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no fan so it's the first thing that we're going
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to tune by plugging it into one of the
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208 volt power outlets in the other unit
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so we're running on 120 volt right now sucking about 270 watts
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let's see what happens here
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all right so after a quick cable swap here for this
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beefy extension cord running out of the other room
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we're running at about 190 volts so
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there was some voltage drop and our same stress test
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is now between 255 and
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260 watts this doesn't make anything faster
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but it does improve your system's efficiency though
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probably not enough that i would if you're in north america like run out and
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get 200 volt power put into your house now before doing anything else you're
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gonna want your motherboard's latest BIOS so you can see ours is so new that
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it has little animations in here you're also going to want the latest os updates
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and a handful of tuning utilities then you want to get some baseline
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readings in your preferred performance tests so you can make sure that any
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efforts you're making any dials that you're turning are actually doing
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something and that what they're doing is positive now we've done more detailed
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CPU overclocking guides in the past so we're going to skip over some details
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here but basically by adjusting our CPU
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multiplier to 51 and disabling svid we were able to get
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our core i5 8600k from 4.3 gigahertz on
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all cores to 5.1 gigahertz with all cores active at
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1.275 volts so that's only a
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0.005 volt increase and it yields a 20
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or higher improvement in our CPU tests
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so we are off to a very good start
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now this is usually where we stop tooling
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around with the processor because CPU cache overclocking
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doesn't really help much outside of very memory intensive applications but not
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today after getting your CPU core dialed in
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you can actually start upping the cache until it's at a similar frequency to the
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core or until it causes uh
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stability problems so ours was able to go from 4 to 4.8 gigahertz with a little
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bit more CPU voltage which actually did
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manage to give us a measurable boost in
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cinebench now when it comes to RAM overclocking we
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generally recommend staying away from xmp or other auto memory overclocking
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since while sometimes it works so it can be worth a shot
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other times it can be questionably stable
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as for our kit well it's rated at 3200 megahertz and our overclocking result
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was 3 200 megahertz even with extra voltage
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so we didn't technically overclock our RAM but we did overclock our system past
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the jdec ddr4 spec so
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yeah we got an extra 27 points in cinebench
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so we're going to call that a success from there
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we did actually try fine-tuning the base
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clock of the system as well but especially given that we already had
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everything else like tuned to the red line it wasn't having
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any of it this whole thing is on the knife's edge of stability
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as it is so then with all the tuning we've done
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so far what do we get for our trouble how has
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this affected our gaming experience
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turns out we've netted a whopping 1.2
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percent increase in 3d mark times by and a whole two FPS
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in far cry 5. so
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it might be time to overclock our graphics my preferred strategy for this
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is MSI afterburner in the foreground so we can make any adjustments that we'd
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like and some kind of stress test running in windowed mode in the
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background so we can monitor stability so you fire up afterburner grab that
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there power knob and rip it all the way
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to the max in our case it's like
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112 some older gpus do let you go higher
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then you incrementally increase the core clock until the system becomes unstable
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so we landed on 150 megahertz for our
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core for our memory clock we ended up with plus
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275 so you do that right after your core
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and this gave us more than a 10 frame per second increase in rise of the
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tomb raider although
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everything else hardly changed for some reason
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that's kind of weird why is that well as it turns out NVIDIA's GPU boost 3
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was already turboing the card up close to 2 gigahertz without our adjustments
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that's much higher than the advertised 1683 that's because the cooling
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capabilities of this card are able to sustain it so that means that without
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overclocking you're actually getting close to the maximum performance you'd
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be able to out of a modern card like a
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which is great for most people but
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overclockers without BIOS modding and
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like physically modifying the card to apply more voltage to the GPU
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don't get a lot of performance gains to brag about
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so up until now everything has been like a nanaimo bar
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just goodness but there has been one downside
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thermals so under full load
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our processor for instance is about 15 degrees celsius hotter
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but what could we overclock
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to make the computer cooler what if we were to give more voltage
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to the fans so stashed in here where a hard drive
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would normally go is something pretty special this is a dc
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to dc converter so all we do is plug
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standard molex 12 volt into this side
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then alex is going to adjust this little potentiometer here
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go for it nice whoa can you hear that
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now we've got 17 volts coming out the
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other side which is where we have our fans attached
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so in ida 64 what kind of an improvement
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will we see bam CPU temps down to 69 degrees a seven
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degree improvement and all we had to give up was sound since this guy went
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from like i don't know 20 decibels or so we're not sure since it was below the
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sound floor of our office thanks in part to the fanless power supply up to 55
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decibels which is around a normal conversation or an air conditioner this
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also by the way won't help the lifetime of your fans our noctuas
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actually might be fine but cheaper ones will likely end up letting out the magic
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blue smoke before long so i think pretty much everything inside
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the case is overclocked now but what about the things outside it
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like your mouse and your keyboard and your monitor can they be overclocked
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yes yes they can okay so for your mouse the
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pulling rate in Windows is 125 hertz
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meaning that there can be up to eight milliseconds of lag between moving your
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mouse and it registering which can lead to noticeable delays in fast-paced games
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in Windows 7 it was possible to overclock the polling rate on your usb
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ports which could be great if your mouse
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sensor could handle it but Windows 8 and up have changed the way that usb drivers
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work and this is no longer possible fortunately a lot of gaming mouse
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manufacturers have found ways to solve this problem for you since most of them
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default to 500 hertz and you can use mouse rate to check yours for yourself
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so click and move your mouse around
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bippity boppity this is going to max out at 500.
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there you have it now with that said
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we can go higher this final mouse right here has a
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firmware tool that you can grab we get one crack at this by the way so
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uh and run
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to flash it to a 1 000 hertz firmware
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and then other mouse manufacturers like Corsair and razer have software tools
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that work similarly let's just let this finish up and then
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we'll see if it worked hey success
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oh i can't even i can't even move it fast enough
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to get all the way to a thousand okay whatever it's definitely over 500.
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as for keyboards this is largely dependent on the manufacturer so this
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Corsair one can actually be adjusted with this switch that's right on the
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back of it bear in mind of course that the reason they make this so easy is
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that it can affect compatibility with your system other keyboards
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may not be possible to overclock at all
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moving on to the monitor overclocking this is actually super easy if you've
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got an NVIDIA card all you need to do is go into change resolution right here
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then click customize tick enable resolutions not exposed by
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the display and create yourself a custom resolution accepting all of the terms
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and conditions and warnings that come along with it from here all you gotta do
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is dial in a new refresh rate then click
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test even a small increase over 60 hertz
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like going to 70 or 75 should make a
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very noticeable difference in games if you've got the GPU horsepower to drive
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it now there ended up being a few things that you can't overclock like your SSD
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or your hard drive like if you've got a 7200 RPM disc
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that's all she's got and the closest thing would be buying a faster drive in
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the first place like a wd velociraptor
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that spins at 10 000 RPM
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but like even that is much slower than an SSD also we tried pretty hard to get
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the webcam overclocked and while it's technically possible to increase the FPS
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while decreasing the resolution our logitech unit just
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wouldn't play ball now
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i was really on the fence about including this but alex insisted that we
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include one last thing that you can overclock and it's probably the slowest
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thing about your computer you
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if you don't touch type learn to touch type also learn all of
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the keyboard shortcuts that you can and if you're doing the same operation often
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enough many modern keyboards allow you to
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program it as a macro key you only have to press one button to execute it and
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there's a joke here it's terrible since although you can't stop ai and machines
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from taking over maybe you can use these tips and tricks to stay useful for a
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little bit longer so big thanks to sea sonic for
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sponsoring this video it's pretty freaking cool that they were able to
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make a 600 watt power supply with literally zero noise
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and that they were cool with us than putting a super loud system around it uh
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thanks for watching you guys if this system this video sucked no the system doesn't
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suck the system is cool if this video sucked you know what to do but if it was
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awesome get subscribed hit that like button or check out the link to where to
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buy the stuff we featured in the video description also down there is our merge
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store which has cool shirts like this one and our community forum which you
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should totally join all we've got to do
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you're in you're in you got it oh you're not in yeah not quite
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dang it alex like close to end okay you gotta you gotta finesse it okay you just
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gotta get the pins kind of in there and then
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you get a you're not in yet you know what you'll know when i'm in
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well yeah