Personal Rig Update 2012 Part 16 - Motherboard & Graphics Card Swap Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2014-05-07
·
3,038 words · ~15 min read
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buy an Intel knock barebones PC and get a limited edition t-shirt and in-game
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items for Planet Side 2 click now to learn
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more so um finally personal rig update
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time it's actually been done for kind of a while so I have my glass window on
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there you can actually even tell NVIDIA hi slick hello you can actually
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even tell NVIDIA how much clearer that
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makes the side panel window so I'm doing a couple small upgrades number one and
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people ask me why I use such a ghetto
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water cooling setup with curved tubes and you know like it's not it's not the
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nicest looking water cooling in the world the reason is because I do things like this I'm going to swap a
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motherboard without actually changing any of my tubing and without making my
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life more difficult than it has to be mine is upgradeable which if you have a
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really really tight runs and you have like you know perfect um you know curved
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fittings and then straight tubing runs or whatever else you can't really you
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don't really have that same flexibility so I'm also upgrading my graphics card
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so I'm going to be going from the GTX 590 that's in there to this GTX Titan
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and uh that is for one reason and one reason only because 590 is still a
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beastly card great performance but the thing that's missing is support for
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streaming to NVIDIA Shield which is something that I want to be able to do
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so we can go ahead and pull the side panel off oh yeah these are something
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that I actually added since the last update so these are just little uh
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decorative hey Focus piece of junk yeah
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there we go little decorative uh knobs
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they don't actually hold anything on the glass is held on by um an industrial
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strength adhesive in here so yeah those don't do anything they just are for
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looks and they're like the cheapest possible thing that I could find at Home
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Depot that didn't look absolutely terrible so there's a there's a look at
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the insides so I've got crucial ballistics Tracer tactical whatever the
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uh with the LEDs memory there's that
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gold CPU block so boss and then there's
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the graphics card that I'll be pulling out all right so I roped slick into
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holding the camera for me for a minute here so I'm just on the last screw to
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pull out the motherboard here so I just got to find somewhere to hold it by I'm
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going to go with this heat sink there we go
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and this my friends is why I do things
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the way I do them because I can extract my
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motherboard just like
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this and probably what I've been doing this maybe what six seven minutes maybe
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yeah and you got all those cards out too and I got all the cards out so I can
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extract the motherboard just like that that's not a card that you pulled out
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and that reveals the oh shoot okay there's one
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thing I missed that SATA cable yeah come
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on locking SATA cables love that all
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right so we can go ahead and put that
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down okay now this is where things are going to get a little bit tricky because
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I got to drain this graphics card in order to swap in this graphics card and
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that's one thing I haven't looked that closely at is how well the Barb
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positions are going to line up between these two cards because I don't want to
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redo my tubing if I can get away with it
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so so let's just kind of try to sort of
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visually line these up and kind of bad yeah yeah that's going to be okay so
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we're going to use this bucket right here as a drain bucket we're just going
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to pop one of the fittings off of the graphics card we're going to undo it and
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then just uh drain into here I don't
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have to fully drain the loop which is great because um I just have to drain
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the part that I need to swap in the new graphics card put that in and then it
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means that it's going to be much quicker to bleed uh bleed the air out of when
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we're done in fact I may not even need to top up the reservoir in order to get it back up and running so this is
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extremely unorthodox I don't really recommend doing this but what I'm doing
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right now is I'm loosening one of the plugs here and we're just going to drain
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just the card and anything that would sit above it while we swap it out for a
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different one now you know the funny funny conversation slick and I just had
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about GTX 590 he's all like hey uh I
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would take that card off your hands and I'm all like like hey are you sure and
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he's like yeah sure and I'm like no Shadow play he's like oh crap GTX 590 is
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probably the best card that just makes absolutely no sense right now from a
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features perspective performance-wise if you're not planning to stream to a
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shield or use Shadow play so game streaming on Twitch or anything like
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that man it's such a beast I'd actually kind of forgotten I was looking it up
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the other night this thing owns the 680
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I'd completely forgotten about that it just Stomps all over it in terms of
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actual FPS performance so uh still a
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good card just got to move over to something else I mean raw FPS I don't
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think Titan's going to be that much faster it might not even be at all
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having the bigger frame buffer will help though because GTX 590 is going to be
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held back by each of the gpus having only 1 and A2 gigs so if you wanted to
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go higher than 2 and 1/2k probably or even higher than 1080p in some of the
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more modern titles then that might hold you back a little bit I think that was
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pretty much all the water we're going to get out of it probably wow that was was pretty
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painless might be speaking too soon here though you never know I've been known to
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do that from time to time oh this is going to be tricky here's something to
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watch out for guys so if you're ever trying to do a ghetto water cooling Loop
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upgrade like this watch out for this so when I disconnect this I'm going to have
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to secure it above the end down here
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somehow because otherwise all the water from that Reservoir will come dumping
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out of it and that'll be a problem so I just got to watch out for that so the uh
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crazy Russian gave me this a little while ago and I had kind of a Nostalgia
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moment just for lws I mean remember guys between the best decent thermal compound
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on the market and the worst decent thermal compound on the market we're
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talking a few degrees so just for laws I'm going to be using ocz Ultra 5 plus
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thermal paste on my 3970x and I've decided to change the order of
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operations a little bit here so I was going to do the video card swap first
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but instead I think I'm going to put the motherboard in first because that'll
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allow me um that'll give me somewhere to put the video card once I'm done so that
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it doesn't just kind of flop all over the place so uh I'm going to get that
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put in right now this is a relatively small upgrade but I'm actually ditching
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the killer Nick it's just causing driver issues again even though it has a really
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cool red LED on it and stuff and I'm throwing in an Intel uh server Nick so
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we're going to go go that route instead it's a bit of an old one but it supports
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everything that I need it to support and at least takes some of the processing load off of the CPU not that it doesn't
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have plenty to spare but you know every little bit counts right putting the raid
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card back in for those of you who haven't seen it before that's running to
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eight Corsair ssds that are running in raid zero giving me a total of around
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900 gigs of SSD based
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storage I don't know how this always happens but like my build log videos
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always end up with things I don't recommend in them like jamming a pen in
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a piece of tubing to keep it from uh spraying water all over the place I used
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to have proper tubing plugs that I used to use for this stuff but I don't really
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have them anymore then like twist tying the block up here so
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that this doesn't drain into the rest of the system anyway here's the new
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graphics card that's going to be going in and uh yeah GTX Titan koolance block
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looks absolutely beautiful here we go so as you may or may not have noticed the
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computer is now upside down um we have a bit of a problem I dropped my back plate
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behind the motherboard so I got to go
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home see my family and stuff so we're going to call that it for uh for today
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but it's like I flipped it upside down and I did manage to get it to come back
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so that's good news I don't have to pull the motherboard out uh other good news
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is the graphics card is now installed the fittings are on and we're going to
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be pretty much ready to rock as soon as I get that uh CPU block mounted and get
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these expansion cards put in very very
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excited all right so I got it sorted out
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uh Fair bit of picking away at the back I also had to completely destroy what
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little I had done in terms of cable management back here in order to access
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the back plate so that's going to be a bit of a mess to fix now but the
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expansion cards are all in there we go
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oh that one needs to be cleaned Zonar zens from Theus with that
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Sennheiser co-branding on it there we go
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maybe that's a little bit better now ah that gleam there we go all right so
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there's the LSI 92 68i there's my Intel
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whatever it is that gigabit Ethernet card as well as sound card and graphics
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card so the last thing left here is to
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oh this is something I did not think of
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uh-oh I don't need one of the two pins
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anymore so this extra two pins I do not
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need that's fascinating um guess I'll have to figure
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out somewhere to hide those good thing I still have that other side panel off and
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I haven't done anything with the wires all right so there she is with the
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board swap done get a bit of a better angle what I
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love about this board is it has tons of piec P Express expansion so you can
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still add like another PCI e6x card
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potentially something else down here if I was willing to move this down a little
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bit I wanted to give it a bit more room to breathe than it had before though so
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yeah I can still put a couple more PCIe adex cards in here which is pretty darn
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impressive so uh now I just got to fix things up at the back a little bit close
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it up and then we're good to go
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you're good so the ultimate first world problem is like having too many ssds
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piled up behind your motherboard tray so you like can't close your chassis
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anymore see that they actually stick out quite a bit from here you got to you got
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to Mush them down flat there so um what
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I have to do with my system is basically lay it down on its side this is why I
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don't like taking up the side panel you can see there's quite a bulge here and I
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just got to see it's quite a tight fit
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now that I had it painted because it changes the tolerances a little bit
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for fitting together and I got a slider
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shut like that in order to contain everything but other than
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that close it up
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okay who now you did it now she's done
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and that is what the inside is in theory
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supposed to look like so that's a little bit gimpy right there that's SATA cable
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but I guess that's not too bad I feel bad cuz like the backs of the cards are
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dusty and stuff but it's not exactly a new build in the same way that it was
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new when I put it together like months ago so time to take it home and fire it
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up and get some uh Shield streaming gaming going on
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here all right friends this is the
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moment where we find out if she boots up
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boots up or powers on and boots on all
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right let's see how that water level's doing in the rez oh looks like she's not
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bleeding perfectly okay so let's oh
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looks like it decided to take another crack at things itself that's
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interesting
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okay come on pump
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come on postcode keep doing things waa
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that's a good sign all right so she
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boots but I don't see anything that looks like particularly good water flow
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in there so we're going to shut her down see if we can let some of that uh
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the air bubbles that are stuck in the pump bleed out all right so I'll be back when we try this
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again and that my friends is why I
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always recommend a variable speed pump
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and not cheaping out and getting the B version of the D5 because I'm able to
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tweak the speed in order to just jar
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loose the bubbles and I'm able to get things running so looks like I didn't
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even lose enough fluid during the refill to completely drain my res so all I got
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to do is top this baby up and we're pretty much ready to rock I hope she
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boots up I guess we'll might as well find out together
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right I think that's the whole point of this little vlogging thing oh that
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doesn't look like enough drives oh there they are okay good normally it's only
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one on the second page so I guess this
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board does it differently for some reason that freaked me out a little so
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you can see my RAID zero has been
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found 9 100
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gigabytes okay please boot up please
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boot up H oh it might not be set to the correct
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uh boot order oh okay well the Rams
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protected that's good cuz officially on paper this RAM is not
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compatible F1 tender
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setup yeah I'll spare you guys the
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suspense and There She Goes booting up into Windows with the fresh changes to
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the hardware it looks like we are good so thank you for checking out uh build
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log number I guess this is part 16 of
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the personal rig update that I guess is finally sort of done I still want to do
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kind of a you know like a Glam video showcase of the
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rig or something but I'm not quite done with my setup yet because as you can see
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I'm still running an older monitor this is like an ancient BenQ 1920x 600 thing
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I've got a new monitor that I've had on order for a while I've had people asking
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me also um for a little while here what I
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use for peripherals so this is my replacement of Cari laser this is my
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third one now so that I mean I guess I use it a lot but you know they I guess
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they die but I can't get used to anything else I've tried um this is a
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Mex zable 60 uses Cherry MX blacks which are not generally my favorite switches
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but I like this particular keyboard these are my steel Series 7 H's that I
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use for when I'm sitting here and when I don't have something else to plug into
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the essence One external USB sound card
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and Dack I use Corsair SP 2500 speakers
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and just to show my uh my total
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nonbiased I balance out my swag with AMD
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swag and this is actually a a ruby sword
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so he uh he sits here with all that stuff which I think is kind of funny
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it's my little swag guy there's my Star Citizen citizen card or whatever they're
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called and I guess that's uh that's pretty much it full tour proper tour and
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some Glam of the system coming when I get around to it thanks guys for
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watching as always don't forget to subscribe to L TCH tips for unboxings reviews and other computer videos
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he