Upgrading Edzel's Video Editing Workstation
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2014-05-07
·
9,804 words · ~49 min read
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hotspot shield service makes your internet browsing safer more secure and
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fully private click now to learn more so our main video editor is actually
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getting a new editing machine so it's
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more of a frankenstein together of some existing things and
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uh you know get some new things and we're kinda we're gonna end up with
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what's a very strange rig so for people who are sitting there
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thinking oh well this will be the optimal video editing workstation no no
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no this is not necessarily what we're going for here his machine is built for
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a very specific usage model which is what he exactly does and that's that's
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pretty much it so i'm going to run through a quick parts list here
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starting off with an Intel core i7 3960x
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this is where the whole this isn't necessarily stuff i would
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recommend thing comes into play because normally for a video editing workstation
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i'd probably recommend a 3930k as opposed to a 3960x because extreme
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editions don't really offer a great price to performance ratio we're going
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to have 32 gigs of kingston value RAM
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ddr3 1600 absolutely nothing special just because it happens to be validated
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for the board that's more important to us than necessarily squeezing an extra
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two three percent of performance out of whatever it is we're doing i'm going to
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be using an ASUS rampage for jean
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motherboard okay it's not a workstation board
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however it should be noted that even ASUS's gaming or channel boards go
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through very a significant amount of validation
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in terms of sort of weird obscure card operation and stuff like that and he'll
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be running a 10 gigabit nick also it should be noted that rog boards have
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very high end vrm solutions we're going to be building this inside a small
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enclosure that's not going to have a whole lot of space so we're going to need something that runs as coolly and
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as efficiently as possible and in addition to that basically it's just uh
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as sweet as it gets in terms of micro
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atx lga 2011 motherboards because we want
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more cores we're running six cores in this machine six cores twelve threads
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because we need wicked CPU performance with that said we also need wicked GPU
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performance we need lots of pci express slots so we're going to have two
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graphics cards in this system one of them is going to be i'm just going to
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reach over here one of them is going to be a quadro 4000 and we used to use this
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for all the cuda acceleration as well as
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getting 10 bit color depth capabilities however we are going to be changing that
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up a little bit because this is based on a gtx 470 it's based on an ancient GPU
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at this point so it's kind of gotta go
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which means that we still want it for the better color depth output but we
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need something a little bit beefier when it comes to cuda acceleration and that's
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why we're adding a secondary graphics card to the system so we're going to be
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throwing in the GeForce gtx 780 wind force from Gigabyte
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this should be able to stay cooled adequately because of its massive cooler
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even though it's in a very small matx case and should give us lots of cuda
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acceleration performance for applications like davinci resolve or
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outputting using the built-in h.264 encoding
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feature in kepler um diesel found a what
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what was it it's a plug-in yeah a plug-in that is allows it to use
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that to be much much faster than relying just on the CPU but of course we still
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need a beefy CPU because there are lots of things we're going to be doing that will be CPU bound as well for the power
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supply i don't know how borderline this is going to be but i've got a dark power
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pro 550 watt uh we're going to find out
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if that ends up sort of reaching the max or not once we finish
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the build so if it does then i'll swap it out for something else but i went
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with a dark power power supply because they're very very quiet and one of the
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things that happens a lot of the time with particularly diesel's rig because
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he's got it running balls to the walls and maxed out all the time is that it
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runs really really loud so i'm hoping this will help a little bit although
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the CPU cooler is going to be a big part of that equation as well now i needed
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something low profile and this is again part of the ghetto-ness of this rig in
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spite of how awesome it's going to be is that this was the only low prior profile
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CPU cooler i had lying around so this is a phanteks phtc 90 ls which is extremely
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low profile like honestly this could probably go in like a 1u almost no
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probably like a 2u but it's got this little tiny fan it claims to be lga 2011
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compatible and capable of dissipating the massive amount of heat that these
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chips output however i don't think we'll be doing any overclocking with a heat
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sink this size um so there you go i guess we'll we'll find
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out what happens we might end up swapping this out as well but if their
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marketing claims are accurate then we may end up using it anyway i think
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that's most of the components oh yeah we're using a crucial m4 SSD just
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because they're reliable we trust them it's not the best performing SSD on the
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market by any stretch but we're not really doing anything performance sensitive with it
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we've got a velociraptor one terabyte that's going to go in there that just
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acts as a random scratch disc or sort of
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temporary storage but mostly we're going to be storing
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things off of the machine itself on our 10 gigabit capable nas server so that's
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why we need that 10 gigabit nic card so
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that means we've got a single slot quadro a 10 gigabit single slot nic as
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well as a dual slot gtx 780 all in this
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machine now i ended up with a silverstone sg01 i was actually going to
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use what is that thing i was going to use an sg09 but what i realized is that
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it doesn't have a five and a quarter inch bay and i wanted a built-in card
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reader because as you can imagine doing video production reading off of memory
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cards comes up a fair bit it also has built-in fan control and he's one of the
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few people i've ever met who actually tunes his fans according to what he's
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doing so i'll set that up for him as well
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and i think that pretty much wraps it up so here we go
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so the first step for me is usually CPU installation it should be noted that lga
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2011 cpus never come with a stock heatsink i believe you can actually buy
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an Intel oem heatsink although the cost
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of it and the performance of it makes like basically don't buy it please
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yeah it makes no sense whatsoever just get a nice aftermarket one or
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any aftermarket one and you'll be better off with that so you can see the lga
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2011 chip is quite large but installs in much the same way that you would have
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come to expect if you've ever installed an Intel CPU before in an lga socket so
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there's a little golden triangle on that corner of the CPU right there
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and then there's a corresponding triangle on the socket itself now it is
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a little bit different in that it has two retention arms so you lift up the
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one okay basically you can't take out the wrong one because if you pull on it
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it's it's stuck so you take out the one with the with the hook then you take out
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the one with the kink in the middle of it then once that's done you can lift
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out the entire hold down plate position the CPU inside the socket
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okay make sure it's in there then put this down put them back down in
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the order that they were originally removed in and remove the cover i only
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recommend removing the cover once you are done
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doing the things that you're doing all right so we've got some included thermal compound
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and i do put a little bit more on lga 2011 CPU simply because they're larger
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and the dyes under the heat spreader are
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larger than the lga lga 1155 1156 or 1150 cpus now here goes
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this cooler so you can see we've got a nice shiny surface on the bottom it's
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all brand new it's still never a bad idea to clean things off with alcohol
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but we're not gonna worry too much about that in this case
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for mounting hardware at least this uh this cooler has an extremely
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straightforward mounting system this is one of the things i like about lga 2011
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it's uh it's got a back plate built in which means that
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many coolers are just a matter of aligning the lga 2011 screw with the
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built-in back plate and screwing them in you can see the springs on there are
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going to make sure that the tension is correct so you should be able to go all
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the way to the end of the stopper tightening in a cross pattern not
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tightening any of the screws fully until you are
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until you have all of them mostly tight so here we go
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okay we're back so diesel has seen fit to actually help me with this since it's
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his machine that i'm building right now so all we got to do is go ahead and
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put these under the little
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oh hold on did i do that right
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oh boy okay this is this is pretty finicky uh
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after careful consultation of the manual we realized we had the fan upside down
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so we flipped it around installed everything completely the opposite way
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and now it makes an awful lot more sense we should also
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you know since the whole point of this is we don't want it to be super loud
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install the little rubber strips that are included so those should keep some
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of the vibrations from the fans from being passed to the heatsink itself
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so there we go and by fans i mean fan there's only one singular
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grammar is important even though the world today doesn't seem
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to think so i really am getting old
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just go ahead and hook those on so it should be noted that many heat sinks
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have this whole feature where there's a groove here that you can hook the wire
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clip into however most of them have some leeway and flexibility in terms of where
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you can hook them onto not this heat sink so these ones are straight these
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ones are grooved the wire only goes where the wire goes and that is it
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so i usually tie the CPU fan cable into a bit of a little knot so that it
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doesn't get in the way of anything before plugging it into the fan header
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so here's diesel's x79 shuttle pc which was actually really hot at the back here
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because he was just editing on it so the CPU sockets right under there quite
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toasty this was serving us perfectly well
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except that limited expansion so there's that quadro
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there's that 10 gigabit nick how do we add something that augments the cuda
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capabilities of the system well we can't because it only has the two expansion
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slots so that's really the only reason why we're changing this out
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for something else so here's the uh here's the guts i'm actually pulling the
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RAM right now more than anything else and slick took my screwdriver
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so i can only take out thumb screws at the moment you're almost done
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almost all right so there we'll do a tour of this to stall for time so
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there's that single slot quadro 4000 that gives us up to 10 bit 10 bit output
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right yeah mind you we only have an 8 bit panel at best we have a pa246 here
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it's 10 bit i thought it was 8 bit
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oh okay well there you go apparently we have a 10 bit panel so that's where
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diesel does all of his uh all of his color work let me go ahead and pull
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these out there's that 10 gigabit nick that gives him pretty much
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un bottlenecked access to our raid array
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oh man this thing's hot holy cow
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ow it says right on it it's hot don't touch
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it so now we know
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all right so here's our RAM guys please do note that even though it might not
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seem like it i am grounding myself before i touch sensitive components so
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you'll usually ground yourself on chassis or power supply or some large piece of
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metal is usually adequate if you were going to do things properly you'd want
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to use an anti-static wrist strap whether you put it around your wrist or your ankle is totally up to you
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so here's our quad channel kingston value RAM memory i really don't
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on our internal machines here we can install this in the rampage i really
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don't believe in spending a ton of money on fancy memory because i have not
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observed a huge performance difference however there are environments where you
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will see better performance from better memory
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ecc would probably be a recommended upgrade for this machine
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or well for a rendering workstation i don't know that the rampage board
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supports ecc memory but ecc memory wouldn't be a bad idea for long renders
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where you don't want any errors you know causing it to stop working
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you know if you're running a lot of virtualized
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if you're doing a lot of virtualization faster memory can definitely benefit you
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but i mean for most of these workloads more memory is still kind of king
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more than anything else so here are the drives i just had dummy ones before that
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i was using as placeholders so these are going to come out and this machine is actually going to be
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inherited by b-roll so we're going to find some lesser RAM and
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lesser graphics card to put in there and then b-roll can make do with the on-board
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networking haha b-roll now he's got his headphones
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on he can't hear me so this case is really uh
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very frankenstein it's been used a lot of times for a lot
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of different builds and uh i don't have half of the screws so it's
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just like random screws that are just jammed into places but i always end up
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back with this case because it's extremely versatile it fits long
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graphics cards they're reasonably long graphics cards i hope all the graphics
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cards fit oh man this would be a good time to find that out as opposed to
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later on down the line so we'll pull up the win force card i
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don't know that i would have necessarily chosen a wind force card for this
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particular rig if if given a choice but
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i mean i'm not gonna i'm not gonna discard the winforce card and then like
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go buy another one separately oh wow yeah that isn't even close so we're
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gonna have to pull out the drive cages i guess
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in order to have that card fit what i would i normally probably would have
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rather done well there's intakes on the side but i
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would have rather gone with a blower style cooler that exhausts everything out of the case
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but you know we make do with what you have i guess
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you know if we have to use that gtx 780
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then we can but usually i recommend wind force cards
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for more of an open case design where there's a lot more space i don't need
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the front firewire cable still so i had disconnected that during a previous
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build and for that matter i don't need the front audio either because the five
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and a quarter inch bay here this is what often irks me about these things is
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they're like yeah we want you to have all the i o in the front of your case like why would i need a nut what case
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doesn't have front audio and what motherboard has you know two hookups for
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it so why are you giving me this i don't need this i want a card reader usb 3
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esata's fine but stuff where it's like a
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hundred percent going to replicate something that your case already had
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just kind of kind of irks me so anyway we don't need
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the front audio there so we're just going to use the hook up the front usb 2
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and the front um
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sort of power reset all that good stuff so the next stage now that we've
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stripped everything out of the case is probably to install the i o shield
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so just get all four sides just like that
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all the standoffs are already in this case so i don't really have to worry about
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moving them around or anything like that microatx is quite a bit more
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well more standard than atx in terms of where the standoffs go some atx boards
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particularly a few years ago had you know standoffs missing or standoffs
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added compared to other ones so you had to be a little bit careful
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to make sure that you don't short out your board by accidentally having a standoff installed somewhere where you
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don't need one it's actually a lot less important
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to have all the standoffs installed versus not having any extras installed
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extras are really really terrible
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so once the i o shields in all we got to do is grab that their motherboard so
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this you guys are going to see why i needed to have a low profile CPU
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cooler there is not going to be a lot of space once we install our power supply
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which i have misplaced there it is there's not going to be a
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lot of space once we have our power supply installed
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under there so even the even that stock lga 2011
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cooler i don't think is going to fit in this config
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so now we screw in the motherboard i don't remember which uh which type of
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screws it uses so the trick that i usually use
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is start with a small one so those are the ones that are threaded
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for optical drives often motherboard standoffs and then if
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those ones don't stay in then switch to a coarser thread one which are the ones
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that are threaded for hard drives for example so we'll go with
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this guy and you can see that that is indeed holding so it looks like this
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motherboard uses the smaller threads or this case uses smaller threads
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so i'm trying to figure out how to get the drives in here um
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because i have to take out the drive mounting cage i'm stuck with one of a
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few different options so i can either just like bolt the volt i mean the SSD
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i'm not worried about that one could just kind of hang out inside the case as
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long as it's like velcroed to something but hard drives i tend to prefer a more
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stable mount so i was thinking what i could do is i could grab some silicone
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isolators that i salvaged from another case and maybe just mounted in the
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bottom here by drilling some holes through the bottom of the case
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or another option would be to mount it in the five and a quarter inch bay in a
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similar fashion in fact i think
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that might actually work best because then i could just take the SSD
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and this one chuck them in there
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and hopefully i would actually still even be it yeah i
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think so i think i can even still fit my five and a quarter inch card reader
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thing if i run all these through here man
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there's gonna be a lot of cables in here it's a good thing we're using a modular
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power supply what is that oh
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apparently i owe diesel like 500 because
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my camera broke his lenses or something so he's
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quietly sneaking that onto my desk before he goes
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it's like awesome all right so there we go yep it looks
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like i'm going to be able to fit all that stuff in there
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without too much trouble i really don't like how little room there is for air
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flow around that velociraptor though so i still might opt to put it down here this
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is kind of ridiculous i've uh i've never seen anything like this before but this
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multi-uh multi-function front panel thing actually comes with
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its own self-tapping like plastic screws
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that go into some special
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holes that are just plastic and are not threaded at all
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it apparently uses a little tiny phillips head bit so i'm going to have
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to grab a different bit unbelievable
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sometimes you just encounter like the weirdest stuff that just has no right to
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exist and you just kind of go okay well whatever when i'm building machines for my own my
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own personal use or for internal use here at Linus media group
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it's very rare that you'll catch me putting all the screws in especially for
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things like you know a front panel card reader
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two screws is fine you know you don't have to
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you don't have to attach every you don't have to weld everything to the case
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unless it's something where there's like a you know a safety reason or a
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reliability reason that it needs to be attached incredibly well so i'll just
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put in on the corners although it could be argued that i should probably put in
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all four of these because they're like these weird special custom screws that
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i'll probably never encounter ever again so if i were to lose them then i would
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never be able to do a proper installation of this thing with all four screws so there you go
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i'll at least put them in a little bit so that they'll stay there
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and not come out um i do have some new ideas for how to
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mount the hard drive well not really new ideas but i've went i've gone and obtained the hardware
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so i grabbed some uh some screws so these are hard drive
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screws that have a non-threaded portion in the middle so i don't even know if
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you guys can see that at all but whatever anyway and some uh silicone or
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rubber isolators so i'm gonna put some holes in the bottom of the case and i am
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going to mount that hard drive down here in the bottom i am going to end up with a ridiculous
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amount of front panel i o stuff connected so hd audio goes into the aafp
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over here that's one of the things i also like about this board it has a
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great onboard audio solution so when he's um working on audio
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stuff which evidently he does apparently some point in time um
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you know the the quality of it isn't going to be just so horrible that it's
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unusable i mean a lot of the time the issue with onboard audio solutions is
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less to do with even that the quality is terrible which it usually is but often
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more to do with that the drivers are terrible and i would have higher
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expectations than that from something like an rog
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supreme fx3 audio solution so there you go that's one of the reasons to justify
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a high-end board if you really need to do that for yourself i mean really the
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reason for us going with the high-end board for this is more to do with just
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um we want the utmost in terms of
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reliability i could kind of considered overclocking it and so that was that was
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one of the reasons why we'd gone with an rog board but i mean particularly on a higher end socket like lga 2011 you're
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going to expect to get better overclocking headroom out of out of a
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better board with the consumer grade platforms it's less less of a factor
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from what i've seen in the last couple gens
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um yeah i don't know not much else to say at the moment so i'm just plugging in
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all the front panel stuff so that was my front panel connectors they're labeled
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on the board i mean those little things high-end boards those convenient
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creature and comfort features that you don't really get on the low end stuff
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where normally you'd have to go look in the manual or something like that
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because of the unique configuration with our five and a quarter inch bay device
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and the fact that this board has four or this case has four front panel usb 2
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ports we're going to end up with a total of six front usb ports which is great
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because he really uses a lot of them so we'll go ahead and plug those in down
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here and i've got a phone call so i'm going to go ahead and take that
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oh how disappointing i miscounted the uh
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the number of front usb plug-in devices that i had versus headers so actually
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two of the ports on the front will be dead so that the card reader can get the
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usb connection that it needs
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that's a shame and it comes on its own full block here even though actually
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only four of the pins are populated so it could have in theory supported at
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least one more port but oh well cable management here is going
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to be a bit of a bit of a trick just because all those cards have to be
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installed somehow i usually cut these off these days these this is the old
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ac97 um
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onboard audio pins or wires or whatever you want to call them so
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if you're not going to use them which you're not unless you're going to
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install like
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on like a pentium 3 computer or something and just you can just cut them
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off because otherwise they can be in the way of things just make sure you don't cut them off in such a way that they're
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going to short out on each other or anything like that so this gives us a
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lot less room for
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that brilliant hard drive mounting strategy that i'd come up with
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which could make things a little bit challenging maybe what we can do is we can take all these wires
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and we can actually manage them up here off of off of sort of ground level
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so that we don't get in the way of everything so if we just kind of tuck
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everything over here we should still have space for that long card which i've
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decided is going to go in the third pci express slot so that's
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a full 16x slot so full bandwidth yeah yeah
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and there we go so we should have room for
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that and the quadro should fit just fine
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where there's a little bit less room so that one will go right there
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like that yep should be just dandy okay so here i'm
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eyeballing approximately where on the bottom i want to drill the holes for the
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hard drive i don't know off the top of my head what the spacing is so what i
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did is i marked approximately where i want one of them to go with sort of
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landmarks of junk that goes through and just making sure that things like
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this that are poking through aren't going to be interfering with anything so it apparently will sit about there then
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what i'll do is i'll measure this out and drill holes so wish me luck with that i
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don't recommend drilling holes in a system with components already installed
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in it but there are things you can do to prevent it from being as much of a
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problem so you can put masking tape over it so that the shavings don't go flying
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all over the place orient it so that they fall away from the components and
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all that but really please don't do that in general all right so hopefully these
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are approximately right i hope yeah i still have audio here we go
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oh i went through the mother no i'm just kidding all right next hole
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okay number two and i was only able to put in three
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because one of them ended up under this foot so we'll just see how this goes
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okay no idea if these are going to align or
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not but the only way to find out for certain
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is to measure before you i mean
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just try things all right
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here we go
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where are the holes where do they go
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there's one sort of it's hard to see here
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oh wait wait for it no
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no that's not a hole
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that's interesting ah yes i see the problem now right i moved it
27:03
further down because i didn't want to interfere with the SATA ports other than
27:07
that there's nothing hanging off the right hand edge of the board that would interfere with
27:11
plugging things into the hard drive that the hard drive would prevent from
27:15
operating correctly all right so
27:19
there's one of them so one of them definitely lined up with
27:23
something
27:29
all right so the idea being that
27:34
huh that's a shame that's the biggest drill bit in slick's kit so uh that's
27:38
not big enough to put these through without the threading unfortunately
27:42
which means that i might have to go back to the uh
27:46
back to my own house to get my own kit
27:50
to do that okay well we'll continue this when we're
27:53
ready oh look at that that one almost lines up
27:58
so that should be good enough for our purposes here so i did wuss out and
28:02
remove the motherboard so yeah the mess of all the filings around
28:07
here is less of an issue i was able to find another wider bit
28:11
so i did end up being able to drill the holes that i need so my brilliant plan
28:17
is screws through here
28:21
okay i've only got three still just because
28:24
that foot was in the way then i'm going to put the rubber isolators on the other
28:29
side then i'm going to attempt to screw in the drive so this is going to be a
28:33
bit of a balancing act here
28:37
i've gone ahead and put the board back in off camera now
28:40
so that's done oh wow yeah because all of
28:45
these have to go on i hope you guys can see this
28:48
yeah all of these have to go on and they all have to kind of stay in place at the
28:52
same time which isn't going to be easy
28:56
it's okay these are the challenges that make pc building fun
29:00
as opposed to you know just buying things that all work together in the
29:04
first place yeah that's for noobs
29:07
or something no actually this just makes it more
29:10
stressful but whatever all right so we're going to go ahead and put that
29:14
drive on there now
29:39
wow it worked okay i don't need to mush the crap out
29:43
of those isolators just got to make sure that it's reasonably firmly mounted
29:51
and there we have it the hard drive
29:55
is now mounted actually pretty darn securely i don't have as much clearance
29:59
over on this side if i as i had hoped
30:02
for the connectors but that's okay i'll just go find a left angle connector for
30:07
the SATA port and then we'll figure out power can't be that complicated
30:12
and there you have it all right so i did manage to get
30:16
just regular straight SATA connectors in there although it's extremely tight so
30:21
we'll add this to the long list of things i wouldn't recommend doing about
30:24
this build i got my industrial strength velcro
30:29
so i'm going to go ahead and attach the SSD i decided rather than using up a
30:33
five and a quarter inch bay i mean the whole the whole you know notion of
30:38
drives must go where the manufacturer says they should go to me that really uh
30:43
that really that really bothers me drive should go wherever is most convenient
30:48
and awesome so i'm going to go ahead and put some velcro on the back of this
30:52
drive so that'll give me the option to add an optical drive later should i
30:56
should i choose to um by doing this this way so i'm adding
31:00
sticking the velcro side to here and then i'm going to go ahead and i'm going to put this SSD kind of here ish
31:08
kind of here-ish no i'm going to put it here there we go so the SSD will go there
31:12
that separates it enough from that velociraptor that i don't have to worry
31:15
about heat or anything like that because i had
31:19
thought about just sticking it straight to the top of the velociraptor but then i changed my mind about that i don't
31:23
want the SSD to have its lifespan affected by its
31:28
neighbor like i do can you guys believe i have to
31:32
sit like right across from diesel my desk here at work right across from
31:37
him i mean the music he listens to he listens to bieber
31:41
so for all those of you who think he's cool
31:44
now i guess that is pretty cool oh wait
31:48
um so all of our front panel connectors are all attached i'm starting i've wired
31:53
up the drives uh now it's pretty much time to get the expansion cards in here
32:04
i said no no no see now you've got that song stuck in my
32:08
head wow this uh this case is uh
32:12
not has seen better days let's just say that the spacing of like the pci bracket
32:18
isn't even right anymore that's the thing about aluminum cases is they often
32:21
uh they often bend in pretty spectacular ways
32:26
so oh this is a pci okay well here's a good tip for you guys PCIe 8x cards can be
32:32
installed in PCIe 4x slots you might get
32:35
slightly less overall bandwidth available to the card i don't remember
32:39
on these 10 gigabit cards whether they actually needed all of the available
32:43
bandwidth i think each PCIe
32:46
2x lane or PCIe 2.0 lane is around 250
32:50
megabytes per second so we should be pretty close to all that it can consume
32:54
actually but there you go if i ideally i would
32:57
put it in another slot but in order to get all my cards in here that's not going to work so this case has
33:03
a kind of a unique fan arrangement here which i actually had turned around
33:07
before so i had this as exhaust and this is intake but i'm going to put those
33:11
back in the default configuration so i can bring nice fresh air down to
33:15
particularly these ones there's vents in the side the wind force can take
33:19
advantage of but particularly these ones i want this fan to get nice fresh air
33:24
and i want this heatsink to get some incidental cooling as well so
33:30
last but not least the windforce gtx 780
33:34
for cuda i can see diesel
33:37
drooling over there about the fast output times
33:41
you're not drooling are you it's okay because i can't see you either
33:45
so everything i said was a lie
33:48
everything i said was a lie
33:52
except the part about installing this graphics card there we go so one screw i
33:56
actually only had three screws in there so i'm just gonna find another random
34:00
one there we go and let's put that in there
34:05
all right so that my friends is one
34:10
monkey jam-packed card configuration
34:14
love it all right so i turned the fans around
34:18
you can see right here is where the power supply sits on the other side so
34:21
this piece of steel and this piece is aluminum since it doesn't really do anything other than hold a couple of
34:26
fans there's no actual structural integrity of the case that's
34:30
being taken care of i'm pretty sure this isn't
34:33
how you're supposed to put it in but yeah
34:36
i'm pretty sure a lot of the stuff we've done with this build isn't how you're
34:39
supposed to put it in now this bracket uses those weird countersunk screws that
34:44
only silverstone and like some other sort of weird
34:48
manufacturers seem to use and i only have like two of them so i'm gonna put
34:52
this in as best as i can without having to use too many of them
34:56
if you don't use the countersunk ones though then the
35:00
uh the case cover doesn't sit right so
35:05
you you just kind of have to you kind of have to use them maybe this one will
35:08
work i'll try this one so that's pretty low profile
35:13
so there we go now we have our cooling fans in place i just got to find
35:18
somewhere to tuck these this is a uh this is a working machine
35:23
not a show machine so cable management is a bit of a secondary
35:27
concern as long as it's out of the way of airflow i don't get too uptight about
35:31
it and stuff like this so there we go yeah we've got nice
35:35
unrestricted airflow from our intakes to our graphics cards
35:40
and it's pretty much time to get the power supply in here now with these
35:44
smaller form factor systems i often find it's easier to install the modular
35:49
cables first and then actually install the power
35:54
supply so i'm going to start with i really wish these would stay under that
35:58
usb 3 cable that is supposed to be kind of anchoring them i mean i could cable
36:02
tie them down which would be a better way to do this but i'm trying to get
36:06
this done so that diesel can get back to work because it is now the next day
36:11
wow this 780 takes two eight pins do they all do that
36:15
i can't even remember all right so i'm going to run this through over here
36:22
then over here because once we've got the power supply
36:26
in this case it's going to be a total nightmare to get my hands in anywhere
36:31
so just get it all done now
36:35
make life easy for ourselves i mean as easy as it can be when you're
36:40
just making your own drive mounts as you go and uh
36:43
sort of playing by no one's rules except your own
36:48
not even your own
36:52
all right i think there's that yeah so this powerful this is one of the
36:55
things i like about be quiet! power supplies is they tend to come with sort
36:59
of a bunch of different options in terms of the modular cables so it comes with a
37:03
dual PCIe and a single PCIe on a 550
37:07
watt power supply i think the manufacturer's expectation is that
37:10
you're using one of those two options but we're going to go ahead and use both
37:14
i mean they give you the modular connections on the power supply for it
37:17
so you know they asked for it i guess
37:20
my expectation for a dark power power supply is also that it's going to be
37:24
able to handle pretty much near its peak output at any given time so i'm not
37:28
worried about blowing it up or anything like that next up we've got our wow that's a long
37:34
cable this is where those short cable kits that guys like silverstone sell
37:38
come in handy because this is an awfully long cable and the only real way to
37:42
cable management is going to be to chuck it back here or something
37:46
or potentially actually we could throw it over here with all these other cables
37:49
near the hard drive that'll probably work
37:54
but it if we were relying on any airflow from
37:57
the front of the case which this case doesn't have then this isn't really
38:00
something that i would want to do too much so there's that one and finally the
38:05
24 pin connector is pre-attached to the power supply so we're pretty much ready
38:08
to put the power supply in and find out if this system
38:14
works at all i think it comes with its own special
38:17
screws so i'll find those and
38:21
right at exactly the moment where i had found some other thumb screws that also
38:24
had nice long threads on them diesel found the be quiet! thumb screws that
38:29
have even longer threads so that you can really
38:32
you know put them on there and get that power supply installed i like the noise
38:36
isolating strip i wish that it didn't reduce compatibility with other screws
38:41
but you know sometimes that's the sacrifice you have
38:44
to make so there you go so those are installed
38:48
which brings us back to the inside wow this is starting to get heavy with those
38:52
graphics cards in there so that brings us to the inside so we're
38:57
going to tuck our 24 pin actually no we're going to plug in the modular
39:00
cables that we have here first so i'll try and get you guys a decent
39:04
view of that so pci express we have four
39:08
different pci express plug options here
39:12
again the thing with the whole like options on the be quiet! power supplies
39:16
that i uh that i quite like next we've got one for drives
39:21
all right oh actually let's do oh cool it has fan
39:26
plugs too so we could actually we're using manual fan control in the front of
39:30
the case but if we weren't using that then we can have the power supply
39:34
control our fans which is kind of neat
39:39
actually all right so the CPU connector goes over here most modular power
39:44
supplies these days use the same plugs for the
39:47
p4 connector or p8 connector or whatever you want to call it and pci express but
39:52
this one doesn't it has a specific spot for it i wonder if it has to do with the
39:56
way that the rails are distributed because it is not a single rail power
39:59
supply it is a multi-rail power supply so we've got that
40:04
we can tuck our 24 pin up here in the five and a quarter inch bay at least
40:08
until we wanted to install a five and a quarter inch drive maybe at some point
40:11
in the future and then what i'm going to do this is
40:14
something that i often do with builds is i use cables to cable manage so i'm
40:19
going to use the 24 pin to hold all that other stuff out of the way of the CPU
40:24
fan so that there's nothing interfering with it so if i can just get in there
40:29
a little bit better i should have plugged this in just like
40:33
i did with all the other cables first before i actually installed the power
40:38
supply fully because the cable's so long i could have gotten away with that
40:41
even though it's pre-attached this is one of the reasons why full modular can
40:46
be nice even if it's not a necessity because it does allow you to fully wire
40:50
up your system before you actually have
40:54
to put the power supply in it or if your rma in your system or your
40:58
power supply for example it can be a great way to not have to actually rewire
41:03
anything when the new one arrives back which is neat as well
41:06
i'm having a little bit of difficulty here yep
41:10
having some difficulty a little trick guys if you plug the four pin in first
41:14
then the 20 pin will often sit on top of it and lock it
41:18
into place depending on how the cable is
41:22
designed and that is how this one is designed so that's in there now and then
41:26
the last thing we need is it would be just like be quiet! to
41:29
include something like this but i need like a single molex
41:34
oh they got a single SATA all right so i was close
41:38
and a single molex look at that i love
41:41
it because i don't need any more than that so i'm just going to plug in my
41:45
dual SATA connector for the drives down there
41:49
oh i'm trying to get you guys a view of this but it's not working too well
41:53
so that's going to go into drives number five and then my other my molex
41:58
connector is going to go into drives number four and i'll be using that to
42:01
power my front panel five and a quarter inch bay device which
42:05
is going to power my fans and my built-in card reader
42:09
and evidently all the other things one thing i didn't show you guys is i did plug in
42:13
the SATA connector for the esata in the front panel
42:16
so all the i o options will be had with
42:19
this particular machine very cool
42:25
there we go not the greatest cable management i've ever done but lots of
42:29
clearance around the CPU cooler which hopefully works otherwise we're gonna
42:32
have to pull the power supply out and swap that out for something a little bit
42:35
taller perhaps and uh
42:39
hopefully ample cooling for those graphics cards and hopefully enough
42:42
power so there's a lot of things to test once we fire this bad boy up
42:46
so it's moment of truth time we're going to find out if she boots up
42:53
i really hope we get into the os because we don't have time to reformat before
42:57
pax so
43:01
yeah if there's any kind of hardware conflicts or anything like that oh we've
43:06
got an rog logo that's a good sign
43:09
uh there's our 10 gigabit nick so that's
43:12
detected
43:18
fan control
43:23
seems to be working all right so we've got that going here
43:30
new CPU installed press f1 to run setup 32 gigs of RAM
43:34
both of our hard drives are detected this is all looking
43:37
pretty uh pretty solid so far
43:43
f1 to run setup let's make sure we don't have any sort of completely weird this
43:46
is something i really recommend doing right oh that CPU is at that 57 degrees
43:53
already that is a big that is a big problem at idle we should be not sitting
43:57
at 57 degrees
44:03
that i'm not happy about i wonder if there's anything we could do
44:08
fan wise to uh to be a bit more aggressive although
44:13
often a very high idle temperature actually indicates a bad amount so we
44:17
may want to take it right off and then put it back on and see if see
44:22
if that alleviates the problem well let's find out if
44:25
she'll boot either way i mean 60 degrees is hot but it's not um
44:29
it's not it'll break immediately if we go into an os hot so
44:34
oh that's a shame
44:37
let's find out your boots i guess you guys can come along for the ride if you
44:41
want we're pretty much done here i was just thinking uh because diesel and i
44:46
were having a conversation about the irony of amy winehouse making a hit song
44:51
this is actually his observation not mine i can't take credit for this or
44:54
blame or whichever making a hit song about not going to
44:59
rehab and then dying of drug related complications and
45:03
i was actually thinking so this is my contribution to the to the discussion
45:06
that the the name irony should actually be
45:10
different because irony has iron in it which rusts
45:15
and deteriorates over time but irony i believe will be just as delicious a
45:19
thousand years from now as it was a thousand years ago
45:23
when dinosaurs and their hubris okay i think we're done
45:27
now so rendering oh okay we gotta wait well
45:31
either way we're into the os so i'm not too worried about it at this point so
45:34
that's great the upgrade worked we just got to diagnose our CPU
45:39
uh oh yeah and we've got to find out about power consumption as well
45:43
so we're sitting at 160 watts idle
45:46
right now so
45:49
we'll be back so this is a bit of a public service announcement on why ps2 keyboards are
45:55
still important and ps2 ports are still important because they don't require any
45:59
drivers so we've booted up again and we're still not getting our keyboard and
46:03
mouse drivers loaded now ps2 doesn't support hot uh hot swap on many
46:08
or hot plugging or whatever you would call it on many motherboards so we're gonna reboot this and then we should be
46:12
able to use the ps2 keyboard to at least navigate into the os
46:17
where the drivers are more likely to be picked up and installed
46:22
all right so i'm pretty sure at this point that it's not a bad mount just
46:26
because it doesn't really seem to be behaving like one but there's only one
46:30
way to know for sure what i did determine is that there is enough room
46:34
in here for the stock cooler that we happen to have one
46:38
of so we're going to go ahead and install that but once we pull it off
46:43
we'll be able to tell for sure if it was a bad mount or if it's just uh
46:47
not quite up to the task of an extreme edition
46:50
on lga 2011 here now i think i have some
46:54
bad news i think i can get this one out but i don't think i'm going to be able
46:57
to get that stock cooler in without removing this
47:04
brace here so i really really hope that that doesn't end up being the case but
47:10
you gotta work with what you got yeah see that that's a perfectly fine thermal
47:15
paste application there so i really don't think that was the
47:19
issue it's not too much not too little just right as papa bear would say or
47:25
goldilocks or whoever it was that uh
47:28
it was goldilocks apparently okay well whatever man so i'm gonna
47:33
you know speaking of perfect thermal paste applications i'm gonna commit a
47:37
sin here and i'm going to just kind of plunk this
47:40
on top of the old thermal paste once i can find something to
47:46
wipe it off with do you have any teepee
47:49
really i stole it
47:54
uh i call rubbish on that you brought it downstairs
47:58
okay that does sound like me all right time to put a beefier cooler in here so
48:02
i've at least cleaned off the base so we're going to go ahead and
48:07
yeah i guess we'll install it first i really hope this fits
48:11
or well the screwdriver fits and i'm able to get in there and screw it in
48:16
come on come on come on gill
48:21
oh i think we got this nice
48:24
oh except that wire that's under the uh heatsink that'll be a problem
48:29
at some point in the future here in like four minutes
48:32
okay same thing cross pattern
48:38
this side first remember going in at an angle is okay as
48:42
long as you're careful and gentle
48:48
as long as you don't cross thread the screw what did you guys think i was talking about
48:52
okay one two three
48:59
and four there we go
49:03
so we have a slightly better cooler in there now it's
49:06
still a stock cooler still nothing special about it but at least it should
49:10
work at stock speeds without sort of running too hot or
49:14
anything like that so we're going to fire this bad boy up back up once i've
49:17
closed it up again and take a baseline reading of the
49:21
temperatures and the BIOS again to make sure that it's running all right
49:25
okay so our CPU is still running a little bit on the
49:28
toasty side but the funny thing is it was showing up as lower in real temp
49:32
than it is in the BIOS here so maybe it's some weird rog feature i've
49:37
never heard of either way i'm going to just kind of go for gold here and we're
49:41
going to go use CPU level up which is ASUS super simple overclocking utility
49:47
thing and we're going to go for 4.25 gigahertz just to see what happens so
49:50
wish us luck with that and as long as as long as she's stable and doesn't exceed
49:55
the maximum power we can draw from the wall which is going to be around 600
49:59
watts because we're looking at about 90
50:02
efficiency on this power supply then uh we should be okay let's see if
50:06
it even like boots now fans ramping up we set it to turbo mode
50:11
for the automatic fan speed control
50:16
save at the os all right so we're finally done the rig
50:21
upgrade overclocking was a complete no-go so we're trying to figure out how
50:26
to liquid cool this thing at some point here uh that stock cooler no just
50:30
no just know we might be able to turn clock speed up a little bit but we're not able to use any of uh ASUS's CPU
50:36
level up stuff so now to make sure that it can handle fully loading all the
50:41
components inside we're running prime95 in place whatever it is the one that
50:46
does a lot of CPU and some memory so we're sitting at around 320 watts at the
50:50
wall now we're going to run the arion bench 64
50:55
to load up both of our graphics cards with a cuda benchmark here to find out
51:01
what our absolute max power consumption is going to be with this system
51:06
so there you have it guys i knew it was
51:09
going to be borderline uh this isn't the first time we've run this so that 504
51:13
watts we're seeing right now is not quite the peak the highest i saw was
51:17
around 560 watts which means when you factor in that the power supply is
51:21
probably only around 83 to 88
51:25
efficient at this kind of a load uh means that we are actually nowhere near
51:30
the maximum load of the power supply with that said you should allow for a
51:33
power supply to age a little bit and become less
51:37
efficient and less capable over time but particularly with very high quality
51:42
units it's a much less of an issue so a dark power pro should be just fine for
51:45
that so we're calling that good on the power supply side we got to figure out
51:49
better CPU cooling at some point but other than that
51:52
the new workstation is ready to rock so don't forget to subscribe to Linus tech
51:56
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52:03
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52:07
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