ULTIMATE Video Editing Workstation PC Computer "How To" Build Guide

Linus Tech Tips ·Linus Tech Tips ·2014-05-07 · 10,396 words · ~51 min read
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0:19 well guys the lab coat's on which means it's time for another ultimate build
0:23 guide this time it's going to be the ultimate video editing workstation so
0:27 we're going to be walking you through the mechanic of putting this system together but more
0:32 importantly we're going to be talking about the rationale behind each of the
0:37 parts we chose as well as giving a couple of other options cuz for
0:41 professional use there are often at least a half a dozen options that would
0:46 all be valid for any given part depending on your particular needs like
0:51 most rigs a professional video editing machine starts at the CPU now our CPU
0:56 choice is not the only choice we went with the 493 K on the LGA 2011 platform
1:02 and we did this for a number of reasons we found the 4930k to be a good sweet
1:06 spot it's the lowest end six core processor that's available from the core
1:11 i7 family we could step down to a 4820k
1:14 but then we'd be losing a couple of cores even though it is less expensive
1:17 or we could step up to a 4960x extreme Edition but we wouldn't be getting a lot
1:22 more performance and we'd be paying quite a bit more for it zons are also
1:26 options but from a price to Performance standpoint we didn't find that for car
1:30 rig bearing in mind that adobe can be easily offloaded without even buying
1:34 additional licenses to a render Farm we didn't find we needed even more
1:38 processing cores or more than 64 gigs of RAM which would be another benefit of a
1:42 Zeon processor support for ECC memory now benefit number two beyond having
1:47 more cores of choosing the LGA 2011 platform is more PCI Express Lanes these
1:53 are PCIe 3.0 lanes and it has about
1:56 double the lane support of the consumer grade platform meaning that as you add
2:00 in bandwidth hungry expansion cards like
2:03 accelerator cards and raid cards and nit cards and graphics cards and anything
2:09 that you want compute cards whatever kind of crazy stuff you might want to put on here you need to make sure that
2:13 bandwidth is available and only a professional grade platform will have
2:16 that benefit number three is more RAM support even using consumer grade
2:21 modules such as these Corsair Dominator platinums these are clocked at 2133 MHz
2:26 we can get up to 64 gigs of RAM in this
2:30 board which is more than we need for our application although it'll be up to you
2:35 guys to decide whether you need more than that but you might end up with something like a dual socket board with
2:40 even more memory slots or highdensity ECC modules now let's talk a little bit
2:45 more about the memory we went with DDR3 2133 modules so remember we did a
2:51 showcase a little while ago where we demonstrated that anything of around
2:54 1333 or higher doesn't benefit gaming applications however with Pro
2:59 applications where you're swapping massive amounts of data in and out of the memory that can be a bit of a
3:04 different scenario with that said you still want to find a sweet spot and you
3:07 don't necessarily want to spring for DDR3 3,000 MHz or anything like that so
3:12 we found 2133 was a good balance now why
3:15 did we go with this particular kit and really a big part of the answer is not
3:20 all memory kits are available in eight-way configurations so first of all
3:25 you have to be able to get a quad Channel kit of whatever memory it is
3:29 there's a chance that two dual Channel kits will work together in Quad Channel
3:33 but if you want maximum compatibility buying quad Channel kits is the way to
3:36 go remember LGA 2011 not only supports more memory but also about double the
3:41 theoretical bandwidth of LGA 1150 so we had to find a quad Channel kit then we
3:46 wanted to find a quad Channel kit that actually has all eight modules in one
3:51 kit all validated together because this
3:54 again improves compatibility with your motherboard and CPU and is makes it less
3:59 likely that you're going to run into any issues down the road you want a six core
4:03 processor and 64 gigs of RAM you're going to need a board that supports it
4:07 this is the p9x 79e Ws from ASUS and
4:10 don't let the Ws fool you it's not just suitable for workstation use guys so if
4:14 you want to overclock or game on this board yeah that'll be just fine don't
4:18 worry but what makes it WS well number one is there's the pure quality of the
4:23 components it is an an extremely well-built board it is designed to be
4:28 used in a professional environment and yes those components do cost more and
4:33 they do last longer next up is the expansion so check this out seven PCI
4:38 Express 16x physical slots three of them are wired for 8X four of them are wired
4:43 for PCIe 16x 3.0 that's supported by
4:47 that IV brid e processor wow lots of
4:50 expansion you've also got8 DDR3 module slots so that'll support up to 64 gigs
4:55 of regular non-cc memory with a normal
4:58 Core Series processor or you can support
5:01 even more if you step up to a Zeon processor which will cost you a little
5:06 bit more and then you'll spend a little bit more on the memory as well to get
5:09 even more Rock Solid stability and even better performance now it's got other
5:13 workstation oriented features as well such as the Dual Intel NYX at the back
5:16 that increases throughput and decreases CPU utilization when you're working off
5:21 of network resources but that is not actually where it really shows its value
5:26 compatibility is where this board shows its value could spend half as much less
5:31 than half as much on a motherboard that would give you the same performance yes
5:35 I'm going to let that sink in for a moment less than half as much so why
5:39 doesn't everyone just do that because when you're buying a professional grade
5:42 product you expect zero downtime when you buy a new red rocket accelerator
5:47 card and throw it into your board you expect it to work you don't expect to
5:51 find out that there's a compatibility issue and you've got to pull that
5:54 motherboard eBay it flip it somehow buy a new one and replace it you can't
5:58 afford that if you want something something that you know is going to work this is it friends WS series boards are
6:04 validated to a much higher standard with aftermarket parts than other boards
6:09 whether it is the aforementioned red rocket card raid cards multi- Channel
6:13 Nicks or whatever else you can fill up these PCI Express slots Zeon F cuadros
6:18 Teslas it's all validated in this board
6:21 so if you can't afford the downtime and you're willing to pay an extra premium
6:25 for that and you just want what I generally consider to be the best single
6:29 socket board on the market p9x 79 ews my
6:32 friends we went with a prograde product for the motherboard but for the power
6:36 supply we're going with a bit of more of a gaming branded product why would that
6:41 be well for one thing the Corsair axi series comes with a seven-year warranty
6:45 so if you had any doubts as to how wellb built they are there's that you can also
6:49 check out the reviews on Johnny guru.com these are extremely well-built power
6:54 supplies right up there with a workstation grade power supply and they
6:58 come with a seven-year warranty and they come with Corsair link which allows you
7:01 to monitor its usage as well as its efficiency as well as your voltage
7:05 levels and all that crazy stuff so we kind of went well what's the real
7:09 difference between this and a workstation power supply well there's the brand name on the front which isn't
7:14 terribly important to us and there's the fact that it doesn't look like an
7:17 industrial piece of equipment and sound like an industrial piece of equipment
7:20 it's very very quiet to go along with that 80 plus Platinum efficiency so
7:25 there doesn't appear to be a downside we went with the ax860i
7:29 now there's a million different options in terms of storage there really are
7:35 literally a million but we're going to walk you through what we went with SSD
7:39 boot Drive I still feel is the most important thing to have in any machine
7:43 gaming workstation doesn't really matter and for us we went with the Intel 530
7:48 series 240 gig drive it's got a 5-year
7:51 warranty so they're standing behind it in terms of the reliability the
7:54 durability of The Flash you could spend a lot more and get something like a$
7:58 3500 series drive that would be an option but because we're not going to be
8:03 using this drive for any of the real work we're not using it as a scratch
8:08 disc we're not using it to actually store any HD footage on it we're just
8:12 basically reading off of it we did not feel it was necessary to go with a
8:17 prograde component in this case when
8:20 working with HD video files or even Ultra HD video files you will need a ton
8:25 of space we wanted to try and keep our
8:28 storage internal to make this workstation as as portable as possible
8:33 without tying us down to an external storage array so we went with four WD
8:38 black 4 tbte drives we're going to be running them in RAID 10 we're going to
8:42 be running them off the onboard raid these are not necessarily the only
8:46 options Available to You adding in a high-end raid card so that you can run
8:50 something like raid five very quickly or some kind of an unraid or some kind of a
8:55 raid six these are definitely options but by the time you buy a raid card
9:00 that's capable of running those types of raid fast enough for professional usage
9:04 you're probably looking at adding another 500 to ,000 to the cost of the
9:08 build so I wanted to present that option but that's not something that we went
9:12 with RAID 10 allows us to take our four four terabyte drives and get a total of
9:17 8 terabytes of fast safe storage we get
9:21 the benefits of raid zero so that is double the sequential throughput and we
9:25 get the benefits of raid one which means that we can have any one of the drives
9:29 in the system fail and up to two of the drives in the system fail before any
9:34 data losses incurred this is so important for for professional work
9:39 whether you're running a raid card whether you're running raid off of your
9:42 onboard or whether you're running uh some kind of an external enclosure
9:46 whether that's Network or USB 3 or ESAT or whatever the case may be redundancy
9:52 is key it is not a substitute for backing up preferably offsite but
9:56 redundancy will save you from a hardware failure choosing a graphics card for a
10:01 professional rig is a very personal choice and I just want you guys to maybe
10:05 be able to make a better educated one even if I can't tell you exactly what's
10:09 right for you now graphics cards in general have always had the hardware
10:13 oomph to be great for applications like video editing but the software is still
10:18 catching up so prior to Adobe CS5 for example if you're a premier editor
10:23 anyone telling you you needed a great workstation graphics card for better
10:26 video editing performance was probably trying to sell you a great workstation
10:30 graphics card that ultimately wasn't going to be doing a whole lot for you in
10:33 terms of performance anyway with CS5 that all changed so we're able to
10:38 leverage that highly parallelized processor the onboard memory the fast
10:42 interconnects to the rest of the system for wholesale changes to individual
10:46 pixels imagine a graphics card being good for that such as uh color
10:50 correction scaling or compositing so that was with CS5 now we're actually
10:55 continuing to improve so for example in After Effects in CS6 the Optics Ray
11:00 tracing engine was added that's GPU accelerated as well so that instead of
11:04 fake cluggy 3D effects and after effects now editors can work in real 3D with
11:11 real depth values now on the NVIDIA side
11:14 alone you've actually got options in terms of you got two whole different
11:18 lines of graphics cards to choose from so there's quadros which I was waving
11:22 around before the workstation grade cards and then there's also the consumer
11:25 grade GeForce cards now what GeForce cards do is they offer a great price to
11:31 Performance ratio if you're looking for sheer Cuda cores and Cuda performance if
11:36 the application that you're running doesn't call for a specifically
11:40 validated GPU where there's no easy hack GeForce cards offer great bang for the
11:45 buck now with that said they don't undergo the same degree of validation
11:50 because there's a whole lot of variety in the implementations from different
11:53 manufacturers so that means that you've got to make a pretty careful choice for
11:57 which one you going want to go with the the ASUS direct cu2 GTX 780 that we've
12:02 got for our rig is an overbuilt card it's overclocked but you know not crazy
12:07 like it's going to die immediately or anything like that and it has a
12:10 fantastic cooler on it so we'd expect it to have a very long life cycle even
12:14 though it's not rated for 24/7 operation
12:17 the same way that something like a Quadro is with Quadro cards on the other
12:22 hand performance takes a definite backseat to validation and reliability
12:26 the things that workstation users value the most these cards are all built by NVIDIA with
12:32 exactly the same components every time allowing large corporations to validate
12:37 particular workloads and particular machines with this particular card and
12:42 know that it's going to be available in exactly that configuration over a long
12:45 period of time this is important in a corporate environment but not
12:48 necessarily something that individual users value now that goes for software
12:52 makers as well this is less of an issue with Adobe software where they actually
12:57 do validate some G4 uh chips and configurations in addition
13:02 to Quadro configurations but AVID for example only certifies workstation grade
13:08 cards for their Avid software now with that said there are hacks there are text
13:12 file hacks for both Adobe applications and for Avid that allow you to you know
13:18 cludge in GeForce cards and and allow them to be recognized as validated cards
13:22 but this is a very a very home brew way of approaching it and not everyone's
13:26 comfortable with that now for the multi talented video editor who also does some
13:30 3D rendering work as well you'll probably just plain old need a Quadro
13:35 card professional 3D rendering applications such as 3ds Max and Maya
13:40 are often only going to work with GPU
13:43 acceleration with Quadro cards this is because of the way that the quadro
13:46 driver is architected to specifically enable performance profiles and
13:51 compatibility settings even down to if
13:54 that particular rendering application is the active window on the screen it's
13:58 making optimization in the background for the utmost compatibility and the
14:02 gForce drivers just aren't tuned to operate that way they're going for Balls
14:06 to the walls performance rather than that stability and validation that
14:10 Quadro brings to the table so basically if it it comes down to choices if you're
14:14 a tinkerer and you're willing to spend the time you know hacking things a
14:18 little bit and you don't mind if if a card isn't validated for 24/7 operation
14:22 and if it dies you kind of go to yourself well I spent half as much on
14:26 this card as I would have on the workstation one I'll just buy another one and it'll probably be higher
14:30 performance by that time anyway if you're one of those kinds of folks
14:33 GeForce can be a great option if you're building workstations that just need to
14:39 work and you don't want to ever touch them again then maybe there's a value to
14:43 you for the additional stability that something like a Quadro brings to the
14:46 table I mean another example is if you're building a system for someone else where frankly it's not your money
14:51 anyway and you want them to have a great experience with your system maybe you
14:55 just go for the hassle-free solution that doesn't have the hack that you
14:59 implemented and validated by a driver update that comes down through GeForce
15:02 experience and you're kind of sitting there going well I wouldn't be dealing with that if it was a Quadro then you
15:06 might find that to be a better option as well now with that said you can't just
15:12 swap out quadros for gfor and get all of the same functionality some of it is
15:16 just plain Hardware so if you're doing any kind of stereo 3D video editing and
15:21 you want to use a prograde 3D solution that runs off of a D connector Quadro is
15:25 going to be the way to go if you wanted to take advantage of ah yes deep color
15:31 so 10bit panels more on this pa279q in a
15:35 moment for any kind of serious color work during your video editing process
15:40 you are going to need a Quadro because that's the only thing that is going to
15:44 support the 10bit output that that monitor can then interpret and finally
15:49 they come in form factors that GeForce cards just don't come in this Quadro
15:52 k4000 is a single slot card giving you a ton of flexibility in systems where you
15:58 might also have you know a red rocket accelerator and all those other things
16:01 where you can run out of expansion cards pretty quickly and I mean for us it's
16:05 great because we were able to put a two slot GeForce card in sneak a single slot
16:09 Quadro card in and still have a lot of expansion for other things as well so
16:12 that's yet another advantage of Quadro for peripherals particularly for
16:18 keyboards and mice we've moved almost completely towards gaming peripherals
16:23 not because gaming peripherals are you know more professionall looking in fact
16:28 they're not but because the functionality and the build quality of
16:31 them tends to be well designed for more wear and tear than your typical mouse or
16:36 keyboard so this right here my friends is the g602 and this gets my
16:40 recommendation it lasts for weeks in performance mode and much longer than
16:44 that in its endurance mode it has very
16:48 good precision and it has a ton of fully
16:51 programmable buttons which can be great not just for gaming and binding to your
16:55 voice chat application or whatever else but also for programming in things like
16:59 keyboard shortcuts it's comfortable it's wireless it's hard to go wrong for our
17:05 keyboard same thing we've started moving towards gaming keyboards because
17:08 features like lighting up in the dark having programmable keys on the sides
17:13 having built-in media controls and a volume wheel well these are useful for
17:17 professionals as well as for gamers so the g710 plus gets my vote it has
17:22 excellent software it comes with Cherry MX Brown key switches with O-rings
17:26 meaning that it's not that loud so you're not going to be bugging your neighbor again the loud system thing and
17:31 it's Logitech so it's extremely wellb built and if anything goes wrong with it
17:35 you will definitely get a replacement it's also very well priced for a
17:38 mechanical keyboard with those features now when it comes to audio that's where
17:42 the gaming thing goes completely out the window most of our guys here use Im so
17:47 something like sennheiser's i8s would be an excellent option although any kind of
17:53 closed monitoring or reference sounding
17:56 headphones from the likes of AKG be Dynamics heer or Den would be great
18:02 choices ASUS originally told us they were going to send us a new PB 27in
18:06 monitor for this showcase and I kind of went okay um yeah I can dig it PB is uh
18:12 is a good value option if you want you know great monitors that are not Factory
18:18 pre-calibrated like the PA series the proart series is um and if you want me a
18:23 little bit more value uh that's not what they sent they ended up sending a pa279q
18:28 which is one that I can wholeheartedly recommend for use with this video
18:33 editing rig or pretty much any video editing rig yeah it's expensive if you
18:38 look at it from like a gamer's perspective you go oh Pro art monitors
18:42 those are really expensive but when you look at it from a professional user's
18:46 perspective and you consider the features you're getting you compare it to something like an HP dream color and
18:50 it starts to look a lot more attractive this right here is a 27in 2560x1440
18:56 monitor it has a 10 bit Ah IPS panel so
19:01 for those of you who understand what that means great for those of you who
19:04 don't that means a much much tighter
19:08 level of granularity in the colors that it can display so on your monitor when
19:13 you see blocking or banding between similar colors that will not be present
19:18 on this monitor as long as you are using a supported graphics card so in our case
19:22 a Quadro with a supported driver Quadro and a supported application such as
19:26 Adobe Premiere now you are taking full
19:30 advantage of deep color it also has a 14bit lookup table so it can actually
19:35 understand even more than it can actually display to you giving it an
19:38 even better approx ability to approximate those colors and it's got
19:43 more features as well so it's a professional monitor meaning that the onscreen display has an updated
19:48 navigation menu with a little four-way switch it's highly ergonomic so you got
19:51 your height adjust your tilt your swivel your pivot all that stuff that you could
19:56 possibly want it comes pre-calibrated like all PA monitors and this time ASUS
20:01 is going for gold because they're promising a Delta e of less than two and
20:05 they actually ship a little certificate inside the box that shows you how your
20:09 individual monitor tested it supports six AIS individual color adjustments so
20:15 that's on RGB s magenta and yellow so
20:18 you can adjust individual colors without affecting the other ones it has
20:22 uniformity compensation which is one of the big issues with even many prograde
20:26 monitors and that is to say that the back leg isn't always uniform so as much
20:30 as the color reproduction might be perfect you might still have issues with
20:34 this corner being a little bit different looking than this corner and you want it
20:38 to be as uniform as possible comes with compensation for that of course with you
20:42 know a 10B bit panel and all of these fancy features it has 99% Adobe RGB
20:48 color support and 100% srgb color space
20:52 support and 120% ntsc color space
20:55 support and I think I've probably gushed about it in enough but guys this is a
21:00 fantastic choice if you're looking for a great monitor for color work and you
21:05 don't necessarily want to spend several thousand dollars on it choosing a case
21:09 for this was actually a bit of a challenge because what's a professional
21:14 case I mean you don't want to go and spend $300 on a case for a video editing
21:19 rig unless there's some kind of a compelling reason like you need support
21:22 for 12 hard drives or something like that you want something that's
21:26 reasonably portable if you ever had to move it around or you know take it
21:29 somewhere else in order to work on it I mean we do that from time to time when
21:33 we go to shows for example you don't want it to be like you know covered in
21:37 like flames and plastic or all that unless you you don't mind people seeing
21:41 that when they come into your office for a meeting or whatever else um so we
21:46 ended up with the Silverstone tj4 e it's clean looking metal construction it has
21:52 great features it's around $150 which is reasonable although it's certainly not
21:57 inexpensive and it's easy to build in I like this
22:02 case I've been using it for years actually back to the old tj4 model I
22:06 don't think Silverstone gets enough attention for how high quality their
22:10 products are and how reasonably priced they are especially can when you
22:13 consider how much better built they are than some of the other really really
22:17 popular options that are out there now if I didn't want to spend 150 bucks and
22:20 I didn't mind stepping down to something that has a little bit more of a plastic construction the fractal designed Define
22:25 R4 is a great option one of the reasons we didn't go with the Define R4 for this
22:30 build guide is that we've already done a build guide in the Define R4 so I didn't
22:33 really see much of a value to doing another build guide in the Define R4 the
22:37 first step as always is to prepare yourself at an anti-static workstation
22:43 not working on a carpet preferably using an antistatic strap whether it's on your
22:48 wrist or like I prefer to wear it on my ankle you're also going to need a
22:53 Phillips head screwdriver which should be pretty much all we need in terms of
22:57 tools for this particular I build I always start with building the system
23:02 outside of the box as much as possible
23:05 and by box I of course being the case not the box but I'm not going to kill
23:08 the shot just for that so I've got the motherboard the CPU the CPU Cooler on
23:15 previous build guides when we've used liquid cooling installing the CPU Cooler
23:18 prior to putting the board into the case has not been an option but this time
23:21 we're going to do that and if UPS would hurry up and bring the RAM to us I would
23:26 have the RAM here as well Intel uses simple eco-friendly packaging for their
23:31 2011 processors it does not come with a heat sink so it's a good thing we have
23:36 an aftermarket heat sink to use they expect professional and Enthusiast users
23:40 to have their own cooling solution we open up the plastic clamshell and find
23:44 the little Golden Triangle on the corner of the CPU that's important so we're
23:48 going to put it down on our motherboard oriented correctly relative to the
23:52 little triangle on the corner of the socket itself then with LGA 2011 there
23:56 are two retention arms first we lift the one with the hook at the end then we
24:02 lift the one with the kink in the middle and the straight end once that's done we
24:06 can lift up the hold down plate position the CPU carefully in the socket without
24:11 putting any force on it while we're putting it down if you bend those pins
24:15 you will likely be so guys because no
24:18 motherboard manufacturer will warranty physical damage and they're extremely
24:22 difficult to repair now we lower the hold down
24:26 plate lower the k ARM and lower the
24:30 hooked ARM then pull off the plastic plate and the CPU is installed if you
24:34 follow Noz instructions carefully mounting the nhu1 14s isn't going to be
24:39 too complicated you'll need all the hardware from inside the Intel mounting
24:43 hardware box other than the back plate for LGA 2011 that's not needed and then
24:47 you'll need some stuff from the accessories box so it does come with a
24:51 screwdriver which is pretty handy you'll also need the extra fan Clips the extra
24:55 fan grommets as well as the thermal compound the the only thing we're not
24:59 going to use from inside here is the case badge which is totally optional and
25:03 the low noise adapter because this motherboard includes excellent software
25:07 fan control now that we've got everything together it's pretty
25:11 straightforward get the four little pieces with threads on either side and
25:15 the thicker thread goes into the four holes around the LGA 2011 socket next up
25:21 take the two mounting bars and position them on either side just like this
25:26 you've got four more nuts that then go go over top I recommend using a
25:30 screwdriver to tighten these ones into place because this is what's giving you
25:33 the security and firmness for that large heat sink next up is applying thermal
25:38 compound I recommend the line method on LGA 2011 processors use a little bit
25:43 more than you'd use on a smaller LGA 1150 processor now you have to pull the
25:48 original fan which comes pre-mounted to your heat sink off because otherwise you
25:53 won't actually be able to mount it then position it centered on top of the CP
25:58 you so that both of the pre-installed tensioned screws are positioned over top
26:04 of the threads that are on that mounting plate now alternating sides make sure
26:10 first that the threads catch then switch
26:13 back and forth until they stop and you can't screw them in any further put the
26:18 original fan back on then for your secondary fan which is totally optional
26:24 and is only if you buy an additional fan what you're going to want to do is take
26:27 the thick ER spacers that are included in the box with your heat sink swap off
26:32 the four spacers that are on the side where okay that are on the side that is
26:36 pulling air into the fan so you can tell from the label of the fan guys so here
26:41 you go the label should be facing away from the CPU heat sink on that other
26:44 side then swap on the thicker spacers that are included it's a little bit
26:49 tricky you got to kind of pull the little Nubs through the corners but this
26:53 will generate a little bit less turbulence when the air is passing first
26:57 from the push fan through the heat sink and then is being drawn away by the pull
27:02 positioned fan when you're done it should look a little something like this
27:05 nice massive heat sink lots of cooling fans plenty of space for 64 gigs of RAM
27:11 now something you might have noticed about this board is in order to achieve
27:14 its massive seven PCI Express slots
27:18 there wasn't a lot of clearance between the RAM slots and the PCI E slot so Aus
27:23 has done the only natural thing which is to remove the movable clips from one
27:28 side so you can see here on the one side we have clips that snap forwards and
27:32 back and on the other side we have no clips due to the fact that there's no
27:35 clearance there so this makes installing RAM a little bit different in this board
27:39 from most also if you were installing only four modules please note that you
27:44 would install them in the blue slots because we're installing eight modules
27:48 we're just going to go to town fill them up on one side fill them up on the other
27:52 side now you might have noticed that on the side where we put in the additional
27:55 spacer on the fan that is a very tight
27:59 fit for that first memory module so it's up to you whether you want to opt for
28:03 the slightly less turbulence and slightly lower noise operation or if you
28:06 want to opt for having a little bit more clearance for your
28:09 memory so the first thing is to open up the case by removing the two thumb
28:16 screws then getting the insides basically prepared so we're going to
28:20 remove that SSD mounting bracket that's
28:24 down here in the bottom of the case we're also going to put our power supply
28:27 right in so if you look at these These are the types of screws that we use for
28:31 power supply mounting for screws there's a bit of a decision to be made when
28:35 you're deciding whether to have your fan mounted up or down for your power supply
28:40 fan up has the benefit of pulling air away from your graphics cards and
28:44 helping cool your graphics cards but the drawback of drawing hot air into your
28:49 power supply making your power supplies cooling less efficient so we opted
28:53 instead to go for drawing air in through the bottom of the case this case can
28:58 conveniently has an air filter down here that you can easily remove and clean
29:02 whenever you need to this isolates the heat from your graphics cards away from
29:06 your power supply and will make it run cooler in the long term when installing
29:10 the io shield into the case do a quick sanity check and make sure you're
29:14 putting it in right side up just align the io shield with the back of the
29:17 motherboard make sure all the ports stick through then align it with the
29:21 back of the case and press firmly on all
29:25 four corners this might require some pressure in order to get it to work
29:29 properly and it's not incorrectly until it snaps into place and you can put some
29:33 pressure on it from behind without it falling back inside the case now to
29:38 continue preparing the case we're going to replace those stock fans and fill her
29:42 all up with better fans for awesome cooling so Silverstone includes okay
29:46 fans with their cases but that's exactly what they are they're okay in the back
29:51 we're going to take that okay fan we're going to take out all four screws and
29:54 replace it with an NF F12 now we don't have to use use the same stock screws to
30:00 install that n12 back there because premium fans also come with some premium
30:04 mounting options so instead we're going to use these little rubber isolators to
30:10 have what is what is a very vibration resistant Mount so the way that it's
30:14 done is you position the fan then push
30:18 the little rubber spacers through as much as you can you won't be able to
30:22 completely Mount them this way then if you have room for your fingers you can
30:26 pull them through to the point where the fan now is locked into place and if you
30:31 don't have room for your fingers then you can make your life a lot easier by
30:34 using a pair of needle nose pliers once you're done with that check it out very
30:39 little vibration if any can be passed now from the fan with its spinning
30:43 blades to the case on the top there's a
30:47 top piece that actually acts as both an aesthetic cover for our fans and as an
30:53 easily removable and cleanable fan filter we have a bit of a unique
30:57 configuration for the top of this case it accepts 1 140 mm fan and 1 120 mm fan
31:04 in the top there is not enough room for us to use those rubber spacers unless we
31:09 were really determined so in this case we just went for the old hard mount with
31:14 screws it should be noted that again premium fan features these fans have
31:18 little rubber isolators built into them as well so they're still not making
31:22 direct plastic to metal contact with the case which will reduce vibration we want
31:27 to pay special attention when installing all case fans to the position of the
31:32 cables that are coming out of them with respect to where we expect them to plug
31:37 into the motherboard or any other kind of power solution that we have planned
31:41 in this case because we're one motherboard fan header short on this
31:44 board for the number of fans we're going to have in the system I'm going to be
31:47 using a splitter off of this top connector right here into these two top
31:52 fans so I want them positioned near the back so I can route them cleanly up
31:56 there without any additional wire clutter the last fans that we're going
32:00 to swap out are going to require us to take off the other side panel and there
32:04 we go two more nf12 these are going to be used to directly cool our hard drive
32:10 RAID 10 array now I want to take a moment here okay so yeah we use slightly
32:14 different Hardware here it includes more of it but just to save time because
32:18 we're just doing a build guide here this isn't a permanent build I'm just doing
32:21 two screws per fan and at diagonals okay
32:24 so maintain the cable management that's there and I want to take a moment to
32:27 talk about why I love N1 12s and other
32:31 pressure optimized fans um manufacturers
32:34 will often make the argument you should use an air flow optimized fan for
32:37 something like a case intake or rear exhaust or whatever else the negligible
32:41 performance Improvement that you get with an air flow optimized fan versus a
32:45 pressure optimized fan I feel is offset by the versatility of pressure optimized
32:50 fans because you can do all the planning in the world and if you go and buy an
32:53 airflow optimized fan that's going to end up being a case intake that sits
32:57 next to hard drives pulls air through a honeycomb mesh and pulls air through a
33:01 fine mesh fan filter I would make the argument that's more of a static
33:06 pressure optimized application anyway and you run into that a whole lot so I
33:10 love the versatility of pressure optimized fans I find them more useful
33:15 in a wider variety of scenarios every manufacturer takes a
33:20 slightly different approach to which motherboard standoffs come pre-installed
33:24 Silverstone has opted for the skinny but fulllength ATX configuration so that is
33:30 six screws two at the top two in the middle and two at the bottom in order to
33:33 put a standard ATX motherboard or in this case a slightly eatx motherboard so
33:39 it uses standard holes but it is a little bit wider we're going to need
33:42 three more screws or standoffs rather so standoffs look a little something like
33:47 this and they screw into the back of the motherboard tray you're going to also
33:50 find another piece that has a Phillips head on one side and then a socket on
33:54 the other side you can use that piece to screw your standoffs into the
33:58 motherboard tray so we're going to install three more one in line with the
34:01 two bottom ones one in line with the two middle ones and one in line with the two
34:06 top ones so we end up with a total of nine here here here here here here here
34:10 here and here now positioning the motherboard
34:14 it's important to be extremely careful the last thing you want to do is scratch
34:18 the back of your board on those fancy new standoffs that you just put into the
34:22 motherboard tray so what I recommend is going in at a bit of an angle and
34:26 positioning the rear IO so that it sticks through the back of your IO
34:30 Shield back here before you actually lay
34:34 the mother board down flat on the standoffs now holding the motherboard in
34:39 place put in at least one screw in this
34:43 case we're using the same coarsely threaded screws that we used for the
34:46 power supply although this varies from manufacturer to manufacturer and even
34:50 from case to case so always do a test fit before you start installing screws
34:55 into your standoffs or you might cross thread something then proceed to tighten in the other
35:00 eight screws now once you've done that
35:03 it's easier to install your motherboard connectors before we move on so we're
35:08 going to start with the front panel connectors for the power reset and as as
35:13 well as our LEDs so first up is power and reset for these ones the orientation
35:18 doesn't matter so just follow the clearly labeled connectors and clearly
35:22 labeled pins on the motherboard itself if you have a little bit of trouble
35:25 reading those grab out the old magnifying glass or better yet just
35:29 consult the manual because it'll tell you exactly where they are next up are
35:33 your power LED and your hard drive activity LED for these ones the
35:38 orientation of the cables does matter you want the colored wires towards the
35:43 back of the motherboard or where the io and the PCI Express slots are on all
35:47 ASUS motherboards that way you're going to have your positive and negative wires
35:51 in the right place if you do get them wrong don't stress out about it it's not
35:55 going to break anything just switch them around around when you realize that the
35:58 light isn't working next up we've got our front USB 3 for this one be really
36:03 careful to install it in the correct orientation there is a key on the USB
36:09 connector itself as well as on the socket so you shouldn't be able to
36:12 install it incorrectly but if you did you would likely Bend all those very
36:16 fragile pins the usb3 connector is very
36:19 large but the pins themselves are quite small and delicate finally we have our
36:24 front HD audio this has been simplified so much since 10 years ago and now all
36:29 you got to do is figure out which block doesn't have a pin in it align that with
36:33 the one on the motherboard that doesn't have a pin in it and plug the whole
36:37 thing in finally fans we actually have
36:40 an opportunity here to show you a multitude of different ways that you
36:43 might install fans our rear fan we have a little bit of extra slack on that wire
36:48 so we're going to do my signature Knot Before we plug it into the motherboard
36:53 fan header next up we've got our top fans I needed to use a splitter for
36:58 these because I don't have enough stand or enough headers on the motherboard in
37:02 order to install all of my fans so the splitter plugs directly into the
37:06 motherboard this came with my fans another benefit of buying premium
37:09 quality fans then runs around to the back of the motherboard tray where
37:13 because I was thinking Cable Management as I was building my motherboard fan
37:18 cables are already running so I can plug those in tuck them away and I'm good to
37:22 go which leaves us finally with the front fans these ones are both different
37:27 so one of them is perfect it's a perfect run to one of the remaining plugs on the
37:32 motherboard that's the top one the second one the bottom one actually has a
37:36 cable that's too short Noctua includes
37:39 very short cables built onto their fans to allow for shorter cleater cable runs
37:44 without having a lot of extra wires to tuck away so what they also include is
37:48 extension cables so I'm going to use one of those extensions in order to make
37:52 this wire long enough to reach my final fan header which is down in the bottom
37:57 of the chassis next up we're going to install our SSD and our hard drivve so
38:02 in order to do any drives we're going to have to take out that entire hard drive
38:07 cage assembly so four screws two up at
38:10 the top and then two up at the bottom this handle comes out and then you can
38:15 pull the whole assembly out of the case now this is a very strange hard drive
38:20 mounting system I've never seen anything quite like it before but it's also very
38:25 versatile so first things the first things first we're going to install our
38:29 SSD in the very very bottom here we got
38:32 to use screws that are counter sunk screws so that is to say they don't have
38:36 a head sticking up above them so we're going to use anywhere from two to four
38:40 of those depending what you prefer it's an SSD so it's you know not going to be
38:44 moving or anything so I usually use just two screws on them so we're going to go
38:48 ahead and mount that down in the bottom where it's nice and hidden then we're
38:51 going to have a look at this hard drive cage it can accept up to eight drives if
38:56 you're willing to stack them right up next to each other but the way we're going to install them is we're going to
39:00 do four WD black drives and we're going to stagger them out so we're going to
39:04 leave spaces in between them for more air flow in between the drives however
39:09 how necessary this is I don't know so we're going to install one screw into
39:12 each of them on this side then flip the whole cage over and install two more
39:17 screws on the other side but wait we're not done yet this is a very unique
39:21 feature of this case that's the kind of thing that I would expect to see as like
39:25 a weird aftermarket option for most cases but Silverstone instead includes
39:30 what's probably a couple bucks worth of aluminum in heat sinks for your hard
39:34 drives so you can actually Mount these directly to up to eight drives on the
39:38 other side they're going to be taking air flow directly from those nf12 that
39:44 are coming in on the side keeping your hard drives much cooler than they'd be
39:47 able to be if you didn't have heat sinks on them if you wanted to go crazy you
39:51 could get some thermal pads and install those in there or even some thermal
39:55 paste if you think you've got a nice tight Mount although you have to check and make sure it's actually mounted
39:59 right up against there but this is a very unique way to keep your hard drives
40:03 cool and very unexpected to see as a stock option on a case so we can go
40:06 ahead and put a couple more screws into each drive with the heat sinks there
40:10 then put the whole assembly together it's quite heavy now and slide it back
40:14 into the case this is where Silverstone shows yet another great Innovation and
40:18 that is with these SATA cable Splitters so you can see we're able to wire things
40:22 up quite cleanly now we weren't quite
40:25 able to reach that 2 and2 in SSD down in the bottom however if this was my own
40:30 rig I would either stretch it and see if I could just barely get there or what
40:34 I'd do is I'd move that SSD take the screws out of it mount it with
40:38 double-sided tape to get it a little bit closer and then I'd be able to use those
40:42 SATA splitters for all of my drives and I'd only need two SATA connectors to
40:46 power all the drives in my case very very nice thinking now I've been using a
40:51 new technique lately where instead of pre-attached
40:57 modular power supply and then running them to where they need to go I've been
41:10 pre-attached I'd never built in this case before but check this out behind
41:14 the power supply there is a whack ton of space where you could put all the cables
41:19 you need to that you're not using from a nonmodular power supply Silverstone has
41:23 then put the power supply right up against the side panel which doesn't
41:27 matter cuz it's not like it needs any extra space on this side very unique
41:30 approach I really like this anyway we started with the 24 pin plugging that
41:34 into the motherboard and then running it behind the motherboard tray next up is
41:37 the eight pin for the CPU up at the top left this is a No Frills no gimmicks
41:42 professional grade board so there's only one eight pin because the reality of it
41:45 is guys you only need one eight pin unless you're going like crazy Wicked
41:49 liquid nitrogen which you're not doing with a board like this now in order to
41:53 Cable Management those cables we're going to want to install the rest of the
41:57 the power supply cabl so we'll need to install our graphics cards first the
42:00 first stage in installing a graphics card in this case is to remove this
42:04 little cover back here that gives you access to all the screws that allow you
42:08 to remove the PCI slot covers which have extra ventilation in them very nice
42:12 silver Stone so we're going to go ahead take those two screws off and remove
42:15 that now it is time to consult the manual because regardless of how
42:19 experienced you are technically and regardless of how much you wish you
42:22 could do things without the manual this one's important so the PCI Express slots
42:26 on this board they're all 16x physical
42:29 okay but that doesn't mean that you just take any card and install it into any
42:33 slot and you're going to get Optimal Performance it doesn't necessarily work
42:36 that way you want to check the manual where it will give you recommendations
42:39 for how many cards you have installed and which ones you should use so that
42:43 you can best take advantage of native PCI Express Lanes versus ones that are
42:48 relying on a plx chip for example so in
42:51 this case we wanted our cards installed in PCI Express slot one and five so
42:56 we're going to go ahead and remove move those slot covers then we can install
42:59 the quadro into the very top one we're going to be using this for our display
43:03 out the reason for using the quadro here was that with the back plate on the GTX
43:07 780 it was too tight of a fit with this cooler up here even the quadro was very
43:12 very tight and normally I would recommend using even something like a
43:16 non any kind of non-conductive very thin material in between this heat sink and
43:20 this graphics card but in this case there's a a chip on the back that is
43:24 non-conductive that is causing it to not short out but anyway I would still
43:28 recommend slipping something in there to make sure it doesn't short out cu they're very very close to these fan
43:33 Clips in particular right here so we installed the quadro then next up is the
43:37 GTX 780 so once that's done we go ahead
43:40 and put the screws back into each of these cards so it's one screw for the
43:44 quadro two screws for the 780 then we can go ahead and put that back cover
43:49 back in place and now we are pretty much
43:52 done with those so now we can do the same thing we did last time where we are
43:58 installing our PCI Express cables backwards so this power supply the
44:02 ax860i comes with harnesses that have two plugs and ones that have an
44:07 individual plug so we're going to use an individual plug one for the quadro and
44:11 then we're going to use a dual plug one for the GTX 780 so we only actually have
44:14 to run two cables finally we're going to use a single four port SATA harness to
44:20 plug in our 2 and 1/2 in SSD and then those two Splitters that we were using
44:24 for power to our hard drives remember guys we now easily add additional hard
44:28 drives without running any additional cables due to those Splitters we can
44:32 fill this bad boy right up now that we
44:35 have everything run I usually find it's easiest to take everything that isn't a
44:39 power supply cable and tie all that down because they tend to be relatively low
44:44 profile so we'll spend a little bit of time uh tucking things into nooks and
44:47 crannies and tying cables down you don't necessarily have to have an anchor point
44:52 in order to get a cable tied down satisfactorily you can just take a zip
44:56 tie even and you know tie it to another cable that happens to be running
44:59 somewhere useful or tie it to itself in such a way that you fold it so that it's
45:03 not visible anymore but either way I find that it's uh you know worth the
45:07 time to just kind of play around with those ones then get started on the power
45:11 supply cables so now that everything's installed we can plug the power supply
45:15 cables into the power supply so first the 24 pin then the eight pin and the 2
45:20 PCI Express ones those all go into the same spots and finally the one lone
45:25 peripheral harness that we ended up using this is one of the benefits of a modular power supply not having all
45:30 those extra cables plugged in and finally we can take those power supply
45:34 cables and now add them to our cable management system at the back making
45:38 sure that we don't stack things up on each other so much that we're not going
45:42 to be able to close the side panel there is lots of cable management room in this
45:46 case but that doesn't mean that we should you know take it for granted
45:50 necessarily either admittedly if I'd been thinking straight I would have done
45:54 this earlier in the assembly process probably before I installed graphics
45:58 cards but SATA data we have to install
46:02 our SATA cables that actually deliver data to the drives so in this case this
46:08 motherboard has some interesting options for how we can plug in the drives the
46:12 SSD for sure we needed a straight SATA
46:15 cable so unfortunately the board doesn't come with any of those so we had to go
46:18 scr one but we plugged in a straight SATA cable and we're going to plug that
46:22 into the Intel controller SATA 3 6 GB
46:25 per second ports so that's the very top SATA 3 ports all right next we've got
46:30 four Intel SATA 2 3 gbit per second ports or four Marvel SATA 3 6 gbit per
46:37 second ports so we could plug these drives these WD black drives into either
46:42 of them they both support the raid 10 that we're going for and it's just a
46:47 matter of whether we feel like we need SATA 360 gbit per second or whether we
46:51 want the compatibility of Intel RAID because if our board ever did die or for
46:56 some reason we needed to grab all these drives and migrate the data off of them
47:00 by putting them into another system if you use Intel RAID you'll get better
47:03 compatibility however we might see slightly better performance particularly
47:08 in burst operations using the Marvel controller so we opted for the Marvel
47:12 controller but you might opt instead for the Intel one and that's uh that's
47:16 definitely a good option as well in terms of cable management we weren't
47:20 able to move them back around the back of the motherboard tray so we just ran
47:23 them up the drives cable tied them off and then plugged them into into the
47:27 ports where they belonged well there you have it guys we're done and the Mystery
47:32 of whether or not we can put that six 2 and 1/2 in Drive cage back in when we're
47:37 done is has been answered the answer is yes however I think you'd be hardpressed
47:42 to uh cable manage six more drives into that spot on top of being able to have
47:47 another eight drives here and you would definitely need to add some kind of SATA
47:52 or SAS controller card to even be able to plug in all of those drives which
47:56 which I mean it's very cool the amount of capability this case has when you
48:00 consider its size so without further Ado
48:04 I'm going to hand it off to Slick to walk you guys through some of the
48:08 performance we were able to get out of the machine as well as sort of his
48:11 impressions of the overall configuration all right so we're going
48:15 to jump into the BIOS here and our mission is to change to XMP profiles and
48:20 to change the boot drive so first thing we're going to go to is Advan mode and
48:25 then jump into AI overclock to and change it to
48:28 XMP once that's done we're going to jump over to the boot menu over here go down
48:33 14 times which is ridiculous down to
48:37 hard drive BBS priorities don't worry I know it's not a hard drive just jump in
48:41 here change boot option one to your SSD ours is an Intel
48:46 520 press F10 to save you can review your changes and then just press enter
48:50 for yes and you're good to go so once we get into the controller we just jump
48:54 directly into the configuration wizard and go down and select all of our drives
48:59 by pressing space bar and down once you've done that press enter change to
49:02 raid 10 which is just raid 1 and zero keep
49:07 64k stripe size as it's a little bit faster and then name it something that
49:11 probably isn't default and once you've done that just go next and you are done
49:15 that's all it has to do just press y to confirm that you actually want to do
49:18 this and you'll see right there under virtual diss that what you've named is
49:22 now an actual raid so we wanted to talk
49:25 about the PA 279 but instead of just talking about it and how ridiculously
49:29 good it looks we wanted to show it off so this is a 10 bit image sample that
49:32 we're showing on a 10bit p279 panel and
49:36 an 8bit panel you can see on the 10-bit panel that it is extremely smooth and
49:40 when when you move it over to the 8bit panel you can see vertical lines running
49:44 through it so while we can talk about how good it looks this actually shows
49:47 how good it looks so we want to show off the raw power of this system so what
49:51 we're running is Da Vinci resolve using a source file that was filmed by Brandon
49:55 and then heavily eded by edited by edzel we are currently rendering it using Cuda
50:00 although with this system you can use CPU encoding Cuda accelerated encoding
50:04 or even h264 encoders because of all the options that you have as you can see
50:09 we're using both of our gpus the quadro is at fairly low usage and is actually
50:12 just being used for guy for dentally resolve and the rest of the general
50:17 Monitor and then GPU 2 G the GTX 780 is
50:20 actually being used for its Cuda performance so it's actually pushing pretty hard along with the CPU you can
50:26 see temps in here right now both the gpus are sitting right around 50° which
50:30 is totally fine and the CPU is only going around 40 to 50° tops which is
50:35 also totally fine and great for this system as you can see the CPU is
50:38 actually running fairly hard bouncing between 60 and 70% so with all of that
50:43 out of the way a big thanks to you guys for sitting through this entire video a
50:48 huge thanks to Intel for making this video possible these are extremely
50:52 timeconsuming for us to produce and with their sponsorship we are able to bring
50:56 you guys Guys these fantastic build guides in the ultimate build Guide
50:59 Series and as always guys like the video if you liked it dislike it if you
51:03 disliked it and if you're not subscribed already don't forget to subscribe
51:28 it's