Build the Perfect Gaming PC - Holiday Buyer's Guide 2015
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2016-05-06
·
2,641 words · ~13 min read
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Maybe it's cuz I'm a sucker for punishment. Or maybe it's because your
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strong objections to my component choices fear me. But I'm back with
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another holiday buyer guide for the gamer in your life who's been really,
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really nice this year. Whether that's your child, brother, sister, or just
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yourself.
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FreshBooks is the super simple invoicing solution that lets you get organized,
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save time, and get paid faster. Click now in the video description to learn
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more. As usual, we'll be targeting three different price points in US dollars
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before operating system under $500, $900
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to $1,000, and about $2,000. I'll be
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using pricing from Neweggus US as guidance since their sorting features
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are excellent and their pricing is generally very similar to other sources
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like Amazon.com and NCIX. And I will
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have a link in the video description to all of the products mentioned. So, let's
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start with Just Game, a high quality, capable 1080p gaming box that doesn't
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sweat small stuff like upgradability or
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futureproofness. If it doesn't make the FPS number go up, it does not go in this
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rig. So, for our CPU choice here, Intel
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has priced themselves completely out of the race with their least expensive quad
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core, a must for some modern AAA titles,
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sitting at $185 US, over a third of our budget.
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AMD, by contrast, has a variety of budget multi-core CPU options, including
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the Athlon X4860K, which is 70 bucks for a chip
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with four steamroller cores and a heat sink in the box. It supports dual
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channel RAM, but because our MSI A68HM
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E33 V2 motherboard only has two RAM slots, we forwent dual channel operation
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with a single 8 gig stick of Kingston value RAM here. This gives us the option
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to upgrade to 16 gigs of RAM in dual channel in the future if we buy a
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similar stick and have a little bit of luck. For the case and power supply, I
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generally don't really recommend combo bundles because the power supplies
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included in them are frankly usually barely worth the metal that their
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housings are made of. But Cooler Master is somewhat of an exception here. So, we
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went with their Elite 350 case with an included 500 W power supply. It's
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nothing too sexy, but it'll get the job done, and it has the appropriate six pin
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PCI Express connector for our GTX 9602
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gig graphics card. That one was a tough choice because 2 gigs is about half the
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frame buffer that AMD offers on competing cards like the R9 370. But at
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a price like this, we're likely sticking with 1080p gaming for the foreseeable
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future. And at the prices that NVIDIA partners like EVGA are clearing two gig
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cards to make room for the more expensive 4 gig models, I think I have
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to go with the 20% better RAW GPU performance versus AMD's offering. For
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storage, I am one of and apparently one of the only ones on the planet, but I'm
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one of the people who leans towards a hybrid or SSHD drive on an entry-level
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system. Seagate's ST-1000 DX001 TBTE
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hard drive with 8 gigs of MLC SSD cache
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gets my choice here. Now, compared to last year's system, we saved $6, used
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the same case, got twice as many, albeit
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slower CPU cores, opted to save a bit on
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storage by skipping the boot SSD, but we turned that savings and our RAM savings
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into nearly double the graphics horsepower by reallocating that budget
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to the GPU. So, I'm confident that in modern games, this year's model is
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anywhere from 70 to 80% faster than the
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one from last year's buyer guide. For our next system, future expandability,
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features, and usability beyond gaming are much bigger considerations. It's for
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this reason that we decided to kick things up a notch with an Intel quad
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core. Not one of those fancy Skylake ones that are so hard to get your hands
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on, but a last generation Haswellbased
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Core i54460. I mean, sure, you lose out on
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the better onboard graphics and the lower power consumption, and it doesn't
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have hyperthreading, but it's still a quad core that boosts to 3.4 GHz, and we
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get to save a few bucks on our motherboard and RAM since we're using a
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last generation 16 gig kit of GSkill Rip Jaws XDR3 on an MSI B85 G41. Note that I
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actually went with MSI's non-gaming branded B85 board in this price range to
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get something with four DIM slots and dedicated ports for all audio channels
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and to avoid a killer network card. My
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personal experience with them is that the extra features they offer are a
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trade-off against just plain working all the time. So, I don't want to pay extra
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for one of those. For our power supply, we ended up with an EVGA B500 watt, a
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much better, not to mention 80 plus bronze unit for only $7 more than the
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CX430 we went with last year. Thanks EVGA for that. Our case choice, once
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again, didn't change much, and we went with the NZXT Source 210. It really is a
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great value case. There's not really much else to say about it. And the GTX
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970 rears its 3 12 GB head once again
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coming in at $290. So about 10% cheaper than last
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year for the same performance. Although it should be noted that an R9 390 is a
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slightly faster option at a higher price
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if you bat for the red team. Storage was a bit of a toss up for me for this one.
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A 960 gig value SSD like an OCZ Trion
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100 goes for pretty much the same price to the dollar as a 500 gig Samsung 850
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EVO and a 4 TB Seagate hard drive. And while both are valid options, I
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eventually decided that because this is a desktop, it's more likely to act as a
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file repository for other devices in the household if you don't have a NAS. And
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the the one two solid state mechanical punch is my best bet. A DVD writer also
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made it into the thousand machine just in case you need one. So, compared to
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last year's model, then we spent the same amount almost to the dollar. And h
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well, gaming performance actually didn't change more than probably 10 to 15% in
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CPU limited titles. What we did get though for our money was a much faster
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CPU for multi-threaded workloads like light content creation, a much better
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power supply, and twice the solid state storage on our boot drive, meaning that
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fewer games will need to be relegated to living on the hard drive. Not to mention
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that we also jumped from 3 TB of hard drive space to four. For our last
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system, we are assuming that the buyer is one who cares about getting a longer
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life out of his or her system, is one that wants the utmost in performance and
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is willing to pay a bit more for it, and is potentially a computer performance
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enthusiast outside of gaming, whether that's content creation or some other
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demanding workload. So, the CPU choice was a fairly obvious one. I didn't want
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to pay as much for a CPU as I did for our entire entry-level gaming machine.
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So, the 5930K with its six processing
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cores and 40 PCI Express lanes was out of the question. But fortunately, this
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generation, the step down 5820K is still
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unlocked for easy overclocking and has the same six physical cores with
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hyperthreading technology. So, the only thing missing is 12 of those PCI Express
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lanes, which won't matter much unless you're trying to run more than a few
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high bandwidth PCIe devices, and some
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CPU clock speed, which our Noctua NHU14S
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CPU cooler, and a few minutes of tinkering in the BIOS with the help of
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this easy overclocking guide will easily take care of. For RAM, DDR4 is the only
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choice on the X99 platform, so I went with 32 gigs of Corsair Vengeance LPX
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quad channel memory. At 2133 MHz, it's
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not setting any speed records, but since we're locking ourselves into up to 64
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gigs of RAM in the future, unless we want to pull that out and replace it, I
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don't think we'll be running a crap ton of virtual machines on this PC in the
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future anyway, and that speed, especially running on quad channel,
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should be enough. For the motherboard, I opted to pay the $50 ASUS tax in this
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case and got the X99A USB 3.1. It lacks
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some of the bells and whistles of the deluxe model that we use here at the
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office, like high-speed AC wireless, but it's got the same overclocking
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capabilities. SLI and Crossfire support for multiple graphics cards and USB
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3.110 GB is a nice touch. I also like
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the color scheme and that it goes nicely with our Corsair RMX 750 W power supply
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and Air540 White Edition case. I know it's shallow and I just
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spent a little more than I had to on those components, but past a certain
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point, case selection in particular is less about fitting the hardware inside
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it and more about personal taste. And if we're going to be spending this much, it
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doesn't hurt to have a rocking black and white theme going to the build that
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especially combined with our MSI GTX 980 Ti is going to look absolutely sick. So,
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on that subject then, I opted for a single graphics card this year because I
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realized that while my dual 970 setup
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last year would perform very well, likely better in many cases than a
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single 980 Ti where SLI scaling and the smaller video frame buffer aren't
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issues. It still meant occasional SLI
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compatibility woes, and it completely lacked a sensible upgrade path,
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something that I can see folks spending 2gs on their PCs wanting. So that single
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more powerful graphics card provides that upgrade path and that hassle-free
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operation with the option to go SLI down the road if you really feel like it.
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Although if you see that in your future, I would recommend an 850 W power supply
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versus the 750 in our base config. For storage, I really think people spending
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this much on a desktop should also have a NAS in their house for redundant
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network storage and backups. So a single 1 TB class SSD should be plenty. But
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just in case, I put together two options here. A 960 gig OCZ Vector 180 or a
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Samsung 850 Pro, albeit at a lower capacity with that same Seagate 4 TBTE
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drive from the last config. This machine also, by the way, gets an optical
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drive. So although it could be easily
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remedied by going dual 970s, again, our top tier config is the only one that
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actually gets slightly degraded gaming performance for 2015. I also stepped
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down the hard drive from 6 TB since I believe again anyone keeping that much
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data on a single drive in their computer needs to re-evaluate his or her
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strategy. But the machine also got a few very significant upgrades. It'll look
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awesome, be nearly silent, and I doubled my solidstate storage to 1 TBTE, more
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than most people will need for a while. I stepped from four non-hyperthreaded
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CPU cores to six with hyperthreading. And I doubled my system memory. That's
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going to make this machine a freaking beast capable of performing better in
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content creation tasks if using all of its horses or just as well as last
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year's model in general tasks if its resources are being split by running VMs
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in the background. Maybe something like this unrade setup that we showed a
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little while ago where a NAS operating system and a gaming machine running
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Windows are both running off of the same hardware. So, that then concludes this
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year's holiday PC buyer guide. I hope you guys enjoyed it. And remember that
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these selections are not hard and fast rules. They're just guidelines. This
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year, for example, I didn't assume, except at the very high end, that the
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user would be overclocking. So, your best cooling and motherboard choices
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might be a little different if you plan to do that. And this is really important
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for commodity items like RAM and video cards. My component choices are not set
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in stone, and my shopping methodology is pretty much as simple as sorting by
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lowest price and scrolling until I find a brand that I trust. So, feel free to
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mix and match these things to get the best deals from wherever you end up
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buying your new system. Although, on that note, if you decide to use this
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guide, I'd love it if you shopped using the Amazon or NCX links in the video
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description. We don't get any sponsorship money from PC hardware
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vendors for doing these buyer guides because that would be a huge conflict of
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interest. But using our affiliate links is a way that you guys can support us
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directly regardless of whose parts you end up buying. Speaking of regardless of
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what parts you end up buying, you'll probably need a place to put them all.
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And Upesk has got you covered there with a wide range of powered standing desks
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available on updesk.com. What almost all of them have in common
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is the high quality dual motor electronically controlled height adjust
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system that lets you either manually raise or lower the desktop surface or
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pre-program three different heights for sit, stand, and okay, I actually don't
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know what the third one is for, but it's there. So, so what the one that I've
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been using ever since Upesk equipped our office is the large size power up. a
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fairly standard gently curved on one side affair. But the benchmarking room
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is set up with a couple of their squared up L-shaped corner desks to allow Luke
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and John to work on a couple of things at once. And they've got some other
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really cool options as well, like the upright that has a dry erase board for
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the surface on the top. So whether you're just trying to get in the habit
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of shifting positions periodically throughout the day or you want to get
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some real health benefits out of your new desk by putting a treadmill under
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it, check out Upesk over at myupesk.com linked in the video
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description. So thanks for watching, guys. If you like this video, do that
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thing. If you disliked it, do the other thing. And uh wait, if you liked it,
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back to liking it again. Get subscribed. Maybe even consider supporting us by
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buying a cool shirt like this one. uh changing your Amazon bookmark, one with
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our affiliate code. Instructions for how to do that are up there, or even by
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supporting us directly through our community forum and getting a cool little badge next to your name. Now that
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you're done doing all that stuff, you're probably wondering, well, what should I watch next? Maybe you could check out
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our video where we, let's see, ah, yes,
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right, review the Xperia Z5 Compact from
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Sony, also linked up there.