The ULTIMATE Space-Saving PC - Desk PC Build Log
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2016-05-06
·
3,043 words · ~15 min read
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oh hi i didn't see you there today we're going to be doing a build
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log that's going to be a little different from anything else that we've ever done
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before i will be doing the ultimate
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space-saving pc by not just building a computer into a tiny case but having no
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case at all building a computer into the bottom of a desk
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it's going to be awesome
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so i bought pretty much all the hardware that i'm using on mcmaster car those
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guys have almost everything under the sun you can get l
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brackets and all kinds of different shapes and sizes um
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see i've got all kinds of different kinds that i that i measured out in
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terms of what i needed
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you can get screws in pretty much any length and thread so i had to gather up
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a bunch of the different kinds of screws as well as these cool housings i'll show
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you how i'm going to use those later there was one thing that i was not able
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to get on mcmaster car though and it was this this is motherboard standoffs now i
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could have just salvaged these from a case we had lying around but i wanted
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this build log to be to reflect how you
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guys would go through the process and you might not have those lying around so i got those on amazon we've got our ASUS
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GeForce gtx 980 ti strix that they sent over for this video this will give us
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some gaming capability even though this is like a stealth type of build well not just some
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gaming capability i mean pretty much as good as it gets the motherboard we'll be
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using the stylish sabretooth z97 mark s
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from ASUS this is for a couple of reasons uh number one i've used this
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board before and it's fine which is good number two is i actually really like the
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idea of having this protective shield over top of the top of my motherboard in
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this case because on the bottom of the desk it could happen that i could
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accidentally touch it somehow and the motherboard
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would be the worst thing in the system pretty much to shore it out so their
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thermal armor comes in handy once
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for the RAM we went with some matching kingston hyperx fury RAM
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this is a two stick kit a total of 16
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gigs mostly we just went with the white RAM because we got the white board and
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what the hey why not and on the subject of what the hey why not i dug out our
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white ax 860i power supply from Corsair
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that i actually painted back when we did our sub zero build guide so to go with
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that though as you guys may or may not have noticed this is not a standard case
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and the power supply might not actually be able to reach all the components with
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the standard cables so i reached out to our buddies over at cablemod who hooked
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us up with some custom length white
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individually sleeved cable mod cables
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yeah these are gonna come in handy for a
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build like this this is the Intel core i7
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5775c this is a broadwell-based desktop
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CPU and basically it's an upgrade for anyone
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who's using a z97 platform already and
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with one of the big improvements over the previous haswell-based chips being
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that it has much better onboard graphics to cool it we'll be using an h100i gtx i
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think we were actually planning to use a 110i gtx originally but uh whether it's
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due to you know the 100i using 120 millimeter fans and therefore being
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slightly lower profile or whether it's because Corsair forgot to ship us one of
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those i'm not sure we're using this one now
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and finally as much for show as it is for
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performance we'll be using two Intel 7
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30 series ssds in this case we've got a couple of 480 gigs that'll give us a
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total of 960 gigabytes of raid 0 SSD
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storage for this rig oh yeah we've got some Noctua fans for the uh cooler there
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and here's our next component two lg ultra wide 34 inch monitors so these are
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the 34 34uc87c the main difference between these and
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the one that i've used in the past being that it has a height adjust sand not
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that that matters because we'll be using a modified ergotron desk mount like
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individual stand that's actually got a wide screen gaming forum edition upgrade
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to it with like a bolt through on the desk so that's going to be pretty sick
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step number one after setting up our workstation being all you know safe and
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clutter free of course no actually all this is stuff that we're working on is
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gonna be to actually redo my test fit
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just to make sure that when we start drilling because we will be drilling for
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this build log everything is in exactly
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the right place for components like the power supply graphics card and motherboard
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we're gonna need to be extra careful that we're leaving enough room for io
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because depending on what type of table you have you might have some kind of a
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reinforcing lip around the outside that
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if you position your i o ports too close to might make it
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impossible to plug in any usb connectors
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so definitely watch out for that another pro tip is when you're mounting
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something like a power supply you're going to want to make sure that even if
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normally you would go fan side down now you go fan side up because otherwise
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you're not going to have any cooling for that particular component this is well
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actually it's a pair of pci express
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extenders and these are one of the very
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common tools in the toolbox for people who do wall mounted pcs or other sort of
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unusual form factor pcs you can usually get away with up to about 30 centimeters
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of extension from a pci express 16x slot
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without seeing any degradation in performance as long as they're of
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sufficient quality so we'll be using these in order to mount our graphics
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card there we go flat against the table just
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like that fan positioning is going to be kind of personal choice you'll have to
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decide do you want the slightly warm breeze blowing towards your legs or
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do you want it blowing away from it neither is going to offer any tangible
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benefit or disadvantage in terms of cooling so you can go whatever route you
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want i'm going to go with blowing the air away from my legs just in case
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they're feeling a little chilly now before i finalize where all of the
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components are going to go
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i need to go ahead and put my custom cables on and make sure that
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both i sent cablemod the right measurements and they made the cables to
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my exact specifications because you might have to make some slight
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adjustments to where we're positioning things otherwise
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here's our 8-pin CPU connector look at this thing
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now just because the cables are going to be hidden away under a desk doesn't mean
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that's any excuse to have crappy cable management so the way that i've planned
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out the build is to have one mass of individually
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sleeved cables come out of the power supply and then work its way up
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this edge of the desk splitting out as needed to the different parts of the
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motherboard and the rest of the components so the pci express connectors
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for example will come out along over in a straight line and then
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down and the way that i plan to achieve these nice straight lines is using these
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bay stage cable ties this episode not brought to you by
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baystate cable ties but basically these are just anchors that can have uh zip
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ties go through them two different ways and that can screw down
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into the tabletop surface so that i have a really strong anchor point and i can
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really get those cables nice and tight and straight so for me the only thing
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that's really important back there in terms of spacing is making sure i have
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enough room for a normal standard usb
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cable now that i've traced the outline is actually going to be
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to trace the positions of the mounting holes so
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the next step involves our drill and these little puppies right here we're
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going to be using these in order to be able to install our standoffs well into
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the bottom of a table surface
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ow i'm gonna hit my head on that a lot of
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times
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easy as pie
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look at that we have a rock solid mount for our
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motherboard to the bottom of the table here
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very very nice
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lower the cover lower the ARM and then go put your
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socket cover in a safe place if you ever need to rma your motherboard you'll need
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to find that now even though it means the radiator
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might get in my way a little bit later i'm going to go ahead and mount the CPU
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block now this way i can ensure that my radiator position is going to be correct
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when i install it and that i'm not going to be putting too much strain on the
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tubing dennis i don't want to jinx it
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but i'm amazed at how well this is going so
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far okay so one slightly tricky thing with
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getting our video card mounted towards the the back of the table so that we're
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less likely to accidentally bump it is that there's not a whole lot of room for
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our displayport cable to go into the
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back of our graphics card before we screw down the graphics card
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we're going to pre-install the bulky displayport cables these are pretty much
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the largest cables that we'll have to plug into the back of our motherboard
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the last hole we need to drill for the graphics card is actually going to be in
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the plastic of the shroud now this is not a mounting technique that you're
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going to find in any kind of proper guide but basically we'll be drilling a
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hole that's slightly smaller than the threading of our screw and we'll be
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using just a normal screw as a self-tapping screw because the material
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it's going into is so soft i spoke too early there is still actually one
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thing we need to drill on the graphics card and this one's a little bit scary
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we have to drill a hole in the bottom of the pci bracket to go
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with that one that we have in the top so
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for the next step i actually need something i forgot to mention before these are 632 nuts
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so we're going to put some thread locker
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onto the screws that we're putting into them
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because i forgot washers washers would be another
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another option here
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now something we could do to get a firmer mount with our radiator is
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install another couple brackets on the other side but frankly it's so far out
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of the way that i'm really not that worried about it it's just the kind of
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thing that you could do if you wanted more peace of mind so for mounting the
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ssds i'm using these ones with the hole
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on the one side and the slot on the other and then i'm actually going to
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overlap two of them just like that
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for the middle and then put additional ones on the
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outsides of the ssds this was more luck than anything else but with our
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configuration the included SATA cables actually ended up working out perfectly
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not just with the color scheme black and white
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and sometimes red but also in terms of length so we're just going to run these
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puppies through our existing cable management
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uh loops that we've run and plug them into the board
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this switch that i pulled off of an old case some time ago so i'm just gonna
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mount that up uh under the
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you know bottom of the table not not really anything special and all that's
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left now is basically just a few finishing touches so we're going to
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install our memory and then plug our fan
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cables into the leads off of the Corsair
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all in one liquid cooler plug that into the motherboard
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and we're pretty much ready to flip this puppy over and start working on the
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other side of the desk there are some more finishing touches here i'm going to
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start cinching tight all of the cable management giving it a bit of a a
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cleaner cleaner overall look once we're
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done
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not bad not bad at all i mean this actually went
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really well
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okay so all that's left now is to flip it over and uh
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you have got to be kidding
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me the whole thing is backwards
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the chair slides in this way the DisplayPort cables are going to
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come up right under the keyboard
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dennis i don't want to jinx it but
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i'm amazed at how well this is going so
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what are we gonna far
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you know what we might be able to take the whole leg
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assembly off and put it on the other way
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i think it's symmetrical
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okay no we have a plan
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all right let's try it
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thank you modular ikea furniture
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all right so all that's really left now is to flip her over
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and uh find out if she works i actually forgot the other really awesome thing
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about this model compared to the one that i reviewed
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the vase amount is now included thank
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you instead of having to use a weird janky
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accessory for it awesome
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basically all we do is screw the thing into the thing
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put this thing on top of this thing do a test mount with our monitors to
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ensure that the height is correct mount them permanently by screwing
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those vase amounts that are included with the ergotek slash widescreen gaming
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forum stand here in and then clipping them over these
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rails and locking them into place once they're there you can actually make fine
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adjustments to them uh by using the
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let's see yeah there they are the knobs that are on the bottom
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but it's recommended that you try and get things as close as you can before
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that
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and then start plugging in all the connectors for the back of the
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motherboard as well which as you can see
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are able to just barely plug in which is exactly how we
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intended it okay here it is
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our mouse is charging
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here we go
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moment of truth didn't go so well it looks like my white saber tooth may not
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have survived the uh
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sub-zero experiment
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and yeah so we're going to take another
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crack at things with our black saber-tooth z97 the mark one
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and see if it goes a little better this is something to consider if you are
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thinking about building a desk pc though and that's that uh
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maintenance is not going to be quite as easy as it used to be actually i guess i
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could have flipped the desk over
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you've got to be kidding me
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moment of truth it's so quiet is it even on
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hey oh
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okay so i think it's time to do a recap then
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for y'all because we ended up having to change a couple things so number one
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thing that we changed was our pci express power connectors it
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looks like we got a couple of bunk ones these kinds of things happen at least it
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wasn't the eight pin because and this was serendipitous the other thing that
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didn't work was two of these pci express extensions at the same time
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maybe the ones we got were not actually shielded or whatever else was the issue
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but one of them is working fine but that meant i had to turn my graphics card
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around so being able to use shorter cable mod cables that i already had
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lying around ended up working just fine
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and i was able to use some of the extra brackets that i bought to remount the
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graphics card with about an inch of space between it and the table which is
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actually not that bad and better in some ways because now at least you can't
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accidentally put your knee or or a finger into the fan on the bottom of the
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card so that is it my friends
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it worked thank you for watching the uh desk pc
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build log here if you disliked this video then i think you know where that
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badge and all that good stuff so without further ado um
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thanks again for watching and i will see you guys again next time