How to Build a PC - Step by Step Beginners Guide

Summary

This comprehensive video guide by Christopher Flannigan walks beginners through the process of building a PC, highlighting each critical step from choosing compatible components to assembling and powering the system. Christopher shares his expert tips gathered from assembling numerous PCs annually, helping viewers avoid common mistakes. The video covers the selection of cases, motherboards, CPUs, coolers, RAM, storage drives, and GPUs, offering insights into compatibility and performance. He also provides detailed instructions on configuring BIOS settings and installing the operating system.

Highlights

• Discover the step-by-step guide to building a PC, perfect for beginners! 🛠️
• Learn about common mistakes in PC building and how to avoid them easily ❌
• Get to know the difference between various case sizes and their implications 📏
• Explore the world of motherboards and how to choose the right one 🖥️
• Understand the importance of CPU selection in building a future-proof PC 🚀

Key Takeaways

• Start with a well-researched component list to avoid compatibility issues 🎯
• Choose a PC case that accommodates your components and suits your aesthetics 🎨
• Understand the differences between Intel and AMD CPUs for future compatibility 🔄
• Utilize a mid-range case for easier building and budget flexibility 💰
• Always check your motherboard's manual for the supported hardware to avoid installation headaches 📘

Overview

Building a PC might seem daunting at first, but with Christopher Flannigan's experienced guidance, even beginners can navigate the process with ease. In his detailed step-by-step video guide, Christopher demystifies the complexities involved in putting together a personalized computer system from scratch.

The journey begins with selecting compatible components like the PC case, motherboard, and CPU, all tailored to ensure optimal performance and future-proofing. Christopher shares invaluable insights on avoiding common pitfalls, ensuring that each decision—from choosing the right chipset to configuring the BIOS—is informed and strategic.

Not to forget, Christopher’s friendly and engaging approach makes the learning process fun. He meticulously unpacks each step, making sure viewers not only know how to assemble their PC but also understand the why behind each choice, reigniting that DIY spirit with a blend of education and entertainment.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 01:30: Introduction and Overview In this chapter titled 'Introduction and Overview', the author presents a beginner's guide to building a PC. The focus is on taking the audience step-by-step through the process of assembling a fully functional PC from various parts. The author promises detailed explanations for each step, aiming at readers with no prior knowledge of PC building. Additionally, the chapter will provide the rationale behind each step, enabling readers to understand the procedures and make informed adjustments if needed. Recommendations for each PC component are also part of the comprehensive guidance offered.
• 01:30 - 05:00: Case Selection and Preparation In this chapter, the focus is on case selection and preparation for building PCs. The instructor shares insights from their extensive experience of building approximately 25 PCs a year. Emphasis is placed on understanding the impact of budget and needs on choosing the right PC case. The chapter aims to highlight common mistakes in PC building to help viewers avoid them and ensure a smooth experience when powering up their newly built PC. The first crucial step discussed is the importance of selecting the appropriate case size.
• 05:00 - 10:00: Motherboard Installation and Preparation This chapter covers the basics of choosing a PC case size, explaining the options from mini-ITX to full tower. It suggests that for first-time builders, a mid-tower case is a good choice due to its balanced space and compact design. The chapter emphasizes selecting a case based on available space and personal preferences.
• 10:00 - 17:00: CPU and Cooler Installation The chapter discusses the installation of a CPU and cooler, emphasizing the advantages of choosing a mid-tower case over an ITX case. It highlights that mid-tower cases, like the Lian Li Lancool 216, offer more space, easier building process, a wider range of components, and more budget-friendly options. The Lancool 216 is recommended as a great choice for first-time builders and was considered the best case of the year in 2022.
• 17:00 - 23:00: Storage and RAM Installation The chapter discusses the process of choosing and installing computer cases, focusing on personal preferences, features, noise levels, fan aesthetics, and performance. It emphasizes the importance of researching reviews to ensure the selected case meets all desired criteria.
• 23:00 - 27:30: Power Supply Installation The chapter discusses selecting a suitable power supply case, highlighting features of a recommended case from Lean Lee, which offers good value and design. It notes that similar alternatives may also be used with adjustments. Attention then shifts to choosing a compatible motherboard considering different form factors such as EATX and micro ITX, outlining importance of size in motherboard selection.
• 27:30 - 36:00: Cooling Options and AIO Installation This chapter discusses the different types of cooling options available for computers and the installation of AIO (All-in-One) cooling systems. It provides a comparative overview of mini ITX, micro ITX, and ATX motherboards, highlighting the differences in size and form factor. The focus is on how these differences impact the installation and efficiency of cooling solutions.
• 36:00 - 44:30: Front Panel and Fan Connections The chapter discusses the dimensions and features of mini ITX boards compared to full-sized ITX boards. It highlights that mini ITX boards are smaller, generally more expensive, and offer fewer features and less choice. There is also mention of reduced PCIe and M.2 slots, as well as fewer I/O ports.
• 44:30 - 53:00: Graphics Card Installation and BIOS Setup The chapter advises using a standard ATX board for mid-range PC builds due to the greater variety and choices available. It warns against installing a microATX board in a full-sized case because this setup will leave a large gap at the bottom, leading to unappealing cable management as cables will need to run up to the motherboard headers.
• 53:00 - 60:00: Operating System Installation In the chapter titled 'Operating System Installation', the discussion focuses on common mistakes new builders make when choosing a motherboard for their system builds. It warns against opting for smaller, cheaper boards with the expectation they'll perform the same as full-sized ATX boards. Although cases may accommodate various boards, full-sized ATX or regular ATX boards are recommended for optimal aesthetics and practicality due to better cable management once installed.
• 60:00 - 69:30: System Optimization and RGB Setup The chapter discusses system optimization, focusing on the decision between choosing an AMD or Intel CPU. It emphasizes the incompatibility of motherboards between the two, stating that each CPU type requires a specific motherboard. The guidance suggests opting for an AMD CPU for a system build at the start of 2023.
• 69:30 - 74:15: Performance Testing and Conclusion The chapter discusses the benefits of choosing a certain type of motherboard, specifically for the AM5 socket. It highlights the advantage of being able to upgrade the CPU annually without replacing the motherboard. In contrast, the transcript mentions that the current Intel boards using the LJ 1700 socket are nearing the end of their lifespan, with a new socket expected to be introduced in the future.

How to Build a PC - Step by Step Beginners Guide Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 hello and welcome to my beginner guide to building a PC where I'm going to be showing you how to put all the parts I've got in front of me together today to come up with a fully working PC not only that but I'm going to be explaining each step in a lot of detail I'm going to be assuming that you don't know how anything about PC Building and roll and give you a guide that you can follow from start to finish I want to explain why I'm doing each of the steps so should you want to deviate away from any of them you're going to understand how to do it and I'm going to make a few recommendations each of the parts of
• 00:30 - 01:00 where you can go up or down depend on your budget and depend on your needs as well I build probably about 25 PCS a year so I know what the common mistakes are and I'm going to be pointing all these out today so you can avoid them so at the end of the video when you press that power button You' got the best chance of your PC bidding without any problems okay let's get started so the first thing to pick is your case and I think the most important factor when picking your case is the size this
• 01:00 - 01:30 depends on your own personal preferences of what type of builds you want to do and as well how much space you have in the room or on your desk for a PC case and they range from really small miniitx cases to full tar cases if you're building your first PC probably a good middle range is to go with a midar case like I've got here and the mid tars come in more Compact and like we have got here a fairly generous mid tarus and the reason I'm recom recommending this the
• 01:30 - 02:00 many ITX cases where a lot of your components are squeezed in the components are generally more expensive the building process is more difficult where if you go with a midar case like we've got here in the Lan 216 you shouldn't really have any difficulty fitting your components in you're going to have a better range to pick from you're going to have more budget options so for a first build this is a perfect choice of a case the Lan Co 216 which I have picked here was my case of the year for 20 22 so I can definitely recommend
• 02:00 - 02:30 it and the other thing then when you're picking your case once you pick the size is pick a case that you like the look off um go on to YouTube check out the reviews of the cases make sure it's got all the features that you want make sure it's good in terms of noise levels if it's got included fans make sure they look good and make sure they run nice and quiet the last thing you want to do is buy a case based on the fans and find out that they're all really noisy so
• 02:30 - 03:00 I've done the hard work for you here this is a really nice case from lean Lee it's well priced it's got a lot of good features and that's the reason I've recommended for today but should you want to go with a slightly different case you should still be able to follow along to this build guide with a few changes so the next thing for us to do is to pick a motherboard and there's a lot of factors that come into play when picking a motherboard but the first thing I want to take a look at is the size so the motherboard range from the largest in eatx D t8x then micro ITX and
• 03:00 - 03:30 then miniitx um the ITX boards are generally high-end boards only and in terms of their size in terms of the actual length they're the same height as an NX but they actually extend further over to the side so they're a wider board but the same height as an ATX board comparing then the microx to the full-sized ATX board you'll notice at the same width but in terms of the height and the micro ITX board isn't as
• 03:30 - 04:00 tall and then we've got the mini ITX board and it obviously isn't as tall and isn't as wide as a full-sized ITX board in general you've got less choice in these type of boards they tend to be a bit more expensive than a standard board and being smaller you're getting less features on it if you look at the pcie slots look at your slots for m.2 and then if we turn the the boards around if you look at the io you're going to have less ports on these boards with which is
• 04:00 - 04:30 the reason I'm recommending if you're going for a mid taras go with a standard ATX board because you're going to have a bigger Choice One Temptation I would avoid is putting a microatx board in a full-sized case and the reason for that is when you install it it's going to install in the same position but you're going to notice there's going to be a big gap at the bottom and then you're going to have all your cables from the bottom of the case running up to the um headers at the bottom of the motherboard and they're going to look really really
• 04:30 - 05:00 untiy and this is one of those common mistakes I see a lot of new builders make these boards tend to be quite cheap and people pick one of these up instead of one of these thinking it'll do the same job and the cases will accommodate the the case that we've got will actually accommodate all for these boards but I would say only the full-sized ATX and the ATX board are actually going to look good in this case this board you might think looks good but once you plug in all the cables and they're running up the case to the motherboard it's not going to look good
• 05:00 - 05:30 anymore so next thing to consider is do you want to go with AMD or do you want to go with Intel because the motherboards aren't going to be interchangeable if you want to go with an AMD CPU you're going to have to get a specific type of motherboard if you want to go with an Intel CPU you're going to have to get a different motherboard and these are the two St equivalents one for MD and one for Intel um for me at the moment this is a guide for building at the start of 2023 I would go with an AMD as CPU
• 05:30 - 06:00 personally if I didn't have any parts and I was selling out from new and the reason for that is this is the first motherboard for the am5 socket so the advantage is if you go with this type of motherboard should the CPU get upgraded each year you're going to be able just to drop a new CPU into your motherboard and get that improved performance the LJ 1700 socket that the current Intel boards use this is going to be the last year of this particular socket and there's going to be a new socket coming
• 06:00 - 06:30 either later at the end of this year or the start of next year I don't think the data has been fully confirmed just yet so the current 13th gen of CPUs is going to be the last lot of CPUs that you're going to be able to drop into this board if you have got some ddr4 lying about there is certain boards that you can get that will work with ddr4 on the latest 13 gen CPUs whereas the current generation of AMD CPUs you're going to be using ddr5
• 06:30 - 07:00 so it makes sense if you don't have anything sitting the bite this is what I would recommend buying the advantage of this if you've got some ddr4 L on bite you don't actually have to go with the latest generation of board the 12 gen CPUs and the Zed 690 motherboards and equivalent chipsets um will run with a 13 gen CPUs with a biased update so there definitely is cheaper options to get into your PC with Intel but you're going to have less forward compatibility at the moment so for today's build I'm
• 07:00 - 07:30 going to be showing you how to install one of amd's later 7,000 serious processors so assuming we're going with an AMD board the next thing to decide is what chipset we want so the highest end chipset is the x670 and the E is the highest end that stands for extreme the more lower end chipset is the b650 and again it comes with and without an E E standing for extreme and it is the better version so you've got a choice and a motherboard this is one area you can really overpay for um the same CPU
• 07:30 - 08:00 running in both these motherboards there's going to be fair little difference in terms of performance out of the box the big advantage of the more expensive motherboards is one they look good they tend to have more features um and as well if you're planning to overclock them you can get the most from your CPU but in general you're really talking about a few percent in terms of difference for actually hundreds of pounds in difference in terms of cost so my advice to you is check out the mother board reviews find a good one check and
• 08:00 - 08:30 see if the cheaper boards you like the look of them and they cover all the features that you want and then pick a board that way rather than just spending all your money in a really expensive motherboard and having to go with a lower quality graphics card because actually if you're building a gaming PC going for a more expensive graphics card on a budget motherboard is quite often the better way to do it and then the final thing to consider is brand if you're going for a particular brand a PC for example if you're going with an Aus
• 08:30 - 09:00 graphics card and Aus motherboard the one RGB package is going to be able to control everything whereas if you're going with lots of different Hardware you might need one RGB package for your graphics card and one for your motherboard um so it's just worth factoring that in people tend to have brand loyalty there's one particular motherboard they like I use motherboards from All Brands in this Channel and in general they all work fairly well and fairly similarly so I wouldn't go with that as a particular preference pick something that you like has all the
• 09:00 - 09:30 features that you want and isn't going to break the bank so then we need to choose our CPU and again it's a choice between Intel and AMD and if you start off by comparing the core count you might get confused here because they don't work the same AMD just go with all cores the same um Intel have this hybrid architecture where they have PE cores for performance and E cores for efficient so the P cores are the big cores that do the heavy lifting the E cores are the cores are the ones that do
• 09:30 - 10:00 more background tasks on the PC so you might look at this and think this has got more cores than this um and this is the one I should go with so what I would suggest doing is what do you actually want to do with your PC is it just for gaming is it productivity as well all those factors are going to determine what sort of CPU you should go with so one I would again suggest doing is going over to the benchmarks comparing one CPU with the other for each of the tasks that you want to do and see is it really
• 10:00 - 10:30 worth spending that extra money to go up on the CPU in general with something like this um six core tends to still work pretty good just for gaming if you want to do more productivity stuff you generally want to go up on the cores so for the CPU for today I'm going to be installing the ryzen 9 7900x which is a 12 core CPU um it's a pretty good CPU in terms of productivity it's more than than what you need for
• 10:30 - 11:00 gaming but again if you want to go with one of amd's other CPUs installation will be exactly the same as what I show you in this video so you'll be pleased to hear we're now ready to start putting some parts together I'm going to be showing you how to install a CPU on the latest AMD and Intel platforms so the biggest difference between these boards is the socket you can't interchange them so you've got an an AMD CPU you need to install an AMD motherboard and if you got an Intel CPU it need to go on an Intel board the sockets are both LGI
• 11:00 - 11:30 sockets so they will have pins in the socket and no pins in the underside of the CPU and this is a change for AMD previously you would had the pins on the underside of the CPU and no pins in the socket and the big Advantage is with this new platform I think it's much easier to install so another big difference between the boards if we take a look at the AMD board you'll notice that we get Ming clips for the stock CPU kers pre-installed it has a back plate on it if we turn the motherboard over and you can't actually remove this back
• 11:30 - 12:00 plate which is again a change from the previous generation of motherboards and CPUs comparing this to the Intel boards you generally don't get a back plate with the motherboard you just have holes for mounting a back plate which needs to come with your CPU killer and Aus have two different types of holes here the outer holes are for LGA 1700 kers and the older generation of LGI 1200 had slightly different spacing so isus have two holes here so you've got an older killer that has LGI 1200 support but not
• 12:00 - 12:30 LGI 1700 support you can still mount it my advice is most Killers now will have LGI 1700 support which is what this socket is and I would try and get the correct bracket because you get improved Ming and improve cooling using the correct bracket but this is a way if you only have an LJ 1200 compatible cooler you can't get a bracket for it you can still install it on this motherboard the other thing you'll notice is I have the motherboard resting on a box and the reason for this is the back of the
• 12:30 - 13:00 motherboard is sharp you've got all these pointed things and if you have this on the table and move it up and down it will scratch your table so it is generally good practice to pop it onto the back of the box where you're not going to scratch up your table okay first step and install our CPU is to open the socket cover so this lever here we need to push it down and out to free it up and then we're going to lift it up towards the middle of the motherboard in this position we should be able to open the socket cover by bringing it up towards the top and then
• 13:00 - 13:30 you take a look at our socket you'll notice we've got lots of pins in the socket and we need to be really careful with these pins that we don't touch them or be really careful when we're putting our CPU in that we don't damage them because if we do that could be the end of our motherboard and you'll notice that the socket cover has this black plastic protector on it which is designed to protect the pens when you don't have a CPU installed in the socket so the other thing I want to point out if you look at the top left hand side of the socket you'll notice it's got a triangle on it and this is an orientation Mark so we're going to have
• 13:30 - 14:00 to line this up with a similar mark on our CPU so we Pi the CPU in the socket in the right orientation so this is our CPU and we look at this top left corner you'll notice it's got a little triangle on it so we're going to have to install our CPU into the socket the way I have it orientated now which is with the tax the correct way up and with the latest generation of AMD and Intel CPUs it's really straightforward you just put it into the socket the way the text is installed so it's up the right way with the older ones you had to install them slightly on the side so it was always
• 14:00 - 14:30 difficult to get the orientation right the easy way to remember you can line the triangles up or just put it in with a text the correct way up taking a look at the back side of it you'll notice we've got loots of gold contacts on it and importantly I'm holding the CPU by the sides I'm not touching the underside because I don't want to get anything on that and prevent it from working so next we can set our CPU in to the socket with the Tex the correct way up with little notches at the top and the bottom of the socket which line up with not in the CPU and help it get into place and once
• 14:30 - 15:00 you've got the CPU in the socket you want to just slightly rock it from side to side just to check it's properly seated in the socket now it's really important you don't go pushing down because if you don't have it in right you can actually damage the pins in the socket so we can see that's fully in the socket and it's sitting nicely so once we're happy with the CPU in the socket we can simply close the cover down then what we're going to do is pull the lever back down now as we do this black bit of plastic will pop off so don't be alarmed
• 15:00 - 15:30 by it so we're going to push the lever back down and then pop it in underneath the socket and you see why I warned you about this if this happens when you're doing this for the first time it can be really worrying now what we're going to want to do is pop this into the motherboard box so we don't lose it and whenever we take the CPU out it's really important that we put this back on to protect those pins in the socket so I'll show you how to install a CPU in the Intel board so again we're going to push the lead down and out but this time we're going
• 15:30 - 16:00 to bring it up towards the top of the motherboard and the socket's going to open the opposite way up towards the middle of the motherboard so in terms of installing the CPU it's exactly the same make sure we don't touch the goal contacts underneath and in terms of orientating the CPU in the socket we're going to install it with the text the correct way up so again we're just going to set the CPU into the socket line it up with The Notches at the top and at the bottom and again once it's in a little wiggle from side to side checking it's properly seated which it is we can then close the socket cover down I've
• 16:00 - 16:30 always find it easier with the Intel boards you actually apply a little bit of pressure here and get the black bit of plastic to pop off before you close the lever so just a little bit of pressure here take the black bit of plastic off and again put it in the motherboard box to keep it safe and then we just need to close the lever down and that's our CPU installed so next thing to talk about is storage and if you're building a PC in 2023 my advice is to use an nvme m.2 drive if possible it's the easiest to install it simply slots
• 16:30 - 17:00 into your motherboard underneath the heat sink there's no additional wires to connect up to it so in terms of installing it it's going to be the easiest and it's also going to give you the fastest possible speeds compared to the other options that we are going to talk about and I will show you how to install all of them so in terms of this drive it's available as an nvme in gen 3 Gen 4 and hopefully coming later this year Gen 5 as the generations go up so do the speeds it is important to say where you going to get benefits from these speeds
• 17:00 - 17:30 um in terms of I think having it as a boot drive for your Windows PC you're going to get some benefit from your PC booing quicker and everything running smoother if your Windows installation is installed on one of these drives certainly compared to a hard drive and there' be definely some advantages over the SAT Drive in terms of storing your games library on it you won't get that much of a benefit over a SAT drive but again you're going to get a massive benefit over a hard drive um and again
• 17:30 - 18:00 going up the generations you're not going to get that much of a benefit either where you do get a benefit from that fast Gen 4 and hopefully Gen 5 Drive is if you use your PC for Content creation you'll get a benefit there and I tend to have multiple Gen 4 drives in my video editing PC at the moment the other options that you have available to you are sat drives and SATA drives come in this 2 and 1 half inch form factor like I've got here where you're going to have to plug in a power wire and also a
• 18:00 - 18:30 SATA wir and connector up to a SATA port on your motherboard so the connection is a way bit more difficult it's going to take up space at the back of your PC and there's going to be some wires running on it and you also get m.2 sat drives so importantly make sure when you're buying an m.2 drive it's an nvme one to give you the fastest speeds compared to an m.2 SATA drive um and then the other option that you have is these mechanical hard drives with moving Parts in them and this is a 3 and 1/2 in form factor but it also
• 18:30 - 19:00 does come in a 2 and 1/2 in form factor and this is the slowest but it is also the cheapest to buy so how I would tend to set up my PC is the first thing I recommend at least two drives in your PC what I would do is have a Windows install on one drive and then if I'm going to be installing games library for example or I'm going to be using it for video editing I would use another Drive for that purpose and the reason is you
• 19:00 - 19:30 don't want to fill up your windows drive with lots of games and once it gets filled up it's going to be less efficient and perform not as well and the other thing is I if I'm video editing I don't want all my files on the same drive that has got the operating system on it so the very idea in packaging is bringing in lots of files into the system and send it out when it's rendering I also don't want that to be the same drive that Windows is running on where it's going to affect performance and in general my video EDI any PC I'll
• 19:30 - 20:00 have a drive for my operating system I'll have a drive I keep my files on and then I'll have another Drive where my files Go to when it's being rendered and that keeps my PC running nice and efficiently but my recommendation is if you're building a gaming PC have a smaller capacity nvme drive for your boot drive and again I would recommend a Gen 4 drive for that at the moment to get the best performance the price in terms of the generation there used to be a big jump between Gen 3 and Gen 4 and
• 20:00 - 20:30 you used to have to consider one over the other was it really worth it there's not that big of a difference now and again there's not that big of a difference between this and the 2 and 1 half in SATA drives so in general I'm always recommending nvme drives if your games Library you won't get that much of a benefit over gen 3 versus Gen 4 but I would still probably recommend a Gen 4 if you can get it for a reasonable price so that's the mvme drives um where I would recommend some of these other things if you've got these drives lying
• 20:30 - 21:00 a no harm putting them into your system if you're baning them from scratch go for the nvme drive the big limitation with the last generations of motherboards used to be the number of nvme ports on your motherboard um some of them used to just have two so for example for me where I like three drives at least I was going to have to use two of these and one of these or get an extra card plugged into the motherboard to allow me to add more nvme drives to it now the motherboard that I have has got
• 21:00 - 21:30 five um m.2 slots in it so again my recommendation is mostly for these um if you run out of m.2 slots you can use these and you're going to go down and speed slightly but I wouldn't use that for your par intensity tasks if possible I would pick one of the nvme drives over it the mechanical hard drives tend to be the cheapest option but they're also the slowest so again it would make a terrible boot drive for your window Windows PC it would make a terrible video editing drive if you're
• 21:30 - 22:00 loading games off it it's going to take longer for your games to load so in general I would use this for long-term storage so files that you're not really going to need and you want to back up onto and the other slight downside of this is it is noisy there's Parts moving in it and actually I can't leave this part on in my PC I do have two of them in my main PC but what I do is I remove the power cable from them and whenever I want to get files off it I'll open the back of the PC plug the power in and
• 22:00 - 22:30 then go into it and get the files off because I don't like the noise off it so again lots of options but the summary is stick with this if at all possible so next thing for us to do is install m.2 drives and this motherboard has four sockets so we've got one behind this heat sink one behind this heat sink and two behind the bottom heat sink each of the heat sinks are held on with two screws so we'll go ahead and get them removed
• 22:30 - 23:00 so the first thing to point out that aough our board has 4m. two slots they all aren't created equally the first clue is the top slot has this really beefy heat sink with a heat pipe in it whereas a lot of the other slots the heat sink is not as beefy so you're going to get better Cooling in this top slot the next thing to do is go into your motherboard's manual and look at the specification of each of the slots quite often they will vary from one
• 23:00 - 23:30 motherboard to the next so I've done that and what I can tell you is that three of the slots support Gen 5 speeds whereas one supports Gen 4 speeds so the one that supports Gen 5 speeds are this one at the top the two bottom slots while this one here only supports gen four speeds the next thing is how many lanes do each of them have how many pcie lanes and they all have four PCI lanes and this is important because again
• 23:30 - 24:00 certainly in some of the older generations of motherboards the number of lanes for each slot varies and then the final thing to factor in is if we install our drive in any of these slots is there going to be any sacrifices and yes there is this slot here which is m.2 slot 3 if we put a drive into it it will actually downgrade the number of PCI aliens for our graphics card from 16 to 8 basically halfing the bandwidth of the
• 24:00 - 24:30 graphics card so this to me doesn't seem like a good idea so I'm going to be trying to avoid this slot if possible the final thing to mention is where do the PCI leens for each of the slots come from some of them will come directly from the CPU While others will come via the chipset and then go to the CPU so the ones going directly to the CPU will be the faster ones on this motherboard three of the slots go directly to the CPU and there're this one this one and
• 24:30 - 25:00 this one whereas this slot here which is m.2 Slot 4 goes via the chips up so putting all that together I'm going to install two gen 4 drives and one gen 3 drive so our two fastest m.2 slots are going to be this one and this one so I'm going to put our Gen 4 drives into here I've already mentioned I want to stay away from this one but I don't want to limit the bandwidth of my graphics card so it leaves this Gen 4 slot that I've
• 25:00 - 25:30 got here which also goes via the chipset so I'm going to put my gen 3 drive into it so if you're using the motherboard from new you're going to have some plastic protection here to remove so all we need to do is insert our drive into the slot at a slight angle and push it in and then we're going to flatten our drive down now one of the nice things that is this have in this motherboard there's a little catch here to secure the m.2 drive so all we need to do is push it around and that's then going to hold our Drive
• 25:30 - 26:00 in place before we return the heat sink again if you're using the motherboard from new you'll have some plastic protection here to remove and then it's just a matter of lining the heat sink again back up and then screwing it into place and it's a good idea to just get this screw tight and slightly before going on to the next one
• 26:00 - 26:30 and then alternate between the two of them till it finally goes tight okay so next we've got our other Gen 4 Drive the one I've installed here is a 500 gigabyte Drive which I think is plenty for my boot drive this is a 1 tab Drive which I'm going to use for my video editing normally 1 tab's enough for a video that I put together for the channel this drive does come with a heat sink so one option is we can attach the
• 26:30 - 27:00 heat sink onto the drive and then install it in without returning the original heat sink and because this is a fairly high-end board it comes with heat sinks over all the m.2 slots if you get a more budget oriented board some of your slots won't actually have a heat sink on it and having something like this is actually quite useful in terms of Aesthetics I think it's going to look better just with the original motherboard heat sink so we'll set it on without the heat sink slide it into the slot again FL flatten it down and then
• 27:00 - 27:30 we'll close the Q latch to secure the drive into place and then I've got a gen 3 drive this is another 1 TB drive and I'm going to use this for my games Library again you don't get much of a benefit in terms of loading games from a gen 3 to the Gen 4 drive and I've got lots of these setting about so it's just a matter of setting the drive into the socket and again flatten in a dine and then we can close the latch here secure into place in terms of the heat sink
• 27:30 - 28:00 again I've used this one before so that's why there's no plastic protection on the back so we'll go ahead and line it up with the slot and then we've got our bottom heat sink and again I haven't installed drives in these slots before so we do have the plastic protection still installed so I'll go ahead and remove it over the drive that we're going to actually need to install it them and again another question I'm quite often asked is even if you're not installing the drive should you remove the plastic
• 28:00 - 28:30 protection I don't think it really matters I've installed for example I've installing the drive up here I don't go removing all the other heat sinks to remove this before setting up the PC but it probably does make sense just to remove it since we're here now and the worry is people worry about having plastic in a PC that's going to get hot that it will melt again I've never had issues with this so I want to show you how to install a drive if you don't have q
• 28:30 - 29:00 latches but as well I want to point out a very common mistake so you'll notice we size our drive up It lines up with the actual hole that we're going to secure the heat sink back on for this drive so to install our drive all we would need to do is push it into here and then flatten it down and when we put the heat sink back on the same hole that's going to secure the heat sink is going to also secure the drive now these drives do come in shorter lengths and there is an option to put standoff into here and here if you've got a shorter
• 29:00 - 29:30 drive and what you would then need to do is use a screw from the motherboard box to secure the drive and I can show you this down at this bottom slot we've got a standoff here we simply insert the drive in it lines up with a standoff we're going to take a screw from the motherboard box and then secure the drive into place and you'll notice that this motherboard it's more budget oriented board and we've only got a heat sink for
• 29:30 - 30:00 this drive at the top this is the heat sink here so if we were installing the drive in this mode it' be better to put it at the top where it would have the heat sink and actually if we were wanting to go for a second Drive the one that came with the integrated heat sink it would work very nicely here so coming back to my common mistake and that would be leaving an existing standoff in place and then installing the drive over the top of it and the problem with this is is it can actually bend the m.2 drive so
• 30:00 - 30:30 for example if you're putting the drive into here with the standoff here we'll put the drive in and then when we flatten the drive down the standoff underneath can actually be putting pressure on the drive and I have made this mistake myself in a previous PC build which is why I'm pointing it out to you here so if you're ready to install your drive the first thing you probably want to do is size it up with the motherboard work out if you're going to actually install with a standoff that secures your heat sink or whether you're going to have to add an extra one in if
• 30:30 - 31:00 you do have to add an extra one in and there's another one here make sure you remove it so what we would need to do is remove this standoff before installing the drive and that way we're not going to damage our drive so next thing to talk about is RAM and if you're going with a ryzen 7000 series CPU you're going to be using ddr5 which is the newest version if you're using an Intel 13th gen CPU you could be using ddr5 or ddr4 depending on the
• 31:00 - 31:30 motherboard that you go with there is an option so make sure when you're getting your motherboard you check it's ddr4 or ddr5 so you get the right kit of ram I think if you're starting out from scratch and you're picking up all your parts as I've mentioned I would recommend going with the AMD and ddr5 because it doesn't make sense to me to be buying old Hardware that that you can't carry forward into the new generations so there's a few things to factor in when you're picking your RAM
• 31:30 - 32:00 kit so it is available both with and without RGB so you're going to have to decide is that something that you want or something that you don't want again you might be going with a build where a big autter going to be blocking the RGB on it but again you might always have that build you might decide later you're going to get an AIO and when you take it off you might want to see the RAM and see it lighting up another thing to factor in is the number of sticks the ram is available in kits of two and four generally you can also buy it in single
• 32:00 - 32:30 sticks um for most people I would recommend getting a kit of two the reason is it's generally more stable and you're going to get faster speeds when you go up to a k of four it doesn't tend to run as fast and you're going to have more stability issues a common mistake is actually I'll pick up a kit of Two And if I want to increase it later on I'll get another kit of two and add it in that may or may not work in generally if
• 32:30 - 33:00 you want to have four sticks of RAM for increased capacity or Aesthetics you should be buying a kit of four sticks of ram that are guaranteed to run together so even if you pick two identical kits from the same manufacturer it is not guaranteed to work together at the advertised speeds so if you want to stick if you want to k a four get a kit of four you might be able to add two kits together I've done that in the past with DDR 4 with ddr5 it may be more of
• 33:00 - 33:30 an issue and I haven't tried doing that yet so two other things to factor in our capacity and speed so for most gaming systems 16 GB of RAM are going to be perfectly fine if you're want to go down the more rout of content creation 32 GB is probably where I would start with and again to Future proof your PC a little bit if I was buying one now I would probably still get the 32 gab the price of ddr5 recently has come down signicantly from where it started so I
• 33:30 - 34:00 think if I was picking up a kit I would go for 32 GB in terms of the speed again this is improving as the ddr5 improves so again I would price is probably one of the biggest factors for me that I would look at and try and factor in is it really worth paying for that extra speed and again look at the benchmarks and see how much improved performance gives you in the tasks that you're going to be planning to do with it final thing to mention is my Ram kit actually going to be compatible with the motherboard
• 34:00 - 34:30 and the CPU that I'm using and particularly with ddr5 this is something that I would check out before spending my hard-earned money on parts and if you go over to your motherboard's website there is a list of all the compatible Ram kits it will tell you whether it will run with two sticks or four sticks and at what speed with each CPU so before you spend your money go over to the motherboard website that you're planning on getting getting and check out the compatible RAM and if you buy
• 34:30 - 35:00 off that list it should work so we're now ready to install our RAM and the kind of ram that I have got has got two sticks in it if we take a look at our motherboard you'll notice it's got four slots but we can't just pick and choose which of the slots we put it into and expect it to run at the fastest speeds but there is a little clue on the motherboard there's a little diagram here that tells you if you've only got two sticks you're going to want to put it into the second and fourth one along from the CPU so this one and this one
• 35:00 - 35:30 that will allow the ram to run in dual Channel and will give us the best speeds so we need to open the clips on the slots that we're going to install it into so it's just a matter of pushing here and here to open the slots up some other boards will be a clip on both slots so just check before you insert the ram so next thing for us to do is to size the ram up in the slot and make sure we're going to put it in the slot the right way around in general the good end of the ram faces out towards the end of the motherboard whereas with the end
• 35:30 - 36:00 with the label on it faces towards the CPU although I have seen Ram kits as the other way around so all you want to do is there's a center marker here line the ram up to the slot and what we can see is this way around looks right if I turn it this way around it won't actually go down into the slot where there's a little Gap in the RAM and where this little silver bit on the motherboard is means it won't actually insert into the slot but had you tried to push the ram down in this
• 36:00 - 36:30 orientation you can actually damage it so we'll put it around the correct way line it up with a slot at the top and then we're going to push it down gently once we've got it lined up nicely it's just some firm pressure to the top of the RAM and you hear that nice satisfying click telling you the ram has been install correctly and you'll notice the clip on the top has not closed for our second step it's just exactly the same
• 36:30 - 37:00 process once we're happy it's lined up in the slot some firm pressure and the ram will click into place so another common beginner's mistake is thinking that ddr5 and ddr4 can be used interchangeably they can't some people will think they've got ddr4 sitting about they'll get a new ddr5 motherboard put their ddr4 into it and later on upgrade the ddr5 this will not work the gold connectors at the bottom the spacing is different so ddr4 must go
• 37:00 - 37:30 into ddr4 motherboard where the spacing will fit and ddr5 must go into ddr5 motherboard they cannot be used interchangeably so we've got one more step to do before we put the motherboard into the case and that is install the brackets for our CPU killer and it isn't going to use the stock brackets and in general I would recommend at least putting the bracket for the CPU killer on if you're going with an AIO if you're going with an ER killer I would generally install the whole a killer onto the motherboard before setting everything into the case so for us on
• 37:30 - 38:00 the MD socket we need to remove these stock clips and they're each held on with two screws so whatever you do don't throw these away um if for example you want to change your CPU killer in the future or sell your motherboard you're going to need these so the best place to keep these is in the motherboard box so all we need to do is screw one of these brackets onto Each corner
• 38:00 - 38:30 so I'll also show you how to installed in an Intel board you'll notice that we don't have a back plate and we've just got these two holes the inner holes are for LGI 1200 which was an older socket and the new ones are the outer holes the LG 1700 which is what this socket actually is Asus have just put dual holes to make it compatible with more CPU colors and the bracket that we have that comes with our AIO supports both of these standards so the pins pushed all
• 38:30 - 39:00 into the middle if we line it up with the back of the motherboard it's going to go through the inner holes for LGA 1200 if we pull all these to the outer setting it's going to be LGI 1700 spacing which is what our motherboard actually is and we'll get better contact with our CPU killer using it in this setting so you're going to want these all pulled to the outer setting where they're going to go through the outer holes and if you're going with another manufacturer board as this as far as I'm
• 39:00 - 39:30 aware is the only one that does this you're only going to have the LJ 1700 holes so it won't be quite as confusing as to which you use and then we're going to have one of these spacers to go over each Corner before we get our motherboard into the case there's a little bit of preparation that we're going to need to do so we're going to need to get the panels off if there's any panels we're going to need to remove to get access to change fans or install radiators or any dust filters that we're need to remove it's a good time to do it now I've
• 39:30 - 40:00 already done a full stepbystep build guide in this case where I cover all the case features in real detail so if you are wanting to do a build in this particular case it's probably worth checking that out to look at the different options that are available today I'm going to keep it things more General so if you were using a different case you'll be able to follow along to this build guide and I'm going to just focus on the main features you need to do this particular build so our temper glass side panel has a little thumb screw here which we need to loosen and then with that loosened we can tilt the
• 40:00 - 40:30 panel out from the top and then lift it away our other side panel we can simply just pull light from the top and left away because we're going to be installing our reator at the top we're going to need to remove the cas's top panel so we've got two c thumb screws at the back which need to be loosened once they're loosened the panel just needs to be slid backwards to free it up and then it can be lifted away so this isn't a feature that you'll find in every case but this particular case you can actually remove the top and this is quite useful if you're going to install a radiator because what you can do is remove the top install it onto your AIO
• 40:30 - 41:00 and then set the AIO on the top of the case back in which makes installation much easier but as well removing the top gives you better access during the build so the top of our case is held on with two screws at the front so we'll go ahead and get it removed with the two screws removed all we need to do is lift the top of the case up and slide it forward and leftt away so taking a look at the front of the case you'll notice we've got 2 60 mm argb fans pre-installed so there's no
• 41:00 - 41:30 reason for us to remove the front panel for this particular build if you do want to change the fans at the front or install your radiator at the front you will need to remove the front panel at this stage and in most cases it's just a matter of pulling it off from the bottom to give you access to the screws for the fans in this particular case we've got these thumb screws which hold the front bracket in place to which our fans are pre-installed at the rear of the case we've got a 140 mm fan which doesn't have any RGB on
• 41:30 - 42:00 it pre-installed which is great because we don't actually need to add any extra fans to this build with the two at the front and the one at the rear and our radiator at the top we're going to have plenty there is an option to install two fans at the bottom in this case although I'm not going to do it for this particular build so we're now ready to get our motherboard installed in the case but there's a few things I want to check before I do and the first thing is that all the standoffs are installed in the correct position so so for an ATX and also an eatx motherboard what you're
• 42:00 - 42:30 generally going to do is have nine standoffs in three rows of three and if you go along the vertical axis the standoffs should line up with each other in a lot of motherboards you'll have a little diagram at the back um which tells you for ATX microatx and ITX where the standoffs should be and beside each hole there's a little corresponding letter to tell you which one need you need to install where if your standoffs aren't in the right place in the case of box you get the standoff insertion and removal tool all you need to do is pop
• 42:30 - 43:00 it onto the end of your screwdriver put it over the standoff and that then allows you to turn to unscrew the standoff and then if it's not in the right position you can move it to where you want to put it in and then screw again to tighten it up so for our particular motherboard the standoffs are in the right position for an ATX motherboard and this case is a little bit unique in the fact that You' have two different positions you can install an ATX motherboard in and if you look at
• 43:00 - 43:30 the back of the case there's a down arrow and an up arrow in the down arrow position it your motherboard is centered down towards the bottom of the case to make space for radiator and fans at the Top If you want to go with an AIO if you want to go with an a cooling um in general you want to move the stands up into the upper position in each of the three rows and then your motherboard is going to be higher up in the case where you're just going to have fans at the top of the case so this case is already set up for water cooling just the way we want it the other thing to check is that
• 43:30 - 44:00 this side bracket is in the right place so we've got a NX motherboard so it is in the current position if you've got aitx motherboard as already shown you it's going to extend further over this way and it would actually block these cutouts to the back of the case so what we would need to do is remove these three screws rotate the bracket round so these cutouts would now be here and then screw it back in again and that would make space for the extra e8x motherboard but as I mentioned we've got an ATX motherboard so this is right for us
• 44:00 - 44:30 final thing to mention our motherboard has an integrated IO Shield which means that the io Shield is already attached to the motherboard so we don't need to worry about this next step if you go with a lower spec motherboard quite often the io Shield isn't already attached and it comes separately and it will line up with the back like this so what you would need to do is install this in the case first of all so to install it all you would need to do is line it up with the cut at the back of the case and once you're happy everything's lined up apply a little bit
• 44:30 - 45:00 of pressure to it and it's then going to clip into place and it is very importantly the back of this is metal and it can cut you so take care not to cut yourself while you're pushing it into place and you can hear that's just clipped into place so that's all our checks done we're about to put the motherboard in but the last thing I want to point out is the middle standoff it is different to all the other standoffs it protrudes a little bit out and the idea of it is once you get your motherboard in and the holes line up this will go through the hole in the
• 45:00 - 45:30 middle of the motherboard and help hold your motherboard in place and this design varies from case to case some cases don't have it others have it like this and others have it where it puds a little bit but the middle standoff is actually solid and you don't put a screw into it this one protrudes but it is a whole nit so you're going to put your motherboard in and get a screw in the middle standoff the last thing to mention is I'm going to show you installing the motherboard with the case upright but you're much better putting your case down on its back and then setting the motherboard in because
• 45:30 - 46:00 you're not going to have to hold the weight of the motherboard to get it lined up the only reason I do it this way is to give you guys a better view of things okay so we can set our motherboard into the case line it up with the cutout at the back and then we'll try and get that middle standoff into place and you hear it's just clipped there so the middle standoff is currently holding it so I'm then just going to pass our Middle Screw through and tighten it up okay so that should hold motherboard in place it's just a matter of getting another eight screws into it and in
• 46:00 - 46:30 terms of the screws you use there's a nice diagram in the case manual which tells you which screw to use so the one we're going to use is the one with a little lip around the outside the next thing I like to do any build is get all our case cables plugged in and the reason I do it at this stage is we've got loads of access to all around the motherboard at the moment once we start adding more stuff into the
• 46:30 - 47:00 case the access to all the ports is going to become more and more limited so it's a good idea to do this now so what do I mean by our case cables well our case obviously has front IO ports and at the moment because they're obviously not connected up to the motherboard they're going to do absolutely nothing so we need to make the connection to make these ports work so we've got a power button and a reset button we've got a combined audio jack for a headphone and microphone we've got two USB type A ports and a single type c Port so running from a
• 47:00 - 47:30 front IO module we've got these cables so first of all we've got our HD audio cable which lets our headphone and microphone Jack on the front of the case work we've got our front panel connectors and very nicely lean Le have combined this into one cable for us sometimes you get these in a combination of one or two pin cables which you need to plug into individual pens on your front panel header on your motherboard so this is definitely much easier the way we have it here we've got our USB 3.0 cable which lets the two type A
• 47:30 - 48:00 ports in the front of the case work and then we've got our USBC cable which lets the single type-c cable work so the HD audio cable normally goes into the header in the bottom left hand side of the motherboard if you're using another motherboard just check your motherboard manual but this is normally where you're going to find it and if we look at the header itself you'll notice there's a pen missing on the top row and if we look at our cable you'll notice the cable has a hole missing on it so it's only going to go in one way and for this particular case we're going to need to
• 48:00 - 48:30 install it with the audio text facing up the way so it's just a matter of lining it up with the header and once we've got it lined up a little bit of pressure to it and it will simply SL into place and then we do want the any exess cable at the bottom on display so it's just a matter of pulling it gently through to the back so next we got our from panel connectors to plug into and at the bottom right hand side of the motherboard is normally where you'll find this header it looks like one big long header here but it's actually only the pins over to the left hand side that
• 48:30 - 49:00 we're going to use so what we need to do is bring the cable through and as I've mentioned uh Le and Lee have been really kind to combine them all into one easy cable to plug in so we're just going to need to plug it in with the front panel text facing up the way push into place and then pull the access cable through to the back now as I've mentioned in other cases you will get all these coming as separate cables some of them have one hole in them some of them will have two and you have to plug them into
• 49:00 - 49:30 individual pins on the headers so if you do have this what you're going to need to do is get your motherboard manual out and look and see what each of the individual pins does and then you're going to have to line them up with the individual cable so what I'll do is I'll put a little bit of footage up of me plugging this style of cable in on another build so generally in the top row into pins one and two working from left to right or for par positive and Par LED negative so it's really important that you plug those into the
• 49:30 - 50:00 right one next to that you're going to have your par switch and it doesn't matter which way up this goes it can go in either way then moving back down to the bottom row and again working from left to right you've got hard drive LED positive and hard drive LED negative so you're going to have have to plug that cable in only one way round making sure the positive and negative contacts are round the right way and then next to that independent 3 and four you've got
• 50:00 - 50:30 your reset switch and like the par switch it doesn't matter which way it goes you can plug it in anyway our USB 3.0 cable is going to go into this header here now what you'll notice is there's a little Notch over the right hand side of this header um and if we bring the cable through you'll notice that there's a little notch on one side of the cable so it has to be lined up the right way around so this clip is going to go over to the right hand side now these pins are really easy to damage so what you're going to want to do is be
• 50:30 - 51:00 really careful plugging this Cable in so we're going to bring it through making sure this little raised area is facing to the right hand side line it up with the header and we're going to take our time here and it's only once we're happy everything is lined up that we're going to put some pressure on it and you're going to get a nice satisfying click as it goes into place okay so just above it we've got our type-c cable so again we're going to bring it through the cut out we'll line it up with the header and push into place so our case has a
• 51:00 - 51:30 built-in fan and argb hub so we're going to have a few extra cables to plug in because of it but also because our fans are already plugged into it a few less cables to plug in to the motherboard so our front fans have two cables coming from each of them and they're already pre-installed into the headers on The Fan Hub so the first if they unplugg it is this four pin pwm connector which is good to par our fan and allow us to control the speed of the fan so we've
• 51:30 - 52:00 got one for each of the two cases front fans plugged into here and here and the other cable is a three pin 5vt argb connector um what lean Lee have done is dizzy chained the two of them together so that's the two fans DIY chained in together which gives us just one header to plug into the controller and that's then going to let us control the lighting on the fans so I'm just going to put that back into place and
• 52:00 - 52:30 then we've got our rear fan it doesn't have any RGB on it so we've just got the four pin pwm connector plugged in and then we've got some spare four pin pwm connectors if you wanted to add more fans in and Behind These protective covers here we've got more 3 pin 5vt argb headers if you wanted to add any other devices which of argb effects on them so if this doesn't make a lot of sense to you know the different connectors have talked about on the argb headers I'm going to cover all this when
• 52:30 - 53:00 we come on to the CPU cter so you will understand it at this stage but really all you need to know is the cases fans are already installed Into The Fan Hub but we're going to have to connect The Fan Hub up to our motherboard to allow it to work so coming from our Fan Hub we've got three cables the first is a 4 pin pwm connector which we need to plug into one of the system fan headers in our motherboard and that's then going to allow our motherboard to control the speed of any fans that we plug in to this
• 53:00 - 53:30 controller the second is another 3 Pin 5vt argb cable and if we plug this into one of the RGB headers in our motherboard it's going to allow our motherboard to control the lighting effects of anything that we plug in to here the third cable is a SATA power connector and for this Hub to work it's going to need par so we're going to need to plug this into our par Supply to par it to allow it to work and again this is another common mistake a lot of people will make they don't plug this into the power supply and then they wonder why
• 53:30 - 54:00 their Lighting on their fans aren't working this will be the reason if you don't provide this with power it's obviously not going to work so Tak a look down at the bottom of the motherboard we've got a system fan header so I'm just going to bring the four pin pwm connector through I'm going to line it up with the motherboard and push into place and then pull the access cable through to the back next to that we've got two argb headers and you you'll identify an air GB header from the diagram and the motherboard manual
• 54:00 - 54:30 um but it generally has two pins Gap and one pin and it is a 5vt header for addressable AR argb the other type of RGB header you will get is a four pin 12vt header um and we have one of these up at the top of the motherboard now what's really important is you can't mix and match what you plug into where you can actually damage your Hardware if you plug them into the wrong place so we've got a three pin 5vt connector so it needs to go into a 3 pin 5vt header so
• 54:30 - 55:00 we'll bring it through the cutout and you can see we've got two pins of Gap and one pin and also in our cable two pins of Gap and then one pin so it's really important we line it up the right way with the header and again it's really easy to damage these pins so you don't want to put a lot of pressure on it you want to take your time line it up and only push it in when you're happy things are lined up so we'll bring the cable through line it up with the motherboard and then once we happy everything's lined up we can just push it into place and then again we'll pull
• 55:00 - 55:30 the access cable through to the back a taking car not to put excess pressure on the cable where we can bend the pins so if your case doesn't come with a built-in fan or RGB Hub all you would need to do is plug the individual cables that we have plugged into the fan and argb hub directly into the motherboard so the four pin or three pin fan connectors into a system fan header and the three pin 5V argb connectors if you've got argb fans into an argb header
• 55:30 - 56:00 on your motherboard the big advantage to this is cable management is going to be much easier because you're just bringing the cables through to the back and if your motherboard doesn't have enough fan headers or RGB headers this solves the problem for you again what you could do is get an aftermarket fan in argb Hub if your motherboard doesn't have enough headers or you just want to make it that little bit easier for yourself so the only other cable that we have to plug in is this SATA par cable which will once we get our power supply installed which we'll take a look at next so the next
• 56:00 - 56:30 thing to talk about is our power supply and although it doesn't sound the most interesting component in the system everything in the system needs stable reliable power to function at its best so it is actually quite an important component and one that I wouldn't skimp by all so the first thing to mention is size this is an 8X power supply this is an sfx or small form factor power supply and for our midar case this is what we're going to want if you're doing a mini ITX build a lot of them you won't be able to fit this into it um and with
• 56:30 - 57:00 your mini ITX motherboard everything being smaller you're going to need a smaller par Supply and you can also get an sfx L one which is the same footprint here but slightly longer this way downside of these as you've L to choose from they don't tend to go up as high in terms of the wattage and they're much more expensive for the equivalent ATX power supply so assuming you're going with an ATX power supply they do vary a little bit in their length so it's important if your case is one of those more compact ATX cases or you're wanting
• 57:00 - 57:30 to install hard drives at the bottom for example the length is quite important so check your cases manual to check the par Supply you're going with is going to be compatible so that's the first thing these come in a range of different types you can see the type I've got here is what we call a fully modular power supply none of the cables come plugged in big advantage of this is you only need to plug in the cables that you're going to use and the advantage of that is that you're going to save space at
• 57:30 - 58:00 the bottom of your case you're not going to have a whole load of cables that you're not planning on using but have to be in your build you can leave them in the power supply box you get what's called a semi modular power supply I I don't have any of these to show you actually all the power supplies I have on hand at the moment are fully modular which tells you what my preference is um the semi modular ones have your important cables plugged in for example your 24 pin cable and also your EPS cable to supply additional part to your CPU now they are essential cables you're going to have to plug in anyway and
• 58:00 - 58:30 you've got spaces to plug the other ones in the non- modular par supplies come with all the cables plugged in so regardless of whether you're going to use them they're going to be in your build and price tends to go down from that Philly modular to the non-m modular also a lot of the not cheaper non- modular ones the cables won't look quite as nice as what you're going to get as you work your way up the power supplies I would recommend spending money on a par Supply and not going from one from an unrecognized name because if something's going to set your PC on fire
• 58:30 - 59:00 it's going to be your power supply so I would go for a good one and in terms of the ratings they they range from bronze gold to platinum um and again I would probably try and get a gold power supply at the minimum if you really are trying to save money you can go with a lower efficiency power supply but again this is something that should last you from build to build you can get maybe 10 years out of a power supply without having to changes so it is worth investing in a lot of your other parts are not going to last as long as this so
• 59:00 - 59:30 the next thing we need to consider is the wattage of the power supply that we're actually going to need so it's hard to determine this without using an online calculator so what I would recommend doing is heading over to one of the manufacturers websites and putting in the specs of the system you're planning to build and it will give you some recommendations on your power supply so I did this over on bat's website and it was recommending that we could get byy with a 750 wat power supply it would be using that potential
• 59:30 - 60:00 at its Max up to 92% of the power available which is too high so really the minimum that we're going to need for the system that we're going to be building is an 850 wat power supply so again here I don't recommend you just go just under what your power supply is going to need that's not very efficient for your power supply it's going to run hotter the fan is then going to kick up to cool the power supply down and that's going to bring noise into your system so you generally want to leave a reasonable Headroom so
• 60:00 - 60:30 that your power supply is running below its maximum load where it's going to be much more efficient and produce much less heat um the other thing is you want to Future proof things a little bit as I've said a power supply can lasts for years and years and again the systems the power demands are going up and up from generation to generation so the last thing you want to do is have to change out your very expensive power supply that youve bought and it is worth I think leaving yourself a little bit of Headroom final thing to consider is
• 60:30 - 61:00 we've now got a new standard of power supply an ATX 3.0 power supply which is what I've got here this is a 1200 wat Titan gold from Monch so it brings certain power standards to cover for the par hungry graphics cards that we now have but it also brings a special connector which is this 12vt high power connector so you've got one cable that goes into your power supply and it can supply up to 600 wats of power for your graphics card there is other ways around
• 61:00 - 61:30 this if you do want to go with an ATX 3.0 power supply you can plug in a standard PCI cable and then with your new generation of graphics card you should get one of these adapters this is for a 4070 ti so it's going to have two pin connectors to give me a 12vt high par connector on the other end problem with this is this does not look quite as clean and I think if you don't currently have a power supply and you're buying one to me it makes sense to buy an ATX 3.0 power supply with a decent range of
• 61:30 - 62:00 power that's going to cover you for the next number of years it doesn't make sense to buy an old power supply and get an adapter for it so if you don't have an ATX 3.0 power supply and you don't want to use the horrible adapter that comes with the graphics card an alternative option you is is to get a new cable for your power supply so I've got a lovely dark Power Pro 12 from bat it's a 1200 wat power supply it's about £300 worth and it'd be awful just to have to get rid of that because
• 62:00 - 62:30 it doesn't have the right cable so bad produced this after market cable for it these two ends plug directly into your power supply and then it gives you a 600 wat 12vt high power cable to go into your new graphics card so again I'm focusing today mostly on building a Cutting Edge system with new components I've done previous builds we're looking at the older components the point of today is to get you ready for a system going forward starting off in 2023 so for me buy an ATX 3.0 power
• 62:30 - 63:00 supply if you can and it's just going to Future proof your system the next thing for us to do is get our cables plugged into our power supply so the power supply is normally labeled telling you what goes where so our motherboard cable our 24 pin cable is going to go into these two headers here so it's just a matter of lining the cable up and pushing and you hear a nice click as it goes into place and this is again another step that a lot of builders who are new to building will get wrong they'll build their PC and it doesn't work and they'll wonder why and that's
• 63:00 - 63:30 because they just haven't secured one of the connectors correctly so take your time and make sure that everything goes in fully and it clicks nicely into place so there we go that's the 24 pin cable plugged in next we've got our EPS cables and you'll see one side of the cable is labeled CPU and the other side is blank so it's the blank side that's going to need to go in so it's just a matter of lining it up and pushing into place so this cable provides additional power to your CPU and in general the
• 63:30 - 64:00 motherboard varies depend on the number of these cables that you're going to need our motherboard actually has two eight pin connectors some motherboards have an eight8 pin some have an 8 plus 4 but ours has two 8 Pin connectors which means we can get away with just plugging one of these cables in but because we've got quite a par hungry CPU and if you're wanting to overclock it to get the most out of it you're probably best plugging both cables in but if for some reason you just had a power supply that had one 8pin EPS cable yes plug-in one of them
• 64:00 - 64:30 will work even if your motherboard has two 8 Pin connectors so we'll go ahead and plug in our second cable and we take a look at the second cable what you'll notice is you can actually split it so it's just a matter of pulling it apart so you've got two four pin connectors so for example if your motherboard had a n pin plus a four pin you can plug it in this way and just not plug the other one in you tuck it round out the back out of the way our next cable is label PCI 5.0 this is this
• 64:30 - 65:00 is for our 16 pin 12vt High par connector for our graphics card so it's great that we only need one cable for our graphics card so just a matter of lining things up and then pushing into place so we've also got a SATA cable to plug in it's going to go into these ones labeled more like SATA over to the right hand side the six pin connectors so it's just a matter of lining things up and pushing into place and you can see this one cable has actually four set of connectors so it would be enough to par
• 65:00 - 65:30 four drives or we can plug in our RGB Hub into here and we still got space for three drives so that's our power supply ready to go but what I want to do is show you how you would set it up if you were going to use the adapter that came with the graphics card so what we need to do is plug in a PCI cable to here and looking at the adapter that we have it's got two h connectors so looking at the cable we've got it has a 6 plus 2 pin and a 6 plus 2
• 65:30 - 66:00 pin so you would think actually I can just plug these into the adapter but what you're generally going to want to do because so much power can come through this cable I would actually use two separate ports on the power supply and in fact if I had one that needed three ports I would be using three separate ports on the power supply so we'll plug in another pcie cable and then then all we would need to do is line this up with our adapter push into
• 66:00 - 66:30 place and then we'll take one of the connectors on the other cable line it up with the adapter and push into place so you can see why um this one cable is a really useful thing to have we've got this one cable to provide this power which is going to look nice and clean versus having this adapter on display with all these other cables to manage so I know which the solutions I would prefer so I'm going to remove the
• 66:30 - 67:00 adapter so just a couple more things to say about our power supply this is our power supplies fan and this is it intake so in general you're going to want to install the power supply facing towards the bottom of the case there's normally a cut out at the bottom for fresh air to get in and the power supply is then going to take a in through this fan here and then exhaust it out the back which is normally out the back of the case and then the last thing I want to point out about this power supply it has a smart zero fan mode so when the power supply
• 67:00 - 67:30 is under low load the fan will stop spinning so that switch is currently turned on if we turn it off the fan will run all the time and the power supply will be louder so I'm going to leave that turn to on which means when our power supply is under low load the fan won't spin and our PC will be quieter some power supplies have this switch others don't but the more high-end power supplies will at least offer this as a standard feature where you don't have to press switch or give you the option the cheaper power supplies quite often what you'll find is the fan will spin all the
• 67:30 - 68:00 time and again if you're running your power supply you've only just met your systems requirements your fan will spend much more because your power supply will be less efficient it'll be making more heat running hotter and noisier the final thing I want to mention is cable extensions and I do use these in a lot of my builds so all they really do is provide an extension from your power supply cable with which looks slightly better they come in a VAR of different colors so these are purely for
• 68:00 - 68:30 Aesthetics so all you would do for example this is an EPS cable extension they quite often come in a pack all you would do is simply slop it into place like this and this bit is on display in the front of the case it's a slightly nicer looking cable they come in a whole red of different colors and it's going to improve the look of your build but offer no functional benefit the downside is you've increased the amount of cable that you have to manage at the back of the case these cables aren't quite as nice to manage as well they tend to be stiffer and thicker particularly when you come
• 68:30 - 69:00 on the 24 pin cable compared to this so you're going to make Cable Management a little bit more difficult for the purposes today I'm just going to keep this build simple without any cable extensions but if you wanted to add them in it would be quite a simple step to do so so just before we install our power supply it is worth pointing out that a lot of cases will have a removal power supply bracket at the back this case doesn't it's normally held on with a couple of thumb screws which which you remove you're then able to fix the bracket to the back of your power supply and then the advantage is you can slide
• 69:00 - 69:30 your power supply directly in from the back which is a little bit easier if your case doesn't there's no big problem you put your power supply in from the side and fix it directly to the back the other thing to point out we've got a vented panel at the bottom and actually got a dust filter here so our par Supply is going to get cooler from under the cas when we installed it's important we St it with the fan facing down the way okay so we can slide our power supply into to the back of the case just a matter of lifting the other cables out of the way and then we can slide the
• 69:30 - 70:00 power supply in and direct it all the way towards the back of the case and then we can secure the power supply into place with four of the larger screws from the case accessory box our 8 pen EPS cables are going to go into the two headers at the top left of the motherboard so we can bring them through the cutout at the
• 70:00 - 70:30 Top Line them up with a header and push into place then we'll bring the second one through as well again line up with the header and push into place and then we'll just pull the exess cable through to the back so our 24 pin cable is going to go into this header here and you'll notice we have a little Notch over to the right hand side so the clip on the cable is going to have to go on this end so we can bring the cable through the conut
• 70:30 - 71:00 out we'll go ahead twist it round and line it up with the header again making sure the clip is over to the right hand side and once we're happy everything's lined up it's just going to be some firm pressure to the cable and making sure it clips into place and then again we'll just pull the exess cable through to the back and then we just need to plug the Sata cable coming from our fan stroke argb Hub into the Sata cable coming from our power supply the next thing for us to chat about is Cooling and for most people building a
• 71:00 - 71:30 PC you're choosing between a cooling and an AIO in general if you're building your first or second PC you're not going down the custom Loop rout and either of these two would be perfectly fine options which you go with really depends on the type of CPU that you're trying to cool and how easy or difficult it is to cool but there's probably options in both for either an easy to cool CPU or a difficult to Cool C CPU so some of the differences some people really just don't want any water at all in their
• 71:30 - 72:00 system where there's any risk of leak at all although it's fairly low with a lot of the aios including empty Lake technology there still is a risk to having water in your system and some people aren't prepared to take that and are happy with an air killer downsides of an air killer particularly if you're going with a big beefy air killer to cool a hot CPU like we have you tend to need to use a premium coer which comes at a cost in terms of price but also in terms of the size it's going to take up in your case and it is actually going to block quite a bit of your build so for
• 72:00 - 72:30 our 7900x either the dark Rock Pro 4 or not as nhd15 would do a good job of killing it but this smaller with a single fan killer would really struggle to kol that CPU but for something like a 7600 this would be a perfect CPU killer so you have to match your cter to your CPU how do you do that well you look at the power requirements of your CPU match that up with the manufacturer's website
• 72:30 - 73:00 for the Killer and they'll give you a recommendation if the Coler is suitable for that part of the CPU that you're going for so there's a TDP rating and you need to match it up to see is the killer going to be suitable for the CPU that you're going to be using and whether you're going to be overclocking that CPU or not so while I've said both of these will probably do an okay job for our 7900x depending on where we install the iio if we salt in the right place and set it up correctly we should get lower temperatures with a 360 mm iio than one
• 73:00 - 73:30 of these premium ER Killers um I also think it's going to look slightly better um but again that's very subjective in general installing an iio is more difficult than installing an airer in my last full stamp step build guide for beginners I did an air killer so what I'm going to do today is show you how to install this AIO I've got lots of separate guides to install in the ular if you want to go on the aill D really easy just Swap this step out for one of my Standalone guides to install
• 73:30 - 74:00 an a killer and you'll be good to go and as I've mentioned if I'm doing an another killer I would put it in at the stage of working on the motherboard on the table and then just put the motherboard and killer directly into the case and you're ready to go the iio is just the bracket I put at the start and then we'll install the rest of it later on so before we come on to talk about the orientation and sizing of aios I think it's important to talk about airflow through a case in general and there is normally a couple of rules in
• 74:00 - 74:30 terms of air flow in general the front of the case you're going to want to have set to intake the top of the case and the rear of the case you're going to want to have set to exhaust and if you have any fans at the bottom of the case generally they're set to intake so the reasons for this is your graphics card is going to be sitting here you don't want to be exhausting a taking it away from the graphics card so bringing fresh air up to the graphics card would be a good idea from the bottom again the front of the case is your major source
• 74:30 - 75:00 of intake for most cases some cases will have an intake on the side but again it doesn't make sense to be exhausting out the front because you're sitting at the front and the last thing you want is lots of hot air coming up and hitting you in the face so in general that's why the top of the case and the rear of the case are set to exhaust and if you look at the way lean Le have installed the fans in this case they're making it very clear for you this is how you should generally operate in the case case the first thing to do is talk a little bit about fan orientation so we take a look at the fan
• 75:00 - 75:30 this is the front of the fan the fan blades are unobstructed if we turn it round the rear of the fan you generally have a sticker on it and you have these little bits of plastic blocking the fam breads indicating that it is the rear of the fam so when the fan spins her is going to be coming in from the front and out the back and on some fans you'll a little arrow telling you the direction of air flow if you're not sure but majority of fans this is the front this
• 75:30 - 76:00 is the back a comes in the front and out the back and you can see the way lean Lee have set this up this is the front so it's going to be bringing her in from the front again this is the front of the fan so that her is coming out the back so if we go back to our case up at the top we've got space for 360 mm aou which is going to give us lots of cooling potential the larger your aou the better the cooling potential so you do get aios in 120 and in general it won't compete
• 76:00 - 76:30 with a good a cooler at 2040 mm a set up the right way but maybe just about to compete with a premium ER killer whereas a 360 will generally outperform a good premium a killer so we're going to set our AIO at the top sticking with these general rules and having it set to exhaust which means we're going to have to have the front of the fans facing into the cas where it's going to be taking a from in the case exhausting it through the Rader and out the top so this is our AIO and it's probably worth just giving you a brief talk through how it works so taking a look at first of
• 76:30 - 77:00 all this is our pump and we've got a cool plate and the cool plate was on top of the CPU we've got some tubes and a radiator so the pump drives water over the coal plate through the tubes to the radiator um the coal plate hits the water up so hot water goes out to the radiator we're going to have fans on the radiator blowing cooler through the radiator which is going to cool the water down and the cool water comes back to the CPU and helps cool it so there's
• 77:00 - 77:30 a circular motion of water around the radiator and back to the cool plate and keep it cool now there's a few things we can do to cool the water better so it depends how we set this radiator up in the case if we have it set up to intake for example the radiator is taking cooler from outside the case and blowing it through the radiator example if we had this up at the front of the case set like this um cooler
• 77:30 - 78:00 would be coming in from outside the case going through the radi a and would give you better cooling potential than if we did what I was talking about in this particular build having a set to an exhaust at the top of the cas whereas slightly hotter from inside the cas will be going through the radiator where it's going to have less cooling potential than that cooler from outside the case so that's the first thing if you have your AIO set to to an intake for the same size of iio you're going to get better cooling than having that iio set
• 78:00 - 78:30 to exhaust and it can be up to about 8° is from what I found in most of my testing between an intake and an exhaust so you might ask me then why am I installing my iio as an exhaust in this particular case and there is a good reason for it while we would get better CPU temperatures if for example I turned the fans around rather than having them this way around where they were exhausting at the top they were set to intake so they were drawing cooler in from the top of the case through the
• 78:30 - 79:00 radiator my CPU temperatur would be improved by doing it this way but then I would be dumping lots of additional heat into the K it's going to heat up all the other components in the case it's going to heat up the graphics card and it's going to interfere with that normal pattern of air flow through the case so there is definitely certain circumstances I would do this but as we've mentioned stick to those General rules um have the top of the case set to exhaust the front of the case set to intake so you might be asking why don't
• 79:00 - 79:30 we then put the iio at the front of the case and have it set to intake and the big reason for this particular build is we've got nice 160 m fans from Le and Lee there that won't fit anywhere else in the case so we have to leave those at the front now it is important to mention this again is very topical um if you are going with a front minded aiio there's a recent trend for people to want to install it with the tubes in a downward
• 79:30 - 80:00 position so I've got tubes up here uh and the pump here so in general as long as your pump is not the highest point of the loop any additional eror that will develop in here will connect up at the top of the radiator here and it won't connect in the pump so for me this is okay it has become very trendy recently to install radiator in a tubes dying position and in general then any air that gets into the system is going to clect up the top of the radiator where
• 80:00 - 80:30 it's not going to be circling about around the tubes the downside with doing this is that the tubes look horrible installed this way round and quite often if you think if you're going to have a graphics card getting in here the graphics card is going to be buing the tubes So in theory this would work slightly better and you're going to have less noise potentially from the IOU if you can imagine if you have it installed around this way and there is a little bit of air at the top where these tubes
• 80:30 - 81:00 are coming in there may be a little bit of turbulence and you might hear some noise with it as fluid evaporates over time but in general I'm installing my iio at the front with the tubes up most of the time and I don't get any issues with it and final thing to mention about AIO is we've already mentioned that the larger it is the more fans and the bigger the radiator obviously the better your koling potential is um as they get bigger they get more expensive but the big Advantage for me is I think you should fill the space that the case offers so if you have space for 360 at
• 81:00 - 81:30 the top it makes sense to put one there from an aesthetic point of view if you're only occupying part of the top of the case and it's not symmetrical it doesn't look good so there's space at the top of the case for a 360 in my opinion put a 360 there the same at the front if you were to put a 240 and leave a gap where a fan would R it would have fitt it it's not going to look very good um so that would be particularly for the CPU I'm going with particularly having an exhaust where it's not going to cool as well as having the T intake I would
• 81:30 - 82:00 recommend a 360 mm iio but again depending on the CPU you're going with you might decide that actually an air killer would be the best killer for you and that's completely fine we are now ready to start working our AIO and the first thing is to set the fans onto the radiator so I've already lined it up in the case and the tubes are going to be over to the front of the case which means this is the back of the radiator so I'm have the fan cables coming out towards the back and as we mentioned we want it to
• 82:00 - 82:30 be exhausting out the top of the cas which means the front of the fan facing into the case and exhausting out the top then we're going to take the long radiator screws that come with the iio and install them through the fans and into the radiator so we're going to tighten them up but just fairly gently to start with so all I'm really doing is just getting these screws to catch and once we've got them all in then we'll tighten them up
• 82:30 - 83:00 okay so now that's all the screws in Loosely I'm just going to tighten them up slightly again we do want to overtighten if you overtighten things there's a risk of damaging things and also the fans are bent out of shape they're not going to spin easily and you might get additional noise so it's just very lightly tight and I also think it's a good idea when you install fans just to give them a little spin just to check they're able to spin freely and there's not any noise associated with it so coming from each
• 83:00 - 83:30 of our fans we've got a standard 4 pin pwm fan connector and the problem is we've only got one CPU fan header but what deep cool do is they include this triple fan splitter cable so all we need to do is plug one of the connectors from each fan into this cable so it's just a matter of lining things up and pushing there we go and that now means all three
• 83:30 - 84:00 of the fans just have one four pin pwm connector which we can plug into our CPU fan header and that's going to allow our motherboard then to control the speed of the fans and adjust the speed of them depending on what the CPU temperature is so again one of the nice things about our case is it comes with a removable top bracket so we can set it into place and then what we're going to do is use these shorter radiator screws to secure the top of the case to the radiator so again I'm just going to put the screws in Loosely until I've got them all in
• 84:00 - 84:30 place so at the moment we have a little bit of movement in the bracket so we can slide it to exactly where we want it and then just tighten up the screws and again take care not do overtighten things as we bend the radiator out of shape we can damage it so the top of this case is a really nice way of being able to root the cables
• 84:30 - 85:00 directly into the rear compartment rather than actually seeing them in the main body of the case so to do that we would need to rid our fan cables through this cut out here so the easiest way to do that I think is just to unplug them from the splitter cable and then what we're going to do when we install it into the case the cables are simply going to right down here and we're directly into the rear of the case so now I want to take a look at the cables coming from our pump we've
• 85:00 - 85:30 got two cables the first is a three pin fan connector we're going to plug this into the pump header on our motherboard and it's going to allow us to control the speed that the pump runs at depending on the temperature of our CPU now probably a good point as any to discuss the differences between three and four pin connectors and most of the time this is going to be relevant to the fans that you're using um so in General I do prefer the four pin fan connectors because you're going to be able to run these in pwm mode um anything with a
• 85:30 - 86:00 three pin connector you can't run in pwm mode pwm mode really is just a way of controlling the fans the two most common ways that most motherboards will control your fans is either pwm or DC mode or voltage controlled so with voltage controlled and this is really the only option you have with a three pin connector you adjust the voltage applied to the fan of the p P to control its speed the side issue with this is you can't reduce the voltage all the way down because the
• 86:00 - 86:30 fans will stop spinning or the pump will stop working um with pwm what you do is you apply the full voltage to the device at all times and it has then an additional connector which controls the pulses so it will have the device on for a certain period of time and off for a certain period of time and that alternating on and off will adjust the speed of the device and the big advantage of this is you're going to be able to run your devices at much lower
• 86:30 - 87:00 speeds reliably than what you can with voltage control and again the big advantage of this is that you're going to have a quieter device because your fans will be able to run much slower when the PC is under low load whereas with voltage control they're going to have to run much higher even though they don't need to be at that rate it doesn't matter so much for a pump because the pump line generally run at full speed um but it does have some implications for how you set your devices up in the bias and
• 87:00 - 87:30 anything with a three pin or a four pin connector as I've mentioned you can run it in DC mode you've got a choice but I don't think it's a good choice with a four pin connector because pwm mode would be better the one place you can get into issues is if you take a three pin connector and don't change the sellings and the buyers to PW from PW M to voltage controlled the device will just run at 100% all of the time so I'll
• 87:30 - 88:00 be covering this when we get into the bias and setting up the devices depending on the connector in them if you want to keep it simple run your three pin devices in DC mode run your four pin devices in pwm mode and if you ever turn your PC on and your fans are just incredibly Li and they've got three pin connectors on it the chances are your motherboard is currently running them in pwm mode it doesn't have the additional pin that it needs to control the speed so it'll just run at 100% and
• 88:00 - 88:30 you need to go into the bias and change it to DC mode so hopefully that makes sense to you the other cable coming from our pump is a 3 Pin 5vt argb cable and this in general is to par the lighting on the pump and also to allow you to adjust the lighting on the pump it doesn't serve any function so if you didn't plug this in your pump wouldn't light up but it would work perfectly well because you plugged in the par connector here RGB headers on most motherboards are quite limited so what
• 88:30 - 89:00 deep cool have done has got a little splitter cable here so what you could do is plug this into your motherboard and then the other end you've got a spare header you can plug another device into it so with us um we've got an argb Hub in our case so we probably will just plug this into the Hub rather than plugging it directly into the motherboard if your case doesn't have one of these just plug it into an airG head on the motherboard so we do have a couple of additional steps to take with our pump before we're ready to install it the first thing is this mirror is
• 89:00 - 89:30 just really a cover which is magnetically attached so it can simply be pulled off during the installation and you can see here the RGB device is just connected to it it's just the lighting whereas this is the bit that actually does the killing it is important to mention if you're getting the a from new the thermal Pace will be pre-applied and there'll be a protective plasting covering over the coal plate um in general you're not going to want to remove that until you're ready to install it but you don't want to damage the thermal paste I've used this AIO before which is why there's no thermal
• 89:30 - 90:00 paste on it we now need to put the brackets on and there's different brackets depending on whether you're installing it on an Intel or AMD motherboard so I'll show you it for the AMD motherboard so I'm doing this on the table at this stage because there's not any thermal paste on it if you were installing it with the thermal P preprise I would install the iio in the case and then install the bracket separately because if you take the cover off and put the bracket on you're not going to be able to put the protective cover back on again so all we need to do
• 90:00 - 90:30 is set the bracket up into place we can take one of the screws that comes with the aou and set it in and the nice thing about this aou is actually magnetized so it's going to hold the screw into place which really makes a difference and then it's just a matter of screwing it into place and like with most things in PC Building I'm just putting this in very Loosely to start with till I get the other one in and then once we've got the other one in we'll tighten both up and then same again on the other
• 90:30 - 91:00 side we're now ready to set our AR into place at the top of the case and just as I do I'm going to pass the cables through this cutout at the top and then we can slide things down and
• 91:00 - 91:30 into place next thing to do is get the end of the triple splitter cable with the fans and the radiator plunged into the CPU fan header we've got three fan headers at the top the CPU fan header is the one furthest to the left so I'm going to bring the cable back in through the top conut H our AIO up at the top and that's going to give us better access to the headers so I can simply line up with the header here and push into place and then tuck the excess cable through to the
• 91:30 - 92:00 back and lower things down again so we're now ready to install the pump in the motherboard and same as actually installing the motherboard into the case you'll find this easier with the case down that's back I just won't get a good angle for you if I do it this way so that's the only reason I'm installing things facing up um again you should have some pre-applied thermal paste on your AIO if you're getting it from New I don't so I'm going to add some to the center of the CPU so the AO that I'm applying here actually comes with thermop pre-applied and you've got this hard plastic cover
• 92:00 - 92:30 that comes over the top so you're not going to forget to take that plastic cover off some of the iOS will come with thermal paste in the box so you're going to have to add your own like I did in the video but quite often they do have a plastic wrapper over the coal plate that you're going to have to remove before you use the AIO it is important you remove the plastic from the cool plate because if you don't it's not going to actually kill your CPU very well and you'll be wondering why your CPU temperatures are high also what I'm going to do is just help organize this cable by tucking it around the cool
• 92:30 - 93:00 plate here which is just going to mean I'm going to be able to control it up towards the top of the case and then we can line the bracket up with the standoffs we put on earlier on and we apply a little bit of pressure to it that's just going to keep it held in place and then we've got one of these thumb screws to go onto Each corner and then what we can do is just tighten
• 93:00 - 93:30 things up with the screwdriver in general you want to go from one corner to the other tighten it up a little bit at a time okay so that's our pump secured you can see how having the cable rooted slightly around the bracket is going to help organize it and we want to get it up to our pump header which out of these three headers is the one furthest to the right hand side at the top and again it's just going to help to lift up the radiator at the top now because we got a
• 93:30 - 94:00 three Pin cable and a four pin header it will only fit onto the three pins over to the right hand side you'll notice at the top of the header there's a little bit of plastic which is going to limit where you can plug it in so don't worry about plugging it into the right three pins it only go into to the right three ones and then we'll bring the access cable up at the top and we can lower that back down again so you can see there the cable actually looks nice and tidy and you can barely see any off it so at this stage we can return the mered cover to the pump it's just a matter of lining it up
• 94:00 - 94:30 and then it will magnetically attach and then we've just got the cable to root up towards the top of the motherboard and we'll just bring the cable out of the back and then at this stage we can then secure the top of the case into place so up at the top of the case all we need to do is plug the RGB cable coming from the pump into one of the RGB headers on our Hub so just a matter of pull the protective covering off so we're going to want to make sure we lined up the right way way we've got two pin of Gap and one pin so that's the right way around and then it's just a matter of getting things lined
• 94:30 - 95:00 up once we're happy everything's lined up we can just push things down into place so as we mentioned if you don't have a case with an argb Hub we're just going to plug this directly into our motherboard but it does make sense because we're just going to need one argb header on our motherboard and all the RGB is going to syn up so another mistake that a lot of people make when building a PC is they set all their f hands up to run off the CPU temperature and this is something that can drive you absolutely mad because when you're
• 95:00 - 95:30 working in normal task on your PC your CPU temperature will have little spikes in it where maybe it goes from 30 to 55° and what happens if you've got all your fans set up to react to the CPU temperature all your fans in your system will suddenly ramp up at that increase in temperature it lasts for a short while and then it goes down again and then it happens again so you'll be sitting beside your PC and it will drive you absolutely mad that all your fans are suddenly cycling up and cycling down so there is a way around that if
• 95:30 - 96:00 that is driving you currently mad or something that you want to avoid um what you can should generally have is your CPU fans should definitely be reacting to your CPU temperature going up and down like that so they can keep your CPU cool but you don't necessarily need all your K fans responding the same way so for me there's three different ways that you can set up your fans to avoid avoid this the first is you can just fix the speed of your system fans so that they don't react to the CPU temperature and
• 96:00 - 96:30 they just provide a constant level of flow that the noise is acceptable to you and then if it's only your CPU fans that are spinning up they're going to be less noticeable the other thing that you can do is you can probably this is the quickest one um is just set up your fans to react to the system temperature rather than the CPU temperature it's going to change very slightly as the C CPU heats up so it's pretty much going to do the same thing your speed of your system fans isn't really going to cycle
• 96:30 - 97:00 up that much when your CPU goes up as the system heats up gradually definitely they will go up a little bit the third thing that you can do it's a little bit more complex than the other two but it is set up a custom fan curve and in general what you want to do where the CPU is cycling up and annoying you during those low intensity tasks it's not really hitting that high a temperature you want to flatten the flatten curve slightly so it's not as obvious a ramp up in the fans um in general it's that steep curve that the fans are going from quite low to quite
• 97:00 - 97:30 High when the CPU is under quite a low load and the temperature is not going up that much that is probably driving you mad whenever your CPU is under a high load and a high intensity task at a high temperature you want that nice steep fan curve so that it actually does a good job of keeping your CPU cool so another important topic to mention here is the type of pressure you have in your case so it can either be positive pressure negative pressure pressure or neutral pressure so with positive pressure for example if you had three fans at the front and one at the rear you would have
• 97:30 - 98:00 more fans bringing her into the case than exhausting them so that's positive pressure if you had it the opposite way round you only had one fan bringing a in but three exhausting it that's a situation where you have negative pressure that single intake fan providing the fans are off the same speed and the same type is not going to be prably enough a for those three exhaust fans so in that situation you're going to bring more into the case through the other cutouts and that is why people worry about negative pressure
• 98:00 - 98:30 because rather than coming through the filtered intake at the front where you want to get her um it will draw it in from the pcie slots and other gaps in the case and the worry is that those slots aren't filtered so there's risk of it bringing dust in and then if you have neutral pressure where you have a balanced intake and output um that's the other situation that you can have so in general when build the PC most people prefer to have either a balanced system or to have positive pressure to avoid that risk of dust being brought into the
• 98:30 - 99:00 PC so it's not just quite as simple as matching the number of fans up the fans may be of different sizes and different locations they may have different speeds that they run at you may have set the fan curves up differently um if there's a dust filter in one place or not that's going to provide more resistance so the same fan running at the same speed will be shifting lesser if it's passing through a dust filter where there's no dis filter on the other side and the other thing if you have the fans on a radiator again that's creating more
• 99:00 - 99:30 resistance as well so they will be shifting lesser than a fan that's not on a radiator so it's not quite as simple as just managing up those fans but it is something to think about particularly if you're adding extra fans into the system extra fans isn't always good um sometimes it will affect the air flow in the case and you might turn a case from positive pressure into negative pressure and bring more dust into it the other thing it might do is Alter the air flow in the case and actually make The
• 99:30 - 100:00 Thermals worse so if you are planning on building in a case it is worth checking out if anybody's done a best fan configuration for that case because it will help you decide whether adding extra fans in or not is a good idea but in general it's worth just keeping those rules in mind that you would probably like to have your system either balanced or in positive pressure and trying to avoid neither Under Pressure if at all possible so although I know install salad drives in the build I did say I would show you how to install them for
• 100:00 - 100:30 completeness so probably the best place to install them is on these removable brackets at the back of the case so we need to remove the thumb screws at the top and then we can lift the bracket up tilted out so all we're going to do is set our drive onto the back of this these are the connections that we're going to need to connect up and then we can turn things around and we line the holes up we're going to going to use exactly the same screws we used to secure the motherboard to secure the drive to the bra of the
• 100:30 - 101:00 bracket it's probably easier for me to show you how to install the cables before we put the drive back onto the bracket so we take a look we've got two L-shaped connectors on the underside of the drive the smaller one is for a satad data cable which is going to connect to our motherboard and the larger one is for SATA par which is going to par the drive so in our motherboard box we get a SATA data cable which again has an L-shaped connector on it so it's just a matter of lining things up the right way and then pushing it into place and again
• 101:00 - 101:30 if we take a cable coming from our power supply and push it into place so now that we've got the drive connected up we can install it back on the bracket again just a matter of sliding it into place sliding it down and then we can rescure into place with the thumb screw we can then pass the other end of the set a data cable through to the main body of the case and then we'll get it plugged into one of the seta ports on the
• 101:30 - 102:00 motherboard this cable does have a little locking connector on it so if you want to remove it you have to push the silver connector in and then that's going to free the cable up in terms of installing a 3 and 1/2 in hard drive we've got a hard drive cage at the bottom which can accommodate to 3 and 1/2 in drives so we just need to remove a dri tray by pulling a light importantly we're going to want to install the drive with the io facing the back of the case and then it's just a matter of sliding the drive into place
• 102:00 - 102:30 there's little holes on the drive at the side and we've got little notches on the drive tray so it's just a matter of lining these up and then it simply just push the drive tray into place and that's going to hold the 3 and 1/2 in drive and then we can simply slot it back into the drive trve and that's going to clip into place and it's just exactly the same process for connecting up the 2 and 1/2 in Drive we've got a set of data cable here and a
• 102:30 - 103:00 set of power cable here I'm not actually going to install this as I've mentioned I'm not a big fan of 3 and 1/2 in drives in my build they are quite noisy so I'm not going to install it so what I normally do in most of my builds is actually remove the hard drive cage if I'm not going to use it if you need more space for 2 and 1/2 in drives you can also install 2 and 1/2 in drives in these Drive trays as well but you are going to have to screw them in from underneath so we'll remove the drive
• 103:00 - 103:30 tray and if you want to adjust the hard drive cage you can either half it down by removing the top half there's a lever here you fill up and that removes the first half of the train again that's going to make you plenty of space but I'm just going to go ahead and remove the whole thing so the lever at the bottom we pull up and then we can pull the drive right towards us and lift it all the way out and it's just going to mean we're going to have more space at at the bottom for our power supply cables last thing to mention about drives before we move on is this is a 500 GB SATA SSD but the nvme m.2 drive
• 103:30 - 104:00 that I want to install Windows on the Gen 4 Drive is also 500 GB so when I go to install Windows it might be difficult to tell which Drive is which um and obviously if I install Windows on here it's not going to run anywhere near as fast as the Gen 4 nvme Drive in general what I have found is Santa Drives tend to show up first in Windows so it would generally be the second um 500 GB drive that I would want to install onto but
• 104:00 - 104:30 there is a more feel prooof way of getting into issues and installing Windows in the wrong drive and then having to repeat everything and that is simply just to unplug one of the cables from here so this drive doesn't show up at all as an option install Windows on the m.2 drive and then plug this back in and then install it onto Windows which is the option I'm going to go with so we can pick one of these cable either the power cable or the Sata cable it won't show up with one of them unplugged so we'll just simply unplug the SATA data
• 104:30 - 105:00 cable just a matter of pressing the little Cable in and removing it so when we're ready to install it all we need to do is plug that cable in just before we get our graphics card in the last thing I want to mention is the option of installing fans down at the bottom so we do have these removable brackets at the bottom you are able to M ssds on them the other option is to put fans to do fans you need to remove the two screws at the front and then the brackets You're simply able to tilt up and left away so
• 105:00 - 105:30 if you were going to install fans you would install them with the cables facing towards the back of the case so they're going to be out of the way and importantly we've talked the bottom of the case any fans you install you're going to want to have them as intake so they're bringing cooler up to the graphics card so normally when you're installing fans in you use fan screws and screw them in for in the back end the problem is getting the screwdriver in here is going to be quite difficult so Leon Le have got custom holes here and you're going to secure
• 105:30 - 106:00 them the same way you would secure the fans to the radiator on the AIO Le they include these long radiator screws You're simply going to pass them through the fans and then screw them in to the underside of the case we would then simply pass the cables through to the back and again we've got two familiar connectors on them there's a 4 Pin pwm cable and a 3 Pin 5vt argb cable remember if you don't plug the RGB Cable in the fan will work perfectly well with the four pin pwm cable plugged in but it just won't light up to get it to light
• 106:00 - 106:30 up and control the effects you're going to need to plug this in for us it would make sense to plug these into the controller that we have at the top of the case if you're doing a different case and you don't have them it would just be a simple matter of plugging these into your motherboard into a fan header and an argb header and like most things um there's limited argb headers but you are able to daisy chain the fans together final thing to mention on fans before we get on to installing our graphics card is I have shown you how to
• 106:30 - 107:00 install an AIO and kiss fans that run off the standard fan headers on the motherboard and standard argb headers to control the lighting effects on them it is important to mention that there is other options for controlling both the fan speeds the pump speed and also the argb effect on the fans and a lot of other manufacturers compared to the ones that I've used here will actually use a little Hub to control those and either your fans or your iio plug into the Hub
• 107:00 - 107:30 the hug PLS in with a USB 2.0 header to your motherboard and you install some custom software from the manufacturer and that will then let you control the devices plugged into that Hub be it fan speed or RGB effects without using the standard headers on the motherboard this is getting more common and it varies widely between different manufact so obviously I can't cover all the possible options here today but if you have an AO that has a USB 2.0 header or you have a
• 107:30 - 108:00 fan that requires a hub to work it is going to be slightly different than the steps that I've shown you today so if you do want to keep the build fairly simple using fans that just have the standard fan connectors and argb headers on them and using an AIO that doesn't have a USB header you should be able to follow this guide without any difficulty so the next thing to talk about is graphics cards and really which graphics card you go with is going to depend what you're planning on doing with your system if you're building a gaming PC
• 108:00 - 108:30 the graphics card should be the most expensive part in your system and which one you need and how much you're going to need to spend on it the way to tell that is to go and look at the benchmarks look at the games you want to play in the resolution that you want to play them in and see what the different graphics cards will give you in terms of frame rates remember to factor in how much your monitor will up to because there's no point getting a graphics card that will output 300 frames per second if you can't see that on your monitor and is it really worth P all that extra
• 108:30 - 109:00 money for all those extra frames so you're going to have to weigh all those things up and in fact when you're building your whole PC this is what I would strongly encourage you to do list all the components and write the different options that you have in terms of pricing beside each of them and then you're going to go through and pick all the different options in general what I think you're trying to do with most of all your other components is can I really sacrifice this component for example your power supply can I bring it down to this can I drop the ram down to
• 109:00 - 109:30 this can I drop the cooler down to this to enable you to go up to the next level on your graphics card because this is where you're going to get the most bang for your buck in terms of spending your money in terms of that raw giving performance if you're planning on building your PC mostly for Content creation whether you go for a good graphics card depends on what you're actually doing with it and what software package you're planning on on using I use D Vinci resolve studio and a really good graphics card does make a good difference in most of the tasks you're doing in D Vinci resolve studio if you
• 109:30 - 110:00 get the free version of D Vinci resolve the graphics card definitely helps with some of the tasks but a lot of the other tasks that will be used in the studio version it uses a CPU for so it can't make full use of the graphics card in the free package so it might not be as good an investment to buy a really good graphics card if that's not what you're doing a lot of the other packages they might not really use the graphics card at all and they rely mostly on the CPU so you really are going to have to check out the benchmarks for the package you're planning on using to see does a
• 110:00 - 110:30 good graphics card make a difference and in some of them you're actually better spending your money on the CPU rather than the graphics card but in terms of looking for gaming benchmarks they're really easy to find everybody loves benchmarking these things you go on to YouTube and you'll find really good data if you're building a gaming PC for video editing and content creation there's less out there but a really good sources pit systems that's where I go to when I'm thinking of making upgrades to my video editing PC they've got really good information and I'll put a link to them
• 110:30 - 111:00 in the description so go onto there look at the package you planed on using and see what difference the graphics card makes and decide is it worth spending how much of your money on that card the other thing to look at is if you're building your PC for browsing the web using PowerPoint and word occasionally and simple tasks like that you might not actually need a graphics card in the system and to be honest using your PC for that if I was to put a 4090 into it versus integrated Graphics you probably couldn't tell the
• 111:00 - 111:30 difference so in that situation it is not worth paying all that money for an expensive graphics card a lot of the CPUs will have integrated Graphics in them and that might be the best thing for you and then if later on if you start to use your PC for more Graphics intensity tasks or take up a little bit of gaming you can add a graphics card in another thing worth considering here is whether you should get a CPU with integrated Graphics or not even if you are planning on getting a high-end graphics card for gaming and I would
• 111:30 - 112:00 recommend that you do um the reason is if something goes wrong with your graphics card and you have to send it away to be repaired and this has happened to me in the past when I built my son's first gaming PC just after a month the graphics card developed a problem we had to send it away to get repaired and because we didn't have integrated a graphics in the CPU he had no PC over that month period I hadn't started YouTube at that stage and I didn't have a Shelf full of Parts where I could just drop another one into his system and I imagine for most of you that's the situation you'd find yourself
• 112:00 - 112:30 in had we got a CPU with integrated Graphics what we could have done is moved the HDM display port cable from the graphics card and plugged it into the motherboard and then at least we would have had the PC for simple PC tasks like browsing the web and using the computer for work it would have been able to get his homework on it but unfortunately at that stage he was stuck without a PC for a month now you didn't used to have quite as good a choice with CPUs with integrator graphics and certainly with the rise in CPUs picking one with integrator Graphics you really
• 112:30 - 113:00 sacrificing the CPU performance it's not currently um this way at the moment the new AMD 7,000 Ser CPUs come with integrated Graphics so if you get one of those great de of integrated Graphics the Intel ones you have a bit of a choice about whether you do or don't get integrated graphics and one of the mistakes I think people would now make is I'm going to save $20 or20 by getting the version that doesn't come with the graphics because I'm not going to need it I'm going to get a good graphics card when something happens to your graphics card that is going to be the best $20
• 113:00 - 113:30 you have spent so my advice is there's no sacrifice no it's just that little bit of extra money there's no sacrifice in CPU performance so get the one that comes with integrated Graphics if you can okay so you worked out how powerful a graphics card you're going to need the next thing you're going to need to decide is do you go with AMD or do you go with Nvidia and again you need to look at what the features each of the platforms is going to give you and decide which you should go for so again you're going to have to look at those and look at the benchmarks for me when
• 113:30 - 114:00 I'm buying a graphics card I'm buying it mostly for video editing into Vinci resolve studio and for that purpose I always find the Nvidia cards work better you could have a less powerful Nvidia card and a really powerful AMD card but because with the Nvidia Studio the integration and the drivers work so well in Dent resolve Studio that lower power card will actually give you better performance than that really high power AMD card um so that's for me is the reason why I'm picking a card I would go
• 114:00 - 114:30 for NVIDIA but again your use may be different than mine so you're going to have to look at the reviews and the benchmarks for what you're plan to use it for the different features it has to help you decide they're both really good options so another thing to point out if you're going with one nvidia's new 40 series cards it's going to come with this new 16 pin 12vt High par connector which you're either going to have to one of the ATX 3.0 power supplies with a special cable coming from that I've shown you already or use the adapter that comes in the box with the graphics
• 114:30 - 115:00 card with the standard power supply PCI cables the8 pin connectors and depending on the graphics card you go with it'll vary between 48 pin connectors or two8 pin connectors like we've got for this 470 TI to connect up you might have some reservations about going with one of these cards because certainly there has been a number of reports of the cards going on far in general that was cables that weren't plugged in correctly but I could understand why you might be a little bit worryed to go for this so
• 115:00 - 115:30 it's only the latest 40 series cards from Nvidia that are using this connector if you go for the latest card from AMD they're still using the eight pin connectors that we've been using on the graphics cards for years so I think this is the new thing um there is a few things you're going to have to be careful with if you're installing it for example you're going to want to make sure you plug the cables in correctly uh into the graphics card and get a nice click you're not going to want to put a big band on it and when you're plugging it into your power supply if you go with the adapter this adapter has two pin connectors in it it's important you don't just use the
• 115:30 - 116:00 one cable from the power supply and then plug in the two8 pin cables into the adapter you need to use two separate cables coming from your power supply and just use one a pin connector on each of those cables to power the card so you're spreading the power between the two cables to the power supply rather than just the one it is going to be less of an issue with something like this 4070 TI but if you're for example if you got the 4090 um and you're using less cables you're going to have an awful lot of
• 116:00 - 116:30 power going through those cables and that's going to increase the risk of fire another thing you may have considered doing is mounting your graphics card in the vertical orientation because I think we can all agree in this orientation looking from the front of the case the graphics card looks really good in this orientation you're not getting the best look of it I think here definitely looks better again that's subjective there's a few issues with doing this the first is that you're going to have to buy some additional Hardware if it doesn't come with your case you may need to buy a bracket to mount it in the case because your PCI
• 116:30 - 117:00 slots may be horizontal and you're almost certainly going to need a riser cable because the slot is going to be down here you need a cable that runs from here up to your motherboard and that is going to come at an extra cost so that's one thing to factor in the other common mistake that you can make is if you get a gen 3 Riser cable so not a Gen 4 riser cable a gen 3 one and plug your graphics card into it it might not actually show up when you first plug it in um the reason for that is the Gen 3
• 117:00 - 117:30 Riser cable that you're using to get it to show up what you would need to do is install your graphics card horizontally go into your motherboard bias and then adjust the pcie settings from Gen 4 to gen 3 and then when you went back and installed the Riser cable the Riser cable would work this is less of a issue nowadays um because there's more Riser cables about that are Gen 4 and in general the price of them they're still expensive but they are coming down but
• 117:30 - 118:00 this was a big issue when the 30 series card first came out people were just still using lots of gen 3 Riser cables and they were building their system and suddenly it wasn't working and this was a big reason why so just be careful if you are planning on doing this you need to be careful for this particular thing you're better getting a gen for Riser cable I think um if you're planting the mro graphics card vertically going forward and this will just avoid this whole issue the final thing I want to mention about graphics cards before we go on and get this installed in the system is graphics cards are most
• 118:00 - 118:30 definitely getting bigger this is probably one of the smallest 40 series cards that you can get and I chose it purposely because I wanted to get one that I could fit into the mini ITX systems that I build but they are really really big and in general if you're putting them into your system depending on how good your KSM motherboard is you could have a little bit of sag in them so what you will find is most of these graphics cards are coming with some sort of GPU support bracket nowadays so the idea of this is there's a little knob here where you can just adjust how high
• 118:30 - 119:00 up this goes and if you put this onto your graphics card it's going to provide a little bit of support and prevent it from sagging um like I say most of the 40 series graphics cards are coming with one of these or another this one there's a little screw here which just adjusts how far up this comes so you put it in the right position for your graphics card and tighten it up there's other cases that will offer this as part of a standard feature nowadays um and as well some motherboards that will offer a GPU support bracket if it comes with your k a Subs whether you put it in or not you
• 119:00 - 119:30 can set your graphics card and see if there's a lot of sag on it um there is a few downsides one it doesn't look quite as good the big downside and I have had this happen to me in the past you have to be really careful on the underside of the graphics card of where you're putting it and you want to make sure it's well away from the fans I installed one of these certainly in the last year it was an absolutely massive card so I used the manufacturer's bracket and there wasn't a great straight design on the card it was really curved and I had
• 119:30 - 120:00 a sitting here and then at some point it actually moved when the graphics card was spinning up um under some thermal testing and the bracket went into the fan and broke the fan so if you are using this this is just one area you want to be really careful with look underneath the card and check that it's in a safe position well away from the fans because again that card as well the manufacturer had sent out to me and I had to explain what happened if that's your card you're going to have to send it away and get it repaired probably at
• 120:00 - 120:30 your own cost we're now ready to install our graphics card and we're going to need to remove the second and third slot cover from the top depending on the thickness of your graphics card this may vary so in terms of installing the graphics card we're generally going to want to install it in the top slot for the fastest speeds so we're going to need to open the clip in this slot um Asus of a really nice way of doing this there's a little button over to the side which we can press and that will open the clip on the slot the reason this
• 120:30 - 121:00 exists is once your graphics card is in place and say you've got a big autor been able to press the button here can be quite difficult um so actually just been able to open it from all the way over here to remove the graphics card is quite a nice feature then we can slide our graphics card into place and all we're going to do is try and get it lined up with the slot just a matter of it about a little bit till we get it into place once we're having everything's lined up it's just some firm pressure to the graphics card that we need to apply and the graphics
• 121:00 - 121:30 card is going to clip into place and the slot will close and then we can secure the graphics card back into place with the two screws we've just removed then we can bring our 12vt high power cable through the cutout at the bottom we'll go ahead and line it up with the graphics card and once we're happy things are lined up we can apply some pressure and it's going to clip into place we need to be really careful to make sure we've got the cable all the way pushed in the cards that were going
• 121:30 - 122:00 on fire were related to the cable not and properly pushed in so make sure you get a nice satisfying click when it closes and make sure that you're not putting any unnecessary pressure when you bring the cable back so we're not going to try and put a big band into this cable we're just going to pull it back down gently towards the bottom of the case the last thing for us to do is some cable management so we need to tidy up these cables so we can get the side panel back on again and you can see one of the reasons I really recommend this case the Cable Management Solutions at
• 122:00 - 122:30 the back of the case are absolutely brilliant we've got these clips here for managing our EPS cables and we got lots of velcro cable straps over here so we should be able to get a really clean job done with cable management so I'm going to take our APS cables and just push them over behind these clips here and just work them down towards the bottom of the motherboard
• 122:30 - 123:00 and then we can use the vro cable straps here to manage these cables and then we can just tuck the excess cable that we have left down at the bottom of the case so that looks nice and tighty I briefly just plugged this satad data cable back
• 123:00 - 123:30 in I'm just going to unplug it and it's going to sit here nicely now it's managed with the cable so it's easy enough to plug back in once we've done the windows install so hang on there a minute we're not ready to put the side panel on just yet and we rewind that back did you spot the glaring mistake at the back of the case I'll give you a minute to look closely yep that's it so the two front fans have become unplugged from The Fan
• 123:30 - 124:00 Hub when we've been doing the cable management and this is a very real risk when you're managing all those cables there's a risk that you're going to unplug them either from the motherboard or from the power supply so whenever you put your PC on and it doesn't work this may be one of the causes in this particular case the two front fans wouldn't have span up the argb cable looks to be connected well so they would light up but not spin up so one thing you can do is before you actually manage your cables you can switch the PC on to check it's working and then only later
• 124:00 - 124:30 on go on to manage the cables so if you know it stops working after managing the cables you probably unplugged something the other lesson here is whenever you're managing your cables take care not to put excess pressure on them and it is probably worth a final check to make sure that you haven't listened any of the cables that you plugged in
• 124:30 - 125:00 and then if there's any plastic protection on the glass you can go ahead and remove it again I've done a build in this case before and that's why there's not any here so we've now reached the most nerve-wracking part of your first build and that is flipping the par switch and see what happens will it actually Bo now importantly there is a few places you can go wrong here and a fairly common mistake is to plug your display port or HDMI cable into your motherboard rather than your graphics card so I've got mine plugged into the graphics card I've got a cable plugged
• 125:00 - 125:30 into the power supply and it's turned on I've got a keyboard mouse and ethernet cable plugged in and importantly I plugged a Windows 11 bootable USB drive into the back of the PC if you don't know how to make one of those I've made a video on it and you'll find a link to it in the description so there's no point putting it off any further we're going to flip the part switch and see what happens so I'm around the wrong side to see what's going on in the PC but hopefully we've got lights on and fact I can hear the fan spinning so what we're going to
• 125:30 - 126:00 need to do is keep an eye on our Monitor and see what happens so this is all fairly normal it's going to cycle up and down for a little while while we're waiting for something to go on the screen with your first boot so it's just a matter of keeping your patience and see what happens so that's a good sign we've got the Republic of Gamers logo appearing on the screen and that's great we've now got all the information on the screen about our system and it's telling us to press F1 to enter the setup and this should take us into the bias so I'm
• 126:00 - 126:30 not going to make any changes to the bias at this stage I'm going to come back later on once we've installed Windows so what I'm going to do is press F10 to save our settings and then if we press enter the PC will reboot and hopefully now this time what it will do is it will find the windows 11 bootable us speed Drive in the back of the PC and Bot off that because all the drives that we have in the system at the moment are completely blank there's no operating
• 126:30 - 127:00 system on it so it can't Bo off that so it's just a matter again of waiting patiently and seeing what happens so there we go we're through to the windows installer screen what I'm going to do now is show you how to install Windows 11 but to make it a little bit easier for you to see I'm going to flip over to the screen mode okay so over the next lot of screens I'm going to pick the options that apply to me of different options apply to you pick the ones that are relevant to you I'm from the United Kingdom so I'm going to click on next I'm going to click on install now and if you've got a Windows product key you can
• 127:00 - 127:30 go ahead and enter it here if you don't have one click I don't have a product key select the version of Windows you're going to get a product key for in the future I'm going to select Windows 11 Pro and click next we're going to accept the license terms click next we're going to go for custom install and then all our drives are now showing up here so you can see why I've unplugged the SATA drive which is the 500 gab drive because it would be difficult to tell it apart from Drive zero um so this is where we're going to want to install our
• 127:30 - 128:00 operating system so I'm going to select it and click on next and this next bit will take a little bit of time so I'll go ahead and Skip through it okay I'm from the United Kingdom I'm going to click yes and yes again I'm going to skip a second keyboard layout we're going to need to connect to the Internet so I'm going to click on connect and put my details in we're going to need to name the device click next and then the PC will restart I'm going to set up for personal use and click next so we're
• 128:00 - 128:30 going to need to sign in to our Microsoft account so we'll click on the sign in and then we need to put our details in if you don't have a Microsoft account you can go ahead and create one so I'll put my details in so I have a lot of previous builds associated with this account so I'm just going to click on view more options and I want to set this up as a new device I'm going to click on next I'm going to need to create a pin click okay I'm happy with apps using my location I'll click yes I'm happy with find my device accept um I'm only going
• 128:30 - 129:00 to chend the required data accept uh no inking no no I'm going to skip all these I'm going to skip this I'm going to only save files to this PC I'm going to decline this I'm going to decline this I'm going to click continue I'm going to decline this as well and I'm going to skip for now okay so that's just through the windows and we're getting a pop up here asking us do we want to install the Armory crate and the land drivers both of which we're
• 129:00 - 129:30 going to need so we're just going to click on yes we can click on I understand and yes and then we can click on reopen up we're going to pull this all the way down to the bottom click on I agree and click next same thing again and I'm just going to skip the wallpaper and click on cancel okay so we'll come back to the Armory create in a minute but this is where we're going to get our drivers from but the first thing I like
• 129:30 - 130:00 to do is get Windows fully up to date so we click on the Windows icon we're going to click on the settings we're going to click on Windows update and we're going to click on check for updates what's going to happen is Windows is going to find a whole load of updates it's going to try and install some of them for to install some of them it's going to need to restart the computer but we're going to keep back here and checking for updates and only move forward when there's no more updates available okay that's Windows fully up to date whenever I click on check for updates there's no further updates available so the next thing to
• 130:00 - 130:30 do is get our drivers installed so we're going to open the armory crate which we installed and then we're going to click on the tools tab so we've got the driver tab here we'll just wait for it to load up and what you'll notice is it's find our chipset driver AMD graphics driver for the integrated Graphics we've got the Bluetooth driver the Wi-Fi driver and the audio drivers um it's also found a land driver but it already installed it remember it did that at the start when the pop-up appeared so this is a
• 130:30 - 131:00 really simple way of installing the drivers all we need to do is click on download install click yes and then we can go and make a cup of tea and wait while it does all the hard work for us okay so that's all the drivers installed we can click on restart now okay so there's one more driver that we're going to need for our graphics card so we can either just download the driver or what I prefer to do is download the GeForce experience which will let us keep our drivers up to date so I'm going to click on download now we can open the file click on yes
• 131:00 - 131:30 we're going to agree and install and then we're going to need to put our login details in if you don't have an account you can create one or log in with one of your social media accounts and I'm just going to click a link in my emails okay so we click on the drivers Tab and if we click here we can choose which version the driver we want to install so there's game ready drivers who using your PC mostly for gaming or Studio drivers we using it mostly for Content creation so this is going to be a gaming PC so I'm happy with the gam
• 131:30 - 132:00 ready drivers which is already gone ahead and downloaded for me so I click on Express installation click yes and it's going to go ahead and install the drivers for me and it's normal for the screen to flicker during the driver installation so when this happens don't worry okay so that's the driver's installed we can click on close and close again okay next thing I want to do is get all our drives to show up because if we head over to this PC the only drive that's showing up is our boot Drive which is our 500 gbyte nvme drive so to do this
• 132:00 - 132:30 we need to head down to the bottom and type in dis management and create and format hard drive partitions will come up so we'll click on that and we're going to get a prompt um that comes up asking us to initialize the drive drives so it's the three drives that aren currently installed it's fine we're just going to click on okay so Drive zero is our 500 gab nvme
• 132:30 - 133:00 drive and what I have found is the drives tend to go in the order so into m.2 slot2 we have our team group drive so we're going to right click here and click new simple volume click on next next it's assign the letter D if we want to change that we can I'm happy with d so I'm going to click on next and then we just need to name the drive and then click on next and finish the next drive we can do the same thing new simpol volume next next next
• 133:00 - 133:30 and we're just going to name it and click on next and finish and then when the PC was off I did replug in the SAT drive so it is noise showing up as well so we'll right click on it click new simple volume next next next and we're going to name it and click on next and finish okay so we now go back over to this PC you'll notice that all our drives are showing up so we've got our boot Drive we've got our 2 m.2 drives
• 133:30 - 134:00 and we've got our SATA drive okay next thing I want to do is head over to our motherboard's page on ausa's website we'll click on the support tab at the top and then we click on drivers and tools so we select our motherboard and then we select our operating system and over here is the other place you can get the drivers so for example if there was something else that wasn't installed um at the Armory crate at the start you can go ahead and download it here if you skipped the step where the
• 134:00 - 134:30 popup appeared to get the Armory crate you can get it from here as well the other thing I want to do is head over to the bias but what I want to do is download the latest version of the bias um before we head there so in case we got a chance to update it so we click on the bias and firmware select our motherboard so we can see that the latest version of the bias is 805 so we'll click on download and then what we want to do is head over to our
• 134:30 - 135:00 downloads folder and then we're going to extract the file extract all extract and then this is actually our bias file so we'll copy it and I plugged in an external USB drive and we'll paste it onto it and then we can close this down so we're now ready to enter the bias to do this we're going to restart our computer so we'll click on restart and whenever the screen goes black we're
• 135:00 - 135:30 going to start pressing the delete key and this will take us into the bias so it's going black now it's starting to press delete key and that's us into the bias now take a look at the version of the bias that we have installed we do have a later version installed on our USB drive so I'm going to show you how to update it so what we want to do is head over to the Advance mode we're going to click on
• 135:30 - 136:00 the tools Tab and then we're going to click on the flash utility it's found our USB drive and here's the latest version of the bias that we installed so we can select it and we're going to go ahead and click on yes and yes so it's going to give us a compr about do we really want to do it I'm going to click on yes and then it's going to start updating the bias okay so that's the bias updating few things about updating
• 136:00 - 136:30 the bias you shouldn't really do it unless you really need to because if something was wrong during a bias update you can actually Breck your motherboard and leave it completely functionless reasons for updating it if your PC is not working well or the new version of the bias offers some function that you need um what's really important is that your PC does not not lose power during the bias update um because that's a really good way to break your motherboard okay so that's the bias update we need to press F1 to run the
• 136:30 - 137:00 setup so that's us back into the bias and we can see we're now running the datest version 0805 and it's a good idea not to make any changes to your bias if you're planning to do an update because when you update it it tends to be that everything gets reset so there's a few things for us to change in the bias starting off off with our memory we can see our memory is currently running at 4800 MHz but it can run at 5600 so all we need to do is go down
• 137:00 - 137:30 here to docp and click on enabled and you see we've now got 5600 mahz next thing to do is take a look at our fans so we can see the speed our CPU fan is running at chassis fan one which is where we've got our Fan Hub plugged in and the two fans at the front and the one fan at the rear we don't have anything else plugged into any of the fan hubs and we've got our AIO pump header and it's running here so we can click on Q fan control and this is where
• 137:30 - 138:00 we're going to be able to make any adjustments that we want to make so starting off with our CPU fan it's currently running on autodetect but we can change it it's a four pin connector so it needs to run in pwm mode so we can click on pwm so you can see here it's currently running on the standard fan curve if we select the silent fan curve it's going to make a slight change to things we can click on full speed if we want the fans running at full speed or if we want to make our own manual fan curve we can do
• 138:00 - 138:30 that and then we can drag each of these points to where we want it to be I'm happy enough with a standard fan curb for our CPU fans it doesn't sound particularly loud at the moment heading over to chassis fan header number one so as we've mentioned it's got a four pin connector so we're okay run it in pwm mode and then the last thing that we got something plugged into is our AIO pump so it's only got a three pin connector which means it can't run in
• 138:30 - 139:00 pwm mode so we're going to have to run it in DC mode so we can go ahead and click on DC mode and I normally do run the pump at full speed um if the noise is particularly bad I will adjust it for example we can click on standard but I'm happy enough with the pump on Full Speed I can barely hear it sitting right beside it so that would be the way I would normally set the fans up and then we can click on exit so I also want to check that our resize bar has been
• 139:00 - 139:30 enabled so I'm just going to click on it and turn it to on okay that's all the changes I want to make to the bias so we're going to click on save and exit it's going to give us a summary of all the things that we have done and I'm just going to click on okay and then the PC will reboot into windows okay so that's us back into windows we want to check that the changes we've made in the Bios have been applied so we right click on the Windows icon click on the task manager we'll just maximize it
• 139:30 - 140:00 here uh and then if we click on the performance tab we then click on our memory and what we can see we've got the full 32 GB of memory here and if we check at the speed it's running at 5600 MHz so that's perfect the memory is running at the correct speed to check that we've got the resizable bar enabled we're going to click on the Nvidia settings we're going to agree and continue and we're going to click on the system information and we see resizable
• 140:00 - 140:30 bar is currently enabled so we can close this down okay last thing to do is get the RGB set up so if we head back over to the Armory crate so we'll go up to here we'll click on all apps and there we go we've got the Armory crate here okay so that's us into the Armory crate where we're interested in doing is setting up the RGB so we need to click on the aura sync so at the moment it has found our motherboard our memory and the addressable LED strip which is the RGB
• 140:30 - 141:00 header on the motherboard that we pluged things into it's not showing up our graphics card so we may need to check for updates to see if it appears so we'll click on the settings we'll click on the update Center and check for updates we can see that there's an update for the memory and an update for our graphics card so let's go ahead and install these okay so hopefully now when we head back to Aura sync hopefully the graphics card will now appear let just
• 141:00 - 141:30 refreshing and there we go we've now got the graphics card so we're able to set up these devices individually or just sync them all together I'm happy enough just to change them all together so we can head over to Ora effects and then we can pick whatever we want things to be on as you look at the case at the moment you can see everything is currently set to Rainbow um but we've got a whole variety of different options I think I'm probably just going to go with my traditional static white so let's click
• 141:30 - 142:00 on static and you'll notice everything in the PC at the moment has currently changed to Red um I would like it to go to White so we just need to click on the color and to get white we just need to type 255 into each of these boxes and then click on okay and you'll notice that everything the fans at the front the lighting on the graphics card the ram the AIO and the motherboard lighting have all turned
• 142:00 - 142:30 to White and this really is one of the big advantages of using the same hardware for your motherboard and your graphics card it's just going to limit the amount of RGB software that you're going to need to install to control everything okay so that's the PC up and running and looking great oh
• 142:30 - 143:00 [Music]
• 143:00 - 143:30 so I think you'll agree the build looks great and I think the white color theme that have gone with with the RGB works really well but there's no point having a PC that looks great if it doesn't perform well so we'll better take a look at the benchmarks so in City bench we had a single course score of
• 143:30 - 144:00 1,992 and a multi-course score of 28835 In Time spy we had an overall score of 20997 with our GPU score outperforming our CPU score in UN in heaven 1080p high with an average frame rate of 536.773500 the gaming benchmarks and all games were tested at a resolution of 3440 by 1440 with graphic settings set to high starting off with shadow of the Tomb Raider with dlss set to Quality
• 144:00 - 144:30 using the game's buil-in Benchmark with an average frame rate of 2011 in Assassin's Creed Valhalla we had an average frame rate of 116 in fortnite we had an average frame rate of 135 and then finally in Far Cry 6 again using the game's built-in Benchmark with an average frame rate of 13 to in terms of the temperatures when we were ging both our CPU and our GPU temperatur were mostly in the 50s and the highest temperature I seen on both was 60° moving on to a more extreme
• 144:30 - 145:00 temperature test and I did a 10-minute it of 64 stability test with all components in the system being stressed the maximum CPU temperature recorded during the test was 86° with our core clock somewhere between 5.2 and 5.3 gahz the maximum recorded GPU temperature was 65° and in terms of noise levels during the it 64 stability test the average noise was 54 DB while at idle the average noise was 34 DB so putting everything
• 145:00 - 145:30 together I'm absolutely delighted with this PC it not only looks great it runs well but importantly it runs cool and quiet so I can 100% recommend this build guide and I think I actually forgot how good this case actually is from the time I did my full stepbystep build guide in it it is absolutely brilliant building in it was without any difficulty and the features the fans in it are good they look great and they run quiet and as well the cable management and the built-in Fan Hub it's an absolutely
• 145:30 - 146:00 brilliant case and I don't think you could really do better for the price in terms of putting everything together following this guide I don't think you should have had any problem it was one of the easiest PCS I've put together so if you are contemplating your first PC build this would be a really easy one to follow and I think with the steps I've shown should you want to deviate away with things with a different CPU maybe a different CPU killer or a different graphics card you shouldn't really have any problems if you want to go with an older graphics card all you would need to do is don't worry about this 12vt
• 146:00 - 146:30 High par cable plug in the standard PCI cables and you'll be absolutely fine um and I don't really think you should get yourself into trouble if you have to deviate away a little bit this case does have a whole host of features I didn't get covering today in this build guide but I have done it previously in My Lan 216 full step by step build guys it's things like installing fans at the bottom the optional argb controller you can mount at the front moving the io module um stalling the graphics card vertically and adjusting the motherboard
• 146:30 - 147:00 so if you do want to do a build in this case and maybe change a few things about it's probably worth checking out that guide as well today I just wanted to focus on a general guide to building a PC for a beginner which I'm fairly happy with what I've achieved and the final result I'm absolutely delighted with another thing that I really enjoyed using today today was this new standing desk that mid site have sent out for me it's their S2 Pro Plus which is their Flagship desk I'm using one as my main desk behind me as well and they've sent
• 147:00 - 147:30 me a second one for building PCS on and it is just so much more comfortable sitting here today with the desk up at the right height and it allowed me to get a lot of angles during the build that I wouldn't have been able to get without a desk that went up and down so big thank you to Mid site for sending this out for me if you do get your PC built and you're willing to upgrade your desk set up I can strongly recommend this desk and I'll put a link to it in the description if you want to check it out so hopefully you have enjoyed this build guide if you have please remember
• 147:30 - 148:00 to give it a thumbs up and if you're not currently subscribed to the Channel please hit the Subscribe Button as well thanks for watching a [Music]