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Cleaning & Upgrading My HTPC: Gaming in the Living Room!

2016-01-30
what's up guys welcome back to the channel today is going to be a build vlog of sorts where I'm essentially going to be upgrading my HTTP see here those of you who aren't familiar HCPCS that stands for home Peter PC and that's what I pretty much been using this for for the last few years now actually we're on a z77 platform with a core i5 3570 k which is not overclocked what a shame even though the cooler that i have in there a Samuel 17 from prolimatech isn't the best overclocking cooler that you could probably use I probably should dial in a small OC at some point in this video so we'll get around to that it's also got a gtx 750ti black edition from gigabyte very nice budget and factory overclocked card that's been excellent for our 1080 needs well connected to my 55 inch screen over there but there are certain things about this HTTP see that I've been wanting to change or upgrade or modify for awhile the first of which is throwing in another stick of RAM now actually this was built with two initially built back in 2012 or whatever with full eight gigs of RAM it had two four gig sticks now one of those sticks had to be taken out in an emergency situation where one of the sticks was used to save another pcs life is a very dramatic genetic day but finally this is going back in so we can actually do some triple-a high-end gaming on this thing now that being said we aren't going to be able to do some high-end gaming with a 750 Ti in here well it is a great budget card we need a little bit more power if we're going to be gaming at a decent decent smooth high quality settings so I've got an r9 285 here Mini ITX version from sapphire excellent little card I did a review on this the ITX compact I should say it's actually smaller or shorter than the 750 Ti but it's more powerful absolutely more powerful it's got a single PCIe 8 pin PCIe but it doesn't necessarily need two more power-efficient especially compared to the Maxwell architecture that the 750 Ti is rocking it's it's it's kind of a power hog in comparison but the fact that there's only a single pin single 8 pin PCIe connector means will minimize some of the cable clutter the last thing I want to upgrade is the storage configuration here now so far ever since I built it it's had a single 256 gig Plextor m5 pro SSD in there which has been fine for my wife and i's needs because we have an ass and we we stream a lot of our content and media from Netflix and things like that but if we're going to be doing some triple-a titles triple-a gaming I should say we're going to need some more storage in here now granted I could throw in something like another SSD or even a three and a half inch mechanical drive because there is room in here believe it or not but it's already so packed and the cables are already just kind of chaotic that I'm actually going to go a different route and that is mSATA there's actually an M SATA slot beneath the motherboard that does z77 e ITX from asrock excellent little board for the price at least it was back in the day I didn't even realize when I bought the board years ago that it had an M SATA slot underneath it so I just ordered some no-name brand from Taiwan or China whatever hopefully doesn't die on me in the first week but it's on its way right now to my place it's in shipping so once I once I get that I'll be able to take this this guy apart clean everything out and install that M SATA Drive in there and start loading up some games then we can do some testing and actually a game on this thing with with some heavy hitting games that aren't just you know Sonic all-stars racing transformed or something like that so I've rambled on long enough why don't we go ahead and start breaking this guy down clean this up and we'll take it from there boom all right and we're underway the deconstruction process has begun let's go ahead and start off with the undoing the OD e the stupid thing about this optical drive is that I haven't really been able to use it all that much because I haven't found a good blu-ray playback software on Windows 8.1 hopefully you guys can maybe give me some suggestions if not I hate all of you so that came off pretty easy here's the optical drive and then we've got the SSD right beneath it very nasty I would have been it would have been tight to fit another one of those things in here especially a three and a half inch I believe the three and a half inch would have had to go in place in lieu of the optical drive so I would have had to take this out completely in order to get a mechanical in there so good thing we're going with the mSATA which is still on its way by the way and I figured out it's a 5:50 and crucial it's not I was looking at some no-name Taiwanese brands or whatever but I ended up going with a crucial crucial awesome looks like there's their latch that I need to press or can I just pull this up yeah how the motherboard works up yep this is nasty ooh whoo it is just and their last and final screw it's the same okay it's Paris boy it's just the Paris blackout calm down remove the motherboard now see this is where the super long thermal right screwdriver comes in handy you know I like it long it's super magnetic too it's super effective against groove now watch us take this motherboard out flip it around and find out there's no m SATA port on the bottom there is oh thank god oh thank god it's right there I know you guys can't see right now but it's right there can confirm I probably shouldn't hold it from the CPU cooler let's go ahead and grab the motherboard instead get this 8-pin connector out yes Thank You EPS thank you and then next we're going to go ahead and just remove this CPU cooler here again I think I mentioned this maybe earlier in the video but we've got a Samuel 17 CPU cooler heatsink I should say very nice low profile heatsink one of the best I have ever used personally dumb heat pipes look at that Lee gasps sexy that it doesn't come with a fan so it gives you the option to slap whatever a fan that you'd like on there 120ml I've got a silent 12 pwm gelid is a gallon or gelid I don't know there should be a swordfight on awesome hardware but I've got a 120 millimeter fan on here that stays really quiet but does move a lot of air it's kind of a nice balance between airflow and static pressure so we've got our fan off here below you look at that that is some belt and master stuff let me go ahead and focus on this oh I love this camera app thank you Paul for introducing me to this camera app that I can auto focus with from my phone oh it's amazing it's so amazing but here he isn't even closer look just so I can tap to autofocus again oh it's beautiful it's so cool but yeah it's nasty right that is disgusting so we're going to go ahead and clean that kept autofocus boom and that is the last of them go ahead and take it out BAM good use some fresh coat of thermal paste why not but there you go there's a full look at the board as well as the cooler alright it's dust off time I'm definitely not going to do it in here because there's just way too much crap here so compressed air will be our back okie dokie let's go ahead and wipe this then we'll paste off here gonna get a fresh coffee filter but I also like to use these Arctic clean thermal thermal removers thermal paste removers and purifiers these are excellent I'll put links to this India links to these in the description below if you guys are interested there's one that's removing the actual thermal paste and there's one that purifies the surface and preps it for for for another application of thermal grease of your choice so why don't we go ahead and just I like to give it one swipe just one dry swipe like that first apply maybe like a dot or two you really don't need much of this stuff comes right off and then just go ahead and circle circle around boom like that so that is clean that's clean right there right but but it's not pure is not here you know why because we haven't used the purifier yet guys come on this is grade school elementary stuff here so go ahead and apply about the same amount a little second little circles little circles and boom that is peers as some pure ass right there same thing same thing with the CPU bum bum bum bam z77 EE ITX what aboard what aboard this was one of the best mini ITX boards in its class asus had a really good one as well probably the only one that might have topped this one just because they had pretty much the same features except I believe the Asus one had built-in bluetooth this one has built-in Wi-Fi but no Bluetooth so I've actually got a little Bluetooth and USB adapter to get that kind of connectivity boom Cpl and styles let's clean the fan before we reinstall the CPU cooler don't forget the inner the enter the inner rim of the fan it's where it also gets pretty damn dusty is the inner rim right there so you want to give it a nice rim job on the inside that's a happy fan need an itty-bitty me let's go ahead and mount this puppy or we wish you the memory first yeah then we go boom up this guy is not in oh you're in sir you are definitely in by definition oh that's firm so here it is the crucial m5 50 512 gigabytes whoo sweet so we're going to go ahead and install this now and that will allow us to continue on with the rest of this filled here so then we go and boom look at how nice and easy that is love it let's go ahead and put this guy in the case see it's clean it's all clean and shiny even the fan even the fan is good as new wipe down the cables and everything so we are in good shape ladies and folks so let's go ahead and drop this guy in there we go there we go okay yeah now we can go ahead and start plugging in our front Pernell Turner tersh boom the video god o dudududu where you at here you go in we go Geronimo perfect perfect fat why don't we go ahead and install our unit of power in there cables cables cables cams cables cables cables cables cables cables and I think that is Italy Jim holy moly we are they are pretty much done wow that is cool look at that look at how much cleaner everything looks here's a look at the video CAD bogus video CAD looks bad you out you can see kind of how open it is on at the front of the case I mean apart from a few cables wandering around in there that I can't really do much about there is some fresh air flow coming from that intake right they also um yeah why don't we go ahead and connect this guy to a TV to a television system and play some video games on it and see how this r9 285 works out for us all right forgot the htpc all set up connected to my TV now which is what you're seeing sorry I have to talk kind of quietly right now guys because my grandparents just went to bed so I've got to stay hush-hush on the down-low but as you can see here I've got fraps up me at the upper right corner it is we're running around 50 50 ish 50 to 60 fps right now which is actually pretty good considering the settings that I match let me go ahead and show you those going boom boom all right so of course we're at 1080p sync is off we are not using any fxaa but we do have 2x msaa enabled now we could easily turn this off and apply that and you'll just see our FPS our framerate just skyrocket to about 90 as you run around and start shooting engage and different activities around Los Santos that will drop into the 80s sometimes a 70s when you're in really grassy areas that can drop to the 60s 50s or even below but for the most part it's super smooth hovering around 80 on average which is really nice to see much higher than my 750ti was able to achieve so happy to see that let's go back into the graphics here to give you guys a fuller look at the other settings now I turned population variety all the way down it's not really important to me and it eats up a lot of VRAM distance scaling which is important to me I'd like to turn that up it's not too heavy on system resources texture quality we managed to get away with high shader quality very high so this is kind of a blend between normal high and very high it's just kind of all over the place but there's a lot of different parameters here in GTA 5 that they really let you play around with different different settings and stuff but for the most part this is a really decent decent these are decent quality settings I would say it looks absolutely great on the TV and it plays really smoothly too so I'm happy about that if you were wondering about any overclocks yes I have overclocked the r9 285 to about a thousand megahertz pretty much even and then also be 35 70 K has been overclocked just just a smidge to 4.2 gigahertz because again with that low profile heatsink we don't really have too much wiggle room there in terms of thermal capacity and whatnot but the other thing that's fairly obvious but I still want to point out is that I have GTA 5 installed now because I actually have the storage capacity to save that damn game and install it it's a 60 gig file was never able to really install it on that SSD before and so far the crucial m5 50 s been working out in the very brief time that I've spent with it but here we are I've already got you know evolved Metro last light hitman absolution installed onto the HTTP C which is something that was never a possibility in the first place so very happy about that let me go ahead and kill these cops and we'll close out this damn video but that's pretty much it guys so hopefully you enjoyed this little build vlog I guess you would call it go ahead and leave me your thoughts in the comments below what you think of my upgrades I know this isn't like a super crazy upgrade from a 750ti it's not a r9 nano by any means but this is really good enough for my needs but let me know what you guys think nonetheless of this video this kind of style and in my HD please sleep but thank you so much for watching be sure to LIKE the video as well if you haven't already subscribe to the channel and I will see you guys in the next video bye
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