Gadgetory

so on the Ocho of December Oh which is December 8th in Latin Paul from Paul's hardware and myself we'll be doing our annual charity livestream super exciting it's fun a children and like last year we're gonna be giving away 2 gaming pcs on stream 2 to random people who are in chat it's gonna be super nuts and I thought what a great opportunity for me to get rid of the Walmart overpowered gaming PC that I purchased not so long ago and recently did a video on which you should check out if you haven't yet and then I think to myself what a wonderful world no that's not it and I thought no I can't do that there's too many shortcomings and various limitations of this rig to really make it a compelling giveaway price and I want it to be good you know for the children so today I'm gonna walk you through the steps I took to improve upgrade and even modify the system to be a thousand times better than it was the day I took it out of the box for the children the thermal take a 500 aluminum TG mid-tower features a sleek aluminum front panel and two four millimeter tempered glass panels for breathtaking views enjoy 420 + 360 rad support at the front and top respectively and breeze through installation with the dismantle of all modular design step up to your case game with the a500 aluminum TG and click on the link below for more info now quick disclaimer this is not an episode of pimp my rig alright we don't care I don't care how the system looks I wasn't trying to go for aesthetics it would have been really easy for me to go in here make everything all matching at you throwing some sleeve cables and stuff like that but that's not what we're after we're trying to make the rig way more functional and we're also trying to make it way more thermally sound due to that super air restrictive front panel which as you can see we've actually widened the gap quite a bit and I'll show you how we did that later on but a quick refresher of the original specs here this is Walmart's overpowered DTW one model featuring a core i7 8700 a gigabyte h3 10 ms2 motherboard 16 gigs of adata ddr4 2,400 speed memory a gigabyte win for SOSI gtx 1070 a 256 gig a data SSD 2 terabyte Toshiba hard drive and a 550 watt great wall power supply with that said the first rule of order was to gut the system entirely and swap out the motherboard because the h3 10 chipset while it's cheap for supporting 8th gen cpus is just super basic and very very limited for instance you only get one dim 4-channel which blows any chance of you running dual channel memory you also have a significantly cut down number of PCIe and high-speed IO lanes you have fewer USB ports not to mention you have zero support for USB 3.1 gen2 and the list kind of goes on enta the MSI B 360 gaming Pro carbon the B 360 chipset pretty much remedies all of the h3 ten limitations I just rattled off Plus this board gets MDOT to support and a second full-size PCIe by 16 slot share you still can't overclock if you were to drop the case queue CPU and here down the line but you get a lot more connectivity a far superior rear i/o and a much higher quality board overall now since we're just upgrading certain things there are a lot of parts that I kept such as the 8700 CPU the CPU cooler and the single stick of 16 gigabyte ddr4 Ram I'm keeping the RAM single channel for now because it's an easy upgrade down the line for whoever wins this thing and also single channel doesn't really hurt your gaming performance all that much the CPU cooler while let's face it yeah basics it's actually more than capable of handling the 8700 temperatures especially with our front panel mod which we'll touch on in a moment moving on though you bet your bottom dollar I swapped out that great wall power supply it was arguably the weakest link of the entire system and there's absolutely no way I'm gonna ship that out to a fan happily taking its place is a 520 watt see Sonic s12 - which is not modular it's kind of sucks but it is 80 plus gold certified and received an amazing review on Johnny guru plus I got it on new egg while it was on sale for Black Friday for just 39 bucks it was actually the only thing I bought on Black Friday and I bought it for you well one of you the rest of you get nothing overall the C sonic power supply is more reliable more power efficient and gives me the peace of mind that my system will not set my house ablaze now there was really no point in swapping out the storage drives I think the SSD and the mechanical drive that we have in here while they are fairly basic are totally fine for most users needs and the gtx 1070 like I keep saying is one of the strongest parts in the original system so we're keeping that - which brings us to the mods now there are three things that are so wrong with this case that I felt modifications were necessary first no USB 3.0 on the front panel nut you gotta have USB 3 on the front man it's 2018 what are you doing so brace yourself for my super ghetto solution I am NOT a professional mutter in case you didn't know I took a 20 pin USB 3 no adapter to type a and then I ran from that type a connection a USB 3.0 extension cable and with the front panel of the case removed I ran the end of that cable to the front of the case and cinched it down with some zip ties and adhesive velcro which actually worked out pretty well it seems very secure now the solution actually works like a charm but it does take up the only USB 3 header on our motherboard which meant I had to remove the PCI card which had a USB 3.0 type C port coming out the back it's totally fine with me though because our new motherboard has USB 3.1 gen2 type-c already built in take that the second big issue with this case is that there's no dust filtration at the front so I thought this is a quick and easy fix I went on Amazon I bought a 280 millimeter magnetic dust filter which actually fit over our three 120 millimeter fans very nicely I had to make a little cut on the corner of the dust filter though to make room for our new front panel USB 3 port but then I quickly realized after turning the system on that the dust filter was too close to the fan blades and the suction force of the fans was actually drawing the dust filter up against the fan blades that was making this awful rubbing noise it was terrible not knowing how to proceed I kind of just tossed the dust filter aside and gave up so still no front dust filter was just fine totally fine I'm sure you guys have a million ideas of how I could have made that work in the comments but that brings us to the third and final big no-no of this case which is the air restrictive front panel Steve from gamers Nexus actually did a thermal test in this exact same case and found a 30 degree difference by simply removing the front panel I'll put a link to his video in the description if you want to check it out but what makes this front panel out of the box so ridiculously air constrictive is that it's only giving about 4 or 5 milliliters of space between the fans and the front panel itself these fans just don't have the static pressure to intake any air from that limited gap to make matters worse the tempered glass side panel actually extends past the frame of the case which completely cuts off any ventilation on this left side of the chassis the way the front panel mounts to the chassis is actually pretty simple it's got four screws one two three four two on either side that mount from the inside of the case and they pretty much just screw into the mounting holes on the front panel itself now the screws themselves are really really short and that's why there's such a short distance between so I basically ditched those screws entirely but longer three and a quarter inch screws found a couple nylon washers and spacers lying around and with those simple elements I was able to get the front panel a full three-quarters of an inch away from fans which brings in a lot more air and keeps the CPU much cooler now you'll be very mad at me to know that I didn't do anything testing of the original system with the new setup that we have here we're actually seeing some really good CPU temperatures only hitting 64 see on the package at its hottest and that was after 15 minutes of GTA 5 at 1440p the GPU is doing great also hitting 61 C at its hottest under that same load based on Steve's findings I would have to assume that the thermal situation here is infinitely better than it would have been right out of the box so in that sense mission complete you know I feel like I've spent a lot of time with this rig ever since I brought him into this world I've decided to him and you know I feel like as a proud PC parent I've helped him grow and become the rig that he is today and as a proud PC parent I can I can confidently say that he is ready to fly the coop and maybe one day he'll meet a nice admin who makes him feel special whoo-hoo he'll fall in love with which won't happen because he's a computer but anyway if you would like to win this computer we're doing a live stream for charity on December 8 so stay tuned for more information on that you can follow me on twitter at bit wit Kyle apart from that guys let me know what you think of the various changes that I've made to this system I know a lot of these mods and stuff are super ghetto fabulous but hey I would much rather have the system in its current state then the way it was so you guys let me know if you agree toss a Luke on this video if you enjoyed it and get subscribed for more tech stuff coming at you really soon have a good one guys I will see you in the next video