Gadgetory

what's up guys so way back in December I wrote a very important letter to a very important recipient it went something like this dear Santa for Christmas this year I could ask you for superficial gifts like better camera equipment a new computer or my own apartment but then I remembered what happened to Austin Evans and how all those things could vanish in the blink of a freak fire accident so in a brief moment of clarity I made some revisions to my wishlist instead all I want this year is a brand new open-air chassis with it I'll build an awesome testbed for benchmarking computer parts so I can share my findings with the world I really don't mind which case it is just as long as it's not made out of acrylic that sucks your friend always Kyle much to my delight the old man fulfilled my request in the form of a Lian Li PCT 60 aluminum construction full-size hardware supports a carrying handle it was the best Christmas gift I received in years since acquiring the PCT 60 I've been hard at work gathering the rest of the components necessary for a test bed capable of benchmarking today's current graphics cards SSDs CPU coolers and pretty much all else in the PC Kingdom that can be benchmarked since this is arguably no easy task I'm excited to announce that I finally have everything I need to put it all together but before we do a little time-lapse build and show off the finish setup let's quickly go over the individual components that will create this epic testing machine now I've already spoken a bit about this case but it still deserves some sexy b-roll shots just like the rest all jokes aside the PCT 60 from Leanne Lee remains one of my favorite test benches on the market for its tenacious aluminum construction and that ever so useful carrying handle since I'll definitely be toting it around from time to time for processing I've chosen the Intel Core i7 59 30k it has 6 cores with hyper-threading overclocks like a champ and won't experience any bottlenecking with most hardware configurations I throw at it not to mention it also lives on the x99 platform which opens up windows for the latest influx of technologies like ddr4 now to facilitate the capabilities of such a CPU I needed a motherboard of equal caliber so here we have the x99 UD 5 Wi-Fi from gigabyte 4 way graphic support dual by Sandeul m2 are just some of the bells and whistles I'll be using with the finished build and on a side note let me know in the comments if you'd like me to review this board at some point after I've been using it for a while my memory solution is a 4 by 4 16 gigabyte kits of HyperX predator ddr4 at 2400 megahertz it's efficient it's fast and gosh darn it those are some pretty vicious heat spreaders enough said for the task of cooling my 59 30 K I've elected the Kelvin t12 from our friends at fractal design I knew that I wanted a liquid cooling solution in order to hit some decent overclocks on the 59 30 K but I figured a 240 millimeter radiator would be a bit bulky for the PCT 60 so I imagine this single 120 unit will work out nicely now I'm fairly certain that out of all the various components I'll be testing with this system I'll likely be benchmarking video cards the most but since haswell-e doesn't support an i GPU i'll need a daily driver on days i'm not testing video cards so for now we'll be using this EVGA GTX 970 for the win edition with its super-fast factory overclock and 4 gig three-and-a-half gigabyte frame buffer my operating system will live on this Corsair force series LX SSD for now it's not the snappiest drive by any means and write speeds do leave something to be desired but it is still SATA rev3 and should do just fine until I find a better alternative 128 gigabytes should be plenty of space for the operating system and all of my benchmarking tools but for video games and other large programs I'll be using this 1 terabyte Seagate Barracuda fun fact this is the actual drive I used in my first ever PC build back in 2011 it's managed to hold out for this long so let's hope it still got some juice left now powering this entire test bed is a tall order considering the potential for 4-way GPU testing but I am fairly confident that the power delivery of this G 1600 watt power supply from Leppa will suffice 80 plus gold certification and what seems to be 80 plus pounds this fully modular monster of a PSU will hopefully see me through even the most power hungry of hardware setups rounding out the parts list I'll also be using an asus om optical drive to well I probably won't be using it much but I was think of watching it collect dust in my closet so now I get to watch it collect dust in the PC 216 and finally ending on a software note my operating system of choice is Windows 8.1 64-bit with future plans to update Windows 10 when it becomes available later this year assuming it's not absolutely terrible so those are all the parts of my test bed and I gotta admit I'm pretty happy with what I have so far save for the SSD which I might swap out later down the line of course as promising as all of this seems I won't fully know how well the system performs until I build it so I'm gonna do that now and the build is complete pretty straightforward and I'm happy to report that it is booting up properly logically the next step here is to get Windows installed with all the necessary drivers and programs at which point I can then proceed to giving that 59:30 Kay a nice little overclock but moving even beyond the realm of this system if my plan with this build is to conduct relevant benchmarks of high end video cards and even multi-gpu setups in the future I'm going to need something with a few more pixels than a simple 1080 display I need like four of those or or maybe just a single 4k monitor yeah that sounds good so that's my next step with getting this testbed all set up and ideally it'd be great if I could get my hands on the 4k monitor to review that way I wouldn't have to pay for one but in the event I can't secure one soon I may just have to buy my own like some kind of a normal person to 4k panels I've had my eye on lately are the Acer B three to six H K and the Ben q BL three to zero one pH both of which meet my criteria for being over 28 inch IPS displays in the sub $1,000 price range now needless to say I'm having a rough time deciding between the two so in the comments let me know which one you think I'd be better off with or if there's another 4k IPS you recommend of similar price and spec but I have gotten drastically off-topic here so before I close out I wanted to give a quick shout-out to my sponsor for today's video lynda.com now you guys know I love YouTube right I mean come on and while you can find a tutorial on pretty much anything here the videos you often find aren't exactly hardware canucks quality I mean just the other day Paul was trying to follow a streaming tutorial on YouTube and I overheard him use several choice words I'd rather not repeat lynda.com however offers a sware free learning experience with HD online courses led by industry professionals so you can learn things like how to blow up your cat's in After Effects oh God big distinction there at any rate it is completely free to try so I'm gonna put a link in the description below for those of you who like tutorial videos without someone's dog barking in the background but that's gonna do it for now guys as always toss me a like on this video before you go if you enjoyed it and let me know what you think of my new test bed then I choose the right parts or if not what would you have done differently lastly if you like what