Gadgetory

hey everyone this is Steve from gamers Nexus tonight and we are here with a lot of computer components that not a surprise given the content of this channel today we are building a budget AMD gaming PC quick note before we get started I'm giving away an anti 1250 liquid cooler it is a dual pump liquid cooler subscribe to the channel for info on that and check back for the video that details the giveaway and how the process will work if you need a liquid cooler it's a pretty good way to get a free one so moving on this is actually an entry-level overclocking PC if you want to do a little bit more than gaming you want to actually pump up those clocks on the CPU maybe play around with Ram the GPU a little bit this is the system that we expect out for that it is about $700 for all these parts you could go for Intel in this price range but you'd be dropping your GPU a little bit and some of your other components a little bit and I wanted to have some fun with overclocking I know a lot of you are interested in it and of course graphics are pretty important so we wanted more money to borrow from the CPU budget and put into the GPU budget and that's what we've done here so let me run you through the parts and in this guide I'll show you how to overclock this exact system and we're using an aftermarket CPU cooler of course to do that so that's what this guide will cover I'll also run through game benchmarks in the end hit links in the description below for all of the content and all of the charts for the benchmarks if you are curious about how this performs in specific games like Battlefield 4 and whatever so here's what we've got the CPU we've got an AMD athlon x4 760 k now some of you may know the Athlon line from way back during the x64 days when they were first starting this is Andy's new Athlon which is basically just an APU with no IGP so they've dropped the graphics chip on the APU on the richland 80 years to be exact and we've just got a CPU in there so it's just a CPU on the die and and because of his richland that means it's going to perform a little bit better on the CPU side than Kaveri dusk very does better with the GPU we don't want that we've got a discrete graphics card and so what we have here for the video card is an MS Twin Frozr edition r9 270 you can actually get a 284 about the same price now that just dropped it a couple days ago that's about 170 to 190 dollars the CPU is $80 pretty pretty good steel there for the motherboard we're putting the CPU and everything else into we've got an AMD of course 888 XG 45 game motherboard from MSI and because it is an 888 X chipset it's actually going to work with both FM 2 and FM 2 + CP u so if you wanted to drop it Kaveri if you in there you can totally do that it's not going to give you any huge advantages over 885 X because with Richland we can't take advantage of pci-e Gen 3 but that's irrelevant for these purposes you're not gonna exceed the bandwidth of Gen 2 anyway so don't worry about that it will support two video cards and x8 x8 if you want to do crossfire or SLI that is an opportunity there and at overclocked memory up to 2400 megahertz which is a chipset and platform limitation so not crazy high but not bad you're not going to need one 1600 anyway for gaming so moving on to the power supply everything is being powered by a Rosewill 550 watt PSU it is a bronze rated PSU this was actually bundled with the case here and that bundle deals pretty good I think it's like 15 or 25 dollars cheaper than normally if you buy them separately so I was on Newegg links again below in the article the case is a thermal take G 41 commander case so that's it's it's just a cheap mid tower it's a budget case it has a 120 millimeter fan in the back 120mm front you can easily drop more bigger fans to in the top and in the bottom if you want more cooling or need it for our purposes not so much will be fine with that CPU cooler unless your room runs pretty hot or you're overclocking your GPU as well so that's the case it has a little bit of cable management room in the back I'll show you all that pretty straightforward stuff not not too crazy for drives we have technically this build I'm specking with a one terabyte Western Digital drive because that's all you needed 7200 rpm that's what you want for gaming if you want an SSD you can get like a 240 gigabyte one for 90 bucks right now crazy good deal I would highly recommend it for budget purposes we're sticking with a 7200 rpm one terabyte drive technically you'll see a green WD are 2 terabyte drive over there as well that's because I'm building those system for a very piratical friend shout-out to optimum so so that's what we've got here for RAM and the optical drive of course the most important component Ram is two sticks of four gigabyte Kingston HyperX Ram I believe it is their Genesis line and I have pretty good stuff it's this clocked at like 1600 or 1866 something like that and we can very easily overclock it not too expensive and gets the job done for gaming and reliable so then the optical drive standard 24 X don't even I mean if you're not gonna use it if you can install Windows with the USB key do it and forget the optical drive save that will save you 20 bucks then we've got the CPU cooler which of course is going on our $80 overclocked CPU so this is a fan Tex pH 12 DX or TC 12 D X I think that's what it's called it's a very user friendly name as you can notice when the hardware reviewer can't even remember it it is the TC 12 DX and this chips it's pretty cool ships in red silver blue and black and I think it's nickel-plated it uses just normal paint for the for the actual fins it won't impact your performance all that much but it looks pretty damn cool if you want something red or blue or whatever so that's what we have there it's four six millimeter heat pipes pretty standard stuff direct contact and yeah I'm just just a CPU cooler right it's a pretty decent air cooler if you want air if you want liquid I would not recommend getting into it unless you're spending about 80 plus dollars because any of the cheap liquid coolers are you gonna perform worse and louder than a high-end air cooler and those will be priced the same so those are my thoughts there now if you're not sure how to build a computer you haven't done it before I hit the link in the description below or I'll pop it up right in front of me the video that is a guide on how to build a computer it's not the same spec but it's the same exact process so check that out and that'll help you get the system together and up and running but let's jump into this build I'll kind of speed through building it and then I'll show you how to overclock the system run through the game benchmarks and we'll be done now in terms of the actual build process for this it's pretty standard you can check out my other tutorial video on how to build a gaming computer if you need help actually assembling this but in in this specific scenario the only thing I'd really advise you to do specially is to route the fan cable for the rear fan under the video card before you install it plug it in then at the bottom of the board and that frees up your fan slot on the right side of the board if you want to install an additional top fan as I've done here for top intake because the overclock was pushing it a couple degrees too high so this cooled the down to a point where I felt comfortable with it now that we've got the system built we are ready to overclock as I mentioned this is a beginner level overclocking system it's pretty straightforward what we're gonna do today nothing too special because I really would advise you to play around and read a lot before you start tweaking the more advanced settings and BIOS so what we're starting with here today is just meant to be multiplier control and then in in the actual OS we'll mess around with MSI Afterburner to play with the video card settings so here we've got MSI's BIOS open this is UEFI bios of course so it is mouse enable that is pretty fancy on the graphics run not not anything like the old blue and white 8 or 16 bit bios we used to have so what you need to do first is open up this OC tab on the left you'll start on settings and there's also OC before you install your OS you probably want to go to settings and go through to advanced and then integrated peripherals and just make sure you're on HCI mode for the SATA mode because that's that's what we want to install it is it should be like that by default but just out of habit I always do that so make sure in the top left that OC Genie is currently off that is MSI is autumn overclocking feature you can use it if you like to get a baseline but we're gonna play around with this manually so that we can learn some more click on the OC tab you'll see the CPU base frequency is set to 100 megahertz and then if you look down below adjusted CPU ratio which is set to auto right now if you look below that you shouldn't see 3800 megahertz which is 3.8 gigahertz the stock frequency that the processor you purchased shifts at if you got the 760 K so what we're gonna do here is play around with the multiplier and that's all that's going on behind the scenes right now at a 100 megahertz base clock BC LK with a 2.8 gigahertz total frequency we're multiplying it by 38 X right now so if we type in 38 and adjust CPU ratio you will see that nothing changes because all we've done is turn auto off and set it to the setting it was on already what we can do is increment that slowly to higher multipliers and hope that the CPU remains stable with the higher clock rate so I normally suggest just jumping straight to 40 or 41 because that's not too huge of an overclock so it should remain stable and it'll get you through those first steps a little bit easier so we're gonna jump to 41 because I've already tested and this is stable at 41 which is 4.1 gigahertz and if you want to try and step higher you might want to start running liquid once you hit the four point two to four point five gigahertz range because the CPU does run a little bit hot and it's very hard to find accurate measurement software unfortunately so we're at 41 right now that's 4.1 gigahertz you don't have to adjust the Northbridge ratio you don't have to really adjust anything at this point you don't even need to change voltage for the CPU because we're not pushing it that hard but of course if we started pushing up the frequency a little bit higher maybe is a 45 multiplier rains and you probably will need to start changing the voltage to make sure the CPU remains stable just check the maximum voltage recommended by AMD so you don't push it too high and melt things by the way check out my overclocking primer video for GPU and CPU overclock units a bit more in-depth and this will be this kind of a crash course so check those if you want more details on what all these items and BIOS do because it does get pretty advanced if you want to get more extreme with your overclock so starting out you need to make sure your memory is configured properly it'll probably be 1333 or 1600 by default but the memory that we purchased is actually a bit more capable than that so this board has Intel's XMP profiling built into it so we can say enable XMP and you can choose profile 1 or profile to profile 1 will have slightly higher cash latencies or cast timings but it's it's faster in the frequency Department it's 1866 megahertz with a 10 cache latency and profile 2 is 1600 megahertz with a 9 9 9 27 latency so it's a bit faster in terms of wait and see if it's lower in frequency I just using profile 1 right now honestly this isn't going to have a huge impact on your gaming performance but why not boost it above the 1333 or 1600 default right so we'll push it to 1866 with profile 1 and this point we're pretty much done we've got our basic overclock dialed in we have our RAM set to what it should be so we can hit f10 to save and exit and now the system is going to boot normally into Windows once you're in Windows you want to download an MSI Afterburner and that is going to be used for overclocking the GPU and also monitoring the GPU temperatures but before actually tweaking the GPU we need to make sure that the CPU overclock we've just set is stable so the best way to do that is grab Hardware monitor that's HW monitor and that will let us monitor the CPU temperatures unfortunately there's not an accurate measurement tool for any of these modern AMD CPUs I don't know why that is they're all going to measure a lot hotter than the CPU actually is but hardware monitor is the most accurate I found so grab that then grab prime95 it can be found on the interwebs if you type in prime95 and I have a guide on using that as well and our overclocking primer i've already mentioned so grab product prime95 run a hardware monitor and then tell prime95 to run l FFTs large FFT and that's going to really strain the CPU and not much else so you want to run that for if you make it to the 15-minute mark it's probably going to be fairly stable so I would really start with just go to 15 minutes make sure it's stable if you want to try and push the clocks a little bit more go for it but watch that Harper monitor temperature the whole time make sure you're not exceeding anything dangerous I was sitting at around 77 C which sounds hot but again this is not an accurate measurement tool so 77 C was was what it was measuring at with the stock installation with an aftermarket cooler when I overclocked it was sitting around 83 C so that's about five to six Celsius warmer not too terribly much it is quite warm but again we have measurement issues in terms of accuracy so not too bad overall to get 60 warmer with that extra couple hundred megahertz boost to the frequency so as you're measuring temps just make sure it stays kind of on the on the safe side and let it run for 15 minutes at burns to reboot up the frequency if you really want to if you feel confident and if you have a liquid cooler probably and and then do that until you get crashes or blue screens don't let it exceed anything like 90 Celsius 95 Celsius that's getting the danger zone especially since t.j.maxx on these AMD CPUs is technically I believe 75 or 80 Celsius Richland is a bit warmer but I've said it a thousand times now it all comes down to measurement tools so so that's that's the need-to-know information on CPU overclocking run prime95 with l FF T's for as long as you think is reasonable a couple hours ideally once you have a frequency you're happy with just to make sure it remains stable and then jump into msi afterburner and with afterburner we can adjust the GPU settings to get a tiny bit of a GPU overclock you can't overclock GPUs to the same capacity as CPUs because they function differently so the stock setting here in afterburner is 955 of megahertz for the core clock we're gonna just that pretty comfortably to 995 that is about a 40 megahertz overclock and and that'll that'll punish us a couple extra frames if we're lucky depending on the game and it's not gonna be unstable so set set that 995 megahertz overclock you might want to step it up more gradually than that I stepped it up 20 megahertz at a time so I did two increments of 20 before I found this to be stable and safe and then run fur mark with the burnin 1080p test and run that let it run its course if it crashes you've gone too far you need to back off that throttle a little bit if it doesn't crash you're good probably leave it where it is and don't play with it too much don't touch the voltage unless you know what you're doing and the memory clock is nice to jump up but it's not gonna really push a whole lot of extra frames and your performance in gaming but you can read my full guide on overclocking for more information on all of that so what does this gain us well in the real world I got about a 10 FPS boost in average fps in battlefield 4 that's a pretty significant boost that put us from about 40 FPS to about 50 fps and if he drops on the battlefield settings it's the difference between 50 and 60 fps which is very smooth gameplay on a 60 or it's monitored - pretty average gameplay so that's battlefield in Metro last light I saw almost no difference in the average FPS it was a very small however the 1% low FPS which would be your lag spikes we call them graphic spikes that Department was about 5 to 10 FPS better with the overclock so that's fairly significant that means your spikes will be much less impacting to your ability to aim and play the game and then the Total War series I used as a CPU benchmark almost no difference across the board it was pretty flat so you're not gonna see a lot of difference there just goes to show that it all depends on how the optimized and built so that's everything he needs to know about the system if you need help building this post a comments on the article I don't hit the YouTube comments too much anymore but post a comments on the article linked in the description below all of the parts for this build are linked in the description below and let me know if you need help we will see you all next time peace