Gadgetory

as you guys know LTX is coming up in this year we've teamed up with dreamhack so there's gonna be a giant BYOC or bring your own computer LAN party pretty sweet but how can you safely be your CE well today we're gonna show you guys and really anyone else who wants to move their computer around how to safely transport a gaming rig whether you're driving flying or even just shipping it to yourself separately speaking of tips you might want to consider using an Origin PC you can customize your Origin PC desktop with an NVIDIA GeForce r-tx graphics card and pair it with a g-sync monitor for fast refresh rates learn more at the link below first things first packing up a computer is a little bit different than other objects because not only do you have to protect the outside don't want to dent in the top of your case but you also have to protect the insides and that's where we're gonna start today inside your PC some parts are at much higher risk than others take for example the CPU cooler while a lower profile cooler with a robust metal mounting mechanism might not cause much trouble at all top heavy cooler like this one or a cooler that uses plastic pushpins even if it's not that heavy is liable to either put a lot of torque on the motherboard potentially bending or breaking it or worse yet come detached from the motherboard and shipping and banging around inside your system I have seen this it is not pretty so there's a few ways that you can deal with the cooler first is to avoid this situation altogether by using an a IO water cooling kit yes they can be expensive and they don't always even cool your system better but they are a safer solution when it comes to transporting your machine because most of their weight is spread out and mount it to the case rather than hanging off your CPU socket option number two is to remove your cool all together before you transport it now this is labor-intensive and remember you're gonna have to reapply your thermal paste when you put it all back together but it definitely improves the safety the third option is to keep the cooler in place but to pack extra material around it so that it can't move under any circumstances and if it comes off it won't be able to hit anything I'll show you guys how to do that in just a moment our next usual suspect is the hard drive now these are actually pretty freakin fragile because a lot of the assemblies like the disks or the spindle rely on highly precise alignments where a deviation of even a thousandth of an inch can kill your drive not only that but shocks and vibrations can actually cause the recording heads to rattle against the disks possibly scratching them if mounted properly inside your case which will then be in a box it's probably okay to leave it in however if you want to be extra cautious it can be a good idea to take your hard drives out and carry them with you or at the very least make sure that you've backed up your important data before leaving home other vulnerable components in your tower include really anything with an edge connector but not all of them are equally at risk with your RAM you can usually feel pretty safe just by putting a couple of zip ties around the outside of the slot for it and for something like a network card yes it fits into a PCIe slot and it has the same number of anchor points as a graphics card but because it's light there's very little risk of it coming out on the subject of graphics cards these are a problem and the reason is because they're heavy they've got just two anchor points the screw at the back and the slot on the motherboard so as you can imagine it's possible for these to even rip the socket apart when the case gets dropped like a courier is apt to do so the safest course of action is to take it out before transporting your rig but if you're gonna do this and supplies to your hard drive too you should really in an anti-static bag this will prevent electric charges from building up on your device and potentially damaging the circuitry now if you've still got the static shielding bag that came with your GPU or your hard drive these are the best alternatively you can use a polyethylene anti-static bag these ones are usually pink just keep in mind that these are dissipative rather than static shielding meaning that yes they're effective at preventing the build-up of static electricity as they can't create or hold a charge but they will not protect your electronics from a direct static discharge like a shock from rubbing your feet around on the carpet also if you do remove some parts from your rig be sure to tie down any loose cables so they aren't banging around or scratching anything inside while they're flailing around but by this point you're probably thinking most system builders like main gear origin PC obviously they don't remove all the components before shipping so how can we do what they do safely well you basically just need to stuff the inside of the system with enough material that nothing inside of it can shift so one thing that can help you do that is these expanding foam packs that once activated will expand to fill your particular case they're pretty cool but they're not the easiest to use and they're definitely not the cheapest option because most systems will require more than one of them alternatively you can scrounge for packing materials that alternatively you can scrounge around your house for any anti-static foam or bubble wrap or other packing materials it's certainly better than nothing another pro tip is to cut up something like a polyethylene pool noodle or take really nice packing materials like this that you can find and cut them up to size this was actually a super pro tip that we used to use that NCIX where we'd kind of cut them to size and then wedge them in so that nothing could really move the idea is that even if the system gets drop-kicked you don't want things shifting too much because once they gain momentum they can start to gain leverage and wrench things apart so for now we're done with the inside so if you're driving to your next land packing up the inside plus attaching a neato carrying harness or something like that might be all that you need to do but if your PC is flying as checked luggage or getting shipped on its own you'll also need to protect the outside now the most common recommendation is to ship your PC in the box that the case came with it's the right size and you probably still have the original packing foam that came with it but there are a couple of things to keep in mind one is that this box was designed to protect a case not a case that was loaded up with an extra 15 to 25 pounds of components so it's definitely a good idea to put this box inside another box too if your case was shipped with soft foam like this that could be reusable but if it was shipped with a harder rigid style foam like this stuff it could have been spent by its original journey and like bike helmets this stuff is designed to take n impact not a bunch of impacts now we've got to solve our last problem you might have noticed in all of this that there's no room for the monitor so for that you'll either have to one use a different outer box a larger one although I don't necessarily recommend that because your monitor just banging around in there's not gonna be a good time or two you'll have to ship it in a separate box and once again here we recommend using the original one wherever possible with the same caveat that depending on the type of foam that was used it might not have its original structural rigidity another fun option is a lot of these kinds of events actually have the option to rent a monitor when you get to your destination for example Dreamhack and quakecon usually have both PCs and monitors for rent but that's not an option at LTX 2019 so if you're choosing one large box and you want to kind of pack everything in there the most important thing is to make sure that it's big enough for all of your stuff plus your padding but not so big that you're paying for unnecessary size and weight you also want to make sure that you have enough packing material because if there's any space for things to slide around just like with the inside of the PC you're going to have a pretty bad time now for the inside of an outer box you can use whatever cheapo packing material you can find crumpled up newspaper anything that you can pull out of the garbage that'll help absorb impacts without adding too much weight taping up your box you want to use two strips of packing tape across the opening to perpendicular to that and then a loop around the edge just for added stability repeat that on the other side and you're set now the big question do you write fragile this side up or computer on the side well it's probably not going to help you since most of the people who handle boxes are moving so fast that they don't have time to give your package any special treatment and much of the logistics chain is actually automated so that unsympathetic robots who can't read will likely be the ones giving your box most of the abuse it's worth a try we're just not gonna tell you to get your hopes up speaking of getting your hopes up I've got my hopes up that with PIAA my true IP address will be hidden and I will be able to bypass your restrictions and censorship it's not just hopes that's how it works with PIAA you appear as though you are some anonymous person connecting from someplace else you can use pay ia with up to five devices at once it's got an internet kill switch if your VPN gets disconnected involuntarily so you won't accidentally leak any personal information it includes mace P is built-in malware blocker and it offers a variety of levels of encryption that you can fine tune to your heart's content we've got apps for Windows Mac Android iOS and even a Chrome extension and you can check it out at LM GGG slash p IA linus too so thanks for watching guys if this video sucked you know what to do but if it was awesome get subscribe hit that like button or check out the link to where to buy the stuff we featured in the video description I don't put the expanding foam thing in there yeah sure okay cool also link from the description is our merch store which has cool shirts like the one I'm wearing and cool it easily and our community forum which you should totally join