Gadgetory

oh hi I didn't see you there today we're gonna be doing a build log that's gonna be a little different from anything else that we've ever done before I will be doing the ultimate space-saving PC by not just building a computer into a tiny case but having no case at all building a computer into the bottom of a desk it's going to be awesome so I bought pretty much all the hardware that I'm using on mcmaster-carr those guys have almost everything under the Sun you can get L brackets and all kinds of different shapes and sizes see I've got all kinds of different kinds that I that I measured out in terms of what I needed you can get screws in pretty much any length and thread so I had to gather up a bunch of the different kinds of screws as well as these cool housings I'll show you how I'm going to use those later there was one thing that I was not able to get on mcmaster-carr though and it was this this is motherboard standoffs now I could have just selvage these from a case we have lying around but I wanted this build log to be to reflect how you guys would go through the process and you might not have those lying around so I got those on Amazon we've got our Asus GeForce GTX 980 TI Strix that they sent over for this video this will give us some gaming capability even though this is like a stealth type of build well not just some gaming capability I mean pretty much as good as it gets the motherboard will be using the stylish saber-tooth z97 mark s from Asus this is for a couple of reasons number one I've used this board before and it's fine which is good number two is I actually really liked the idea of having this protective shield over top of the top of my motherboard in this case because on the bottom of the desk it could happen that I could accidentally touch it somehow and the motherboard would be the worst thing in the system pretty much to shore it out so their thermal armor comes in handy once for the RAM we went with some matching Kingston HyperX fury Ram this is a two stick kit total of 16 gigs mostly we just went with the white Ram because we caught the white board and what the hey why not and on the subject of what the hey why not I dug out our white ax 860 I power supply from Corsair that I actually painted back when we did our sub-zero build guide so to go with that though as you guys may or may not have noticed this is not a standard case and the power supply might not actually be able to reach all the components with the standard cables so I reached out our buddies over at cable mod who hooked us up with some custom length white individually sleeved cable mod cables yeah these are gonna come in handy for a build like this this is the Intel Core i7 a 5775 see this is a broad well based desktop CPU and basically it's an upgrade for anyone who's using a z97 platform already and with one of the big improvements over the previous has well based chips being that it has much better onboard graphics to cool it will be using an H one hundred-eyed GTX I think we were actually planning to use a 110 i GTX originally but whether it's due to you know the 100 I using 120 millimeter fans and therefore being slightly lower profile or whether it's because of course they forgot to ship us one of those I'm not sure we're using this one now and finally as much for show as it is for performance we'll be using two Intel 730 series SSDs in this case we've got a couple of 480 gigs that'll give us a total of 960 gigabytes of raid 0 SSD storage for this rig oh yeah we've got some Noctua fans for the cooler there and here's our next component to LG ultra wide 34 inch monitors so these are the 34 you c87 see the main difference between these and the one that i've used in the past being that it has a height adjusts and note that that matters because we'll be using a modified herbal tron desk mount like individual stands that's actually got a widescreen gaming forum Edition upgrade to it with like a bolt through on the desk so that's gonna be pretty sick step number one after setting up our workstation being all you know safe and clutter free of course no actually all this is stuff that we're working on is gonna be to actually redo my test fit just to make sure that when we start drilling because we will be drilling for this build log everything is in exactly the right place for components like the power supply graphics card and their board we're gonna need to be extra careful that we're leaving enough room for IO because depending on what type of table you have you might have some kind of a reinforcing lip around the outside that if you position your IO ports too close to might make it impossible to plug in any USB connectors so definitely watch out for that another pro tip is when you're mounting something like a power supply you're gonna want to make sure that even if normally you would go fan side down now you go fan side up because otherwise you're not gonna have any cooling for that particular component this is well actually it's a pair of PCI Express extenders and these are one of the very common tools in the toolbox for people who do wall mounted pcs or other sort of unusual form factor pcs you can usually get away with up to about 30 centimetres of extension from a PCI Express 16x slot without seeing any degradation in performance as long as they're of sufficient quality so we'll be using these in order to mount our graphics card there we go flat against the table just like that fan positioning is going to be kind of personal choice you'll have to decide do you want the slightly warm breeze blowing towards your legs or do you want it blowing away from it neither is gonna offer any tangible benefit or disadvantage in terms of cooling so you can go whatever route you want I'm gonna go with blowing the air away from my legs just in case they're feeling a little chilly now before I finalize where all of the components are going to go I need to go ahead and put my custom cables on and make sure that both I sent cable mod the right measurements and they made the cables to my exact specifications because you might have to make some slight adjustments to where we're positioning things otherwise there's our 8 pin CPU connector look at this thing ah now just because the cables are going to be hidden away under a desk doesn't mean that's any excuse to have crappy cable management so the way that I've planned out the build is to have one mass of individually sleeve cables come out of the power supply and then work its way up this edge of the desk splitting out as needed to the different parts of the motherboard and the rest of the components so the PCI Express connectors for example will come out along over in a straight line and then down and the way that I plan to achieve these nice straight lines is using these base stage cable ties this episode not brought to you by Baystate cable ties but basically these are just anchors that can have zip ties go through them two different ways and that can screw down into the tabletop surface so that I have a really strong anchor point and I can really get those cables nice and tight and straight so for me the only thing that's really important back there in terms of spacing is making sure I have enough room for a normal standard USB cable now that I've traced the outline is actually going to be to trace the positions of the mounting holes so the next step involves our drill and these little puppies right here we're going to be using these in order to be able to install our standoffs well into the bottom of a table surface Wow I'm gonna hit my head on that a lot of times look at that we have a rock-solid mount for our motherboard to the bottom of the table here very very nice lower the cover lower the arm and then go put your socket cover in a safe place if you ever need to arm a your motherboard you'll need to find that now even though it means the radiator might get in my way a little bit later I'm going to go ahead and mount the CPU block now this way I can ensure that my radiator position is gonna be correct when I install it and that I'm not going to be putting too much strain on the tubing Dennis I don't want to jinx it but I'm amazed at how well this is going so far okay so one slightly tricky thing with getting our video card mounted towards the the back of the table so that we're less likely to accidentally bump it is that there's not a whole lot of room for our DisplayPort cable to go into the back of our graphics card before we screw down the graphics card we're going to pre install the bulky DisplayPort cables these are pretty much the largest cables that we'll have to plug into the back of our motherboard the last hole we need to drill for the graphics card is actually going to be in the plastic of the shroud now this is not a mounting technique that you're gonna find in any kind of proper guide but basically we'll be drilling a hole that's slightly smaller than the threading of our screw and we'll be using just a normal screw as a self-tapping screw because the material is going into is so soft I spoke too early there is still actually one thing we need to drill on the graphics card and this one's a little bit scary we have to drill a hole in the bottom of the PCI bracket to go with that one that we have in the top so for the next step I actually need something I forgot to mention there these are 632 nuts we're gonna put some threadlocker onto the screws that we're putting into them because I forgot washers washers would be another another option here now something we could do to get a firmer mount with our radiator is install another couple brackets on the other side but frankly it's so far out of the way that I'm really not that worried about it it's just the kind of thing that you could do if you wanted more peace of mind so for mounting the SSDs I'm using these ones with the hole on the one side and the slot on the other and then I'm actually going to overlap two of them just like that for the middle and then put additional ones on the outsides of the SSDs this was more luck than anything else but with our configuration the included SATA cables actually ended up working out perfectly not just with the color scheme black and white and sometimes red but also in terms of length so we're just going to run these puppies through our existing cable management loops that we've run and plug them into the board this switch that I pulled off of an old case some time ago so I'm just going to mount that up under the you know bottom of the table not really anything special and all that's left now is basically just a few finishing touches so we're gonna install our memory and then plug our fan cables into the leads off of the Corsair all-in-one liquid cooler plug that into the motherboard and we're pretty much ready to flip this puppy over and start working on the other side of the desk there are some more finishing touches here I'm gonna start cinching tight all of the cable management giving it a bit of a cleaner cleaner overall look once we're done not bad not bad at all I mean this actually went really well okay so all that's left now is to flip it over and you have got to be kidding me the whole thing is backwards the chair slides in this way the DisplayPort cables are going to come up right under the keyboard Dennis I don't want to jinx it but I'm amazed at how well this is going so far you know what we might be able to take the whole leg assembly off and put it on the other way I think it's symmetrical okay no we have a plan all right let's try it thank you modular IKEA furniture all right so all that's really left now is to flip her over and find out if she works I actually forgot the other really awesome thing about this model compared to the one that I reviewed the vase amount is now included thank you instead of having to use a weird janky accessory for it awesome basically all we do is screw the thing into the thing put this thing on top of this thing do a test mount with our monitors to ensure that the height is correct mount them permanently by screwing those base amounts that are included with the Ergo tech slash widescreen gaming forum stand here in and then clipping them over these rails and locking them into place once they're there you can actually make fine adjustments to them by using the yeah there they are the knobs that are on the bottom but it's recommended that you try and get things as close as you can before that and then start plugging in all of the connectors for the back of the motherboard as well which as you can see are able to just barely plug in which is exactly how we intended it okay here it is our mouse is charging there we go so moment of truth didn't go so well it looks like my white saber tooth may not have survived the sub-zero experiment and yeah so we're gonna take another crack at things with our black saber tooth z97 mark 1 and see if it goes a little better this is something to consider if you are thinking about building a desk PC though and that's that maintenance is not going to be quite as easy as it used to be actually I guess I could have flipped the desk over you've got to be kidding me moment of truth it's so quiet is it even hot hey hey oh okay so I think it's time to do a recap then for y'all because we ended up having to change a couple things so number one thing that we changed was our PCI Express power connectors it looks like we got a couple of bunk ones these kinds of things happen at least it wasn't the eight pin because and this was serendipitous the other thing that didn't work was two of these PCI Express extensions at the same time maybe the ones we got were not actually shielded or whatever else was the issue but one of them is working fine but that meant I had to turn my graphics card around so being able to use shorter cable mod cables that I already had lying around ended up working just fine and I was able to use some of the extra brackets that I bought to remount the graphics card with about an inch of space between it and the table which is actually not that bad and better in some ways because now at least you can't accidentally put your knee or ax or a finger into the fan on the bottom of the card so that is it my friends it worked thank you for watching the desk PC build log here if you just like this video then I think you know where that button is man you guys all over that button is if you liked it though do click like do get subscribed and do consider supporting us maybe by buying a cool t-shirt actually this is a long sleeve shirt because I'm baller like that by buying a shirt like this one by changing your Amazon bookmarks one with our affiliate code instructions are up there or by the other thing right directly contributing contributing contributing contributing through the forum you get a cool little contributor badge and all that good stuff so without further ado thanks again for watching and I will see you guys again next time