Gadgetory

welcome to the first full build guide that we've ever done on - tech tips powered by Intel today we're going to be showing you guys step-by-step how to build your very own gaming system in the better class so that means we're spending around $1,500 on the tower sword if you subscribe to that good better best way of thinking which means we're not really compromising any features in any performance and we're not spending so much that it's sort of just for bling and bragging rights either we're going to be installing windows 8 we're going to talk about some of the benefits you get from windows 8 including in some games better performance and we're going to be pairing it with a touchscreen and talking about some of the ways that touch really makes Windows 8 come to life whereas the mouse and keyboard do not part of getting the best bang for your buck is overclocking so everything we've got in front of us here is overclocking optimized in some way or another now I want you to think about your gaming experience kind of like pi because the two most important things for pi are crust and filling so I'm going to go ahead and say the CPU is kind of like the crust it supports the rest of the system if it's not fast enough you're going to end up with bottlenecks so if you spent like $1,000 on a graphics card and a hundred bucks on a CPU that graphics card would never reach its full potential anyway so in this case for our crust we've gone with a 35 70 K it performs just slightly less than the 3770k in gaming applications because it doesn't have hyper threading it's a Core i5 but because it's a KC Reis cue you can overclock it to really squeeze the most performance possible out of the architecture we're going to be aiming for anywhere from around 4.4 to 4.5 gigahertz on our CPU the graphics card is kind of like the fruity filling it doesn't work at all without the crust but it really makes the experience particularly from a gaming standpoint enjoyable this is what enables all those visual effects and we've gone with the geforce gtx 660ti power edition from msi it's an overclocking optimized card with a dual fan cooler and I mean it performs great at stock too so if you're not comfortable overclocking you can always run it that way if the CPU and graphics card are kind of like pi then I guess the rest of this stuff is sort of like ice cream because it definitely makes the experience better and you can't really have pie without ice-cream and you can't have a computer without all this other stuff so I think that's where the analogy sort of breaks down but for our motherboard with the z77 AG 45 from MSI this is for a couple of reasons it's extremely inexpensive it's z77 so it's overclocking ready and it is crossfire and sli ready meaning we are able to have a ton of flexibility in terms of graphics upgrade options speaking of flexible graphics upgrade options the GS 700 from Corsair has a three-year warranty a single strong 12 volt rail I mean you can hook up whatever you want to it without worrying about it having an overcurrent protection shut down because you connected everything to the wrong connectors don't worry about any of that it looks great and you can change the colors from red to blue to white to completely off to match your bill depending on what route you want to go the memory choice might seem a little bit weird because you probably know that more than eight gigs isn't really necessary for memory and we've gone with 16 gigs of Corsair Vengeance ddr3 1600 memory so the reason for that is pretty simple if you buy a dual channel kit you're going to buy two sticks to get the most out of the bandwidth available to your CPU okay if you buy to four gig sticks then you're going to be limited to a total of 16 gigs for upgrading unless you want to remove those sticks and add in a completely new set so the reason we've done this is because it gives you the potential to upgrade to 32 gigs without running into compatibility issues by mixing and matching dims down the road or being stuck at a maximum of 16 gigs now you might think that the computer case is all about aesthetics but the CM storm Scout 2 from Coolermaster does more than that it's got great cooling it's very rugged the durability of it the build quality of it is outstanding considering the price and it's very portable it has a handle on the top that's so strong that when I did my unboxing of this case I was able to hold the entire case up by the handle and shake it around without any flex and without it breaking it means you can haul your rig around to land parties without worrying too much about it and it looks really good so yes there's there's aesthetics as well it is a factor for cooling we've gone with SP 120 quiet Edition fans from Corsair I personally find that static pressure is more important than sheer airflow when it comes to getting the most out of your system so I do prefer ESPYs almost all scenarios and for the CPU we've gone with a hydro Series H 100 I liquid cooler this is going to allow us to reach that overclock that we wanted and because it comes with Corsairs link software we can monitor things like fluid temperatures system temperatures and fan RPMs using software keeping close close tabs on our system to make sure it's running at peak efficiency the storage subsystem really comes down to personal choice but what I'll do is I'll explain why we went with what we did so we've gone with an Intel 300 series 180 gig SSD we didn't have a big enough budget for a 240 gig SSD and rather than going for a 520 series we sacrificed a little bit of performance to get a bit more capacity because I personally find that 120 gigs is not quite enough these days if you're running a pure SSD boot drive for all of your OS application and gaming needs we also added a Seagate Barracuda 3 terabyte drive for mass storage because let's face it SSDs aren't at the point yet where they're inexpensive enough that you can store everything on them this gives us a couple of interesting options we can go with a 180 gig drive and three terabytes for storage or if you find that 120 gigs is enough you can go with a 120 gig boot drive partition away 60 gigs of it use it as a cache using Intel Smart Response technology which is built into your z77 board and you can have a super speedy boot drive with a few key applications then on cache SSD accelerated mass storage drive where you can install things like games so your most frequently used applications will be much faster than if they were just stored purely on a mechanical drive when it comes to peripherals things get real personal real fast for our monitor we went with an Acer T 2 3 2 HL this is a 10-point multi-touch touchscreen monitor remember we're talking about the windows 8 experience and how touch really makes it come to life it's also an IPS screen which means better viewing angles and better color reproduction which I personally will prefer to the faster response times but lower color depth of a TN panel not everyone will agree with me on that one and that's fine for our headset we want the vengence 1300 from Corsair because they're relatively inexpensive they sound pretty good and they're lightweight and comfort however there are more premium options out there such as the siphon SteelSeries this one in particular also matches our build pretty well with a white and blue color scheme for the keyboard again this is personal choice not everyone believes that you even have to spend a lot of money on a keyboard for gaming but I personally find that a mechanical keyboard really enhances the typing experience and I prefer it for gaming and this is the quick-fire pro from CM storm this particular one has Cherry MX brown switches but you can choose almost any switch Under the Sun you want and what I like about the quick-fire Pro is it has great build quality and it comes in at a very very reasonable price point considering the budget of the rest of the components we're looking at here for our mouse we went with the Vengeance M 65 you could go with the m95 if you play more MMO games than FPS games it has more buttons and stuff but what we liked about the M 65 is it's got the latest laser sensor offering up to 8200 dpi it's from Corsair so you can't really go wrong and it's white which matched the rest of our build without being overpriced for our mousepad so last but not least we went with a steel series qck this is just the standard sized one you don't have to get a huge mousepad unless you're a low sensitivity gamer and it's available not only in the plain black one you see here but also any number of different configurations with cool game gaming artwork and all that kind of cool stuff like that the actual tools you need to build a computer are pretty straightforward I use a big Phillips screwdriver and a small Phillips screwdriver for when I can't get access to those hard-to-reach areas the most important thing really is a static free workstation that means no carpets no cat hi and most importantly no clothes actually wait no sorry clothes are okay but no carpets and no cats now Tech's who do a lot of work might have a dedicated static resistant test platform for making sure that components work before you install them in the case where some issues can occur but let's face it you guys are watching this video you probably don't have one of those so in a pinch a motherboard box is an optimal place to test the components before you actually install them into the chassis before we can assemble our ghetto test bench we've got to remove the mother word from the box now the only pieces I need are the IO shield and the SATA cables other than that we're going to leave everything inside if we were running SLI for example we would also take out the sli bridge next is the motherboard itself we remove that from the ESD bag this protects it during transport put that inside the box and being careful not to touch any of the sensitive electronics you can see I'm actually holding it by the heatsink and the backplate here we put that onto our makeshift test bench installing CPUs is so easy now lift up the retention arm lifts up the hold down plate no need to remove the protective plastic cover yet align the little gold triangle on the top of your CPU with the triangle on your motherboard itself like so close down the hold down plate close down the retention arm a little bit of strength required here and check that out the plastic cover will pop off and your CPU socket pins were never exposed in order to make use of dual channel memory take your two memory sticks remember we're using two so that we have expandability for later and install them in the color-coded memory slots by pushing down firmly on both sides after opening up the tabs on the side now I personally prefer to install them in the slots furthest away from the CPU socket however because we're using a liquid cooler we don't have to worry about any clearance issues but if you were using an air cooler then this is definitely the recommended way to do it we're only going to need this for the out of the case testing but I do recommend installing that stock heatsink that came with your CPU the pins are already in the correct position out of the box the only thing to watch out for is make sure you've got enough length on the 4 pin connector to reach the CPU fan header on your motherboard push them down in a cross pattern one waiting for the click then plug it in we're going to use this to make sure that the system posts before we proceed now don't worry guys I'll show you all of these steps in detail once we do the proper assembly of the computer but basically all I've connected here is 24-pin power 8-pin power two 6-pin power adapters to the video card I've connected a DVI cable so we can find out if the system boots and I have plugged in a keyboard just in case we have to press anything in order to confirm that yes indeed we do want to boot up so let's go ahead and this board does not have onboard switches so we can use a key a screwdriver or anything else metallic to short out the power switch and now we'll find out if our components are working so press f1 to run setup and we have at least basic functionality time to proceed with the full build preambles over folks time to actually build this thing so you can follow along step-by-step and I guarantee you anyone will be able to build the exact computer that we're building here today and most of the principles can be applied to pretty much any custom machine that you would build at any time step 1 inspect your case for any damage because you're going to want to let the retailer or the manufacturer know if anything bad happened to it during transit step 2 is to take off the side panels even though many cases ship with thumb screws often they're too tight from the factory to remove by hand so you have to loosen them with a screwdriver put all the screws you take out somewhere safe such as in a little tray and I recommend putting the side panel somewhere safe because you guys wouldn't believe how many times I've put a side paddle down somewhere and tripped over it as I go to do something else scratching it so the place I recommend keeping it is in the box that your case came in with the styrofoam pieces in between the two side panels so that they don't get damaged a lot of people ask me what screws and adapters do I need in order to build my computer the simple answer is your case comes with all of that stuff most cases come with either a box or a baggie inside that contains the screws you need to completely outfit that case with whatever hardware it happens to support so in this case in this case we've got a cardboard box that was mounted in one of the three and a half inch hard drive cages that has here we go all the driver rails and speakers and zip ties even that you'll need to assemble your computer in most high-quality cases the cables inside that are pre-wired are going to be tied up in some way to keep them from scratching up the inside of the computer so you can free all of them free the ball don't worry we'll do cable management later so that you can make sure that they're all going to reach the places where they need to plug into now I don't like to have my motherboard lying around so it's the first thing that I'm going to put in my case when I'm building the new computer you need nine motherboard standoffs these are the little golden guys with the hex shape and Coolermaster includes a convenient little tool that allows you to drive them into the motherboard tray with a Phillips head screwdriver so you're going to install them assuming you're using an ATX board that is a full length board you're going to be installing them in holes a b c d e f JKL the other holes on the motherboard tray are for different sizes of motherboards you can consult the manual if you're not sure which one is right for yours putting in i/o shields can be a little bit tricky just make sure that you press on all four corners firmly to ensure that it's actually in place before you try to install the motherboard before putting the motherboard in make sure you've got the right screws by doing a quick test fit to ensure that the threads match up with the threads of the standoffs that you just installed hold the motherboard by something that's not going to damage it this is why I recommend having the stock heatsink on there we're going to remove it later to install our liquid cooler and approaching at an angle line up the i/o ports at the back then hold the motherboard in place while installing at least one screw so that it doesn't move around because that can scratch up the back of it you don't have to wrench it super tight it just has to not move are you powered up actually you're not powered up at all yet because you don't have a power supply in your computer yet when you install your power supply you have two main options for a bottom mounted power supply you can either mount it with the fan on top which will draw air from inside the case and exhaust it out the back the advantage is that you're drawing more air through the case and out the back the disadvantage is that you can be more likely to accumulate dust because you don't have any dust filter right next to it which you would if you mounted the other way and the other disadvantage is that you're using warmer air to cool the power supply the other option is flipping it fan side down so in this case our storm Scout 2 as a filter on the bottom which should keep the insides clean but the disadvantage is if you put your case down on a plush carpet it might suffocate the power supply and it might not get enough fresh air so think carefully about how you're planning to deploy your computer before installing the power supply I generally go fan up because particularly with our graphics card we're going to draw some of that heat away from the graphics card and out the back of the case using this additional fan for cooling line it up with the back of the case install the four screws and it actually takes less time to install a power supply then it takes to think about how to install a power supply at this stage of the game although building a computer is no game I recommend plugging in whatever connectors you can because as you fill the computer up with more components it'll get hard to get at some of those little finicky ones so we're going to start with the main connectors that go into the motherboard the Scout 2 has built-in cable management so we can run our 24 pin through this gap right here and then bring it up right next to the connector on the motherboard making it so that you don't even see the wires really the 8-pin connector can be routed in much the same way going through that cable management hole in the bottom up behind the motherboard tray through the little hole and then into the eight pin connector up at the very top left corner of the motherboard guys if at this point you break open the user manual or the QuickStart guide for your motherboard there is no shame because installing these front panel connectors can be a little tricky and while many motherboards have labels directly on the board for what's what often they're actually not very clear so feel free to check it out in there we're going to start with USB USB 3 is an easy connector to plug in and it's easy to find because it's very distinctive looking also it's keyed so it only goes in one way on our motherboard we have a right-angle USB 3 connector so there won't really be any strain on the cable or on the fragile pins inside but not all motherboards have that so make sure that you don't have it wrenching on the connector itself USB 2 is a smaller connector and the way this one works is there's a blocked-off pin on the bottom of the lead coming from your case and there's a missing pin on the motherboard itself as long as the blocked-off pin corresponds to the missing pin you won't have any issues just make sure you're actually plugging it into a USB header because it looks quite similar to some other headers next is front panel audio usually this is located on sort of the left-hand side of the board near the bottom left corner this one has a blocked-off pin but it's in a different position than USB 2 so as long as you make sure that that corresponds to the missing pin on the connector you won't have any difficulty with that one in either plug in HD audio if you have the option only very old motherboards rely on the AC 97 standard which brings us to the trickiest part power switch reset switch power led and hard drive led for the power switch and the reset switch the orientation is not important it doesn't matter don't worry about positive and negative just plug them in and this is what I mean about some other boards not being clearly labeled the power and hard drive LEDs do rely on being plugged in a certain way and on this particular board the positive and negative terminals aren't labeled so I'll have to consult the manual to make sure I get them right don't worry though if you plug them in wrong it's not going to damage anything your LEDs just won't light up so you can crack it back open reverse them and they'll work just fine okay we could have used the fans included with the h100 eye but they wouldn't be so sexy like these ones with the little white mod rings on them of course that includes white blue and red rings in the box so you can pick whatever you want for your color scheme we went with white to go with our white case now not everyone would want to use an h100 eye in this case because it's a bit of a weird mounting situation where what you do is you remove the top plastic plate here and you mount the radiator a little bit externally now if you're into the sort of modded hot rod look then you might like that if you're not into that go with an H ATI instead it doesn't perform quite as well because it's a single 120 millimeter radiator but it still supports Corsair link it's a thick radiator so it performs about as well as a single rad can and it's going to keep all the components inside so what we're going to do is we're going to start by removing the stock Intel cooler now that we don't need that anymore we're going to pop out that top piece of plastic on the case using the tabs inside we're going to get the radiator in position screw the fans in from the inside then it's time to mount the CPU block and pump combo unit to the processor itself the trick with mounting the fans to the rad with the H 100i is making sure that you get the right screws so there's a lot of screws in the box you can consult the manual if you're not sure otherwise find the one that looks like what I'm holding up because we're going to go through the fan through the top of the case and into the red make sure as you're positioning it you leave the leads the three pin fan connectors somewhere near the back of the case so you can hide them and not have unsightly wires cluttering up your build the other thing is this is where you decide whether you want to push air through the radiator or pull air through the radiator I prefer pull because it allows you to clean it more easily without removing the fans first lining up the screws and the fans and the radiator can be a little bit tricky and to avoid the risk of cross threading I recommend starting them with your hands to make sure that you're not putting it in wrong before you tighten them up with the screwdriver the last benefit of the SP fans that I didn't mention before compared to the stock ones that come with the H 100i is the fact that they have rubber noise-isolating mounts meaning they'll pass fewer vibrations to your computer meaning less noise because we mounted a stock cooler we will need to remove the thermal compound that's left on the CPU however we don't need to replace it the thermal compound that comes on our H 100 I is extremely high quality so if you ever do need to remove thermal compound use a lint-free cloth for the final stage but you can clean the bulk of it off with toilet paper and 99% isopropyl alcohol the higher percentage for the alcohol the better and the more clean it's going to be now the hardware you need is extremely sturdy this is why I like the H ATI in the H 100 i but there are a lot of pieces so we need the Intel magnetic hold down but this is why I love it it's brilliant just click it on like that we need the Intel backplate for everything but LGA 2011 we need the four mounting posts that are going to hold the backplate onto the motherboard and then we need the four thumb nuts which are going to hold the magnetic mounting plate down to the mounting posts which are attached to the backplate that's what makes it secure and that's what makes it once you've done it a couple times pretty darn easy to do now believe me when I say guys I'm as happy as you that we're getting close to the end of the little tricky parts but we're not quite there in order to control the fans in the system using Corsair link we use the included adapters that come with the H 100 I to plug into the CPU block and pump unit then what we'll do is we'll connect all of our fans to these and in this case we had to get one additional splitter in order to hook up the front fans on the case there we go then we can use software for our controls next up we'll have to plug the USB connector into the side of the CPU block and then into a header on the motherboard just like we did before with the front USB 2 connector and last but not least we're going to plug in the leads that are built directly into the CPU block which is the fan rpm monitor or or pump rpm monitor and a SATA power connector that we can run through the back so that it actually powers the pump itself throughout any kind of system build it's important to think about cable management if you want to have a chance of having it look tidy when you get to the end so this is the first time we're plugging in a power connector other than to the motherboard from the power supply so it's important to make sure that we've routed somewhere that we're going to be able to tie it up tightly later on after the fact it's great that we're using corsair link in the h100 i in order to plug in all of our fans but we have to actually plug in that SATA connector that I showed you before so we're going to route this sort of on this side of the 24 but on this side of the a pin in order to make it so that we're going to be able to close our case easily once we're finished so now by plugging this in we have provided power for all five of the fans in our case we're going to leave the front fans there white LED fans there wired into the case in such a way that you can turn them on and off with the push of a button which is very cool but we're going to replace this last rear fan with one of our SP fans so we have a more consistent look to the inside of our build all you got to do is remove the four fan screws from the back probably gonna like fall out here there we go that wasn't so bad keep those four screws because they're the same kinds for pretty much all fans we're going to take our SP fan again making sure to orient the connector so that we can easily route it behind the motherboard tray for maximum tidiness and software control then we're going to put those four screws back in and now we have a nice consistent look to the inside of the system look at this we're getting there it's time to put in our storage devices so we've got our SSD for which we will need I just use two screws because I'm lazy and it's an SSD it's not like it's going to get damaged if it you know Falls around or whatever else and because the CM storm Scout 2 supports SSDs natively all we have to do is grab one of these two and a half inch drive sleds screw it in on the bottom with two of the included screws that come with the case there we go there we go just like that looks good pop that back in and our SSD is installed except for the power and SATA connectors at the back for the hard drive things are a little bit different we're going to use the sleds so the rails that were included in that cardboard box we're going to plug these in with the tabs towards the front that is where the connectors are not on the drive and then the short ends where the connectors are at the back we take that whole assembly with the to sled rails and the drive itself and we slide that in until we hear a nice satisfying click so let's get all those fans connected now we used one splitter on one of our four fans that we can plug directly into the Corsair link module so those ones are going to be our two front fans in a plug goes directly into that splitter we're going to control them at the same time and we're not going to be able to monitor the RPMs of both of them so that's okay because if one of those fans fails it's really not the end of the world whereas we're going to dedicate a full connector to each of the fans on the h100 eye because if one of those fails it could be a problem for us in terms of CPU overheating especially if we've overclocked it really far for our rear 120 millimeter fan that one gets its own fan header as well so that we can control each of the zones of the case separately using the software we're also going to plug in our front drives so power is routed with another one of our two SATA harnesses that we have on this power supply giving us four SATA connectors so we can easily plug in our hard drive right here then we can use the next connector for our SSD which is right here this gives us two more connectors that we could use for additional drives without using any adapters now we need those two SATA cables that came with our motherboard both of which are right angle cables which is fine because we can use the angled side on the back of the drives then we can use the straight side to go directly into the already angled connectors on the motherboard the only real thing to watch out for is as you can see on this board it clearly states use SSDs in the top two ports as opposed to the other ones don't worry it's not going to break anything if you use a different drive but you'll get the best performance if you plug your SSDs into the native Intel serial ata three or six gigabit per second ports now it's really no secret I'm not the master of cable management by any stretch of the imagination but I want it to at least look decent from the front so we're going to take our molex harnesses which we didn't end up using a single 4-pin molex connector we're going to hide those on the other side of the motherboard tray what's great about this case is there's lots of room for hiding unneeded cables so we're going to turn this around so you guys can actually see what I'm doing there we go we're gonna hide this in the front just like that just find somewhere to tuck it it doesn't really matter then what we're going to do is we're going to take some of those zip ties that came with both our power supply and our case and we're just going to organize these cables on the back so that they're not in the way of anything when we try to close the side panel I'm not worried too much again about them being super gorgeous so I'm going to take this bundle and I'm going to kind of tie it up like this and I'm going to take this bundle and I'm going to come tied up like this with the objective being to keep things flat so that the side panel closes without any difficulty you don't want to tie things too tight because then you're going to end up with undue strain on the connectors which can damage them over time if you've hung with us this long you're almost at the end all that's left now is to install the graphics card so the first thing we're going to do is remove the two thumb screws that correspond to the PCI Express 16x slot now PCI Express 16x slots are not all made equally there's physical and electrical specifications so if you're not sure which one's the right one to get the most performance out of your graphics card it's usually the top one if you're still not sure consult the user's manual and it'll tell you what each of them is wired up for so once we remove those two screws and the two PCI slot covers that are in there all we have to do is align the PCI Express 16x interface at the bottom of the card with the PCI Express 16x slot on the motherboard push down firmly until the connector locks into place then put the thumb screws back in and then it's time to connect the power cables we're going to route these much the same way we've done before along the back of the motherboard tray which now looks a little better than it did before with some of the zip ties that we've put in place these are going to come out right near the graphics card itself which is what's so great about these modern cases with cable management I remember back in the old days we didn't have that and we walked to school both ways uphill and it's snowing and there was fired brimstone all over the place and anyway I think I'm off on a bit of a tangent here so this particular graphics card requires two PCI Express six pin connectors which we will plug in and our build is now almost complete still got to power it on make sure she works and close up the side panels now I'm about to do something that's incredibly bad luck I haven't booted up the machine yet and I am going to close one of the side panels usually when I close the side panel before I make sure it works it doesn't work on the first crack and there's one small thing I have to fix but I'm hoping that since we've you know gone to great lengths to make sure that this is an awesome build that you guys can follow along with that we haven't actually made any mistakes so our right side panel is on our left side panel check out what that looks like isn't that a gaming rig that you'd be proud to call your own all right we're going to remove the little plastic cover the windows inside here is we're going to try it's on there pretty good hey there we go there's the one we'll take off the outside one once we're done putting it on helps to have it oriented the right way there folks do recommend doing that and she is closed this is what our $1500 gaming machine looks like and it's time to fire up don't forget your thumb screws and everything's working or is it now that we've got the system booted up it's really important to run a couple basic utilities to ensure that it's firing on all cylinders before you call your system done because the last thing you want is to find out that there's a slight instability somewhere down the line in the middle of doing something critical only to have it go and turn off power down reset have corrupted data anything like that so we're going to walk you through the basic stuff that we run to ensure the system is working at peak efficiency now the first three utilities are mostly for your CPU and they kind of go hand-in-hand in face or other hand if you had three hands and that's what they would do and they're mostly important if you're overclocking in our case we over voltage our CPU to one point three two volts and turn the multiplier up to 44 megahertz because it's unlocked so overclocking is that simple these days more voltage more megahertz until it stops working so in our case we got to make sure that it's working and how do you know well CPU Z tells you if the overclock actually took so you can see right here we're running at 4400 megahertz which is 4.4 gigahertz so that's awesome that's working next up is prime95 so you go into options torture test small FFT and then press okay and it'll run this test for at least I would recommend 24 hours to ensure that your CPU is not making any calculation errors that tells you that it's actually working correctly even though you've amped the frequency way up the last one that you want to use is right here real temp GT and as long as your CPU is staying at around I'd say 85 degrees tops and this is under load this is under an intensive artificial load you'll never see a load like this in the real world unless you're doing some pretty intensive stuff like folding at home for example so you want that to stay under around 85 degrees to make sure your CPU doesn't throttle thermal throttling is when the CPU slows itself down like whoa I can't handle this I got to slow myself down to keep myself cool enough that I can you know handle it not die so we're not reaching that point which means our overclock is good to go and our prime95 is stable there are other applications you can use instead of prime95 but it's the one that we've always been using and we just kind of like it so there you go there's my tech tip now speaking of the importance of temperatures graphics card temperatures are huge what if something went wrong with your graphics card or a fan failed for example or it wasn't mounted correctly it got jiggled loose and shipping or something like that when you got your graphics card so you want to make sure your graphics card is running right before you start firing up games on it as well so we use a couple of programs called MSI's afterburner and combustor and combustor is spelled very uniquely so don't mind that but we use these to make sure that the graphics card is running correctly so we can load it up with combustor then we can monitor our temperatures we can see that it's running at about 76 degrees which is more than okay for these graphics cards anything up to about 90 to 95 degrees is actually okay for a modern graphics card and that tells us again so besides our CPU our graphics subsystem is running correctly as well the last thing that I'd really recommend running but I can't show you when Windows here is mem test 86 you load that onto a USB Drive throw that in your system and it that'll test your memory to ensure that nowhere within your system are any errors being made that way you know you can trust it to be a hundred percent stable here's another software tip for you guys head to 9 night and I n ite dot-com as the first thing you do with your system once you've made sure it's working correctly select all the stuff you want to install you want web browsers kernel them up or Firefox you want iTunes Skype java.net air shockwave Dropbox Google Drive all that good stuff all you got to do is select all the things you want get installer it avoids all the bloatware that comes with the programs and it doesn't automate it install of all of with default options without you touching it at all and there's one really important one you Windows 8 users might want to check out under utilities get classic start because it is a fantastic start menu that adds da-da-da-da the Start menu to Windows 8 not only that but you can decide which kind of Start menu you want and there are a ton of settings that you can change and reconfigure and make the Start menu not only there in Windows 8 but better than it ever was before and more customizable that way you get the benefits of all the touch features of Windows 8 like swiping in in order to do a search or multitasking between applications like this with all the benefits of previous editions of Windows so you guys saw me fire up Angry Birds there yes Windows 8 is great as a casual gaming experience you can get games from the Windows Store you can install regular games that run in touchscreen but it's not just about the casual gaming experience that your kids are going to want to enjoy or whatever else I mean it's cool having a big touchscreen like this basically means you've got like a gigantic tablet that lives on your desk very neat but you can use the other multitasking feature here so we're going to open up the desktop all the major online gaming store platforms steam you play an origin I'll run just fine on Windows 8 and not only that but we observed some tangible performance differences between Windows 7 and Windows 8 due in part to the fact that Windows 8 uses less resources than Windows 7 on your system and actually handles the way that core scheduling works on the CPU a little bit more efficiently in some cases as well so battlefield 3 was an example where it ran about the same in our lab three percent improvement over Windows 7 for Windows 8 but we'll call that margin of error we'll call that the same dirt3 was one example where we found that Windows 8 performed 10% less than Windows 7 however in Far Cry 3 windows 8 performed 32 percent better than Windows 7 and in the Elder Scrolls 5 it was about three percent better so in general we saw more improvements than we saw performance decreases or it's the same so while Windows 8 might be criticized by some gamers as not optimal for hardcore gaming necessary really that is actually not the experience we had at all once you get around a couple of little finicky things make sure games for Windows Live is installed before you try to run any of your games and make sure you got the latest drivers I mean it's pretty basic stuff beyond that went games for Windows Live tip so whether or not you feel that touch belongs on the desktop or whether it should stick to tablets and notebooks and phones and all those other devices you gotta admit the idea that you can go between playing jetpack Joyride on your 23 inch 1080p screen and then switching out and enjoying content on said screen or even going and playing a quote-unquote real game is pretty darn cool I hope you guys have really enjoyed this ultimate build guide for our $1500 recommended system and I'd love to hear your feedback post under the video and let us know what did you think you could have improved with a $1,500 budget and do you really think that with a touchscreen you still need to be investing in high-end gaming grade peripherals such as the ones that we've chosen here today we're going to close out the video with some glamour footage of our finished system and I hope to see you guys next time in our yes there will be more of these next build guide