Gadgetory

well guys the lab coats on which means it's time for another ultimate build guide this time it's going to be the ultimate video editing workstation so we're going to be walking you through the mechanics of putting the system together but more importantly we're going to be talking about the rationale behind each of the parts we chose as well as giving you a couple of other options because for professional use there are often at least a half a dozen options that would all be valid for any given part depending on your particular needs like most rigs a professional video editing machine starts at the cpu now our cpu choice is not the only choice we went with the 49 30 K on the LGA 2011 platform and we did this for a number of reasons we found the 49 30 K to be a good sweet spot it's the lowest end six core processor that's available from the core i7 family we could step down to a 48 20k but then we'd be losing a couple of cores even though it is less expensive or we could step up to a 49 60 X Extreme Edition but we wouldn't be getting a lot more performance and we'd be paying quite a bit more for it Zeon's are also options but from a price to performance standpoint we didn't find that for our rig bearing in mind that Adobe can be easily offloaded without even buying additional licenses to a render farm we didn't find we needed even more processing cores or more than 64 gigs of ram which would be another benefit of a xeon processor support for ECC memory now benefit number two beyond having more cores of choosing the LGA 2011 platform is more PCI Express Lanes these are pcie 3.0 lanes and it has about double the lane support of the consumer-grade platform meaning that as you add in bandwidth hungry expansion cards like accelerator cards and raid cards and Knick cards and graphics cards and anything that you want compute cards whatever kind of crazy stuff you might want to put on here you need to make sure that band what's available and only a professional-grade platform will have that benefit number three is more RAM support even using consumer grade modules such as these corsair dominator Platinum's these are clocked at 21 33 megahertz we can get up to 64 gigs of ram in this board which is more we need for our application although it'll be up to you guys to decide whether you need more than that that you might end up with something like a dual socket board with even more memory slots or high-density ECC modules now let's talk a little bit more about the memory we went with ddr3 2133 modules so remember we did a showcase a little while ago where we demonstrated that anything of round 1333 or higher doesn't benefit gaming applications however with pro applications where you're swapping massive amounts of data in and out of the memory that can be a bit of a different scenario with that said you still want to find a sweet spot and you don't necessarily want to spring for ddr3 3,000 megahertz or anything like that so we found 2133 was a good balance now why did we go with this particular kitten really a big part of the answer is not all memory kits are available in 8 way configurations so first of all you have to be able to get a quad channel kit of whatever memory it is there's a chance that two dual channel kits will work together in quad channel but if you want maximum compatibility buying quad channel kits is the way to go remember LGA 2011 not only supports more memory but also about double the theoretical bandwidth of LGA 1150 so we had to find a quad channel kit then we wanted to find a quad channel kit that actually has all eight modules in one kit all validated together because this again improves compatibility with your motherboard and CPU and is makes it less likely that you're going to run into any issues down the road you want a 6 core processor and 64 gigs of RAM you're going to need a board that supports that this is the p9 X 79 EWS from a soos and don't let the ws fool you it's not just suitable for workstation use guys so if you want to overclock or game on this board yeah that'll be just fine don't worry but what makes it ws well number one is there's the pure quality of the components it is an extremely well-built board it is designed to be used in a professional environment and yes those components do cost more and they do last longer next up is the expansion so check this out seven PCI Express 16x physical slots three of them are wired for 8x four of them are wired for PCIe six neck's 3.0 that's supported by that ivy bridge-e processor Wow lots of expansion you've also got eight ddr3 module slots so that will support up to 64 gigs a regular non-ecc memory with a normal core series processor or you can support even more if you step up to a Xeon processor which will cost you a little bit more and then you'll spend a little bit more on the memory as well to get even more rock-solid stability and even better performance now it's got other workstation oriented features as well such as the dual Intel NICs at the back that increases throughput and decreases CPU utilization when you're working off of network resources but that is not actually where it really shows its value compatibility is where this board shows its value you could spend half as much less than half as much on a motherboard that would give you the same performance yes I'm gonna let that sink in for a moment less than half as much so why doesn't everyone just do that because when you're buying a professional-grade product you expect zero downtime when you buy a new red rocket accelerator card and throw it into your board you expect it to work you don't expect to find out that there's a compatibility issue and you've got to pull that motherboard eBay it flip it somehow buy a new one and replace it you can't afford that if you want something that you know is going to work this is it friends WS Series boards are validated to a much higher standard with aftermarket parts than other boards whether it is the aforementioned red rocket card RAID cards multi-channel NICs or whatever else you can fill up these PCI Express slots Xeon Phi's cuadros Tesla's it's all validated in this board so if you can't afford the downtime and you're willing to pay an extra premium for that and you just want what I generally consider to be the best single socket board on the market P 9x 79 EWS my friends we went with a pro grade product for the motherboard but for the power supply we're going with a bit of more of a gaming branded product why would that be well for one thing the Corsair ax I Series comes with a seven year warranty so if you had any doubts as to how well-built they are there's that you can also check out the reviews on Johnny guru con these are extremely well-built power supplies right up there with a workstation grade power supply and make with a seven-year warranty and they come with course our link which allows you to monitor its usage as well as its efficiency as well as your voltage levels and all that crazy stuff so we kind of went well what's the real difference between this and a workstation power supply well there's the brand name on the front which isn't terribly important to us and there's the fact that it doesn't look like an industrial piece of equipment and sound like an industrial piece of equipment it's very very quiet to go along with that 80-plus platinum efficiency so there doesn't appear to be a downside we went with the ax 860 I now there's a million different options in terms of storage there really are literally a million but we're going to walk you through what we went with SSD boot drive I still feel is the most important thing to have in any machine gaming workstation it doesn't really matter and for us we went with the Intel 530 series 240 gig drive it's got a five-year warranty so they're standing behind it in terms of the reliability the durability of the flash you could spend a lot more and get something like a 3500 series drive that would be an option but because we're not going to be using this drive for any of the real work we're not using it as a scratch disc we're not using it to actually store any HD footage on it we're just basically reading off of it we did not feel it was necessary to go with a probe raid component in this case when working with HD video files or even Ultra HD video files you will need a ton of space we wanted to try and keep our storage internal to make this workstation as as portable as possible without tying us down to an external storage array so we went with 4 WD black 4 terabyte drives we're going to be running them in raid 10 we're going to be running them off the on-board raid these are not necessarily the only options available to you adding in a high end raid card so that you can run something like raid 5 very quickly or some kind of an unread or some kind of a raid 6 these are definitely options but by the time you buy a raid card that's capable of running those types of raid fast enough for professional usage you're probably looking at adding another 500 to a thousand dollars to the cost of the build so I wanted to present that option but that not something that we went with raid10 allows us to take our 4 4 terabyte drives and get a total of 8 terabytes of fast safe storage we get the benefits of raid 0 so that is double the sequential throughput and we get the benefits of raid 1 which means that we can have any one of the drives in the system fail and up to 2 of the drives in the system fail before any data losses incurred this is so important for professional work whether you're running a raid card whether you're running raid off of your on board or whether you're running some kind of an external enclosure whether that's network or USB 3 or eSATA or whatever the case may be redundancy is key it is not a substitute for backing up preferably off-site but redundancy will save you from a hardware failure choosing a graphics card for a professional rig is a very personal choice and I just want you guys to maybe be able to make a better educated one even if I can't tell you exactly what's right for you now graphics cards in general have always had the hardware oomph to be great for applications like video editing but the software is still catching up so prior to Adobe cs5 for example if you're a premiere editor anyone telling you you needed a great workstation graphics card for better video editing performance was probably trying to sell you a great workstation graphics card that ultimately wasn't going to be doing a whole lot for you in terms of performance anyway with cs5 that all changed so we're able to leverage that highly parallelized processor the onboard memory the fast interconnects to the rest of the system for wholesale changes to individual pixels imagine a graphics card being good for that such as a color correction scaling or compositing so that was with cs5 now we're actually continuing to improve so for example in After Effects in cs6 the optics ray-tracing engine was added that's GPU accelerated as well so that instead of fake kludge III D FX and After Effects now editors can work in real 3d with real depth values now on the Nvidia side alone you've actually got options in terms of you've got two whole different lines of graphics cards to choose from so there's quad rose which I was waving around before the workstation grade cards then there's also the consumer-grade geforce cards now what geforce cards do is they offer a great price to performance ratio if you're looking for sheer CUDA cores and CUDA performance if the application that you're running doesn't call for a specifically validated GPU or there's no easy hack geforce cards offer great bang for the buck now with that said they don't undergo the same degree of validation because there's a whole lot of variety in the implementations from different manufacturers so that means that you've got to make a pretty careful choice for which one you don't want to go with the Asus direct Cu 2 GTX 780 that we've got for our rig is an over build card it's overclocked but you know not crazy like it's going to die immediately or anything like that and it has a fantastic cooler on it so we'd expect it to have a very long life cycle even though it's not rated for 24/7 operation the same way that something like a Quadro is with Quadro cards on the other hand performance takes a definite backseat to validation and reliability the things that workstation users value the most these cards are all built by Nvidia with exactly the same components every time allowing large corporations to validate particular workloads of particular machines with this particular card and no that is going to be available in exactly that configuration over a long period of time this is important in a corporate environment but not necessarily something that individual users value now that goes for software makers as well this is less of an issue with Adobe software where they actually do validate some geforce chips and configurations in addition to Quadro configurations but avid for example only certifies workstation grade cards for their avid software now with that said there are hacks there are text file hacks for both adobe applications and for avid that allow you to you know plug in geforce cards and and allow them to be recognized as validated cards but this is a very a very homebrew way of approaching it and not everyone is comfortable with that now for the multi-talented Video Editor who also does some 3d rendering work as well you'll probably just plain-old need a Quadro card professional 3d rendering applique such as 3ds Max and Maya are often only going to work with GPU acceleration with Quadro cards this is because of the way that the Quadro driver is architected to specifically enable performance profiles and compatibility settings even down to if that particular rendering application is the active window on the screen it's making optimizations in the background for the utmost compatibility and the GeForce drivers just aren't tuned to operate that way they're going for balls to the walls performance rather than that stability and validation that Quadro brings to the table so basically if it comes down to choices if you're a tinkerer and you're willing to spend the time you know hacking things a little bit and you don't mind if if a card isn't validated for 24/7 operation and if it dies you kind of go to yourself oh I spent half as much on this card as I would have on the workstation one I'll just buy another one and it'll probably be higher performance by that time anyway if you're one of those kinds of folks GeForce can be a great option if you're building workstations that just need to work and you don't want to ever touch them again then maybe there's a value to you for the additional stability that something like a Quadro brings to the table I mean another example is if you're building a system for someone else where frankly it's not your money anyway and you want them to have a great experience with your system maybe you just go for the hassle-free solution that doesn't have the hack that you implemented and validated by a driver update that comes down through GeForce experience you're kind of sitting there going well dad wouldn't be dealing with that if it was a Quadro then you might find that to be a better option as well now with that said you can't just swap out Quadros for g-forces and get all of the same functionality some of it is just plain hardware so if you're doing any kind of stereo 3d video editing and you want to use a pro grade 3d solution that runs off of a DIN connector Quadro is going to be the way to go if you wanted to take advantage of is deep color so 10 bit panels more on this PA 279 Q in a moment for any kind of serious color work during your video editing process you are going to need a Quadro because that's the only thing that is going to support the 10 bit output that that monitor can then interpret and finally they come in form factors that geforce cards just don't come in this quadric a 4000 is a single slot card giving you a ton of flexibility in systems where you might also have you know a red rocket accelerator and all those other things where you can run out of expansion cards pretty quickly and I mean for us it's great because we were able to put a two slot geforce card in sneak a single slot quad row card in and still have a lot of expansion for other things as well so that's yet another advantage of quad room for peripherals particularly for keyboards and mice we've moved almost completely towards gaming peripherals not because gaming peripherals are you know more professional-looking in fact they're not but because the functionality and the build quality of them tends to be well designed for more wear and tear than your typical Mouser keyboard so this right here my friends is the g6o 2 and this gets my recommendation it lasts for weeks and performance mode and much longer than that in its endurance mode it has very good precision and it has a ton of fully programmable buttons which can be great not just for gaming and binding to your voice chat application or whatever else but also for programming in things like keyboard shortcuts it's comfortable it's wireless it's hard to go wrong for our keyboard same thing we've started moving towards gaming keyboards because features like lighting up in the dark having programmable keys on the sides having built-in media controls in a volume wheel well these are useful for professionals as well as for gamers so the g7 10 plus gets my vote it has excellent software it comes with Cherry MX brown key switches with oring x' meaning that it's not that loud so you're not going to be bugging your neighbor again the loud system thing and it's Logitech so it's extremely well built and if anything goes wrong with it you will definitely get a replacement it's also very well priced for a mechanical keyboard with those features now when it comes to audio that's where the gaming thing goes completely out the window most of our guys here use IEM so something like Sennheiser's ie8 would be an excellent option although any kind of closed monitoring or reference sounding headphones from the likes of AKG Bayer dynamic Sennheiser or Denon would be great choices ASIS originally told us they were going to send us a new PB 27-inch monitor for this showcase and I kind of went okay yeah I can dig it PB is is a good value option if you want you know great monitors that are not factory pre-calibrated like the PA series the pro art series is and if you want me a little bit more value that's not what they sent they ended up sending a PA 279 q which is one that I can wholeheartedly recommend for use with this video editing rig or pretty much any video editing rig yeah it's expensive if you look at it from like a gamers perspective you go pro art monitors those are really expensive but when you look at it from a professional users perspective and you consider the features you're getting you compare it to something like an HP dream color and it starts to look a lot more attractive this right here is a 27-inch 2560 by 1440 monitor it has a 10 bit aah IPS panel so for those of you who understand what that means great for those of you who don't that means a much much tighter level of granularity in the colors that it can display so on your monitor when you see blocking or bending between similar colors that will not be present on this monitor as long as you are using a supported graphics card so in our case of Quadra with a supported driver Quadro and a supported application such as adobe premiere now you are taking full advantage of deep color it also has a 14 bit lookup table so it can actually understand even more than it can actually display to you giving it an even better approximate those colors and it's got more features as well so it's a professional monitor meaning that the on-screen display has an updated navigation menu with a little four-way switch it's highly ergonomic so you got your height adjust yours tilt your swivel your pivot all that stuff that you could possibly want it comes pre-calibrated like all PA monitors and this time asus is going for gold because they're promising a delta ii of less than 2 and they actually ship a little certificate inside the box that shows you how your individual monitor tested it supports six axis individual color adjustment so that's on RGB cyan magenta and yellow so you can adjust the dual colors without affecting the other ones it has uniformity compensation which is one of the big issues with even many pro-grade monitors and that is to say that the backlight isn't always uniform so as much as the color reproduction might be perfect you might still have issues with this corner being a little bit different looking than this corner and you want it to be as uniform as possible comes with compensation for that of course with you know 10 bit panel and all of these fancy features it has 99% Adobe RGB color support and 100% sRGB color space support and 120 percent NTSC color space support and I think I've probably gushed about it enough but guys this is a fantastic choice if you're looking for a great monitor for color work and you don't necessarily want to spend several thousand dollars on it choosing a case for this was actually a bit of a challenge because what's a professional case I mean you don't want to go and spend $300 on a case for a video editing rig unless there's some kind of a compelling reason like you need support for 12 hard drives or something like that you want something that's reasonably portable if you ever had to move it around or you know take it somewhere else in order to work on it I mean we do that from time to time when we go to shows for example you don't want it to be like you know covered in like flames and plastic or all that unless you don't mind people seeing that when they come into your office for a meeting or whatever else um so we ended up with the silverstone TJ o4e it's clean looking metal construction it has great features it's around 150 dollars which is reasonable although it's certainly not inexpensive and it's easy to build in I like this case I've been using it for years actually back to the old TJ o4 model I don't think Silverstone gets enough attention for how high-quality their products are and how reasonably priced they are especially we can when you consider how much better built they are than some of the other really really popular options that are out there now if I didn't want to spend 150 bucks and I didn't mind stepping down to something that has a little bit more of a plastic construction the fractal design define our four is a great option one of the reasons we didn't go with the define r4 for this build guide is that we've already done a build guide in the define our four so I didn't really see much of a value to doing another build guide in the define our for the first step as always is to prepare yourself that an anti-static workstation not working on a carpet preferably using an anti-static strap whether it's on your wrist or like I prefer to wear it on my ankle you're also going to need a Phillips head screwdriver which should be pretty much all we need in terms of tools for this particular build I always start with building the system outside of the box as much as possible and by box I of course mean the case not the box but I'm not going to kill the shot just for that so I've got the motherboard the CPU the CPU cooler on previous build guides when we've used liquid cooling installing the CPU cooler prior to putting the board into the case has not been an option but this time we're going to do that and if you PS would hurry up and bring the RAM to us I would have the RAM here as well Intel uses simple eco-friendly packaging for their 2011 processors it does not come with a heatsink so it's a good thing we have an aftermarket heatsink to use they expect professional and enthusiast users to have their own cooling solution we open up the plastic clamshell and find the little golden triangle on the corner of the CPU that's important so we're going to put it down on our motherboard oriented correctly relative to the little triangle on the corner of the socket itself then with LGA 2011 there are two retention arms first we lift the one with the hook at the end then we lift the one with the kink in the middle and the straight end once that's done we can lift up the hold down plate position the CPU carefully in the socket without putting any force on it while we're putting it down if you bend those pins you will likely be Sol guys because no motherboard manufacturer will warranty physical damage and they're extremely difficult to repair now we lower the hold down plate lower the kinked arm and lower the hooked arm then pull off the plastic plate and the CPUs installed if you follow naktu as instructions carefully mounting the Nhu 14's isn't going to be too complicated you'll need all the hardware from inside the intel mounting hardware box other than the back plate for LGA 2011 that's not needed and then you'll need some stuff from the accessories box so it does come with a screwdriver which is pretty handy you'll also need the extra fan clips the extra fan grommets as well as the thermal compound the only thing we're not going to use from inside here is the case badge which is totally optional and the low-noise adapter because this motherboard includes excellent software fan control now that we've got everything together it's pretty straightforward get the four little pieces with threads on either side and the thicker thread goes into the four holes around the LGA 2011 socket next up take the two mounting bars and position them on either side just like this you've got four more nuts that then go over top I recommend using a screw driver to tighten these ones into place because this is what's giving you the security and firmness for that large heatsink next up is applying thermal compound I recommend the line method on LGA 2011 processors use a little bit more than you'd use on a smaller LGA 1150 processor now you have to pull the original fan which comes pre mounted to your heatsink off because otherwise you won't actually be able to mount it then position it centered on top of the CPU so that both of the pre-installed tensioned screws are positioned over top of the threads that are on that mounting plate now alternating sides make sure first that the threads catch then switch back and forth until they stop and you can't screw them in any further put the original fan back on then for your secondary fan which is totally optional and is only if you buy an additional fan what you're going to want to do is take the thicker spacers that are included in the box with your heatsink swap off the four spacers that are on the side where okay that are on the side bit is pulling air into the fan so you can tell from the label of the fan guys so here you go the label should be facing away from the CPU heatsink on that other side then swap on the thicker spacers that are included it's a little bit tricky you got to kind of pull the little nubs through the corners but this will generate a little bit less turbulence when the air is passing first from the push fan through the heatsink and then is being drawn away by the pull position fan when you're done it should look a little something like this nice massive heatsink lots of cooling fans plenty of space for 64 gigs of ram now something you might have noticed about this board is in order to achieve its massive 7 PCI Express slots there wasn't a lot of clearance between the RAM slots and the PCIe slots of a soos has done the only natural thing which is to remove the moveable clips from one side so you can see here on the one side we have clips that snap bore forwards and back and on the other side we have no clips due to the fact that there's no clearance there so this makes installing Ram a little bit different in this board from most also if you were installing only four modules please note that you would install them in the blue slots because we're installing eight modules we're just going to go to town fill them up on one side fill them up on the other side now you might have noticed that on the side where we put in the additional spacer on the fan that is a very tight fit for that first memory module so it's up to you whether you want to opt for the slightly less turbulence and slightly lower noise operation or if you want to opt for having a little bit more clearance for your memory so the first thing is to open up the case by removing the two thumb screws then getting the insides basically prepared so we're going to remove that SSD mounting bracket that's down here in the bottom of the case we're also going to put our power supply right in so if you look at these these are the types of screws that we use for power supply mounting for screws there's a bit of a decision to be made when you're deciding whether to have your fan mounted up or down for your power supply fan up has the benefit of pulling air away from your graphics cards and helping cool your graphics cards but the drawback of drawing hot air into your power supply making your power supplies cooling less efficient so we opted instead to go for drawing air in through the bottom of the case this case conveniently has an air filter down here that you can easily remove and clean whenever you need to this isolates the heat from your graphics cards away from your power supply and will make it run cooler in the long term when installing the i/o shield into the KACE do a quick sanity check and make sure you're putting it in right side up just align the i/o shield with the back of the motherboard make sure all the ports stick through then align it with the back of the case and press firmly on all four corners this might require some pressure in order to get it to work properly and it's not in correctly until it snaps into place and you can put some pressure on it from behind without it falling back inside the case now to continue preparing the case we're going to replace those stock fans and filler all up with better fans for awesome cooling so Silverstone includes okay fans with their cases but that's exactly what they are they're okay in the back we're going to take that okay fan we're going to take out all four screws and replace it with an n F f12 now we don't have to use the same stock screws to install that in ff12 back there because premium fans also come with some premium mounting options so instead we're going to use these little rubber Isolators to have what is what is a very vibration resistant mount so the way that it's done is you position the fan then push the little rubber spacers through as much as you can you won't be able to completely mount them this way then if you have room for your fingers you can pull them through to the point where the fan now is locked into place and if you don't have room for your fingers and you can make your life a lot easier by using a pair of needle nose pliers once you're done with that check it out very little vibration if any can be passed now from the fan with its spinning blades to the case on the top there's a top piece that actually acts as both an aesthetic cover for our fans and as an easily removable and cleanable fan filter we have a bit of a unique configuration for the top of this case it accepts one 140 millimeter fan and one 120 millimeter fan in the top there is not enough room for us to use those rubber spacers unless we were really determined so in this case we just went for the old hard mount with screws it should be noted that again premium fan features these fans have little rubber Isolators built into them as well so they're still not making direct plastic to metal contact with the case which will reduce vibration we want to pay special attention when installing all case fans to the position of the cables that are coming out of them with respect to where we expect them to plug into the motherboard or any other kind of power solution that we have planned in this case because we're one motherboard fan header short on this board for the number of fans we're going to have in the system I'm going to be using a splitter off of this top connector right here into these two top fans so I want them positioned near the back so I can route them cleanly up there without any additional wire clutter the last fans that we're going to swap out are going to require us to take off the other side panel and there we go two more n FF twelves these are going to be used to directly cool our hard drive raid 10 array now I want to take a moment here okay so yeah we use slightly different hardware here it includes more of it but just to save time because we're just doing a build guide here this isn't a permanent build I'm just doing two screws per fan and at diagonals okay so maintain the cable management that's there and I want to take a moment to talk about why I love n FF 12s and other pressure optimized fans manufacturers will often make the argument you should use an airflow optimized fan for something like a case intake or rear exhaust or whatever else the negligible performance improvement that you get with an airflow optimized fan versus a pressure optimized fan I feel is offset by the versatility of pressure optimized fans because you can do all the planning in the world and if you go and buy an airflow optimized fan that's going to end up being a case intake that sits next to hard drives pulls air through a honeycomb mesh and pulls air through a fine-mesh fan filter I would make the argument that's more of a static pressure optimized to application anyway and you run into that a whole lot so I love the versatility of pressure optimized fans I find them more useful in a wider variety of scenarios every manufacturer takes a slightly different approach to which motherboard standoffs come pre-installed Silverstone has opted for the skinny but full length ATX configuration so that is six screws to at the top two in the middle and two at the bottom in order to put a standard ATX motherboard or in this case a slightly EA TX motherboard so standard holes but it is a little bit wider we're going to need three more screws or standoffs rather so standoffs look a little something like this and they screw into the back of the motherboard tray you're going to also find another piece that has a Phillips head on one side and then a socket on the other side you can use that piece to screw your standoffs into the motherboard tray so we're going to install three more one in line with the two bottom ones one in line with the two middle ones and one in line with the two top ones so we end up with a total of nine here here here here here here here here and here now positioning the motherboard it's important to be extremely careful the last thing you want to do is scratch the back yard on those fancy new standoffs that you just put into the motherboard tray so what I recommend is going in at a bit of an angle and positioning the rear i/o so that it sticks through the back of your i/o shield back here before you actually lay the mother down more down flat on the standoffs now holding the motherboard in place put in at least one screw in this case we're using the same coarsely threaded screws that we used for the power supply although this varies from manufacturer to manufacturer and even from case to case so always do a test fit before you start installing screws into your standoff so you might cross thread something then proceed to tighten in the other eight screws now once you've done that is easier to install your motherboard connectors before we move on so we're going to start with the front panel connectors for the power reset and as well as our LEDs so first up is power and reset for these ones the orientation doesn't matter so just follow the clearly labeled connectors and clearly labeled pins on the motherboard itself if you have a little bit of trouble reading those grab out the old magnifying glass or better yet just consult the manual because it'll tell you exactly where they are next up are your power LED and your hard drive activity LED for these ones the orientation of the cables does matter you want the colored wires towards the back of the motherboard or where the i/o and the PCI Express slots are on all the suits motherboards that way you're going to have your positive and negative wires in the right if you do get them wrong don't stress out about it it's not going to break anything just switch them around when you realize that the light isn't working next up we've got our front USB 3 for this one be really careful to install it in the correct orientation there is a key on the USB connector itself as well as on the socket so you shouldn't be able to install it Corrine correctly but if you did you would likely Bend all those very fragile pins the USB 3 connector is very large but the pins themselves are quite small and delicate finally we have our front HD audio this has been simplified so much since 10 years ago and now all you got to do is figure out which block doesn't have a pin in it align that with the one on the motherboard that doesn't have a pin in it and plug the whole thing in finally fans we actually have an opportunity here to show you a multitude of different ways that you might install fans our rear fan we have a little bit of extra slack on that wire so we're going to do my signature not before we plug it into the motherboard fan header next up we've got our top fans I needed to use a splitter for these because I don't have enough to stand are enough headers on the motherboard in order to install all of my fans so the splitter plugs directly into the motherboard this came with my fans another benefit of buying premium quality fans then runs around to the back of the motherboard tray where because I was thinking cable management as I was building my motherboard fan cables are already running so I can plug those in tuck them away and I'm good to go which leaves us finally with the front fans these ones are both different so one of them is perfect it's a perfect run to one of the remaining plugs on the motherboard that's the top one the second one the bottom one actually has a cable that's too short now Noctua includes very short cables built onto their fans to allow for shorter cleaner cable runs without having a lot of extra wires to tuck away so what they also include is extension cables so I'm going to use one of those extensions in order to make this wire long enough to reach my final fan header which is down in the bottom of the chassis next up we're going to install our SSD and our hard drive so in order to do any drives we're going to have to take out that entire hard drive cage assembly so four screws two up at the top and then two up at the bottom this handle comes out and then you can pull the whole assembly out of the case now this is a very strange hard drive mounting system I've never seen anything quite like it before but it's also very versatile so first things first things first we're going to install our SSD in the very very bottom here we got two views screws that are countersunk screw so that is to say they don't have a head sticking up above them so we're going to use anywhere from two to four of those depending what you prefer it's an SSD so it's you know not going to be moving or anything so I usually use just two screws on them so we're going to go ahead and mount that down in the bottom where it's nice and hidden then we're going to have a look at this hard drive cage it can accept up to eight drives if you're willing to stack them right up next to each other but the way we're going to install them is we're going to do 4 WD black drives and we're going to stagger them out so we're going to leave spaces in between them for more airflow in between the drives however how necessary this is I don't know so we're going to install one screw into each of them on this side then flip the whole cage over and install two more screws on the other side but wait we're not done yet this is a very unique feature of this case that's the kind of thing that I would expect to see as like a weird aftermarket option for most cases but silverstone instead includes what's probably a couple bucks worth of aluminum in heatsinks for your hard drives so you can actually mount these directly to up to eight drives on the other side they're going to be taking air flow directly from those n FF twelves that are coming in on the side keeping your hard drives much cooler than they'd be able to be if you didn't have heat sinks on them if you wanted to go crazy you could get some thermal pads and install those in there or even some thermal paste if you think you've got a nice tight mount although you'd have to check and make sure it's actually mounted right up against there but this is a very unique way to keep your hard drives cool and very unexpected to see as a stock option on a case so we can go ahead and put a couple more screws into each drive with the heat sinks there then put the whole assembly together it's quite heavy now and slide it back into the case this is where silverstone shows yet another great in and that is with these SATA cable splitters so you can see we're able to wire things up quite cleanly now we weren't quite able to reach that two and a half inch SSD down in the bottom however if this was my own rig I would either stretch it and see if I could just barely get there or what I do is I'd move that SSD take the screws out of it mount it with double sided tape to get it a little bit closer and then I'd be able to use those SATA splitters for all of my drives and I'd only need two SATA connectors to power all the drives in my case very very nice thinking now I've been using a new technique lately where instead of pre attaching all of the cables I want to my power supply in this case we're using a modular power supply and then running them to where they need to go I've been pre attaching all the cables to where they need to go and then running them backwards to the power supply now if we didn't have a modular power supply in this case actually I'm really impressed I've never built in this case before but check this out behind the power supply there is a wack ton of space where you could put all the cables you need to that you're not using from a non modular power supply silverstone has then put the power supply right up against the side panel which doesn't matter because it's not like it needs any extra space on this side very unique approach I really like this anyway we started with the 24 pin plugging that into the motherboard and then running it behind the motherboard tray next up is the 8 pin for the CPU up at the top left this is a no frills no gimmicks professional grade board so there's only one 8 pin because the reality of it is guys you only need one 8 pin unless you're going like crazy wicked liquid nitrogen which you're not doing with a board like this now in order to cable management those cables we're going to want to install the rest of the power supply cables so we'll need to install our graphics cards first the first stage in installing a graphics card in this case is to remove this little cover back here that gives you access to all the screws that allow you to remove the PCI slot covers which have extra ventilation and very nice silverstone so we're going to go ahead take those 2 screws off and remove that now it is time to consult the manual because regardless of how experienced you are technically and regardless of how much you wish you could do things without the manual this one's important so the PCI Express slots on this board they're all 16x physical ok but that doesn't mean that you just take any card and install it into any slot and you're going to get optimal performance it doesn't necessarily work that way you want to check the manual where it will give you recommendations for how many cards you have installed and which ones you should use so that you can best take advantage of native PCI Express Lanes versus ones that are relying on a PL X chip for example so in this case we wanted our cards installed in PCI Express slot 1 and 5 so we're going to go ahead and remove those slot covers then we can install the Quadro into the very top one we're going to be using this for our display out the reason for using the Quadro here was that with the backplate on the GTX 780 it was too tight of a fit with this cooler up here even the Quadro was very very tight and normally I would recommend using even something like an on any kind of non conductive very thin material in between this heat sink and this graphics card but in this case there's a chip on the back that is non conductive that is causing it to not short out but anyway I would still recommend slipping something in there to make sure it doesn't short out because they're very very close to these fan clips in particular right here so we installed the quadrille then next up is the GTX 780 so once that's done we go ahead and put the screws back into each of these cards so it's one screw for the Quadro two screws for the 780 then we can go ahead and put that back cover back in place and now we are pretty much done with those so now we can do the same thing we did last time where we are installing our PCI Express cables backwards so this power supply the ax 860 I comes with harnesses that have two plugs and ones that have an individual plug so we're going to use an individual plug one for the Quadro and then we're going to use a dual plug one for the gtx 780 so we only actually have to run two cables finally we're going to use a single four ports a two harness to plug in our two and a half inch SSD and then those two splitters that we were using for power to our hard drives remember guys we can now easily add additional hard drives without running any additional cables do to those splitters we can fill this bad boy right up now that we have everything run I usually find its easiest to take everything that isn't a power supply cable and all that down because they tend to be relatively low profile so we'll spend a little bit of time tucking things into nooks and crannies and tying cables down you don't necessarily have to have an anchor point in order to get a cable tied down satisfactorily you can just take a zip tie even and you know tie it to another cable that happens to be running somewhere useful or tie it to itself in such a way that you fold it so that it's not visible anymore but either way I find that it's you know worth the time to just kind of play around with those ones then get started on the power supply cables so now that everything is installed we can plug the power supply cables in to the power supply so first the 24 pin then the eight pin and the two PCI Express ones those all go into the same spots and finally the one lone peripheral harness that we ended up using this is one of the benefits of a modular power supply not having all those extra cables plugged in and finally we can take those power supply cables and now add them to our cable management system at the back making sure that we don't stack things up on each other so much that we're not going to be able to close the side panel there is lots of cable management room in this case but that doesn't mean that we should you know take it for granted necessarily either admittedly if I'd been thinking straight I would have done this earlier in the assembly process probably before I installed graphics cards but SATA data we have to install our SATA cables that actually deliver data to the drives so in this case this motherboard has some interesting options for how we can plug in the drives the SSD for sure we needed a straight SATA cable so unfortunately the board doesn't come with any of those so we had to go scrounge one but we plugged in a straight SATA cable we're going to plug that into the Intel controller say two three six gigabit per second ports so that's the very top state of three ports alright next we've got four intel say two to three gigabit per second ports or four Marvelle say two three six gigabit per second ports so we could plug these drives these WD black drives into either of them they both support the raid 10 that we're going for and it's just a matter of whether we feel like we need say two three six gigabit per second or whether we want the compatibility Intel raid because if our board ever did die or for some reason we needed to grab all these drives and migrate the data off of them by putting them into another system if you use Intel raid you'll get better compatibility however we might see slightly better performance particularly in burst operations using the Marvell controller so we opted for the Marvell controller but you might opt instead for the Intel one and that's that's definitely a good option as well in terms of cable management we weren't able to move them back around the back of the motherboard tray so we just ran them up the drives cable tied them off and then plug them into the port's where they belonged well there you have it guys we're done and the mystery of whether or not we can put that six two and a half inch drive cage back in when we're done is has been answered the answer is yes however I think you'd be hard-pressed to cable managed six more drives into that spot on top of being able to have another eight drives here and you would definitely need to add some kind of SATA or SAS controller card to even be able to plug in all of those drives which I mean it's very cool the amount of capability this case has when you consider its size so without further ado I'm going to hand it off to slick to walk you guys through some of the performance we were able to get out of the machine as well as sort of his impressions of the overall configuration all right so we're going to jump into the BIOS here and our mission is to change to XMP profiles and to change the boot drive so we're going to go to is Advanced Mode and then jump into AI overclocked tuner and change it to XMP once that's done we're going to jump over to the boot menu over here go down 14 times which is ridiculous down to hard drive BBS priorities don't worry I know it's not a hard drive just jump in here change boot option one to your SSD ours is an Intel 520 press f10 to save you can review your changes and then just press ENTER for yes and you're good to go so once we get into the controller we just jump directly into the configuration wizard and go down and select all of our drives by pressing spacebar and down once you've done that press Enter change to raid 10 which is just raid 1 and 0 keep 64k stripe size and it's a little bit faster and then name is something that probably isn't default and once you've done that just go next and you are done that's all it has to do just press Y to confirm that you actually want to do this and you'll see right there under virtual disks that what you've named is now an actual raid so we wanted to talk about the PA 279 but instead of just talking about it and how ridiculously good it looks we wanted to show it off so this is a 10 bit image sample that we're showing on a 10 bit PA 279 panel and an 8 bit panel you can see on the 10 bit panel that it is extremely smooth and we mooney move it over to the 8 bit panel you can see vertical lines running through it so while we can talk about how good it looks this actually shows how good it looks so we want to show off the raw power of the system so what running is DaVinci Resolve using a source file that was filmed by Brandon and then heavily edited by edited by Etzel we are currently rendering it using CUDA although with this system you can use CPU encoding cuda accelerated encoding or even h.264 encoders because of all the options that you have as you can see we're using both of our GPUs the Quadro is that fairly low usage and is actually just being used for GUI for DaVinci Resolve and the rest of the general monitor and then GPU to the GTX 780 is actually being used for its CUDA performance so it's actually pushing pretty hard along with the CPU you can see temps in here right now both the GPUs are sitting right around 50 degrees which is totally fine and the CPU is only going around 40 to 50 degrees tops which is also totally fine and great for this system as you can see the CPU is actually running fairly hard bouncing between 60 and 70 percent so with all of that out of the way a big thanks to you guys for sitting through this entire video a huge thanks to Intel for making this video possible these are extremely time consuming for us to produce and with their sponsorship we are able to bring you guys these fantastic build guides in the ultimate build guide series and as always guys like the video if you liked it dislike it if you disliked it and if you're not subscribed already don't forget to subscribe