Gadgetory

well guys I got my trusty screwdriver because it is time for part two of my 2019 how to build a computer video series and I'm going all out for this one if you missed part one I talked about sort of theory about building a computer what all the parts are and what they do and how to best choose parts that will meet your budget and your needs for building a computer now today I actually have two systems but even kind of three systems I'm going to be putting together to show you the differences between an intel build and an AMD build a mini ITX build and a full-size ATX build as well as three different price points about a $500 entry-level build about a $900 upgrade to that build and then a high-end $1,500 system over here on my right today's video is brought to you by Squarespace go to squarespace.com slash paul's hardware for 10% off your first order or hang around to the end of the video to find out more so the parts for these builds were all picked out and my monthly build series which I do typically at the beginning of every month so the February builds actually did three and again we're looking at an Andy entry-level build you can get for about 480 bucks or you can swap out for the 2600 and a graphics card I've chosen the GeForce r-tx 2060 right here that brings the price up to about $900 you can go with the less expensive graphics card to shave some money off of that but of course all that's covered in the first video where I talk about picking your parts and saving money here or spending more money there on my right side we have all the parts for an intel-based system and with the 8700 k for this build because you get six cores with hyper-threading so 12 threads total it's a really good processor for gaming and it's a little bit more expensive but you get more performance along with it so this system over here is gonna cost you about fifteen hundred dollars let me quickly go over the parts for both systems so starting with our sub $500 build and I want to point out that the cases that I'm using today were both picked up by Joe he just went to a micro Center and picked him out so cuz I wanted some organic like normal cases so masterbox light five is what reason for this you can usually get this for about sixty to sixty-five dollars Joe got the RGB one because that's what they had there but you can save five bucks by going with the non RGB version for a 500 dollar budget I'd recommend spending about a hundred dollars on the case and the power supply so about sixty bucks for the case and then you're gonna look for a 550 watt 80 plus bronze rated power supply for about forty dollars which I have linked in the video's description I'm using a stand-in for today so apologies for that this is a v6 50 from coolermaster which actually isn't really available anymore but like the 550 watt Corsair unit I have linked in the description this is at least modular this one's fully modular but that one's partially modular and it's got all black cables another stand-in for today is our SSD I'm just recommending a 500 gig class SSD which you should be able to find for about 50 or 55 dollars again I have a good one link to the description for today's build I'm using the SanDisk SSD SanDisk makes solid SSDs so if you can find one of theirs go for it for both systems I have a 16 gig memory kit that's 2 8 gig sticks and I'm going for ddr4 3000 or 3200 speed go for a faster memory if you can find it but don't spend too much more 3,000 3200 is where you get the most bang for your buck this trip draws 5 kit is ddr4 3200 and specifically plays nicely with Rison that's why I picked it out so definitely make sure if you're choosing Rison memory that it is compatible and will work with Rison at its rated speed 115 dollars you can get this kit for right now the kid I'm using for the Intel build is a little bit fancier but it's roughly the same when it comes to specs still 16 gigs still 3200 speed but this kit costs 15 bucks more right now it's 130 dollars and that's because it's got fancy RGB lighting which is completely optional completely ascetic and completely up to you whether you want to go for it or not but I've got both of them so I can show you guys both options for our CPU we have the AMD risin 320 200 G this is a CPU with graphics integrated so it's got all that in the chip so you don't need a graphics card with this build this will be perfectly adequate for 1080 gaming it will have some limitations when it comes to graphics capabilities but for less than $100 a quad core CPU and graphics gets you up and running and this entire system can be upgraded to a $900 system which I'll show you in just a second before that though our motherboard is the MSI B 450 tomahawk about 110 hundred and fifteen dollars for this board B 450 chips that still allows overclocking and it's got solid power delivery so if you upgrade to a higher-end processor you could still overclock it even the eight cores on this platform so if you go with these six components you can get in for less than $500 but you can also of course upgrade so if you swap in the horizon 520 600 you now have a 6 core 12 thread CPU but no graphics integrated this is about 165 dollars so that's going to add about 70 75 dollars to the price and then of course you're going to need a graphics card since we no longer have integrated Vega graphics in this CPU so I am recommending the r-tx 2060 right now you can get them for about 350 and this is the MSI gaming Z Twin Frozr seven version of that but by swapping out just those two components you're gonna raise the overall price of the system to around $900 but you're gonna get insanely more performance both with the extra cores and threads on the CPU as well as a huge jump up going from the apu to a discrete graphics card with the RT x 2060 and now for our intel buildin this one was actually designed around a $1,500 price because every month on my monthly builds video I asked you guys for feedback and everyone wanted to see a $1,500 build so this is what I would spend fifteen hundred bucks on if I was going for a higher-end gaming PC with an Intel processor processor I've chosen is the i7 8700 K which is a six quarts well thread processor Intel did some kind of weird stuff with their current generation of 9000 series CPUs the 9700 K is an 8 core processor but it does not have hyper threading so you actually get more threads with this CPU but it costs about 30 or 40 bucks less it is also unlocked for overclocking but all of the K series CPUs from Intel that are unlocked for overclocking do not come with a CPU cooler so we're gonna need the master liquid ml 240 our RGB for cooling this is about $100 all in one liquid cooler and I'm not going to go into comparing and contrasting different all-in-one liquid coolers but 100 bucks is a pretty reasonable price for a 240 millimeter all-in-one liquid cooler and I know this one is a good performer going back to the Rison system if you're wondering how these CPUs would be cooled they actually come with heatsink fans in the Box known as the Wraith stealth and the Wraith spire these are not the best air coolers by any stretch but considering that they come essentially free in the Box you can go ahead and use them and they will work for you just fine and then maybe in the future you can consider upgrading now one thing I want to point out is if you're spending say 100 or 200 dollars on a CPU don't spend $100 on an all-in-one liquid cooler spend like 30 or 40 bucks on something like an aftermarket air cooler like the hyper 212 black you'd be using your money much more effectively upgrading this Rison 520 600 to say a risin 720 700 or 2700 X versus going with a fancy almond liquid cooler but I digress as Jay likes to say let's move on our motherboard for the Intel build as the RG Strix III 90 - I gaming this motherboard is going to cost you close to $200 it comes with fancier features but most importantly it's mini ITX so it's going to fit in our case and give us a nice tiny more compact build since we are putting the system in the NZXT h2 I this is a mini ITX case but it's still slightly on the larger side so it's still a vertical tower with a basement at the bottom for your power supply still supports a full size power supply so we're just going to be dropping in an EVGA 650 G Q here which is a 650 watt 80 plus gold rated power supply with partially modular cables on the back as well as all black cabling for memory we have the aforementioned team T force Nighthawk RGB kit which is a little bit fancier and blingy with its RGB then I have a couple choices here for an SSD I wanted a single nvme m2 Drive like this one and you can actually get this type of SSD for around 70 to 80 dollars for a 500 gig class Drive at this point which is a really good deal but I was trying to come in under the $1,500 price so I opted to drop this one in here just because I was looking at 500 gig SATA SSDs that are 2.5 inch drives like this one as well as SATA rather than that m2 interface and I found you could get a t force Delta RGB one like this for about 55 or 60 dollars which is about 20 or 30 bucks savings over something like this Drive and lastly for a graphics card I have this r-tx 20 80 here which you can get for $700 if you go for an aftermarket version but that would make this build cost about $1,700 total actually meant to use a $500 RTX 2070 but fortunately for the purposes of this tutorial they both install in exactly the same way so those are the parts I'm working with today I'm primarily gonna be using a Phillips head screwdriver to assemble everything but I'll point out to you guys if I use anything else let's get started with a tutorial we're gonna start off with some glorious motherboard unboxings but my workspace here is open its non-conductive I'm working on a wood surface and if you want to be extra safe then maybe consider something like a mouse mat or something rubber or something soft that you can work with the components on so you don't damage anything I currently have the motherboards for both builds and I've also got the memory and the CPUs and then from a fancy build here I've also gotten my MDOT - SSD for accessories apart from the motherboard there's gonna be a bunch of other stuff in the Box like this is a Wi-Fi antenna they can set most this stuff aside and worry about it later you might want to grab a SATA cable if you have a SATA SSD that you need to plug in so now I've got both boards out just so I can show you what I would pull out if I'm doing a build for the first time the motherboard manual for each one of course SATA cables if you need them we actually don't for this build so I've just got one for our AMD build over here I did pull out these very small screws that we're gonna be using to mounts are a little MDOT to nvme drive and then the motherboard IO shields something you'll definitely want to get out so you don't forget to install it that goes over the motherboards inputs and outputs over on this side like that but a fancy new thing that some of other boards are doing and this is I guess one of the benefits you get for paying more for a motherboard is that the Asus board here has a fixed IO shield which actually is very convenient I like that this Rison v 2600 is actually brand new so I'm going to use this to show you guys kind of a brand new unboxing and installation experience inside we've got the CPU itself and we have the Wraith cooler that it ships with and an important thing to note with the cooler the stock heatsink fan it comes with is that it will have pre applied thermal paste right there so you don't want to touch that or mess with it at all until you're ready to install it and you certainly don't want to add any more than what's already there because you've got plenty this is a wraith stealth so I'm gonna set that aside now here I also want to point out that physically the 2200 G and the 2600 look exactly the same and they have the exact same number of pins on the bottom when it comes to installation there's no difference between the two of these just make sure you know if you've got the right CPU it should be labeled on the top there are some slight differences if you're looking at an Intel processor versus an AMD processor the main will be that there are flat contacts or LGA on the bottom of the Intel vs. pins that are on the bottom of the AMD CPU pins are very delicate you should definitely be careful not to bend them or break them and also try not to touch any of the gold contacts on either the CPUs thankfully though one thing that's Universal is the triangle there's a gold triangle on the corner of both of those CPUs and you're gonna use that to determine the orientation to install into the respective socket on your motherboard let's do the rise in CPU first if you look where the gold triangle is on the corner of the CPU there's also a triangle edged into one corner of the CPU socket we're gonna gently lift up our little retention arm which will open up the sockets line up that triangle with the proper triangle in the socket itself and then the processor should just drop down into the socket this is a zip or zero insertion force socket so you shouldn't have to press down on it at all if it's not dropping in then lift it up and try to reseat it or double check that you don't have any bent pins on the bottom of your processor once it's dropped in though all you got to do is lower that little arm and you're set for our Intel CPU the pins are on the socket itself so those are very delicate and that's why there's a plastic cover over the top we're gonna take our attention arm here again push it out to the side and lift it up and that will open the suck it up you could pop this cover off right now but I do want to point out that the triangle is actually on the edge of that cover if you pop it off there's a little triangle on the edge of the retention bracket as well but I recommend just leaving it on reference which corner that little triangles on take your CP you line it up at the socket there's a couple notches on either side of the CPU as well that will line up with notches in the socket drop it straight down I give it just the slightest little jiggle to make sure it's seated in there and then we can lower the top make sure it's under the little nut right there lower the retention arm and as you push that down which requires a little bit of pressure but not too much the plastic cover should pop off and now your CPU is installed it's a good idea to get your motherboard set up as much as possible before you install it in your case there's a few things that I can also do besides the CPU installation here memory I can install them both of these for my smaller system here since I have one of these little MDOT two SSDs I can install that there as well and then I'm also going to be thinking about my cooling solution so I will be installing my cooler onto this one here since this smaller system is using an all-in-one liquid cooler I'll definitely want to get the backplate installed on that so let's start out with this little SSD though this is an MDOT two SSD MDOT 2 refers to the connector here at the end and it is a 2280 SSD which means it's 22 millimeters wide and 80 millimeters long is actually some shorter and longer SSDs that also conform to this form factor and then your motherboard may or may not have a heatsink for your little MDOT to drive he thinks not necessary it can run without it but if you've got it you might as well go ahead and use it on this motherboard there's two little screws that hold the heatsink on and then under the heatsink there's a thermal pad with a protective piece of plastic on it we'll get back to that you want to fish around in your motherboard accessories and find these two tiny tiny little screws what is it nuts and what is an actual screw the nut we're gonna put on the longer of the two points here on the actual MDOT two mounting area I'm just gonna hand tighten this on there but you could tighten it down with a socket if you wanted to or if you had one available I also want to point out here that this is a small motherboard and so that's a little bit more cramped to work with there but I got that on also I have another screwdriver it's still Phillips head but it's a smaller one to handle these tiny little screws we can now install the SSD there's a notch here that'll line up with the notch and the end up to slot and if you're concerned about how this label on here most of the m-dot to nvme drives that i've worked with the labels are actually thermally conductive so you can still leave that on but just slot the SSD in at an angle lower it down and then secure it with your tiny little screw next I'm removing the protective plastic from the heatsink putting the heatsink back on top there and then securing it back down put the two screws that hold it in place don't forget that too next up is memory installations so I'm just gonna take my two dem slots here open up the one side here some dim slots have little latches on both sides some do not have them on one side that's totally fine both ways work but the memory there's a notch that's slightly off-center on the edge connector there at the bottom so you just want to make sure that's lined up with the notch in the dim slot on the motherboard lower it down and then just give firm pressure from the top both sides it gives a really satisfying click into place and the little latch on the side will also close up and you'll know that it is secure also get both of them installed there and then you can kind of reality check that they're both the same level that means they're both installed properly moving back to the AMD system we have four dimm slots and two sticks of memory so which slot should we install them to the short answer the easy answer is probably going to be every other slots and the slots that are further from the CPU usually to start with if you want to double-check a reality check bust out your motherboard manual to make sure that those are the right slots usually they'll say populate these slots first and then these slots next beyond that installation is just the same as it was on our install board line up that notch in the bottom put the stick into the slots firm pressure down on top of it and it will click into place now let's talk about CPU coolers because there's a bunch of different mounting methods for those depending on whether you're using AMD or Intel and whether using the stock heatsink fan or not now AMD's mounting solution for these stock heatsink fans actually like because AMD motherboards at least am for socket motherboards come with this metal back plates on the back of the motherboard and then on the top it's got a couple little plastic notches there are some coolers that use these notches but for AMD's race series of coolers all you have to do is remove this top piece and again I'm shooting with a new tool still a Phillips head screwdriver it's just motorized this time so I've just pulled those off and I would recommend saving these just put them in a ziplock and keep them in your motherboard box because if you do upgrade your cooler in the future there's a chance that we'll need these bear in mind with that removed your back plate will now stay put so if you do want to keep that in mind but all we're gonna do is take our Wraith stealth cooler by the way this is a race stealth at the 2600 comes with we're just gonna line up those four screws with the four screws on the Wraith and lower it down when you're installing any CPU cooler you should keep this method in mind which is that you want to get the corners threaded so there I just got all four corners threaded but just barely so you don't want to cinch down one corner before you have the others going it's the basic idea and then from there we can go and just give a couple twists on opposite corners and we'll slowly tighten the whole thing down so that we get good contact between the base of this heat sink fan and the CPU itself now that thermal paste squishes in between to fill in any gaps make sure we have good thermal conductivity once that's tightened down it's actually sturdy enough that you can hold the entire motherboard up by it so keep that in mind it might be convenient while you're installing and then you want to make sure that you go ahead and plug in your CPU fan you should have a single probably a four pin plug for your CPU fan that comes with and then your motherboard should have a four pin header that is labeled CPU fan that's somewhere close in relation to the CPU socket and just plug that in there for our Intel build I'm busting out the closed-loop cooler that we're gonna use master liquid ml 240 our RGB because it's very helpful to get this back plate set up now our intel board does not come with a backplate that's standard for the mainstream intel stuff but our CPU cooler does for better contacts now CPU coolers aftermarket ones install in a whole variety of different ways so I highly recommend if you get one reference the manual for it for the proper installation procedures but the back plates has some adjustments back here that you can line up for the different sockets once you have that it pushes through like that and then this one at least has these little plastic caps I can fit over the top that'll kinda hold it in place so it won't fall off as I do the actual installation with this installed I can kind of leave it for now move ahead with the rest of the builds and then when I come back to actually installing the closer cooler thing on here it'll be ready to go with those mounting points if you purchased a locked Intel CPU or not one of the unlocked case cues that are capable of overclocking it will ship with a stock heatsink fan that will look somewhat similar to this these do not require a back on the back of the motherboard they just mount from the top they also have thermal paste to pre-install just like this and this just uses a plug system so the arrows on top are actually to unlock so you want to actually turn those against the direction they're pointing and then you can position it over the top and then push down on opposite corners on each one of those to get it installed and now here's how you unbox a computer case first you'll want to slit the tape across the top flaps next we open side flaps and then we flip the whole thing upside down key point to separate the noobs from the experience PC builders these little hand flaps down here pull them out then lift off the box warning you're about to get a static shock I recommend using your elbow and finally we can remove the styrofoam put that back in the box as well as the plastic and get our first look at our brand-new case maybe not just like same procedure for the Mini ITX case here are our two cases and even though this case is significantly more expensive in this case it is smaller mini ITX full-size ATX also commonly called a ATX mid tower and they have the same layout which I'm kind of happy with because it's a pretty standard layout front intake at the front for both of them there is a power supply area at the bottom and then exhaust at the top and the back I find with most cases if you've never worked with it before it's a good idea just to spend a little bit of time with it take it apart take the side panels off figure out how things work and especially if you've got tempered glass side panel windows like this or acrylic ones leave this plastic sheeting on it while you work with it that way you won't have to worry about fingerprints or scratches and then you can peel it off and you've got the build all finished for most cases side panels are held on with a couple thumb screws in the back sometimes they're capped at thumb screws so they stay with it and make it easier or harder to lose them which we always appreciate then in most cases you get a small box of accessories and other things to help you work with the case screws are often in here so here's a good time to grab a metal tray like this one or if you don't have that just a cup or something so that as you're taking screws up you can put them all in the location where you won't lose them and also at this point is a good time to start sort of reality checking where things are where they're going to go where cables need to be routed in particular and where your fans are located this case from Coolermaster actually comes with four fans which is pretty nice it's got three intakes in the front was 120 millimeter and it's got one exhaust here at the back that's a perfectly good configuration to go with so we leave those bands as is and then just kind of look at where stuff's gonna go the motherboard sits at the back on the motherboard tray motherboard trays very often have this big cutout and that's so you can get at the back of the motherboard if you need to install one of those backplate so I was talking about earlier while we're back here you notice a bunch of these little knockouts these are for cable tie downs so as you're routing cables back here you can cinch them down and get them as tidy as possible power supply mount is down here at the bottom and that does have a little basement area so it's kind of covered so if your power supply doesn't look very pretty it'll still look okay and then as far as actually plugging stuff into the computer once it's all put together that'll all be back here for the most part your motherboard IO panel will go right here once its installed and then these expansion slots down here at the bottom are for stuff like graphics cards or other cards you can add on there like audio cards or capture cards but the way I like to do things is get that motherboard set up like we've already done and get the case out and take a look at it and we're going to install our power supply on the case power supply on the case I feel like are very closely tied together then we can install the motherboard at that point I'll show you where everything actually plugs in on the back of the power supply is where your power plug is for your AC power cable that plugs into the wall so that wants to face back and then power supplies will pretty much always have a fan that you usually want to point that down because most cases down here where the power supply goes are gonna have an intake area right there and they might even have a bit of a dust filter this is a budget case so it doesn't have a very good dust filter but it's still better than nothing and also in this case at least in other cases too if I pointed it up it's really blocked right there so you don't want to obstruct the intake of this fan right there if it's open inside the case it's okay to have the fan pointing up just as a general rule I tend to face it down oh also as power supply mounts from the back so this bracket removes with a couple thumb screws you actually attach it here with the regular power supply screws and then put the whole thing in I also want to point out I'm going to talk about plugging in cables in just a second but I've already pre plugged in the modular plugs to this power supply that I know I'm gonna need that will almost always include the 24 pin cable as well as supplemental CPU power which is going to be either a 4 pin or an 8 pin plug if you're not sure about that though just jump ahead a little bit and I'll talk about which plugs you will need depending on hardware you're installing fortunately for our intel build the power supply installation is pretty much exactly the same we have a fan we want to point that down we've got this it's going to point backwards there's a bracket pre-installed on this case that's for sfx power supplies which are smaller but since we have a full sized one we're just gonna remove that and install it there and again I've already got the plugs plugged into the power supply that I wants which is 24 pin for the motherboard power eight pin or a 4 + 4 pin for the motherboard supplemental CPU power I've got some SATA power plugs here and that is so I can plug in the SSD this case has a little hug right here which can control fans as well as LEDs and it has an extra plug that comes down here so that's going to need some SATA power and then finally the graphics card has PCI Express graphics power these usually labeled as VGA or PCI Express graphics this one needs an 8 pin and a 6 pin so I've got both of those set aside and you should be very careful not to confuse these 8 pin supplemental graphics power connectors which are going to be a 6 pin block plus a 2 pin block that's optional with the supplemental CPU power connector because that's also a pin that this separates into two blocks of 4 so at this point I'm ready to install everything else in the case but the big questions are going to be what plugs into what because plugging things in is what most of the rest of the build is about and since everything plugs into the motherboard I thought I'd give a once-over of all the plugs on the motherboard and what is required to plug into them for this project first power from the power supply that's gonna plug in at the top right here they have an 8 pin sometimes you'll see a 4 pin here sometimes you'll even see an 8 + other supplemental connectors usually all you need is that main 8 pin connector plug in unless you're doing crazy high-end overclocking also the 24 pin connector which is down here along the edge of the board beyond that you might find RGB LED headers more on those in just a second system fan headers are very important they're usually labeled like system fan 3 or pump fan these are often just suggestions as far as what you plug into what but they'll usually be labeled in the system UEFI or BIOS as to what is what more on that in the third video but generally any fan you can plug in as long as it's a 3 or 4 pin standard fan header these are SATA ports you'll notice they're kind of l-shaped and kind of narrower these will be for plugging in SSDs hard drives like 3.5 inch mechanical hard drives you can also plug in optical drives to these but usually you'll find four or maybe six on a motherboard like this there's two more here and then finally along the bottom edge of the board you have a bunch of smaller pin outs these can be a little annoying to plug in but they're all necessary to some degree this right here is a USB 3.0 header so USB 3 will require that these are USB 2.0 headers we will not be needing these today since our case doesn't have USB 2.0 on the front panel sometimes you can plug other devices into this though like RGB control boxes and all-in-one liquid cooler pumps right here you have front panel connectors they're labeled jfp one on this motherboard but this is something you want to double check your motherboard manual about they often put a tiny little chart above it pointing out to which connectors are which we're gonna get back to this in just a second it's a pain in the butt but necessary if you want your power and reset buttons to work finally a comm header you can ignore another RGB header which more on that in just a second audio front panel header is right there so if you want your front panel mic and headphone jack to work you'll need to plug in your HDL though honestly front panel making headphone jacks are usually not that great quality but it's there if you have it and here's the same kind of once-over real quick with the mini ITX board so 24 pin power and 8-pin power from the power supply go there three fan headers here across the top these are RGB headers on the right is a three pin one that's a 5 volt addressable header on the left is a four pin one that is a 12 volt non addressable header actually think that RGB LED headers are some of the worst connectors on a motherboard simply because you can accidentally plug into the wrong one just keep in mind they're not compatible know whether you have addressable or non addressable RGB LEDs and don't try to daisy chain these together or especially don't try to plug in your 4 pin header into the 3 pin out which you can do it's harder to plug the 3 pin into the 4 pin they do have SATA ports on here to our right here and 2 or over there on the other side of the memory and then we've got front panel USB once again so that is the USB 3.0 there on the left this right here is the newest USB 3.1 gen2 connector so if you have a fancy new case that has that on it you probably want to get a fancy newer motherboard that has that connector on it as well we won't be using this one today because the H 200 I does not have that connector but wanted to point out that it's there we have a single full-length PCI Express by 16 slot right there that is where your graphics card is going to plug in and then that means everything else on this board when it comes to front panel header is USB and HD audio is all right in there in that little spot so again there's going to be a real pain to get to but will suffer through it and now for motherboard installation we have four mounting points for a mini ITX motherboard like this one one on each corner pretty much and we have standoffs that are pre-installed in the case standoffs are absolutely required for any computer being installed onto a motherboard tray like this since they're pre-installed we don't need to worry about them but definitely double check that they are there and then we can just go ahead and drop this in I would normally install the i/o shield first but it is pre-installed on this motherboard so we can just sort of angle it into place line it up with those standoffs and you want to go into your accessory box fish out some screws double check that the screws will thread into the standoffs properly I've already done that and then we can screw the motherboard in and the rule of thumb here for these motherboard stand us is that you want the screws to be snug but not too tight now our AMD build here is a little bit more traditional we only have one or two standoffs pre-installed so we're going to need to make sure we figure out where the other ones go fortunately this motherboard is a very standard ATX motherboard so there are nine standoff point locations one two and three across the top four five and six here in the middle seven eight and nine across the bottom we just need to make sure that all nine of those points which we'll label on the case with an A a four standard ATX the M is for micro ATX and then a couple suggestions for these standoffs themselves one is that you'll often get a little standoff tightening that definitely use this don't be afraid to tighten these standoffs down pretty good into the case don't over tighten and strip them but you can tighten them pretty good you don't want them to back off if you ever have to uninstall your motherboard the other thing is to make sure which stand off screws you want to use so you'll find those in your case accessory box and just go ahead and thread those in and make sure that they actually fit properly before you go ahead and install those I've got all nine standoffs installed got to make sure to install the iOS shields make sure this is oriented vertically usually the sound IO is at the bottom going to install that and this will knock it right here if you have any difficulty getting the corners of this to pop in feel free to use the butt end of a screwdriver to kind of pop it in place and do be careful these can sometimes cut you now for the motherboard installation pay attention to your rear i/o cuz that needs to pop through that i/o shield that was just installed so you kind of angle that in now the two standoffs that were pre-installed in this case actually have a little ridges that pop out on top of them so once I get it sitting on those it should kind of stay in place right there so that just happened now it should mostly stay there while I can get my screws and finish securing it to the case now we get to plug everything in I'm gonna use this rear fan plugging in right here is sort of an example of a few things one fan headers a lot of fan headers are three pin like this one that's just fine even if you have a four pin header you can still plug it in just bear in mind there's a little plastic notch on one side that needs to line up with the three prong portion next up cable management like you don't want to just leave this hang in there loosely we'll we'll give you a hard time on our live show if you send in a picture of your computer and you do that but don't kill yourself over it either that is an extremely basic job I just looped the cable around and wrapped some twist tie around it and then sort of wrap that up to keep it somewhat tidy if I was doing this and I wanted to be more presentation worthy I probably would have looped it around and tried to tuck it in back here and just have the cable come out to plug in there but I just want to point out guys cable management is important it helps keep clear airflow through the case and also help keep helps keeping things from getting dusty all the time but it also doesn't need to be an immaculate job with no cables visible anywhere especially if it's your first time building for our AMD build here are the rest of the cables sticking out the opposite side of the case so here at the front there's three fans and they're RGB fans since this is the RGB version of this case there's three three pin fan plugs so I could just plug these in if I wanted just the fans to spin up and I didn't want the fans to light up and then there's a separate plug here for the RGB LEDs so I can actually go ahead and plug this directly into the RGB header on the motherboard it's a four pin 12 volt by the way and that way the front fans will light up to be on that we've got front panel stuff in this group USB 3.0 these are standard front panel headers often the most hated part of a PC builds because they're very small but those are gonna go into the front panel header there's our HD audio and then from the power supply power SATA PCI Express and supplemental CPU now there's no set order for plugging in all these cables so I'm just gonna start with the front panel ones cuz I hate those the most so get it out of the way I am unplugging this little fan splitter these are for the three front panel fans it just connected it over to a molex plug I would have to plug a molex plug into my power supply to plug this in and when you have a molex plug just direct connection from your power supply to your fans they just run at full speed I want to have fan speed control from my motherboard for these fans so I'm gonna plug these directly into the motherboard itself so since I'm passing cables from this side of the case through to this side of the case to plug them in it's good to have like a nice angle on it so you come at it from the back and you can sort of reach both sides a nice kind of reach around action I I had a small problem plugging the fans in which is that these fan cables need to reach up to these three headers on the motherboard and this one just just barely doesn't quite reach it's not the option of getting like a little splitter or a small extension but that's not included with any of the parts so I didn't want to add that so instead I've just unmounted this fan I'm gonna rotate it 90 degrees so that the cables go from being down at the bottom it's a little bit higher up and that should give me enough cable length for these connectors from the power supply just bear in mind they all have a clasp on one side and that should line up with a little Ridge or catch on the plug itself and sometimes you need to kind of wobble these back and forth or work them in but usually just some firm pressure should get it to snap in place and you're good to go supplemental CPU power is up in the top corner of the motherboard and there's the smallest little pass-through gap right there for it so I'm just gonna feed these through I'm not sure how visible this is gonna be but just wrapping these around plugging them in the same way as I did the 24 pin now the horrible front panel connectors they're all plugging into this little block right here and there's a chart for it here and this should also be reflected in the manual bear in mind that the LEDs are labeled with plus and minus so you might notice the hard drive LED has plus and minus there the power LED also has plus and minus and those you need to plug in properly in order for them to work right the power switch and reset switch you can plug in either way and it'll work so don't worry about those Hey and there's front panel you notice I already plugged in the USB 3 as well that's just got a notch on one side for orientation and now our front panels are connected actually the last thing I forgot was our RGB header that's feeding over to the three front fans I wasn't gonna dwell too much on RGB for this video but it is something that can add a lot of complexity to build especially if you're doing the addressable stuff fortunately this is simple 12 volt 4 pin connector there's a little arrow on one side that should line up with the 12 volts which is the highlighted left pin here so all you got to do is plug that in and now our fan should light up pretty pretty RGB colors we're almost done with the less expensive version of this build the SSD I'm gonna mount right up here because there's a little SSD mounts there are also some drive caddies down here in the bottom of the system where I could mount a 2.5 inch or 3.5 inch drive but since I got an SSD and black it red it'll match go ahead and install it up here just four small Phillips head screws at the bottom those were also included with the case accessories and now we can use the single thumb screw to install this up here I already showed you an m2 Drive installation but if you're using one of these 2.5 inch or 3.5 inch drives this is a mechanical Drive this is an SSD they both have two plugs on the back or the bottom however you look at it both these plugs on the back have an L shape to them so they can only be plugged in one way there's a longer connector on the left that's for power and there's a shorter connector on the right that is for data so the left is going to need a plug from your power supply and the right is going to need a SATA cable that routes from that plug over to your motherboard I'm afraid I never showed you guys how I got this front panel piece off but for most cases it's a standard method which is just to grab the bottom underneath right here and give it a tug and it should pop off and then it just snaps back on kind of in the same way but I'm happy to say the build one of three would be done right now if we were building that sub $500 build because if we had installed the 2200 G here instead of the 2600 we'd essentially be set to go our motherboards installed power supplies connected up to everything we have our SSD installed for our operating system we could turn it on we use the video outs on the motherboard back here to connect up our monitor and then we could get the system up and running and start loading windows or whatever we wanted to do if we then wanted to get this system a massive upgrade it would simply be a matter of uninstalling the CPU heatsink fan which you guys should be familiar with now removing the 2200 G getting your 2600 or 2600 X or 2700 or 2700 X for that matter installing it reinstalling your cooling solution on it and then of course adding a graphic skirt so that's what we're going to do next for graphics card we have a long edge connector right there that is going to slot into the top PCI Express slot at the back we have IO that's gonna line up with the i/o brackets at the back and then we've got a couple supplemental power connector plugs that we need to plug in as well so if you line it up right here you can get an idea of which of the two rear brackets you're going to need to remove to provide space for the rear video outs then we're going to take our edge connector line it up with that PCI Express slot and we will go ahead and push it back once it goes in all the way there should be a bracket here back on the PCIe slot that sort of engages and holds the card in place then you can take those screws you just removed and replace them to hold it even more securely and finally those PCI Express graphics power cables that I had set aside earlier just feeding through from the back and we're gonna go ahead and plug in again latches on the bottom there so one and this is a six pin so the two pin here just isn't going to be used and - if your cables are bulging on your cable management side here's the pro way of reinstalling your side panel tada and now we have gone from a 500 ish dollar kind of entry level gaming still powerful but good gaming PC for 1080 or so - like a crazy nice system that you could game and stream on at the same time this graphics card could easily handle 1440 or even some 4k titles depending on the resolution you're playing at and everything and you've got a really nice system so that's what I really like about this platform from AMD the upgrade path you can start out with something simple you can upgrade to something much nicer so getting back to the Intel build we essentially have to do the same stuff that we just did with the AMD builds the main difference with this system is that we now have an all-in-one liquid cooler to deal with and this fortunately isn't that much more complex than what we did with the original build it's mainly a question of this radiator that we have we need to position somewhere in the case this pump and block unit we need to connect up to the CPU so it's got good contact and it's cooling stuff and we need to make sure that everything's plugged in because I got a couple fans that are gonna go on the radiator and of course we have to make sure that everything's plugged in for the pump side as well guys I'm gonna mostly ignore the RGB features of this cooler to focus on the functional parts of it and practically speaking installation for right now so this is going to go in the front of the case about like so and we're gonna have a couple fans connected to it they're gonna be moving air we need to make sure these are moving air in the right direction pretty much all fans the side that doesn't have a bracket is going to be where the air goes in and the side that does have the bracket on the back is where the air is going to come out but the point being is that when this is on the front we want air to be drawn in through this so we're going to want those exhausts parts to be pointed back like that so that's how we're going to mount them all so we can think about how we want the cables to go I want them to be fed towards the back of the case so I'm going to rotate these around so that those are in a better location to be fed towards the back here's another pointer we can make about things you spend a little bit more money on and features that you don't get with lower end cases is a removable radiator brackets that's actually a pretty useful feature if you install you an all-in-one liquid cooler with four thumb screws here at the Front's I can remove this whole bracket now we can mount the radiator to the bracket and then mount the bracket back to the case and feeling like we're in the homestretch here but again plugging in cables and we have pretty much the same array of cables that we have with a larger case 24 pin we have some SATA plugs because I don't want to plug in this little NZXT hub supplemental CPU PCI Express power we've got a USB 3 we've got a USB 2 cuz that also goes over to this little hub they have front panel which is in a block thank you thank you NZXT for making these in a single block so you can just plug them all in at once and HD audio is also right there we've also got some fan headers potentially and then just the single SATA power also for that little NZXT hub so might as well plug that in right now and I decided to do the plug in before I actually install the CPU block pump just to give us a little bit more room to work with inside I'm also abandoning most of the RGB in this build I'm just gonna have some basic functional RGB setup because we have like three different potential RGB systems we have NZXT T's we have cooler masters we've got the asus stuff on the motherboard there's not a whole lot of room to work with in this case especially along that top edge but fortunately I have all the important things plugged in where they're supposed to be plugged in and now I can move back to the CPU installation I did route the CPU pump plug up to the pump header up there to to make sure that's plugged in before I install this because it'll be a lot harder to get at once this is installed there's a separate bracket that I need to install here to line up with the Intel socket and then I will just mount it to the backplate to piece that I installed towards the beginning of this video but before I do the final installation I will need to add some thermal paste this CPU cooler has been used before so it needs thermal paste between the copper contact plates and the CPU heat spreader itself if you got an all-in-one liquid cooler chances are it will come with a small tube of thermal paste which you can usually get a few uses out of at least but the basic idea is to put about a pea-sized or maybe slightly smaller than a pea maybe between a grain of rice and a pea-sized blob of thermal paste right in the dead center of the CPU I'm not just gonna twist the CPU pump block around so I can mount it on the back plate that I set up before get it to fed over those threads try to get nice even pressure down on that thermal paste that I just installed and then I will take my little cap screws and start screwing down again here we're gonna use the four corners method just get each of the four corners threaded on there and then tighten them down a little bit at a time going in a circuitous sort of fashion last thing to install is the graphics card and this has sort of a two-tier external retention system for this case just because it's a mini ATX case so it's smaller so the mounting hardware is here on the outside but I'm just gonna remove these first little bracket pops off and then you can get at the screws behind it and now our last potential conflicts our front panel connectors HD audio and everything are kind of covering the PCIe slot but definitely something that you want to plug in first I'm gonna need to push those over to the side then they're gonna kind of feed through this little gap that's right there between the bracket and the PCIe slot so guys I now have two computers that I have built today and hopefully you guys now know how to build these computers to the fact that they are both spinning up and seemingly working is a very good sign and of course the next step is going to be installation of Windows and a bunch of other stuff that's all coming in the video part 3 where we get to that we now have the fun part before I move on though I'd like to quickly say a thank you to this video sponsor Squarespace if you're not familiar with Squarespace they help you do the internet better by setting up a website of your very own you can find the link in this video's description squarespace.com slash Paul's hardware if you click that you get 10% off of your first order I use Squarespace to power my merch store at Pulsar Burnett and it's just really easy to use and get set up because they have templates that allow you to set up a webpage that looks nice and looks professional and they make sure it will look good on any device you happen to view it on whether it is a smartphone a tablet or a desktop PC so check out Squarespace if you want to make a responsive flexible website for your business or for a hobby or just to establish yourself as a paragon of Internet proficiency they also have commerce functions that allow you to integrate a store like I've already done with Paul's Harbor net so you can sell your sweet merch and if you ever need help they have 24/7 support via live chat and email so once again checkout squarespace.com if you need to set up a website and check out the link in the description if you want to get 10% off of your first order or just go to Squarespace comm slash Falls hardware and thank you to Squarespace for sponsoring this video so I think this is the first time that I've built two systems in a single tutorial video and that caused me to get confused and in fact you probably already are aware of this but I've realized that I put the wrong graphics card in the wrong system this system was supposed to have an RT X 2060 which I put in here this system was supposed to have an RT X 2070 and I instead installed the RT X 2080 in here so this system was supposed to be about a $900 build with an RT X 2060 in it and this system was supposed to be about a $1500 build with an RT X 2070 and it's fortunately when it comes to building the systems that doesn't really matter the graphics cards are essentially the same except for the power connectors that plug in so when it comes to you building your own system all the instructions you saw today we're accurate I'm just probably gonna swap these before I move on to the third video especially if I'm going to do any testing with these systems the other thing I might recommend that not everyone does but you can do if you're worried about getting your whole system built and then finding a defective product is doing an outside-of-the-box build before you put everything together I didn't do that today but I'll post a link in the description to one of my earlier how to build a PC videos where I did do that it's pretty simple it's just like assembling the system but without the case and then you power to make sure everything works and then you're like okay good and then you can go through with the installation all of my hardware seems to be working properly so that's good knock on wood of course and we can move on to stage three stay tuned for that video of course and thank you so much for watching this one hit the thumbs up button if you enjoy it and I'll post links to lots of relevant stuff down in the video description down below don't forget to subscribe if you're not already thank you guys so much again and we'll see you next time