Gadgetory

what's up guys welcome to Paul's hardware today's video is a beginner's guide on how to build a computer I've done these many times in the past but today's video I think it's kind of special because for one graphics card prices have finally dropped to the point where you can build a pretty solid mid-range gaming computer which is what we're building today for about eight hundred dollars also this is my build of the month video for July 2018 and every month at the beginning of the month I do build lists videos so the first part of building a PC is choosing the parts and if you're wondering how I chose these parts check out my July builds video posted earlier this month finally it's my first time building in the Leanne Lee 0:11 err chassis so I'm going to be taking a closer look at that at the same time the master case each 500 M by Coolermaster sports dual tortor millimeter addressable RGB fans a USB 3.1 gen2 type-c port and 4 tempered glass side panels both sides top and front and the front can swap out for a mesh panel if you want maximum airflow it has a plethora of cable routing covers to keep things tidy too so click the sponsor link in the description to learn more so what are the highlights of this $800 PC well first you have an r5 1600 CPU which is a 6 core 12 thread processor from AMD this is a very solid processor for both gaming as well as doing some media creation as well as possibly gaming and streaming at the same time if that's something you're interested in we've also got a very solid mid-range graphics card in the RX 580 with 8 gigabytes of video memory and a bonus here is that you if you decide to upgrade to a gaming monitor it is free sync compatible and those tend to be a little bit less expensive other than that we've got 8 gigabytes of ddr4 memory a 240 gig SSD to load our operating system on - as well as a nice feature set on our motherboard I'm gonna go over each part individually really quick to talk about not just the part itself that I'm building with today but sort of the range of parts that you might choose for each component that you're choosing because that's one of the benefits of building your own computer is choosing the parts yourself also building it yourself will allow you to go and in the future to do upgrades or repairs if needs be now a cool thing about this build is that since 2 or 3 weeks ago when I put all the parts together in the list it has actually dropped in price by about 50 dollars thanks to selling the motherboard as well as the SSD going down in price now I've taken that 50 extra dollars and I've applied it to the case the Leanne Lee 0:11 air more in the 120 240 dollar range depending where you buy it and that is probably not the best bet because if you have extra unexpected money to spend on your computer you're probably going to want to apply it somewhere where you get a little bit more performance so let me talk about the prices of each of our components and where you might more intelligently spend your extra $50 to get more performance starting with the CPU and the CPU is often a place where you might start when you're building a computer choose your CPU and then work from there the horizon 5 1600 is a great choice right now because you can get it for about a hundred and fifty dollars six cores and twelve threads it's a very good performer and you get a lot of bang for your buck it's also on a platform which is socket AM 4 which has quite a few different motherboard chipsets available for it but socket and 4 is compatible with a lot of different AMD CPUs including second generation rising processors the 2000 series CPUs such as the 2600 and 2700 X that said if you're going to upgrade the 1600 to something else I would recommend these 1700 even though it is still also first gen rising you get eight cores and sixteen threads and that is a big bump without spending too much extra cash for me next on the list for potential upgrades would probably be the SSD or the memory we have an 8 gig memory kit here which will get us by but 16 gigs is a lot nicer we're gonna pay about $100 for a 8 gig ddr4 kit that's about ddr4 3000 speed and we do want faster ddr4 3,000 or so speed memory for our arrays and platform because it does benefit a lot from faster memory you also want to make sure that your memory is compatible and will work so I specifically went into the memory compatibility list for this motherboard in order to make sure that the kit I chose will work out of the box which is the case for the g.skill ripjaws for kit that I've chosen if you do have a bit of extra cash though you can for about 60 or 70 dollars more get a 16 gig memory kit for the 160 hundred and seventy dollars range just again double check that kit that you choose make sure it will work with your x3 70 or x4 70 or B 350 or B 450 a motherboard that you have chosen and again make sure to get memory that's pretty decently fast I would recommend 3,000 speed or faster I always recommend SSDs for your operating system drive at least and 240 gigs will get you by this SSD is actually only about 54 dollars right now but if you've got again extra 40 50 bucks to spend you can get a 400 gig SSD and that will get you just a lot more basic system storage space especially for loading up games and that kind of thing it is nice to have more storage space but if you can't afford that or if you just want to stick to the budget just remember to grab another hard drive so for 40 or 50 bucks you should be able to get yourself a one terabyte hard drive or do what I recommend and find an old computer somewhere that you can steal the hard drive from format it and then use it as a storage drive in your new system now the graphics card could be upgraded as well but this is about a $250 graphics card also consider the gtx 1066 gig that's another good option in this range but to level up from here you're probably going to need to spend about $400 so for that reason I would say don't consider that for now but yes this system could handle a higher-end graphics card in the future the case again you're probably going to want to stick to about a 60 or $70 range for and here there are just so many options the H 500 from NZXT the P 400 from fantex that I originally recommended there's others as well so just choose a case that has good reviews decent airflow and that matches your aesthetic tastes finally for the power supply my requirements are 550 to 650 watts 80 plus bronze rated or better and then a final bonus is if you can find one that has all black cables like this one here the corsair power supply that's recommended in the parts list will actually be available for 40 to 50 dollars this one will cost you a little bit more but it also has the bonus of being 80 plus gold rated which will give us a little bit more efficiency and it's fully modular so we have plugs for all the cables we only need ease the ones that we're actually going to use so if all goes well today the only tools I'll really need are a Phillips head screwdriver and I like to have to have something to cut with but let's talk a little bit about our motherboard choice before we move on this is an X 370 motherboard that refers to the chipset and then the sockets which is right here that's where the CPU actually goes is a m4 these sockets is gonna be very important for the motherboard that you choose and to make sure that the motherboard and the socket are compatible with your processor and then beyond that there's some other features I would look for now the reason I chose x3 70 for this and you can go X 370 or x4 70 that 470 is a little bit newer I would also potentially have you guys look at B 350 and B 450 motherboards the b4 50s are going to be the newest the X series boards though tend to cost a little bit more but they also tend to be a little bit better this board is on so right now though for $100 and even with a $20 mil and rebate after that so that's part of the thing helping keep the cost down but by going with a slightly higher and motherboard you might get better power delivery over here so that might allow you to overclock the CPU if that's something you're interested in and all these rides and CPUs are unlocked for overclocking the other features I looked for we're making sure it had four dimm slots here so we can upgrade our memory in the future I like that this motherboard has Wi-Fi integrated 802 dot 11 AC Wi-Fi so it comes with a couple antenna right here that you can connect to the Wi-Fi that's integrated onto the back and finally I've got a couple of these m2 slots and MDOT two slots at least these particular ones are made for newer types of storage drive like this little m2 nvme drive right here you don't need drives that are this fast for a gaming system but it's nice to be able to upgrade to them in the future and having two of those just gives you again more expand ability for the future this is an MDOT to slot up here as well but it's a different type of m2 and it's made just for Wi-Fi cards that was all pretty decent amount of exposition but we're actually going to start building right now just to be safe and to test some parts before we put everything together we're going to do what's called an outside-of-the-box build so for that I have our motherboard outs some other motherboard accessories you want to grab just to have them out right now are gonna be your i/o shield right there I got a couple SATA cables so we can connect our storage drives in a minute also got the Wi-Fi antenna we don't really need this stuff right now but I have it out motherboard manual is going to be key to help figure out a few things and then the parts I'm interested in testing right now are going to be the memory the motherboard of course we're going to test out the graphics card and then we've got the power supply and our processing so another way we're saving a little bit of money on this build is going with the stock heatsink fan for the processor the 1600 will come with a race aspire which is a perfectly decent little cooler yes this can be upgraded as well in the future but for now it'll get the job done this has four mounting points on the bottom and will usually have some pre applied thermal paste this one has been used before so I'm going to be applying my own thermal paste but check that out and see if you've got some pre applied there in which case just don't touch it or anything leave it in place and then you won't need to apply your own the CPU itself will come in its own protective clam shell this is actually a 1600 X CPU but effectively exactly the same for our installation processes here and then we're actually also going to need to do a little bit of preparation on the mother because and for motherboards to come with a plastic bracket right here and there are some coolers that latch down to this bracket via these two attachment points on the outside but the stock heatsink fan actually doesn't use that we need to remove this bracket first I should have mentioned this already but static electricity is something that you should at least pay some attention to when you're working with computer parts like this if you are concerned about ESD electrostatic discharge and you can want to take your power supply plug it into a grounded outlet you don't need to turn the power supply on then just touch the housing and that will make sure that you are electro statically discharged and then you can continue to work on your sensitive electronic components when I remove those two brackets the back plates came loose this motherboard does have a back plates on the back which sits in there just like that so just bear in mind as we're setting our motherboard down on our non conductive cardboard box here that it came in to keep that kind of in place and then we can go ahead and install our CPU so now we're gonna install our CPU so we're gonna open the clamshell be careful in this part because the CPUs do have pins on the bottom and those pins can be bent and you definitely do not want to do that so hold the CPU by the edges and then note if you look at it from the bottom or the top there should be one corner that has a triangle on it so note that triangle and then look at the socket itself there should be a small little little tiny triangle on the corner of that socket as well now we're going to lift up this little retention arm on the side of the socket and that will open it up line up the triangle and simply drop the CPU down into the socket should require no pressure zero insertion force required to install that CPU just like these mugs that I sell with a zero insertion force screw on it you guys should all buy one of those available on my store it pulsar Burnett anyway once that once you double check that the CPU is all the way down in the socket all you got to do is lower that retention arm and it is installed now we're going to install the CPU cooler again you'll usually have some pre-applied single-use thermal paste on there if it's a brand new CPU we do not have that so we're gonna apply our own thermal paste with just a blob right here in the center if you have old thermal paste that you need to clean for some reason you can use some paper towels and rubbing alcohol for our purposes though we've got a little blob in the center I usually go smaller than a pea but larger than a grain of rice and then we're going to set our CPU cooler directly on top of that lining up four screws and now we're going to tighten the four screws but don't just tighten one corner all the way down I usually like to get it just threaded on there then go across to the opposite corner we'll do the same there with just a turn or two and we'll get corner number three threaded and corner number four is threaded on there and then we can go ahead and tighten down the other quarters and there we go it should be nice and secure on there our CPU cooler is installed now there should be a plug coming off of it this is a fan plug four pin and there should be a four pin header on the motherboard that says CPU fan if you can't find the CPU fan header on your motherboard it's a good time to double check the manual which should have a layout of where those all are and for pretty much any plug that you're plugging into while installing a computer there's only one way to plug it in so there is a key on one side of this just make sure you line that up next we're gonna install the memory we have two sticks and we have four slots so again you should double-check your manual to make sure which slots you should install too because you do want these in dual channel mode usually it's going to be every other slots and usually it'll be the further two slots from the actual CPU that they want you to start with so we're gonna go with slot number two slot number four here there's clasps on either side sometimes but this motherboard design actually only has clasps on one side and then the memory itself has a notch in the middle it's not quite in the middle slightly offset so you notice the notch here is on this side so we're gonna flip the memory over line up the two sides with the slots and then give it firm pressure straight down and you should get a little snap in on the side that lets you know it's installed it's usually a very satisfying feeling memory is also very easy to remove and that's why memory is an easy thing to upgrade because all you have to do is loosen that little slot lift it out and there you go so memory installation memory removal one of the easier things to upgrade in a DIY PC just a couple more things to do for our outside-of-the-box test setup we need power to the motherboard and there are two main power connectors from the power supply to the motherboard there's an eight pin this is the supplemental CPU power which is up in the top left on the board and then there's the main 24 pin power connector both of these have little catches on one side of them so you can only plug that plug in one way and I meant a - keep an eye out for when it comes to power supply put plugs or the CPU supplemental plug which is a block of eight four plus four like that and then the graphics card supplemental power which is also a block of eight but it's going to be a six plus two like that again these are also keyed in there so it's very challenging to actually plug a PCI Express graphics plug into the CPU one on the motherboard but it is important to know that both exists because is one of the things that you might get to confused about that you're popping and clasp itself pretty easily and then we will bring 24-pin around here for the main and plug that in like so I bear in mind for these 24 pins they can be pretty sticky sometimes so you might want to give the motherboard a little bit of support underneath it and if you do need to unplug it just keep the clasp loosened and you can kind of rock it back and forth and you should eventually be able to get it to come loose there we go last part to plug in this could be the graphics card and that goes in the top full-length PCI Express slot right here this is a by 16 slot and asrock has reinforced it with some steel there to make it look flashy er and maybe even more sturdy who knows there's a long PCI Express graphics plug on one side of the graphics card and it should be able to drop in just like this when we install in a case there's gonna be some connections over here that hold this a lot more securely so for now just keep an eye on it it will be a little bit wobbly but the last thing we need to plug in for power is going to be our GPU supplemental power from the power supply which plugs in just like the other plugs did we're now ready for our first initial test boots and this is going to be encounter one of two with the front panel connectors on the motherboard which are some little pin outs which are kind of annoying to get at but you're going to want to find the ones that say power button and you're going to bridge a connection between them with just a piece of metal or a flathead screwdriver for just a second oh actually before you do that you should plug in and turn on your power supply then you can bridge that connection for just a second and the computer should turn on I've pulled out a dusty monitor here and connected it up just so we can see some stuff on screen hopefully and prove that our graphics card is working but and all signs of success are going to be thin spinning on the CPU cooler as well as the graphics card as well as lights generally lighting up on the motherboard and there we have it we have successfully booted into the BIOS or the UEFI as it's also known and we can see a quick listing of the components that we have installed now I don't have a keyboard or anything attached here if you wanted at this point you could go ahead and plug in drives and start loading windows and everything but for all intents and purposes we have working Hardware here and we can go ahead and install it in the case own people always ask me how to turn off the outside of the box build just the same way you turned it on hit that power button one more time it doesn't turn off immediately hold it on for about eight seconds so here's our case the LAN Li PC o 11 err this is a pretty new case but the original version of it the O 11 dynamic was very popular and well received and pretty well designed but whether you got this case or a different case all standard tower style ATX cases are gonna have some similarities usually you're gonna have some intakes some fan intakes in the front you usually have some exhausts usually at the top in the back or the top of the case in general this case is somewhat unique in that it also has some exhaust straight back that direction which not all cases have but that just gives you some other airflow and liquid cooling options and then the super popular thing these days is to have a tempered glass side panel so you can see in at your system once you've actually put it together this tempered glass has some plastic sheeting on it so I'm gonna leave that on well we do our build will peel it off at the very ends so we keep that protected while we do that but then finally from the back here we can see where our motherboard IO will be so our motherboard tray is right in there like that's our graphics card outputs and it will be right here and then the power supply will be over on this side and then most cases also have an area on the left behind the motherboard tray where you can do cable management one of the nice things about this case is it's a little bit wider so it gives you a lot more room to do your cable management so we're moving on to the case and the first thing you're gonna want to do with any case is pretty much disassemble it or at least take off the side panels maybe the front and top panel as well just to give yourself a better idea of how it's all put together this case for example has a top panel that actually needs to be removed before your side panels can be removed which is an interesting design but I kind of like how the tempered glass sits in there actually but not to get too distracted though the case is going to have typical mounting locations for most stuff so motherboard is gonna go on the motherboard tray right in there whereas a power supply gonna go down here in the back at the bottom where is the graphics card gonna go I'm just gonna sit on top of the motherboard and it's gonna have outputs right here what else in the case needs to be connected up it comes with two pre-installed fans at the front here four intakes that's for the standard LAN Lea 0:11 air this is the zero eleven air RGB which means it came with a three pack of three extra RGB fans which I could install but I'm not going to because I'm going to pretend this is the less expensive version and honestly two hundred twenty millimeter front intake fans is good but these fans are going to need some power connection and that's probably gonna plug into your motherboard and then the case itself is almost always going to have a collection of cables that come from the front panel area which is to connect up the front panel for USB 3.0 this one actually also has USB 3.1 gen2 which our motherboard does not have so that connection is just not going to be used and we've also got HD audio for the front audio jacks as well as those kind of pain-in-the-butt front panel connectors for power reset and LEDs lastly you want to consider where your drives go so SSD is gonna go and one of these drive trays down in the bottom our hard drive actually has a couple options this case has a vertical rail here that could mount a couple 3.5 inch drives to it but actually what I think I'm gonna use as this little tucked-away spot in the back which actually has a couple Drive cages that you can mount the drives to slot them in there and then you can actually access them from the back also tucked in here is our case accessories which you might be interested in as well here's the accessories they come in that little box for these screws here with the kind of rougher thread on them those are going to be for the power supply will mount that in just a second are these finer thread screws here these are going to be for mounting the motherboard to the motherboard standoffs they've also thrown in a few extra motherboard standoffs there although most of them are pre-installed and now we've got these guys and these guys are actually made specifically for spinning mechanical drives 3.5 inch drives because if you have one of the drive trays it might have little rubber mounts like that those just pop right in there and then mount the drive from underneath I'm gonna get the power supply installed just so I can plug power into thing else as I install it other than the three cables coming off of this that we already used in our test setup I've just plugged in the SATA power for this as well since we have two drives to plug in each we'll need a single SATA power plug the power supply does have a fan intake here so it's going to want to draw air in from the side panel so we'll want to have that facing out just drop the power supply in like so so I think move on to installing the drives next since we have those up and ready to go pretty simple to install just flip the drives over and there's mounting points on the bottom I did have to switch these little grommets over one notch on this but the spacer screws line up and screw in just like that and that gives us a little bit of a shock mount on it to help reduce some vibration noise while the drive is spinning and then the 2.5 inch driver as the steam mounts the same way just with four screws from the bottom and both of these have little brackets that will hold them in place and then we can install them so now they're ready to go in but each Drive is going to connect to the power supply for SATA power and that is via the longer l-shaped plugged on the back and then there's a shorter l-shaped plug then that is for data that will require a SATA data cable that's going to plug into the motherboard to make things easier I'm just going to pre plug these in so there's my SATA plug for the 3.5 inch drive alright guys and our drives are installed they managed to use just a single SATA power cable from the power supply to go down here to this lower SSD first and then reach up there to the upper hard drive I probably need an additional cable if I wanted to add more drives to this but everything is wired up and installed for now we're now ready to install the motherboard into the case and before you install any motherboards you're gonna want an i/o shield which is basically a little panel that goes over the inputs and outputs on the back of the board it provides some protection for the back of the case as well as some electrostatic discharge contact points for some of these inputs and outputs and we always want to make sure this is installed first before installing our motherboard just make sure you've got it lined up properly with the inputs and outputs and you should be able to push it in from the inside of the case sometimes they will give you a bit of a hard time in which case just get the butt of a screwdriver and you should be able to pop it in and now before we drop our motherboard in we want to double check our standoffs we have one two three four five six seven eight and nine that's the standard layout for a standard ATX motherboards so we can drop a motherboard on top of that give a little push to the side now we can just go ahead and screw in all nine screws and you don't want to over tighten these just get them snug if you over tighten them then there's a chance that when you try to remove this motherboard at some point in the future that will you you will also unscrew the motherboard stand off beneath it that's annoying a quick note here this motherboard actually has ten standoffs there's one extra one right here that's actually a micro ATX standoff points I'm not putting a standoff and a screw there you can if you want to but it's not really required since we have all nine otherwise at this point everything is pretty much installed except for the graphics card and we're gonna wait and do that last and I've also gone behind here and done a decent amount of cable management there is that harddrive bracket back there and by removing that I was able to access stuff a little bit more easily and just pushed everything through these grommets here so it would come out in about the location I would need it so for example 24 pin main motherboard power connector is right there so we can plug that in eight pin supplemental CPU power connector is over here so we can plug that back in these are the same things that we plugged in when we did that outside of the box build and then I do have a main power plug coming out here for the graphics card but we're just going to set that aside for now let's move on to the other plugs that I have passed through here there is a longer USB 3.0 plug here this motherboard has two headers for that so it doesn't matter which one we plug into I also got two fan plugs coming from the two fans at the front of the case these are four pin plugs but fans can be either three or four pin we're just going to plug those into fan headers that we can locate on the motherboard there's a chassis fan head right there and then another one over here at the bottom next up we have two SATA data plugs and these are coming from the SSD at the front and the 3.5 inch mechanical drive at the back so these are just going to plug into one of our six available SATA ports or SATA headers on the motherboard and again here it doesn't matter which of these you plug each drive into and then we've got a couple more front panel headers this is the HD audio plug this is the same exact size as a USB 2.0 plug just bear in mind there are nine out of the eight pins that are actually populated and the blank pin is different on USB 2 versus HD audio so it is challenging to get those mixed up but bear in mind they are the same size and last but certainly the most annoying are our main front panel connectors again this is so that the power and reset button on the front of the case works as well as the little lights that blink on power and reset you can plug in either way it doesn't matter which pin they're plugged into but the LED does have a plus and a minus so depending on the motherboard you're using you might have printed text on the motherboard itself that shows you which pins you should plug into if you're not sure definitely double check the manual and the final piece we will install here is the graphics card for that there's some expansion slot covers here at the back so again Phillips head screwdriver and we'll remove the two of these that line up with the PCI Express slot that we are going to be installing the graphics card to and then for this part you guys have done this before so just drop the graphics card straight down into that empty slots and it should slot into place that should be a little bit more satisfying this time because you should also be lining up on the back with your rear bracket next up just replacing those two Phillips head screws on the back bracket and that should make everything feel nice and stable in there although this end of the graphics card tends to be a little wobbly and then lastly we have PCI Express graphics power connection and we should have just enough room to plug that into all right guys we are now at the point where you would maybe think about putting like the side panels back on and everything but no don't do that quite yet first you're gonna want to find your power cord for your power supply go ahead and plug that in go ahead and switch your power supply on and then hit the power button and now your system should turn on this is again excellent news everything's powering on we got lights we've got spinning fans front fans are spinning and everything's looking pretty tidy of course at this point what do you do next very good question and I have a video specifically on that topic so I would direct you now to my first five things to do with a new PC build where I walk you through installing Windows 10 as well as some other stuff don't forget to watch the follow up three more things video as well because I supplement it so check both of those videos out if you want to know what to do next well guys the system came together quite nicely and whether you're a first-time builder or you've done this a hundred times before I hope you maybe have learned a little bit of something from watching this video my final thoughts on the Lian Li 0:11 air are that it's a very easy case to build in I like there's a lot of space I like that it's not insanely tall or insanely huge it's just a little bit wider than normal chassis I think if it came across a downside it would probably be a similar complaint to what gamers Nexus have which is that the dust filters on the case although they are everywhere are not the most ideal they're held on by magnets and gamers Nexus also saw that if you remove that front dust filter it actually improves the airflow and the thermal performance of the case quite a bit but again guys check out that first five things to do with a new PC build if you're wondering what next steps are thanking you so much for watching this video and we'll see you guys next time