Gadgetory

what is going on everyone in today's video we're going to put together an extremely compact PC and I'll show you step-by-step how to do it now I've reserved a dedicated video for this because it takes a special finesse to build a system as compact as this and I can already tell you right now we're going to use an AMD APU now but we're also going to be dealing with a very very small sort of unconventional power supply in this space so the AC adapter section would be external so we'll have a power brick but we'll also have a separate board inside the case it's gonna run next to our ITX motherboard that we'll have to deal with and I don't know how we're gonna fit all these cables in here but I'm gonna show you some tips to make this process a bit easier and of course I'll run through the typical how to build a process so you know exactly what to do from start to finish so let's get started so these are all the components you're gonna want to buy and you don't have to buy the exact parts that I have here but you're gonna want to follow a similar format if you want something that's small starting first with the case I think you should in this case build you know pick your parts around a case like this because you're gonna need to pick a board that will fit in this you'll also need to pick a CPU cooler that will fit in this case because the clearance height wise is not a very tolerable you're also going to need to pick a drive that will fit in here obviously this tiny little case here which we'll talk about more in a second it's not going to support a hard disk drive of any sort so only two and a half inch SSDs or m2s any kind of like PCIe based nvme drive or even a SATA and got two like this will do so these are the parts again just want to give you a brief summary of what we're going to be working with you're also going to need a Phillips head screwdriver it's really about it you don't need anything else you can kind of get by with just that tool there and also you're gonna have a bag of screws and maybe even zip ties and stuff that come with your case I just like to collect all of them so you'll see me periodically reaching out of here for some screws but you should have all that included in the case when you buy it so let's get started let's start first with our motherboard in today's build guide we're gonna use the MSI be 350 I which stands for I TX and then Pro AC the AC standing for a built-in Wi-Fi support now I think for smaller cases like this having onboard Wi-Fi is kind of necessity because this might not be hooked up to a LAN cable if it's sitting in your living room if you're using it as like an HT PC or even if it's mounted to the back of a monitor or something like that which we can do with our an Tek case so it's important we have the ITX form factor and in my opinion Wi-Fi is also a plus so we're gonna pull out the board placing it on top of the box this will act as our makeshift workbench we're not worried about this cutting into the box the solder points on the bottom of the board can be a bit sharp and we don't want to work directly on our table surface because we could scratch things other than that it really doesn't matter where you work as long as the system's not running and you're not know know using a metal table or something like that so this is our ITX board this is where we're gonna install the CPU this is where we're gonna install the RAM these retention clips we can kind of we can go ahead and remove these because our cool we're going to use which is the stock horizon Wraith stealth cooler will not require these clips so first thing we're gonna do take our Phillips head screwdriver and remove these four Phillips screws I recommend saving these put these in either CPU box or back in your motherboard box because you might at some point need these now most older Andy coolers will use these clips but a lot of the newer coolers won't require it you will likely need to use the back plate those will have a small little standoff sticking through and this is where you're going to screw in the new cooler so keep this backplate that's this piece right here underneath the motherboard now our CPU cooler by default remember will not fit in our antec case so what I had to do is remove the plastic outer ring that has the AMD logo on it I have more info in the video description of how to remove this depending on the CPU cooler you use you might have to modify it just a little bit in our case we had to but I wanted to get that out of the way upfront before we install the CPU so you know exactly how we got this to fit in our build now we're going to install our CPU so go ahead and slide that out of its box you see this is just a chunk of silicon and metal most of the metal you're seeing here is the IHS this is designed to spread heat across the larger surface area than the die underneath most of these chips are soldered so you won't find too many direct die solutions now the key thing you're going to want to pay attention to is this Golden Arrow if you align this Golden Arrow with the arrow on the socket which you can see right here it's a tension triangle you're gonna want those two to match up so this is the orientation the CPU can see if I can get their reflections just right you can see the Rison word is facing this direction right toward our rear i/o it might differ from board to board but in this case this is the orientation we're gonna want to drop the CPU in its socket so what you can do first is lift this metal lever pull out and then up it'll stand straight up take the CPU align that golden arrow with the triangle on the socket drop the CPU into place very gently you might have to slide it around just a little bit to get those pins on the CPU to slide into the socket there we go once it's all the way down the silicon practically makes contact with the socket you can risa cure the CPU by sliding this lever down you might feel a bit of tension there and then snap it underneath and you're good to go you just installed a CPU next up we're gonna want to install the CPU cooler now depending on the cooler you're using again you might have pre applied thermal paste I've already removed it in this case so there's none applied but if you want to use stock compound it's there's no issue there it's not gonna be the best quality you might have slightly higher temps but in general it's acceptable to use that and all you have to do is just sandwich this on top of the CPU align the screws on both the bottom and top over those little pins sticking through the board and then you can screw them in with your phillips screwdriver in our case we don't have any pre apply thermal compound anymore so I'm going to use thermal Grizzly's cryo knot solution this is high quality thermal compound and we're going to apply it like so I suggest with Rison cpus a slightly longer line from top to bottom just as I've done a little more isn't going to hurt you just don't want this running over it just gets messy it's not conductive so I wouldn't worry too much about that you don't want to put too little that did this paste itself doesn't cover the entire IHS because heat will spread across this entire metal plate so that's why I put a little more than you might be comfortable with and then we're going to sandwich the CPU cool or a top align those screws with the pins running through the board that secures it to the backplate then we're going to take our Phillips screwdriver and start twisting now this point your board might be flexing just a little bit on account of all that torque we've got in this cooler it will bend the board slightly and that's okay these boards are designed to be somewhat flexible but you don't want it of course like you know doing some weird u-shape that would be an issue I probably wouldn't torque the cooler that hard but as is we're fine now we have this cable here this is a 4 pin pwm controlled fan cable we're gonna want to connect this to one of our CPU fan headers we do have two up top here and I really doesn't matter which one you pick some boards won't even let you boot they won't even you know although post but they won't leave boot into your operating system less you have a fan cable connected to the prime CPU fan header in this case I'm pretty sure with MSI it doesn't matter we're gonna plug ours into the CPU fan 1 header so we'll take the cable like so it's keyed to one side so you can't really install this backwards we have this extra slack here and we could do any number of things with this it really doesn't matter as long as it's not blocking something else that we need to access on the board we'll be fine next up is Ram installation now I must confess this system is actually going to my wife's mother and she is she's not an avid gamer or anything like that so 8 gigs is gonna be enough for her and in this case you'd really want to go with dual channel memory using an APU it's gonna benefit you quite a bit you didn't want fast Ram as well but she's not going to be stressing the system at all so that's why we're going with a single dim but in most cases for a build like this you're gonna want to go with 2 sticks even if it's 2 4 gig sticks sticks that's ok because you're going to have dual channel support and that will benefit you to a pretty decent extent with respect to these ap use in our case again doesn't matter so we're just going to install a single dim and if you look right here on the board and see it says a dim a1 and dim b1 a and B are two different channels that's why this board supports the dual channel memory but we're only going to install one and the optimal place here is a1 obviously a comes before B install a first there is a notch on the module mind the notch there is a small little indention here on the socket it's right there once we have this notch aligned with the indention in the slot we can slide the module into place this will require some force here take two thumbs one on each side push down on one side first till you hear a click just like that now holding that thumb still in place push down with the other thumb until you hear another click there ya go so now our module is installed what you can do is turn it sideways see if the module is kind of sitting crooked if you can see a lot of the copper exposed and it's probably not seated correctly in our case it looks good if it doesn't post this would be one of the first things I would try maybe remove this module move it to the other dim slot or just make sure that it's pushed in all the way modules are of a very frequent cause of failed posts you know pcs just won't boot up at all probably because one of these modules isn't installed correctly now this right here is our entire system practically we just need power and we need a storage drive of sorts so what we're going to do next is install our m2 SSD now this is actually a fast SSD and the only reason why I'm including in this budget build is because I got this for a really great deal on new weight these are going for around a hundred bucks each so I bought two of these and they're 480 gig drives which is I think plenty for a budget build also extremely fast these are Gendry by for four-lane nvme SSD so we're gonna get insanely fast reads and writes our systems gonna boot up very fast and we'll be able to load games and anything else on this Drive in a snap so if you want an ultra-fast computer for just day-to-day tasks I highly recommend an m2 SSD particularly an nvme one because you're gonna use a different interface and it will be significantly faster than SATA more on that in I don't know which side the videos gonna be on one of these sides so we're gonna pull this drive out and you can see it is extremely small there isn't much to it it does not come with a heatsink of any sort so if we had a heatsink available we could put that on top of this well actually it does come with a very small one but it's not gonna do much so I don't think in this case it's gonna matter we'll go ahead and slide it on just for good measure but it really won't make much of a difference I can see most of the chips are on this side so we're going to install it like so make sure we don't cover the cutout for the screw now where does this go where do we install this there's no slot anywhere here whatever where do we push it right it's actually on the back of this board it will depend on the board you can refer to your manual if you are a bit confused but you can see we do have an MDOT to pour right here and we have the screw pre-installed this is what we're going to use to lock it in place so your big Phillips head screwdriver might not work in this application if you have a smaller one I recommend you start with that otherwise you'll probably strip this tiny little Phillips screw here you can see there is a key in this port on one side there's a very small area for a few connections and the other side is much bigger and you can see the end to drive follows the same suit right so a very small key off to one side so we're gonna align it like so in this case we're going to whoops backwards slide it in just like this toward the top of the connector it'll snap all the way in you shouldn't see any exposed copper we're gonna push this down about as far as we can and then we're going to secure the m-dot to drive with the removed Phillips screw another thing to be careful of there are actually two screws that go into this hole and the first one you're gonna want to keep installed before you install the drive so I actually messed that up myself when I was installing this the first time I realized that when I unscrewed this I actually took out both ends you just want to remove the thin Phillips screw that sits on top of this plate the reason why you want to keep this in is because you don't want this making contact with anything else on the back of the board just for good measure we don't really have anything insulating this side other than a sticker so just mind that you can see now when we install it the in that to drive is not touching anything under the board see there it looks like it is but it's it's not it's much better now than it was before we can take this tiny little Phillips screw I'm going to seat it like so there we go our drive is secure and again the only thing we have left to do is install this into our case and then set up our power supply our wiring which will be difficult to do and we'll be ready to boot now to prep our case what I suggest you do is remove both the left and right panels move the cables out of the way as much as possible without snagging them and tearing them in mind the standoffs you can see these little gold standoffs here there's gonna be four in total for an ITX board and you're gonna want to line the standoffs off with the four holes and mother which I'll show you in a second but the other thing you don't want to pay attention to is the rear i/o cutout that's this large rectangular cutout here on the back of the case you're going to want to remove your motherboards IO shield from the box it'll look something like this and you'll notice there are pins that stick out on one side these are designed to press against the rear i/o ports on the motherboard so you want these pins you can see in how they stick out here you're gonna want these facing inward so the smooth side is facing outward all right so we're gonna want to install it like so the other thing to keep in mind is orientation so you could really put this in this way or this way either way will work but your motherboard has its layout designed a specific way so when it's facing out and the rear i/o is facing out like this you want to pay attention to where these ports are these are the microphone headphone jacks wherever this is your AC Wi-Fi is right next to that you're gonna make sure that you align the rear i/o the orientation that you insert this so that this fits into this right so now we're gonna slide this through and you're gonna want to press on it it's gonna be a bit frustrating depending on the case you push one side in the other side pops out that's kind of how these work this is frustrating but they really did it so you do it enough times and you get used to it so the more you practice this will get easier so there we go REO REO is installed and then now we can thread our motherboard into place using the rear i/o as a reference as well as the standoffs that I talked about earlier we can see there's standoff right everything's mirrored on the screen right right there that's one of our standoffs so we install the motherboard keep yeah be careful of these cables the especially in this case this is why I'm making a dedicated video for this this PC build here I think what I'm going to try to do is slide it you know front side in first kind of push it to the back if that's possible is it possible a lot of cables preventing us from going straight in like that okay let's try going in from right to left make sure none of these cables get stuck behind the motherboard when you finally install it by the way okay so I finally got it I kind of pushed the board in like so kind of pushing the rear i/o into place first and now what we're going to do secure the mother more to the chassis with four included screws I will get four of those and show you what they look like they kind of look like this and they have little disks wrapped around them almost looks like pre-installed washers of sorts you don't want to use four of these and screw those into the standoffs on the four corners of the motherboard that's what those cold things I was pointing to earlier alright so board is secured to the chassis that was actually kind of easy anti gave us these convenient little you know hemispherical cutouts here that make it much easier to slice Phillips screwdriver into the tight spaces it needs to fit so now we have all these cables and these cables are going to be the bulk of the remaining portion of this video getting these into their correct places so a quick rule on cable management what I like to do is start with the smallest cables first because it's very difficult to work around these thicker cables or you know these like angel hair sloughs of cables especially the 24-pin of the AP ApS so start with smaller cables first you can kind of squish those down with the larger cables as you progress through the wiring section of your build so we have a power switch we have a hard drive LED we have power LED positive and negative and I think that's it so no dedicated reset switch not a big deal for this chassis here but we're going to want to pay attention to these wires want to make sure we plug these into the correct headers on the board now in our case the front i/o header motherboard is right here you'll see it usually denoted as jf p1 and this right here is the correct pin out for front il connections so make sure that you abide by this key when you're installing the cables that I just showed you otherwise you could fry an LED or your system might not power on at all because you wired it incorrectly another quick pro tip if the positive and negative terminals are not listed on the plastic little shroud for these connectors what you can do is reference the small little arrow that points toward the terminating point of this clip if that arrow is on one side the states on the left side then the left side is the positive terminal that means the opposite side the right side is the negative terminal and with the front i/o connections the positive port is almost always the left pin so the one that's closest to the rear i/o of your motherboard just a rule of thumb not always the case but it could help if you're in a tough spot so that there was our hard drive led my kind of tucked that cable around the perimeter of the motherboard next we will do the power switch in this case polarity doesn't matter you're just completing a circuit with this switch so you don't really need to pay attention to which side is the positive side lastly our power LED positive and negative wires that'll do okay next the smallest wire is HD audio and it will typically be denoted as such you can see there HD audio and that port is going to be typically very close to rear i/o as far down as possible with ITX they can get a little weird but you'll see usually on the board a label that says something along the lines of HD audio it is keyed a certain way by the way so there's only one way to install this don't worry about installing it upside down just mind the key ok HD audio is installed you can see those wires have kind of tucked against the chassis sort of underneath the motherboard these are all insulated wires to be not gonna worry about anything shorts they're getting or anything like that but I have just tuck those in and run those along the perimeter of the motherboard you just don't want these small cables kind of just you know free hanging anywhere because they could get caught by the fan this is really the only part of the system but the cleaner the better and it makes things easier in the future if you intend to work on this case may be upgraded or something along those lines our next smallest cable is USB 2.0 and this is key to certain way as well as you can see the bottom left or the top right up in your orientation that is the heed slot and you'll typically see this denoted on the board as such USB 2.0 you can see in our board it just says USB and it's actually written into the header itself so you just have to pay attention to that this is not USB 3 USB 3 uses this port which is much different so you're not really going to confuse the two unless you just do this blindfolded next up is USB 3 that's this connector right here these are pretty difficult to work with the cables are rather thick we do have two USB 3 ports in this case so that's why there are two wires connect enjoin at the head and USB 3 port is basically what I just showed you it's this longer kind of port here and there are many more pins than there are with USB 2.0 this is probably also going to be labeled on the motherboard now the last cables to worry about our power for the motherboard CPU and our drives we have the 24 pin which powers the motherboard and to an extent peripherals we have the a pin eps this could be a four pin depending on the board and the platform that you choose this power is the CPU directly then we have our SATA connectors you have actually SATA here which is this is a SATA power cable and then you have molex which is a small little four pin power connector this is more old-school but you still might see some hard drives and other peripherals powered via this interface in our case we have an either external SSDs hard drives or anything else powered by molex so we don't need to worry about these we can leave them as is kind of tuck them somewhere where they're not in the way of the other two cables we can tackle the AP DPS next the port for this is typically located near the upper left section of the motherboard which you're looking at it like so upper left is here and you can see there's the a pin that right there is for the CPU so all CPU power for the most part comes through this port and we're going to mind the clip if you see a little lip on the port that lip is the same side that you're going to see these little little levers so make sure that you plug it in like that again we're gonna cable manage as we go kind of tuck these cables around the perimeter of the board and last we have a 24 pin this is going to power again our motherboard and to an extent peripherals same thing you have a clip on one side you'll find a lip on the connection point as well on just one side and that's the side you're gonna want to align this clip with you know this is properly secured when there is no gap between the connection on the board and the physical connector into which the wires run okay things look good and I'm just gonna kind of figure out where to tuck these remaining cables and yeah I think we'll just have to call it a day so next thing we want to do let's put our left side panel on you can see this is mesh and I'll show you how close I mean there's literally no clearance at all between the top of the CPU cooler and the mesh luckily and tech indented this just enough to wear a wraith stealth cooler with the removed plastic cover fits perfectly can start by securing the front of this panel first and then you can push down on the backside and you'll hear a few snaps you can see we actually had a dedicated tray here for SSDs for SATA 2 and a half inch SSD so if you had a couple of those you could secure those to this bracket four Phillips screws hold this bracket in place and it just sits under the motherboard very discreetly clip that in first and then the back snaps in there's nothing really back here pressing against it so that was fairly easy and then we also have four Phillips screws on the back next to the rear i/o plate that we'll need to secure in order to keep these panels in place and there we go that is the entire system and this is smaller than most consoles on the market and it's not gonna be and I'll have to run our test the 2200 g is not a very powerful ap I mean it's more powerful than something we had maybe in 2013 with the Kaveri chips but it's not going to replace a discrete card most discreet cards will I'll perform this apu by a longshot said though there's a lot of power still packed into such a small footprint an tech actually did a really great job with this case all right now at this point we have the case sitting nice and snug on the included stand and we do have the AC power adapter to worry about now so if you want to power this up we're going to want to plug this part this end obviously into the wall and then the other end into the brick and then from the brick we have this very small connection that will make with the back of the case so this is gonna be similar to like a laptop and that's just a one I guess downside of going with a smaller compact case like this we can't fit an entire power supply in here and that's why we have the external AC adapter included now let's see if this thing power is on okay that didn't work that's weird the power brick works I can see the light on the brick so it's probably something wire wise that was either removed or that was neglected so yeah I've tried straight-up jumping the motherboard that didn't work I think what I'm going to have to do now I mean all these connections these are all solid connections in here I check 24 1880s CPU fan cable that's just in there I think what I'm gonna do is bypass this small little power supply bit and just run an external power supply and see if I can get this power out and if it does and that means that the both Pico whatever format power supplies in here just isn't working I know the bricks working because the brick is on it's lighting up so that means that something in here is not properly delivering power to the motherboard that is a shame okay power supply on this button is not going to work so I remove the front connectors so let's just jump it there we go system I'm assuming it's posting I mean we actually get lights on the motherboard the fans turning so that means we likely have a dead power supply which means we were one of the people hit with the dead psu plague upon arrival well guess I better call an tech I'm gonna unscrew this board that's a little Kico I still know if it's a big opai's boy but it's just a small little board in here that I'm going to remove and see if I can see any defects I didn't say this earlier in the video because I didn't really think it mattered I thought this would still work but one of the screws on this small little power supply board was dislodged it was just completely removed actually and it was kind of flopping all over the place when it arrived so maybe maybe something happened to it there ain't transport not sure let's see if there are any defects I want to be careful with this because I don't know if current was actually running through any section of this but there might be some diode or inductor or something that's not making proper contact yeah so we have a system that can't boot with its own native power supply because it is dead and hey at least you learn how to build the system I was going to also show you how to install Windows and kind of include that all on the same tutorial but I do already have a video talking about that you check it out one of these sides here so I will direct you to that if you are wanting to know how to install software an operating system or other software but maybe I give them a semi just a replacement board that they've tested in-house beforehand and then I can send this with Lisa back home to Germany so her mom can enjoy a very fast PC maybe not the best for gaming obviously but fast in terms of reads and writes we have a really fast drive in here and I mean come on it's an APU and 2019 C APU came out what last year it's really good for what it is really good for the money and so is this board with built-in Wi-Fi and the works you guys like this video a thumbs up you know what to do I'm sorry I it's just kind of one big failure there at the end but I you know to build a PC now so there's that this went horribly wrong click that subscribe button if you haven't already hopefully we'll have a power supply to be honest in the future stay tuned for more content hopefully not like this this is science video thanks for watching and thanks for learning with us