it's all about finding balance in life right so somewhere in between me trying to speed build a computer in 17 minutes and it taking me five attempts to get my time down to that point and me being like sweating at the end of it and not having any time to give you guys any instructions or insight about what I'm doing and taking six hours to swap out a motherboard in my personal rig there's got to be a happy medium and that is exactly what today's build is all about this my friends is the happy medium machine now our goal was to build a respectable gaming rig for the modest price of five hundred US dollars not including peripherals and monitor and all that kind of stuff now admittedly we did go a little bit over our budget we ended up closer to the 580 dollar range but there are definitely some places where you could you know trim a little bit of fat in order to hit that price point and then easily upgrade later like for example we did include a hard drive so that we can actually install a decent library of games on it assuming we're playing modern triple-a titles some of which are a hundred plus gigs per game but you could scrap that you could install and remove your games as you play them and then just kind of wait to build up some budget to upgrade your storage down the line so we're still calling it a $500 gaming rig and we are gonna get started building it right now at a happy medium pace so we're not gonna speed build but I'm also not going to take like an hour to build this computer and it's brought to you by Ridge wallet wants to redefine the wallet with its compact frame and RFID blocking plates check out how they can help keep your wallet bulbs down and use our offer code Lynas to save 10% and get free worldwide shipping and we're back yes that's that's the way that we do that all right so the first thing we need to decide is whether we're gonna go with the wind or non windowed version of the mg 120 G from cougar rare which ones the windowed one the G alright we're gonna go with the non windowed one because this build is all about modesty and doing things that actually make sense if you are spending five hundred dollars on a gaming rig you should be saving the $5 or $10 Delta between the windowed version of the case and the non windowed version of the case and you should be spending that on a graphics upgrade or a CPU upgrade something that you're kind of stuck with for an extended period of time versus something that can be easily upgraded down the line like for example storage or system memory now I took a lot of flack when we did a budget build recently configuring it with a single stick of memory with the intention of course of upgrading to dual channel later people said hey you know the performance sucks but I'm of the mind that any performance that I give up today like let's say I save you know five percent of my budget by going with a single stick of memory but I lose 5% of my performance that's a trade-off that doesn't cost me anything in the long term it's just sort of like deferring that performance and cost to a later time I fully understood that that was not the ideal configuration and that dual channel makes a big difference to system performance these days it's just a matter of whether that's a system performance compromise that I'm making that is going to cost me more down the line or whether it's one that I'm making that I can just say hey you know what my performance isn't enough today I'm going to go to the computer store and buy another stick of memory and put it in my system because you know I've saved up my my lunch money my parents gave me lunch money and I decided not to buy lunch and I just stashed it so I could buy cool stuff that I want not that I'm speaking from experience let's go ahead and install a CPU so for our motherboard we went with the asrock B 450m Pro this is just such a great balance between performance and cost its em ATX so you don't get some of the expansion that you might expect from a full-size board you've only got three PCI Express slots but let's face it when you're using a p450 board you don't have the same degree of chipset features anyway and an EM ATX board I feel is a really really good compromise there so we've got our socket and four we've still got four memory slots so we can load this puppy up we've got two MDOT twos and then of course the PCI Express slots and actually a pretty reasonable mix of i/o with six USB 3 plus ports only Gigabit Ethernet it's not until you step up to be 550 that you're gonna start to see things like two and a half gig Ethernet on these on these more value oriented boards let's go ahead and switch to our top down here for our CPU we've gone with a Rison 3 3100 this thing is just an outstanding balance of price to performance and I know that we've said some things about it in the past like that we don't think it makes necessarily the oh wait no sorry I'm actually thinking of when we got slammed for a completely different video yeah Brian 3100 is we actually gave it an extremely positive review the one thing that we did get criticized for recently about it is yes I know that you can step up okay so you can step up to a 3300 and that does make a big difference to performance but I still maintain that even if you're going to end up with a little bit of latency due to the two CCX design of this one it's at a certain price point not the kind of thing that you're going to notice when you're pairing it with a 1650 super that's something to bear in mind about the way that you typically benchmark hardware versus the way that people actually deploy it in the real world if you want to pop in here I'm just gonna go ahead and install my CPU just lining up my Dimond with the little you can see that little arrow on the edge of the board right there we've got the arrow nice thank you David so I've already got floatplane chat being like what not 3,300 X okay all right I just I just talked through this not 3,300 X because I think that when you're trying to hit a price point there are cases where look if you're pairing it with a 1650 super realistically 3100 ain't ain't going to be the the bottleneck in that system anyway from a gaming standpoint this is a gaming focus system I think it's fine speaking of things that are just fine for cooling we're going stock cooling in fairness like AMD stock coolers these days are actually pretty legit like they are literally double the mass of Intel's I still remember when Intel did away with the copper plug down the middle of this style of heatsink that they've also used for many many years and if I were call could we might have actually done we either did a video benchmarking the difference between the the new I mean new and not improved the new and not improved all aluminum version and the version that had the copper slug down the middle in fact you used to be able to see it through the fins back in the LGA 775 days like it kind of had like it was like a copper tube and then the aluminum fins were all attached to it around the outside we either did a video about it or did some testing and I just don't I just don't get it like the amount of savings that Intel must have there I don't see how it's worth it AMD clearly doesn't see the point so they still include decent coolers with their CPUs and I commend them for it oh I'm gonna need to take the the brackets off all right I'm gonna not put my thermal compound on and I'm gonna go ahead and just use this screwdriver that I want you all to not worry about just don't worry about this screwdriver you should have no worries in your mind about this screwdriver why are you guys being so worried about it I just don't really get it everyone's stressing out you know I actually have been tempted to pick myself up a nice little utility belt or tool belt ever since I was doing a bunch of like network cabling running in my attic and installing security cameras in my house I've actually been doing a bunch of home upgrades and I found myself needing to carry I hear it's I get correct thermal paste application up in here we're just gonna do kind of a Fat Boy green or ice here I found myself needing to carry like you know hammer drill crimp tool side cutters some rj45 ends like it's gotten to the point where even my my stretchy my stretchy Costco jeans just can't contain at all but look I can store I can store an Andy stock cooler in my front pocket but it's just you know it's not quite it's not quite enough at a certain point all right let's go ahead and install this puppy oh you're good I love this is another thing that AMD slash AMD's partners don't cheap out on compared to Intel boards I love that AMD even on their consumer platform still has a backplate there have been boards that I've seen that have just the these these plastic like these little plastic bracket things and then they just use pushpins to go through the board but unless you're buying like some super random board on Aliexpress or something the vast majority of them have a backplate and I just love coolers that mount with a proper metal backplate compared to ones that use plastic pushpins I've just seen such terrible things happen in shipping I mean recently we had the pewdiepie creeper PC get destroyed and shipping even though everything was mounted with metal like that should give you some idea I have seen systems come back after being shipped across the continent with a push pin style cooler and it wasn't really stock coolers back in the day because this is when I was at NCIX we didn't ship a lot of like custom systems with stock coolers so it was there was a particular Arctic cooling one I want to say like freezer 7 or something like that this is like way back in the day anyway it used push pins and people kept configuring their systems with these things and NCIX is philosophy was kind of like the burger king of custom computers right like you have it your way we'll build whatever you configure so that thing was a great value because it was like 20 bucks and it was a like a tower cooler at a time when those were usually quite a bit more expensive than that so people kept configuring their systems with these bloody things and we'd configure them and I'd see these systems come back that looked like they had been kind of like picked up and dropped kicked repeatedly down the length of a football field with this cooler having popped off and banging around inside the system we're talking graphics cards that were like ripped out of the slot but still screwed in back here so the slot is just like like gaping open none of the pins are making contact we're talking hard drives getting getting knocked out and like putting like not dense I'm not talking dense I'm talking like you can see through the PCB holes in the motherboard I've just seen such and you know as someone who especially at that time you know really had basically no money right like I'm working as a sales rep at a computer store two days a week I'm going to school at the same time I pretty much had no money I like loved hardware like it was all that I lived and breathed and just like seeing those things actually traumatic like looking at you know a $3,000 gaming rig that's just you know SLI and this cooler came off and just like knocked both of the video cards out and they were banging around inside the case and like the power supply survived it still screwed in but like the back of the case is now bent from the weight and it's stall over like just have to steady myself you know sorry I said this stream wouldn't go on for too long so let's go ahead and plug in our CPU fan here so it's pretty typical these days and I just man ass rock has done such a great job of their budget boards come on in here David it's pretty typical these days on what used to be high end boards having a feature where you have two CPU headers one for the CPU fan if you've got a conventional setup like this and a second for if you've got an a IO and you've got sort of one connector for your fan or fans and then a second connector for your pump so you just want to watch out just watch the labeling because you'll usually have CPU fan one CPU fan 2 or CPU fan and CPU fan opt yeah so this one is labeled CPU fan 2 slash water pump unfortunately asrock in their infinite wisdom put the silkscreen under this heat sink before the vrm so you actually can't read it but that's probably in the manual as well so that's it our CPU cooler is install am elated king of the north I've only been live for about 20 minutes or something like that half an hour half an hour wait what I've been live for half an hour we got to build a computer year ladies and gentlemen all right we're not installing an m2 SSD today we're gonna be going SATA so we're pretty much done with the motherboard now that we've got ya know we can go ahead and install our Ram I love that in the time since AMD Rison launched we've gone from ddr4 like 2426 66 being affordable to you can actually put ddr4 3200 Ram for not much more money in even like a 500 to $600 class gaming rig it's great because even though the performance Delta might not be huge in some applications going from you know 2666 to 3200 some things it will be big and I for one love getting the most for my money that's what it's all about is not leaving performance on the table unless you absolutely have to and it wasn't that long ago that in order to hit this kind of price point we would often tell people hey yeah you're probably better off just getting a single stick around today to give yourself more room to upgrade in the future because that way if you have enough money for let's say eight gigs of RAM instead of buying to four gigs sticks which is about the same price typically and then limiting yourself to 16 gigs of total upgrade ability you can buy a single eight gig then a single eight gig you get your extra performance and that gives you up to 32 gigs before you have to start you know throwing things away or flipping them on Craigslist in order to get back some of your budget all right let's go ahead and open up our case I'm just gonna open up the Super chats here best thing that can ease livestreams are I'm glad you guys like the livestream because like honestly it's a lot of fun for me too I actually kind of enjoyed just like building computers I find it relaxing but I'm at the point now where I don't need any more computers it's like what a struggle you know it's it's a bummer I just I just want to build computers I mean that that's ultimately why I got the job at the computer store I wanted to be a tech but I understand now why they didn't allow it I simply didn't have the relevant experience at all yeah I get it so they put me in sales but I would still hang out in the tech room whenever it was slow in the store and sometimes Andrew I don't offer out there Andrew you're good dude though sometimes Andrew would let me let me work on some of the systems he was willing if I made a mistake which I don't think I ever did but he was also a super nice guy and he might just not have told me if I made a mistake and he had to cover for me but he would he'd help me out if if I if I made a mistake putting something together I ended up being really good at sales though okay here gift of gab so I ended up spending most of my time doing that even if I did want to want to work as a tech it's probably just as well because the transition from sales to the business side of things was a lot easier than I the transition from a technician to the business side of things and that ended up being a really good career move for me all right so pretty simple case here M ATX really compact single included fan that should be enough cooling for our configuration this is just a risin 3100 and the 1650 super it's amazing to me though how far budget cases have come on the one hand I lament sometimes the loss of the cases of old I mean we're talking cases that weighed like 20 pounds on their own you know they've got they've got cross braces everywhere like you grab on to these things and you're like wow there is no flex in this whatsoever whereas I've seen modern cases that you basically have to screw the motherboard in in order to give the case structural rigidity you know what I mean so I lament that sometimes but the number of features that you can get in a budget case these days where's my do I have a price like a price list for this thing on the Trello card all right oh there we go like how much did we pay for this puppy 50 bucks love it and even the non tempered glass version does have just at least you know like a see-through front panel it looks kind of gamer II I'm not a huge fan of restricting airflow in the front of a case like this but again for this kind of build it's not a major concern to me because you've got this again magnetically filtered absolutely love it you've got this magnetically filtered top that is going to end up being used as an intake even if that wasn't the original intent because we're gonna end up with probably negative negative air flow or a negative pressure inside this case if I was building this for myself what I would probably actually do as crazy as it might sound it you know what let's just do it I'm going to I'm gonna go out on a limb and I'm gonna say this is this is what I would do so remember I'm someone who's trying to hit a price point here I don't have a bunch of money to spend on extra fans it's shocking how expensive fans are when they're not included with your case or with your AI liquid cooler if you want anything that's decent quality right so I would probably pull this out and I would throw it in the top of the case where I have a nice filter to intake and I'm gonna put it towards the front so it's blowing air right down where the graphics card is going to be so yeah I'm gonna go ahead I'm gonna put it right here just reconfigure my included fan like there's no real reason that it has to be in the back like that other than that's the Intel ATX specification Oh fun fact I was reading an article on a non tech the other day about a new power supply standard that apparently I think it's Intel championing it where basically we're gonna do away with the 24 pin and we're gonna do away with 3.3 volt and 5 volt all together coming out of the power supply so the the computer power supply is just gonna handle AC so that's your 120 volts 240 volt AC to 12-volt DC and then splitting out 12 volt into 3.3 and 5 volt is going to be done on the motherboard level I'm really interested to get my hands on it and I just got a shipping notification so I actually am going to have both on motherboard and power supply for this new standard coming fairly soon and I'm really excited to check it out the main the main play here is just simplifying the power supply and improving efficiency because DC to DC conversion is more efficient than AC to DC conversion now a lot of modern power supplies actually do that internally anyway so they'll just do DC to DC conversion from 12 volt to 3 and a half and 5 volt anyhow but presumably there's some kind of benefit to moving that onto the motherboard and I look forward to talking to some of the engineers who are working on it to find out exactly what those reasons are and bringing that knowledge to y'all okay so that's where I want to put my fan this is powered by either three pin or 4-pin molex so I'm just gonna rip this molex connector off because molex connectors sock what year is it and we're gonna plug the three pin into the motherboard when we get a chance let's go ahead and install our I Oh shield uh-oh where's my notice and I never missed these when I get to work with motherboards that have them included but it's also a small price to pay for you know spending oftentimes you know 20 30 40 50 dollars less on your mother force I've been for a long time an advocate of getting the motherboard that has the features you need as opposed to worrying about you know every every theoretical you know mad game you're gonna get from some kind of more robust vrm solution it's like yes if you're a professional overclock or you're going you know dry ice liquid nitrogen or whatever the case may be there's absolutely a benefit to your you know $400 motherboard or whatever but if you're someone that's just gonna basically say okay I'm gonna enable multi-core enhancement I'm gonna put some decent cooling on this thing make sure I've got good airflow over it just I'm just not convinced that it's worth the a the money and be the extra time you've actually got a really fun video coming soon where Anthony and I went head-to-head in what we're calling the tech triathlon Yuri what do you think fun competition okay so David helped us film that one and what it is is building a gaming PC overclocking set gaming PC and then actually gaming on said gaming PC and I can tell you guys a fair bit about it now even though it's not something that we're ready to release yet if you want to come close up here I'll just show people where I do need to put some motherboard standoffs in this one doesn't have them all pre-installed unfortunately just actually it's kind of a weird setup that it's got because it's got the four ITX ones and then one M ATX one over here but not this one and not anything over here so it's you know it's kind of bizarre so it's a timed event and we go from building a computer obviously as fast as we can the faster you can do it the better to overclocking the system and every percent of extra performance you get gives you a two percent time bonus overall and then we have to play the first level of doom eternal on I think it was nightmare or ultraviolence ultraviolence and neither Anthony nor I has played that game extensively and I can okay one thing I will spoil a little bit is that's definitely going to show in my performance in the gaming segment but one of the things that I was sort of that I thought would be an interesting takeaway from that video is you know how long aside from the extra money that you spend on you know tunable components how much do you have to pay yourself to sit around and tune them compared to if you had just gone okay you know what I'm gonna I'm gonna find a side hustle and treat myself to something a little bit faster in the first place it's just it's been a very interesting calculation for me ever since really ever since I joined the workforce because pc hardware choices for me in the past alarum when I was like a student when I was a kid were more about you know what's the what's the cool new shoes that I want to play with temporarily because I would usually buy it secondhand from someone with buyer's remorse like well it's still current hardware and then I would flip it right when the first rumblings like the first rumors start of a new generation coming and then I would just go back to like you know a PCI graphics card for a few weeks while I wait for the new products come out and then I would take the money that I got back I find someone with buyer's remorse and so on and so forth so effectively I had cash flow tied up in my computer but I never really actually spent any money on it if you understand what I mean anyway as I as I moved into adulthood I started seeing like basically I had what I had was time but no money and then as I got a job and moved into adulthood I found that I had more money but I had no time because I was working all the time like even when I was at home when I was at NCIX I put in a lot of hours off the clock just because that was the depent honestly that was just the demands of the job between product management the PC division and making videos for them as well so all of a sudden I started to see more value in just like you know getting a good one in the first place and not having to tinker with it and it's just kind of a different mindset like everyone is at their own stage or in their so you could see it as kind of like like a spectrum Bart M Siebert over on floatplane says yeah overclocking is fun until you see blue smoke yeah exactly I've actually ruined surprisingly little hardware from like performance tuning or overclocking or anything like that and like you watch me installing a motherboard like this and go really find that hard to believe but ya know surprisingly little just double-check make sure we've got all of our standoffs lined up that's really important hopefully some of y'all watching this as a vote are gonna be following along so one of the things I find really useful when I'm putting screws into a motherboard is just do a quick sanity count you know how many are there supposed to be you got one two three four five six seven eight all right they're supposed to be eight count out eight screws and then if you have any extras well then you know that you missed one not that it really terribly matters you could put in like two screws and a mother and you'd still be alright so I've counted out six here let's go ahead and do some super chatty chats I'm gonna switch to the overhead give David time a break sent me a what sorry okay great where would I find that in teams all right cool some of you are asking about the parts list if you're watching on YouTube it will be at the link in the video description unfortunately I don't know if I have that in the floatplane one and twitch doesn't have like a link in the video description so it's over on youtube we've got affiliate links for all the parts for this system if you're trying to follow along with this build one thing to watch out for here guys is there's two types of screws included with the case there's the coarsely threaded ones with the hex shaped heads those are 632 you guys can't really see this unfortunately but there's not really much I can do about it and then there's the N what are the m3 or m4 I can never remember if it's m3 or m4 whatever the the finely threaded ones just says motherboard SSD screw in the manual thank you very much for not just telling me the threading standard appreciate that cougar I'm not mad though I love Cougar this is a cougar cougar of cases cougar cases cougar lover wait hold on okay motherboards installed wonderful oh wait I'm sorry Davis I didn't warn David oh oh hello there let's go ahead and install the hard drive shall we yeah it's been a while I like installing hard drives oh well I strongly suspect that this motherboard does actually include a couple SATA cables and that we just don't have them here because we probably use them and didn't put them back yes wait two serial ata data cables optional how interesting so when you see optional immanuel what it typically means is that it's down to the regional office to decide whether or not to include it according to you know how they want to position the product and ultimately price it so it is possible that that board does not include SATA cables but usually they do so I'm just gonna grab a couple from here and we'll pretend that you bought a motherboard that includes SATA cables I remember I used to get really mad back in the day when there was no consensus on how to pronounce SATA I was like no we should call it SATA and I just like really cared for some reason and I can no longer even remotely understand why I would have cared about that are these right angle oh for crying out loud well that's why I'm finding all straight ones except all right angle ones except this one there's a right angle one Hey what's the point of labeling the front of it right angle or straight if we're not gonna actually stick with it drive me crazy alright so we're gonna grab one of our hard drive cages I'm gonna go with the top one I just kind of tend to prefer top cage over the bottom cage one of my one of my things and oh that's curious Oh interesting okay so it looks like it does go sort of front of the drive towards the side panel that would have a window if we were using a windowed case and interface towards the back and then you just have to kind of know wait really oh okay I thought we were just gonna have to kind of care look like kind of peekaboo the interface like down there but it looks like it does not go in that way it's actually what I would consider to be backwards typically how interesting where are the little tabs I'm actually having kind of a hard time figuring out what's going on here Oh interesting so okay there's spots that are lined up where it looks like you could screw in the drive like kind of going backwards which is weird but then there's little plastic tabs that you would use to put it in what I would consider to be sort of the normal way so there you go yes so the interface comes out the back there and we'll plug in the drives like that perfect and beautiful thank you David go ahead and run my seated cable now go ahead and route this puppy up here Oh actually yeah we can just go ahead and plug that in man I remember the first SATA cables they didn't lock now there's a couple different locking mechanisms they can have the little metal latch on them or they can just have a little like piece inside that kind of helps they grab onto the two the SATA connector but the original ones didn't have the the border around them on the board they didn't have the lock on the cable itself and those things came out like crazy it was super annoying I'm actually gonna go ahead and I'm gonna put this one in the front I'm gonna bring my second one in the back here you can get a close look at what we got going on here but um there we go and then I'm gonna bring that second one you're gonna be right here David right around there there we go it's gonna give us a little peekaboo all right this is a little awkward we accidentally grabbed an SSD before we started shooting that does not have a D Ram cache and for if I was just grabbing an SSD to put my game library on or something like that where I feel you know most of the accesses are gonna be infrequent and or sequential I wouldn't even care do um cash no D Ram cache whatever it's gonna be faster than the hard drive regardless but when it comes to pulling OS duty so we're actually installing our operating system on it that is not something that I would particularly recommend there are cases where a dear analyst SSD can perform worse than a hard drive even though it's solid-state now that situation is changing a little bit in fact we did a video about Akio kia SSD a little while ago little tiny thing it's called the BG 4 m2 SSD that has no D Ram cache but uses a or has the capability anyway of using a clever system that allows it to borrow some memory from the confirm the system to use as a cache that's pretty cool that could help a lot but this don't got it so we need to make sure that we're going some cash so that's why I i real abled this instead of su 650 we have a link down below to the SX 850 it's only a few dollars more and I think it's definitely worth the extra here we're using the same threaded screws that we did for the motherboard so these are the finely threaded ones with these circular tops you got this David you just wanted to focus on that beer didn't you so beautiful thank you you're totally unbiased right know nothing about what you think David David's a beard he's a beard advocate he's a beard advocate not as much as James do you know how many unsolicited messages and like emails I've gotten from James about my beard he'll say things like you know oh hey you've got a I okay I noticed you know the Opera lips growing a bit a bit too low you gotta like trim it here or just he'll send me like a random comment from the from the YouTube comments that's like you should keep the beer and he's like I second this motion like Nicolas do you mind grabbing that screw sorry I think it's safe to say that between in-person comments emails and like like I am he has sent me at least half a dozen completely unsolicited bits of like beard advice or beard encouragement he is like he's like like a beard like and we even would even call it like like a like a Apostle you know like hair what's that what's the word I'm looking for like a beard missionary or like a beef you know yeah yep spread and spread in the beard gospel now I think I might have made a small mistake fortunately usually when a motherboard includes two SATA cables they include one right angle and one straight and it looks like we do need a right angle cable in order to plug in the stripe yes sir I should check my phone oh oh good I mean hi I have not shown anything that I'm not supposed to be showing and if I did I explicitly said not to pay attention to it so how much is it gonna cost me this time free shipping is that like North America only you know how much it costs to ship stuff to like Australia right sorry what's the code okay that's it thanks Nick code free ship LT t store comm free shipping orders over 50 it's really easy to put together a cart over $50 right now because we actually brought back the elemental shirts and we're doing a 4-pack for 50 bucks so it's like basically with free shipping that's like twelve dollars each for just like really nice soft comfy shirts that aren't our most popular design but they definitely look decent and even let the right angle connector this isn't going in this is starting to it's the starting to turn into what looks like it's going to end up being a longer stream why is this not clipping on I don't get it whoa-ho-ho there it is a nice that is really tight in there can you see that so you can't get the straight cable in there and you can barely get the right angle in because of the way the drive sits and so you can see there's a little bit of strain on the connector this way from it pushing on the metal this is something that could have been a little bit better designed about this case there's no clearance reason that I can find down here why these couldn't have just been you know like four millimeters five millimeters further out that way to make it so you can put in a straight connector let's go ahead and the power supply in now though I guess sir Oh Oh the elemental is not eligible for the shipping code oh that's hilarious okay well it goes to show you what I know right because that's already a loss leader that makes sense you don't stack your loss leaders see business got some got some Linus business tips up in here I mean I wasn't the one who thought of it apparently Nick was the one protecting us from completely losing our shirts pun intended a I got the chuckle that's all I needed that's all the validation that I needed now you're part of the problem not part of the solution David really you just feel like compelled to laugh if other people are laughing so I've never been funny to you then ouch dang alright well you know what that's fine I'll take it for power supply we're going with an EVGA Wow the most generic thing probably in their entire product lineup 400 watt power supply they apparently didn't even have the budget on this one to submit it for 80-plus certification the one positive thing I can say about it is that its EVGA so it can't be that bad you know I remember getting an irate email I think it was from Corsair to be clear this is like ages ago like nobody working there now would have had anything to do with this but I remember saying that in one of my videos it's like yeah it's Corsair so it can't be that bad and they were like really and I'm like no I mean that in like I mean that in like a positive way I really do like what's wrong with that if any thing to me that's like that's a positive what do you think David is that a positive like it's a Linus tech tips video it can't be that bad yeah see that's like it's not a positive thing or like I'm a bad thing you think is positive all right you're sure you're not just laughing along so I'm going with bottom-mounted fan just because again like budget cases now I love them these days we've got a filtered intake on the bottom we've got raised feet so there's gonna be enough room even on like a medium pile carpet I think you'll still get enough airflow to your power supply there so I always prefer to have the power supply draw fresh air from the outside when it can and then we're using this time the 632 screws give me a look at that screw well I just check and see who's blowing up my phone nothing important all right perfect that's the thing it's like when you're popular like me you know it's hard to livestream because people are interrupting you you know it's a funny thing because I never really in my life like even having millions of followers on social media I've never in my life thought of myself as popular because growing up I was the farthest thing from it and the thing about social media is that it's really easy for all the people paying attention to you to start to look like just kind of like a number like it especially with how your reach is so algorithmically driven these days rather than driven by the actual number of people that supposedly follow you on Twitter or are subscribed to you on YouTube like that number becomes so decoupled from the reality of how many people are actually watching that it just becomes like this number that you're just you know it's like a game you're playing almost you're just trying to like increase the number and it wasn't until I started live-streaming more that I started thinking like oh no these are like people that are are actually like out there you know like a hundred thousand even is just this unfathomable number like how many people are watching this stream right now we have a look there are twenty four thousand people watching this on YouTube alone there's probably another 1,500 or 2,000 on Twitch I don't have the counter up but it's usually around there there's hundreds more on flow plane so to me it's like that is you know 15 times the total population of my high school just like hanging out and like yeah let's like build a computer it's gonna be like good value or whatever and as long as I was just sort of like shouting into a void like just uploading videos comments seem so much more disembodied I can see when I first got into live-streaming I was just doing q and A's in my kitchen and the only reason I did it was because I was like okay to be we're putting in the 24 pin connector here by the way guys it's keyed on the one side you just kind of pop it in right here if you can get close-up of that the only real reason that I did it in the first place was because Linus Media Group has a company to be taken seriously I felt we were gonna need to have some kind of live presence and so I wanted to make sure that when the time came that it was going to become apparent that live you know mattered all of a sudden we weren't starting from zero so I was like okay we need to have some kind of live offering it was the only reason I really did it now I do it as much for fun as anything else like I was game streaming last night just because like the answer why not whatever who cares I can't do that kind of stuff on the LTTE youtube channel because it'll damage it algorithmically but on Twitch and flow plane I actually livestream reasonably regularly up here we're doing our four plus four pin connector so the separate in case you've got a four pin motherboard those are pretty uncommon these days but sometimes you see a supplementary four pin so an eight plus a four not here we just need an eight pin we're gonna go ahead and plug that into the top corner I always like running my cable management up the back of the motherboard tray for this puppy you can actually see how I've got the 24 pin and the eight pin routed now even though again this is like a pretty value-oriented case you've got these little loops built in here in here oh these are interesting ones they're actually like a three-way loop oh here here you can get a good look at this one so instead of just one way they've got kind of three prongs so you can put a zip tie through it three different ways depending on how you've got the cable running I really like that that's a that's a good idea cougar I have not I've not seen that before cool now we've just got a couple more cables to run I'm a little worried thankfully it looks like EVGA has gone for these relatively short low-profile SATA connectors particularly the earlier ones used to be quite a bit longer and I was a little bit worried we weren't gonna be able to plug into that SSD but I think it's gonna be okay so we're gonna run this up through that same cable management hole for the data cable and I'm gonna get this turned around so you can get a better look we're gonna pop that into the back of our Drive can you see that alright good cuz I sure can't I'm at a bit of a weird angle here so it's keyed so it only goes in one way just look carefully at it you shouldn't have any problems pop that on there and we should be good to go hopefully does that go into the thing did we make it I don't know oh yeah it's in we got it we did it I don't know what happened to the screws that were screwed into the front of this fortunately there's a couple there so I can match those up let's go ahead and pop that on there I I'm gonna confess I do not fully understand how this mounting mechanism works oh no I get it now so there's two little nubbins on the bottom here and then those nubbins go into these holes which keeps these back one's from slipping out I get it down this seems over engineered it's all I'll say about them okay ah with those screws go I gotta find exactly the right ones I could use other ones because they're threaded the same but my OCD will not allow that so I need to find exactly the right ones that popped out before Daren Chen asks what is this PC for this is for anyone out there at home who wants to put together a decent little gaming box for 500 bucks and change to follow along at home have some fun building the computer have some fun playing videa gaymes when they're done that's who it's for that is a weird amount I don't like it I've decided I don't like this SST mail I think it's I think it's over overcomplicated alright now the last power connector that we need to do for our drives is this puppy right here I'm gonna go ahead and plug the SATA power into the back of the hard drive can you see that alright so once again it's keyed it only goes in one way this guy oh that's cool that's an unfortunate meatball okay one small design I don't know if I want to call it a flaw but I'll definitely call it a thing to consider is that the front of this case is clear which means that if you just jam your extra cables into the front of the case you can't really you can't really see it because of the reflections - well like they're there they're there their cable II yeah so I'm gonna have to give a little bit more thought to how I want to hide these cables that I'm not using I think if I jam them under the hard drive cage I should be in better shape yes ltte store comm code free ship we're doing free worldwide shipping right now apparently just during the stream that's really fortunate because when Nick runs these promos it helps him hit his his revenue KPIs but it does not help us make money which is what I mostly care about from a company standpoint and you should too why are you laughing David you're laughing along again if we don't make money how do I pay people okay if Nick is giving away all the company money you know on shirts and water bottles how will Nicholas get his paycheck because let's face it we'd keep david just kidding Nicholas you're doing you're doing great you're doing great I mean at this point that Nicholas costs us less than the other Nick he's giving away all the company money you know on free shipping promos no it's all good it's all good I barely sure that Nick has some kind of calculation rule that he follows to make it like sort of makes sense ish I kind of got to talk to him about that though all right so a little bit of a little bit of cable management here I'm gonna run my three pin fan connector somewhere let's see let me give this a little bit of thought oh bloody hell I've got a bent pin on the motherboard if the last stream has anything to go by it's probably my fault so I'm not gonna blame ass rock um oh wow there's okay that's one thing we're compromising on this lower end board there's not a ton of fan connectors I didn't see these ones okay yeah we good oh we good okay that's awesome so my fan connector is gonna come up right here get some of that nice fine cable management and plug that right there all right boom not too shabby I ran my graphics card out through the same one here because the graphics card is eventually gonna be right there and it's gonna not have any strain on it other things that I did just now i undid the management straps on the front i/o connectors so we're gonna go ahead and run those now we've got front USB 2 and audio these are kind of joined together but that's ok you can just separate them as much as you need I'm gonna run that one under going under that's how we're folding things down actually we're gonna go all the way to this far corner here with this one yeah and we're gonna regret it immediately hold on give me a sec we are not gonna regret anything we have no regrets we're living that carpe diem lifestyle okay so USB has got to reach around here all that is really tight okay I don't know how well you're gonna be able to see this but because of that drive mount but again I can't stress enough I would have preferred to have a little bit more towards the panel here that is a really tight fit to get that front panel connector in there but I got it and then don't miss the PC build triathlon guys especially if you're someone like me with small hands and you'd like to find you know just something anything that we can point at and say hey yeah you know we are we have an evolutionary advantage for this fitting little tiny cables into tight spaces that's hey that's our specialty yeah I'll have a look at super chests in a bit here we're gonna run our front USB 3 up right here and we've got one of those connectors right here that's one thing that is missing on a budget board like this is like a type-c front panel connector but you also only really find that on the more expensive cases anyway and I don't know about you guys but I actually have a lot of stuff that I would plug into the front of a computer with type C do you okay I could see that yeah but also I mean if you want to charge your phone faster couldn't you just have like a wall board by your desk that's like cable management yeah you have type C external drives okay fair enough but you're a media professional so that's like something to bear in mind I think for a lot of people probably not as much okay so fine David you can go pay the extra for a motherboard of the type-c connector you could get a B 550 board okay you go get a fancy case for everyone else there's type-a still Oh Nick would like me to remind people that the free shipping code is orders of $50 and more so you actually you can't just buy like one thing of cable ties and ship it to like Slovakia and and then have it the free shipping be free that would actually be like a net like forty plus dollar loss or whatever but like I cannot absolutely cannot do that let me have a look here so power LED is the top one okay this is another thing this is my this is my tiny hands super power watch how quickly I can plug in front panel connectors reset power your sarcasm is deserved but not appreciated what just power button you didn't even plug the other ones in know what otherwise the lights won't come on Oh David oh I hate it have you seen my sauce a chance you can get inside I hate it so much after all that talk about oh wow this is really not done after all my talk about putting the right screws in here actually putting the wrong ones there self tappers that are supposed to be in there accidentally just put in hard drive screws derp and now I've probably like completely destroyed the threads from the self toppers from last time oh yeah well whatever I'm still putting them back in dang it and people often ask hey Linus why don't you guys start like a PC building company and then we could just buy systems made by you know you guys do you really want one I mean it's okay it's decent but uh just you know I say I say leave PC building to the professionals no go go go to the origin PC or Puget or whatever ya feel says free ship discount code isn't valid for the admins in your cart yes it's not valid for the elemental bundle so you might have to get a water bottle or stealth ID or whatever the case may be graphics here we are we went so tack we went with a 1650 super it's a great budget card for the money just requires a 6-pin connector it's super small so if you don't have a large case like this one I guess yeah calling this a large case is sort of an overstatement but it is a it is a em ATX case but if you have even like an ITX case or like a super compact one you can fit this thing in no problem it's a pretty solid cooler for for an entry entry level you know what I would consider to be like entry level but still performance like still gaming all right time to plug our graphics card into the motherboard so I'm just gonna line up our top piece Express 200 I did the thing I have suddenly popped out one that I don't need and now it's just gonna be like a gaping hole in the back of the computer womp-womp-womp water that's a shame is that uh is that like trombone sound like copyright like are you allowed to do that okay I know you never well thanks David I'm sure glad David the authority on like what series of tones you're allowed to to play and which ones you're not just as long as you don't make that sound and then say let's get ready to blank okay are you allowed to say the words as long as you don't say it in like his trademark tone of voice I actually I actually don't know how it works if I was smart I would trademark like dropping stuff and then yeah and then people could like like even if they do it accidentally I could be like hey look prove it was accidental cuz you can't because people don't believe me when I say it's accidental so this is one of those funny ones apparently it is enough of a cost savings to take this piece here bend it out and then create a separate piece with one two three four oh man I'm not actually 100% sure how they do this one this must be stamped for this one right here rather than ten so one two three four bends and then have someone screw it in later it's like fascinating it's been actually a long time since I've sat down with a case product manager and been like hey you know why do you guys do it this way versus that way so compared to having a more complex back panel it's apparently cheaper to do it this way you see it on a lot of the budget cases alright let's go ahead and plug in our six pin connector to the back of the graphics card here we've got and a six plus two and then a dedicated six pin this kind of comes down aesthetically to what you prefer you know if you like to have the 6 pin plugged in here and then you like to Aikido manage the extra one sort of back here like that I generally prefer it that way versus if you want to have the other connector just kind of hang in here and plug in the the end one yeah I definitely like it this way better because then you can take a cable tie like this one LTT store comm and I just pop that on there and it kind of kind of hides a little bit I think makes it not look as bad available annoying Jenn white olt t store comm we didn't intend to create you as a meme it just sort of happened oh you know what I'm actually gonna grab on to the 24 pin with this and I'll just kind of tighten those up against each other I'm a firm believer that like tightly wrapped anything looks better than like nothing so you know hey there that's not bad right okay thank David can I get that's fair that's fair I deserve it I deserve it alright let's go ahead and take advantage of these cool cable tie loops that I pointed out before I wouldn't you know what be really cool I don't know how on earth we would coordinate this but like can you imagine doing a live stream like this except we pre announced ahead of time what the components are going to be so that people can buy them ahead of time and like we can actually all build the computer together so that is the problem because we actually did this once but in person so NCIX I think we did it twice not once we called it the PC building workshop or something like that and if you if you happened to be building a computer like at this time and you happen to be available on this day there was like it was either a small additional cost or it was you pay the assembly fee but we don't assemble it but you can attend this workshop where I would sit and like build a computer at the front of the room like a class and like show everyone and then go around and like help them with the weird idiosyncrasies of whatever hardware they had it was a ton of fun it was like actually a total blast it was kind of like a computer building party except I got paid to be there but like you said it's a lot of stars to align like you know everyone happens to need a computer and happens to be available on this day and happens to like want to do this even let's go ahead and pop the panel on not both panels that's bad jeebies we're just gonna do the one panel I should probably also pay a little bit of attention to chat what are the specs for this build we've got them linked in the video description on YouTube but it's a risin 330 100 we've got I believe it's 8 gigs of RAM 32 hundred words yeah 8 gigs of RAM we've got a 1650 Super as Rock em ATX board decent little board pretty inexpensive but not too many compromises it's not one of those ones where you're like oh yeah you know you've got to RAM slot some great you know no upgrade ability or whatever the case may be this is a cougar what is this thing mg 120 case we've got an EVGA they don't even have like a lineup for it as far as I can tell like it's not be orgy it's just EVGA 400 watt ok part number 100 - n 1 - 0 4 0 0 - l1 that's it it's as close to a generic power supply as EVGA is ever likely to make what else did we throw in here we've got an SSD that I creatively renamed so the link doesn't match the actual one that we put in but I don't recommend the one that we actually put in so we put in a link for one that's a little bit more sensible we threw in a 1 terabyte hard drive just in case you've got a big game library why install well just in case you've got a modest game library these days and you want to install you know 5 or 6 games yeah isn't Cod like over 200 gigs 170 there you go so you could install the latest Cod and then like doom eternal isn't doom eternal over a hundred gigs I think it might be so you can stall like latest Cod doom eternal and then like Battlefield yeah another really big one wherever deborah and i'm shells like 150 gigs isn't it yeah so you could install like half a dozen triple-a titles you know isn't that ridiculous I mean I love it give me gimme that visual fidelity for sure but I mean you know I still remember back when it felt crazy that a game came on five CDs far cry 1 baby I still have my far cry 1 CDs alright let's go ahead and fire this puppy up so what do you think first time post oh wow not too shabby it's almost like I've done this before well yeah but I've done this before enough times to know that actually is not not a guarantee that's gonna post the first time alright so all we're really gonna alter in here is loading our XMP profile ddr4 3,200 increasing our voltage a little bit tightening out the timings a little bit and hopefully that works one thing to note guys is with these be for 50 boards if you're using a third gen Rison there is a solid chance that because of limitations to how much data they can actually store on the board itself there's a strong possibility that you'll have to put a first or second generation chip in flash the BIOS for third gen compatibility and then put your third gen chip in now we obviously did that preparation ahead of time but you can't take that for granted and we made it to the desktop all right so what shall we do first just like a good old Cinebench r20 make sure everything's working what do you think mm we need a network connection oh boy uh hold on a second uh yeah sure I will take that do you remember which one is hooked up I don't think both of them are well we'll find out soon enough in the meantime we can start us in a bench run nice right it is still so impressive to me how much CPU you can get for like a hundred over dollars like remember when we were stuck with high-end quad cores do you remember that because I remember that yeah it wasn't it weren't actually even that long ago unfortunately okay go ahead and grab that for a second all right awesome whoops so yeah okay 2,300 points yeah that's not a ton but if you look at what its comparable to like we're right up there as we said in our review we're right up there with a 7700 K which not that long ago was considered you know overclockable enthusiast gaming processor so personally I'm pretty happy with the improvement all right so here in a fairly demanding scenario we're looking at anywhere from 75 to 85 FPS this is on high and I remember when you could only turn on like soft shadows and stuff like this on super super high-end Hardware where your graphics card alone cost 500 plus dollars meanwhile they got this like tiny penny little thing over here spitting out 60 plus FPS and a game looking like this it's amazing we managed over 60 fps in a couple year old but still triple-a title for 500 ish US dollars remember guys I know it's over 500 but you don't strictly speaking need the hard drive unless you want to play like very modern very triple-a games with gigantic installers thanks for watching and oh yes of course the video is also brought to you by our sponsor private Internet access is a tool that masks your IP address and encrypt traffic to and from your devices combined with private browsing tools and Safe Browsing best practices it can even make savvy websites think that you are somewhere else P ia offers reliable service with over 3000 servers in more than 30 countries and they've got no bandwidth caps on their service you can configure your encryption the internet kill switch prevent it from leaking if you're involuntarily disconnected and Mace will block requests to no malware and tracking domains altogether so why wait try it out risk-free with their 30-day money-back guarantee we've got clients for Windows Mac OS Android iOS and Linux and you can connect up to 10 devices at once on a single 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