Common PC Building Mistakes that Beginners Make!

so pc popularity is at its highest i feel that it's ever been at least as long as i've been doing this channel so i figured why not make an kind of a high level don't make these beginner builder mistakes we've done this video before however people continue to make the mistakes so we're going to continue to make the videos so whether you're a beginner or a veteran builder you are a master of the pc master race you should still watch this video because you probably have some insight and things that you could share down in the comments below if we've missed something that you think is a blaring obvious that people do on accident that maybe could save people some headaches in the future so these are in no particular order they're just things that we continue to see over and over that people tend to sort of repeat especially if it's their first time or easy things to overlook because you're so excited you're building your new computer you tore it all out of the box you can't wait to start watching those adult videos i mean play video games and so you are just going to build it as fast as you can and you overlook some things so starting off here let's go ahead and start with the motherboard one of the first things that we tell people to do is to build everything that you can on your motherboard before you put it in your case uh you'd be surprised even though a lot of cases may look like they have plenty of room once you get it down in there you've got it kind of scooted up against your i o in the back you've got the top piece here it starts to get hard to get screws in their place to mount it down to mount your cpu um your ram and all that sort of stuff so we like to build as much as we can on the table before we even start uh trying to put things inside your system so things that you can install on your motherboard before you ever get it inside of your case the cpu obviously amd cpus are pretty easy to line up oh a little side tip don't get thermal paste in your socket i mean this one still works but i didn't do that but in my opinion amd has the easiest cpu to install because of the fact that the pins are located on the cpu so you can get it lined up and pushed in intel cpu sockets are the ones that tend to freak people out because they're much more delicate because they're lga the pins are actually on the motherboard not on the cpu so installing your cpu first is usually the very first thing we'll do other things that you can add is going to be the ram you can get the ram in here nice and easily we'll talk about ram channels in a second here but other things that you can install that are now more common these days which weren't necessarily in the past are going to be your m.2 drive so if you're running nvme or m.2 ssds installing them when they're outside of the case is going to be a lot easier especially if your case is upright you know how to lay flat because they're usually located underneath these metal covers this particular board does also have an exposed one right here that doesn't have a cover because this is a strix board it's more of their mid-range line a lot of the boards these days though do have covers on top of them because they will double as a heat sink with a little thermal pad under there so just getting that installed especially with how small the little retention screws are for holding down m.2 drives a heck of a lot easier if you can just get in close to it and see all aspects of it get it well lit then trying to do it inside of a dark case even if it's a a white case once you start leaning and hovering over it you create shadows it's hard to see just a simple build easy technique now your cooler may be something that you can install outside of the case but that's going to depend on the size of the cooler so what we have here is just a basic noctua tower it's not a double tower like a dh14 or whatever the number is on that so depending on your particular cooler you could probably install it without the fans and still be able to have access to the screws the problem is if you're running one of those double giant towers uh which will actually go like this way they might make the upper screws up here really hard to access so depending on the type of case you have whether or not it has a motherboard cut out on the back a big hole in the motherboard tray so you can access the retention on the back side you may be able to get away with installing it first just check for clearance kind of do a mock-up where you just sort of rest it on top and see can i even get to these screws if the answer is no then you have to install that once it's inside your case so this particular motherboard has four ram slots don't confuse this with four ram channels mainstream motherboards whether it be ryzen non-thread ripper from amd or anything non-x 299 or whatever future x platforms or previous x99 platforms that exist for intel are all going to be dual channel that just simply means there's channel a and channel b which just gives you a dual channels to pull from for the cpu to store data into the memory one of the mistakes people tend to make is they will take their cpu or their ram sticks their cpu sticks and then they will mount them like this right next to each other which will work and the system will boot however you've just occupied one channel with two sticks of ram so you'll see all 16 gigs or 32 gigs or eight gigs or whatever and it will work however you won't realize you're leaving a ton of cpu performance on the table because you're forcing single channel you've got only channel a or only channel b occupied so what you'll want to do is definitely consult your manual to figure out which is the appropriate occupation or occupation the occupation here is memory remember it no to occupy which slots to make sure that you're getting dual channel now you'll also see on some motherboards there's going to be ram sticks on one side of the cpu and ram 6 on the other side of the cpu those are 99 of the time going to be quad channel and then the only time you would actually see anything higher than that it's usually in server grade stuff and it could be six channel eight channel whatever it may be and so you'll want to consult your manual to make sure that you're putting them in the right order every single motherboard manual will have a page dedicated to manual or memory slots telling you which to occupy based on the number of sticks that you have a good rule of thumb is leaving space in between starting on the very outside is going to get you dual channel operations so in this instance here we're occupying because we only have two sticks of ram the outside channel skipping a dim and then the next channel and then having an empty channel next to the cpu this will almost every time give you dual channel operation so right now if you've built a system recently and you don't remember whether or not you looked that up look inside your system are they next to each other with two empty slots on the other side or are they alternating space like that comment down below if you just realized you put it in single channel if you're installing a custom water loop with a custom block or even an air cooling tower like this a lot of times if they don't come with pre-applied paste they'll come with a pre-applied plastic protector to keep this area as smooth as possible don't make the mistake like i have a thousand times as many times i build computers i still make the stupid mistake of forgetting to remove the clear plastic label a lot of times now they'll have writing on there that says remove before use the problem is the cooler spends a lot of its time like this and you don't see the bottom and you're super excited you put your thermal face down and you smoosh it on there and you get it installed you fire up your system you're like why is it overheating and then you go crap i forgot to remove my clear plastic it's like a like a vinyl almost like just like a like a screen protector how they used to be rubber and plastic not glass like they are today if you've built yourself a rigid tube build and you've filled it all up and stuff then you're really going to hate yourself because now you got to drain it pull the pipes off get the block off just to go peel the plastic and go i'm an idiot so i've done it you shouldn't now speaking of cooler there's something else you need to keep in mind and that is going to be the orientation versus your ram sticks so if i was to in orient orientate my cooler like this that doesn't work because we're actually impacting the ram and remember because we talked about ram channels we don't actually have a stick right here if we were running all four sticks we even have less room to get our cpu to clear you can see right there it would not allow for the other ram stick to fit whatsoever so you're going to want to make sure that your cooler is installed in a way that's going to allow you to be able to have the maximum clearance for your memory now a lot of coolers are designed to sit a little higher and to overhang on top of the ram allowing for some ram cooling because some of the air will make its way down but that typically makes for really tall coolers which means you're going to want to make sure that they're also going to fit inside of your case that is another thing i've seen people comment about is they get their cpu cooler they get it installed they get their motherboard in and then they can't get their side panel back on because they didn't account for the tower height or the cooler height now not allowing them to be able to fit their side panel on but that's something you're going to want to keep in mind all coolers are usually able to be oriented in 90 degree increments that way you can make it fit the way that you want typically if you're running a motherboard in a traditional orientation like this people will say you should run it facing up because heat rises but it doesn't really work that way in a vapor chamber the heat is always going to make its way from the hottest point to the coolest point so it's always going to flow through the tower as long as you have air flow going through the tower convection isn't something you need to worry about so something like this would make the most sense because it will clear your ram it will clear your heatsinks at the top and you can have a rear fan right here by your motherboard exhausting the hot air that's coming through the cooler making you have a nice efficient airflow so keep in mind check the manual check your cpu cooler specs before you even buy it to see if the maximum height is something that your case will allow for now you might have noticed we got a little bit of a flow going here and talking about things in the order which we also build them speaking of flow let's talk about fan flow this is one of those things that might seem super obvious to many people out there but to anyone that's never even held a pc fan might look at this and go which way does the air go and you're turning the blade and you're like wait does it sweep does it does it scoop the easiest way to remember is airflow always flows from the non-caged side to the caged side and when i say cage i mean this this is these are the pieces that hold the hub in place that turns that holds the motor that turns the blades so it's always going to flow out from the side that has the visible hub and the suspension cage right here a lot of times fans will now mark on them this particular fan doesn't they'll have little arrows showing you one arrow showing the direction the fan blade turns and another arrow showing that the way that the air goes so that's something to keep in mind because if you take your cooler and you install it on your motherboard like this but then you have the air going that way and then you have a fan here pulling air that way you're creating this crazy air divide and you're not having a nice smooth single direction of airflow so you would want to install a push fan on your tower now we're talking about fans because airflow is very important the last thing you want to do is create all kinds of crazy turbulence in your case because the most efficient cooling that you're going to get out of your case is by having all intakes on one side moving the same direction all exhausts on the opposite side moving the other direction promoting case air flow you want air flow over all the components you want air moving over the ram over the motherboard over the heat sinks through the cooler and out of the case as fast as possible the fastest most efficient exchange of air inside the chassis or the time that that volume of air is exchanged with fresh air is going to give you your best cooling results another mistake i see people make with fans is they'll put it on pool config on the back side and oftentimes that's because they didn't really consider the clearance like i said with memory so instead of having a push fan pushing air through your heat sink they'll go with a pool fan going i got more room over here the problem is airflow always flows from least resistance so that means it's going to pull in a lot of air through the sides and not really promote air coming from the major surface area on the back side we have tested this extensively i have seen up to 10 degrees celsius drop by moving from pool config on an air cooler to push config push is pulling air from the open side of the fan and the air has nowhere to go but through all of the fins and the only way your air cooler is going to operate on its maximum efficiency is if all the fins have air flow over them any fins that are not getting optimal airflow are doing nothing and as such your cpu temperatures are going to suffer so remember air flows from the side with no cage out of the side with the cage and if you're running an air cooler and you only have one fan push is the only config now the exception to that rule is if we're talking about radiators radiators don't care where the air comes from as long as air is flowing over it and the thing with the radiator is the fact that because it does actually seal push config versus pull config has very little difference in terms of its actual cooling performance there's one to two c difference there that you might be able to account for depending on the use case scenario the most important part though is making sure that your aio or your radiator for a closed loop doesn't matter is exhausting air in the right direction if you have it mounted to the top of your case whether it's pulling air through or pushing air through you want to make sure that you're pushing it towards the outside of the chassis i've seen people go well i want to pull cool air from the top of the case down through the problem with that is you really are forcing and working against convection now fans can overpower convection convection is the natural rising of heat now fans can any fan speed whatsoever can naturally overcome the force of convection convection is a very weak force but it is a natural force so if you have your fans pushing it out then you're just allowing the heat that does make it through the rad to just radiate away from the case when you're pushing air down through the rad it's now made that heat go into the chassis and it's got to go somewhere usually you only have one exhaust fan in the back so now you're asking three fans worth of air coming down into the case to be exhausted by one which could lead to a little bit of a heat soak situation and just a non-efficient situation we've we've tested this before it only makes a difference usually if you're dealing with very hot cpu temperatures causing enough heat soak to actually soak the chassis but if you've got a cpu under partial load and a gpu creating a lot of heat something like a unicorn of an rtx 3080 you're asking an awful lot of one chassis fan in the back of your case to exhaust a lot of heat when you could just have it naturally pulling heat out the top you can have natural convection happening here as well as assisted with the fans and now you've got one two three four fans removing heat from your chassis so it should be pretty obvious to you which is the better choice when it comes to fan direction and orientation now here's another common mistake and i'm sure that someone watching this video right now has experienced this and maybe recently given how many systems people have built lately whether they are with the latest gen graphics card or not what we're about to talk about in terms of size of the card applies to every single generation cards have ever existed and that is making sure that your graphics card is going to fit in your case there's a lot of things to consider with your graphics card there's not just the height at which how far does it stand up off the motherboard towards the chassis or the the side panel of the chassis usually like this very similar to what we talked about with the heat sink right there is a height factor there that has to be considered graphics cards are getting more and more powerful as time goes on even the mid-range cards are starting to have the extra height and the extra length associated with them to fit more vrms and more memory and more chokes and stuff on the pcb the only way to fit more is to add more space and by doing that they have started making the cards taller and longer but height isn't the only thing you need to consider length is also important too because depending on the size of your chassis you might be forcing the card to butt up against the drive cage or it might be butting up against the front panel where your fans are going to go and you might only have a space to put your front your radiator in the front because it's a it's a 240 if it's something like an nzx th 10i elite case you only have room for one 120 on the top so it can't go there it has to go in the front if you've now forced yourself to have to put your aio in the front of the case like this we're not going to talk about orientation of the pump we've done a video on that already but if you have to put the in the front like that and you have it in a mid-tower case and uh-oh we can't fit anything there or you might be able to fit the radiator but no fans then that's something that you need to consider this is a mistake people make all the time they buy parts that look pretty and people recommend but they don't think about the way they all have to fit together and work as a system and if you don't think about the length of your graphics card then you're going to have a problem fortunately every single graphics card on the market does have a specification in terms of its maximum length and maximum height and every single case on the market does have a specification in there on maximum length and height graphics cards that will fit it'll usually tell you maximum length that will fit with front mount aio or front mount fan that's 25 millimeter difference there if you're wondering so those specifications are always listed the same thing can be said for your aio though or your your radiator or your water cooler whether it's a closed loop custom loop open loop doesn't matter loop loops if you go out and buy yourself a 360 io and your case only fits 240s well i sure hope you got a dremel because let's just say no matter how hard you try that ain't fitting in there same thing about the graphics card we said that ain't fitting in there without some cutting last but not least we are going to talk about the power cables for your graphics card this doesn't so much apply for mid-range cards i'm talking about any 60 series cards whether it be a 3060 a 2060 a 1060 and let's face it the older the card gets the less power requirement it really has because moore's law as we move forward things are getting more powerful whether or not we're still talking about the exact moore's law it is still an effect in that as you move forward things are more powerful and as such there's some things to consider here i see a lot of people doing this where they will take this pigtail connector and every power supply comes with them and i see people doing this because they think it's going to look extremely ugly if they run two cables and have pigtails just hanging off so what they do is they take the pigtails and they plug them in and i think i already cut yeah i did i think i cut those off oh well just ignore it this is a six pin it should be an eight pin uh they take it they plug it in like this and they go done here's the thing something like an rtx 3080 and yes this only applies to the latest cards however 250 watt cards like 2080 ti and titan x's and such also apply to this the spec states that an 8-pin pci express power connector is rated to 150 watts 75 watts of power for the graphics card also comes from the socket the thing it's plugged into on the pcie slot so 75 watts of power can be supplied by the pcie slot now these are maximum ratings this card is a 320 watt card so if we add 75 to 150 that gives us an effect of 225 watts of power to a 320 watt card so what's it gonna do remember power is not delivered power is drawn the card says give me this much power and the cable is going to provide it it's going to provide it and what you don't want to do is over stress your cables depending there's a lot of factors here that can play into this gauge of wire the type of insulation the rating of the power supply and it will usually not be a problem we've tested this with cards in the past where we just have a single daisy chain like this and try and see if there's any sort of performance loss or in or stability issues and usually the stability issues only pop up when we're doing things like overclocking to the ragged edge but what we're doing is we're effectively operating outside of the spec that is considered the official spec of the pcie and the actual cable now there's a lot of debate on whether or not that really matters lots of people right now are going i've been running like this for five years and i've never had a problem absolutely that's what i'm saying but i'm saying in terms of best practices this is not something that i recommend especially if you're running modern high horsepower gpus instead if you go with a power supply that has individual cables for your pcie you are now operating perfectly within spec we have 300 watts available to us with just these two cables with 75 available to us through the pcie slot giving us 375 watts of spec power on a car that only requires 320. i would like to see more people doing this than using the pigtails and i feel like the problem is the fact that manufacturers have started doing pigtails because it's cheaper for them it's cheaper to add three inches of wire and another plug than to give you another eight what is this 36 inches of wire or whatever because it's a kind of a cop-out thing so more manufacturers are now including individual cables like this without pigtails because they're recognizing that graphics cards and other things that use pcie power whether it be tec's or peltier coolers or sub-ambient cooling are also using pcie cables to draw power they're just 12 volt and ground in there it's only two there's only one voltage source and just grounds for it it's better for your components it's better for the power supply it's better for everything involved mini tip your graphics card is capable of running higher refresh rate than 60 hertz every graphics card is and if your panel is higher than 60 hertz it doesn't do it by default so right click on your desktop go to display settings go to advanced settings go to your resolution and then on the drop down choose your highest refresh rate so you can get that buttery smooth goodness so that is pretty much all i've got for you today but these are the really common mistakes i see people make as new builders i'm sure we've left something out in fact i'm positive of it so you veteran builders out there what do you think we missed what is your number one tip to new builders put it down in the comments below if you guys see a comment that you think is a good one that people should see thumbs it up so it ends up towards the top and as always guys give this video a thumbs up if it helps subscribe if you're new around here share with your friends that are talking about building computers we'd love to expand the community get as many people involved in pc as possible 2020 was a great year in the sense of people adopting pc for the first time and that have never even considered it before i think that's a great thing to see so let's all welcome them give them our best tips and as always we'll see you guys in the next one wow just step out stabby pokey parts on back but amd's got the easiest cpu to install in my opinion because so by this point your system this duel just went down it's time to lose weight ejecta the same can be said about the size the same size ai wow the same same steps

Channel: JayzTwoCents

Views: 1,579,535

Rating: 4.959424 out of 5

Keywords: pc building, pc building mistakes, pc mistakes, building mistakes, gaming pc, streaming pc, stream pc, beginner mistakes, pc mistakes beginners make, pc mistakes to avoid, pc, intel, amd, nvidia, 3080, 3090, gpu, video card, cpu cooler, how to install cpu cooler, how to install pc fan, pc fan, pc fans, pc fan direction, aio placement, how to install an aio, how to install a water cooler, how to install a pc water cooler

Id: -8LMML_EiMg

Length: 22min 29sec (1349 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 22 2021