Common PC mistakes to avoid!

hey what's going on guys js2sense here and if you can't tell by this table of parts and stuff in front of me today we're going to talk about some of the beginner mistakes people make I know I've made this video before in the past but with a new generation stuff out and a lot of people building their first computers finally I figured it was time for a refresher to kind of get some of the new confused confusion in this business out of the way so that you guys will build your computer and then go ah nzxt's build is a quick and easy way to get a new gaming computer build a gaming PC on your budget using the built-in configurator and see exactly how your favorite games will perform want to build your own PC but still have the NZXT piece of Mind warranty then the new BLD build it yourself kit has what you want buy it and build it yourself and NZXT has you covered to get started configuring or building your next gaming PC visit the build Link in the description below so there's a lot of new parts available on the market um obviously there's New Gen graphics cards which isn't really that important I mean PCI Express sockets the same the pcie Gen 1 all the way up through Gen 5 now that's that's not the kind of stuff I'm talking about I'm talking about how easy it is now to accidentally uh mismatch your CPU and your platform or are mismatching your RAM or setting your RAM up so that your PC won't actually boot um little things like that all the way down to just some basic Builder mistakes that you may not even know or mistakes until this video points it out and you look at your system and you go huh yeah we've all done that we've all been there and I've been building computers for 30 years now over 30 years now and it's one of those things where you still make these kinds of mistakes far into like building experience so I figured might as well at least give you guys a little bit of an opportunity to avoid these experiences by knowing what they are before you ever experience them so first and foremost let's go ahead and start with some of the confusion um and things to think about regarding the newest platforms from both Intel and AMD Intel uh has a a brand new socket type called LGA 1700 if you ever wonder what that number means it's basically just the number of pins it's just that simple but LGA 1700 is kind of confusing in the sense that some motherboards will only work with 1700 brackets now these brackets are going to be whether they're aios or air coolers they have to be able to attach through the motherboard in some way so this right here is an Asus tough z690 plus Wi-Fi D4 motherboard couple things to think about with that naming one Intel currently has both for 12th Jan and 13th gen CPUs of availability to use ddr4 or ddr5 so first and foremost it would be easy for you to accidentally get ddr5 because you're like oh it's a new platform it uses ddr5 and then accidentally pair it with a ddr4 motherboard meaning you'll either have to change your motherboard or your RAM depending on the ram that you got both could be about the same price so be mindful of your particular motherboard that you're using for Intel's 12th and 13s gen because of the fact that they are compatible with both but you have to buy the motherboard that's designed for both this exact motherboard the tough is available in a D4 and a D5 D4 for ddr4 and D5 for ddr5 but let's talk about the cooler here for a second because the CPU socket is bigger and it uses LGA 1700 you're going to need a compatible LGA 1700 cooler now usually the only thing that denotes whether or not a cooler is going to be compatible with the new Intel sockets and there's been a lot of sockets over the years is basically the standoff spacing see Intel doesn't come with any sort of back plate mounted to their CPU there's some tape on there that got stuck from this but anyway it is intended for the cooler to provide its own backplate mounting solution so what that means is with the additional width and 1700 being a bigger socket means the square and it is a perfect square by the way versus AMD has always been more of a rectangle the spacing of the holes gets wider so what that means is that if you're going to use a bracket that's compatible with 1700 it must come with the appropriate 1700 bracket for your cooler most coolers today depending on Overstock that's still sitting on shelves from prior to 12th gen even launching will include a 1700 bracket or at the very least you can contact the manufacturer if it does not have one and request one most of the time they'll provide one for free or you can buy one on Amazon usually they're like 10 bucks depending on the manufacturer but one you may not even need that and the reason why I say that is if you take a look at the mounting holes on the motherboard you'll notice on the 1700 motherboards the LGA 1700 boards 12th gen 13th gen you might see this kind of a double hole looks like a number eight where there's two holes drilled on there and the reason for that is it's compatible with both 1700 brackets and pre 1700 brackets meaning these motherboards that have the double holes like this will work with just about any of the Intel coolers in the last like 10 years so that's something to keep in mind most Intel brackets that you'll find now are adjustable like this guy where you can actually just push the bracket out to match where it is supposed to line up this particular one right here supports lga775 115x it was going to call 11 5x's because there was a 1155 and 1156 and then uh 1366. but as you saw it also works geez that tape is very sticky it also works on the LGA 1700 board because the board supports the older cooler brackets not the other way around so sort of another mention here though when it comes to amd's new am5 motherboard and this is gonna probably end up throwing out my shoulder this board is so heavy this is a Crosshair extreme AMD am5 motherboard it is the first motherboard from AMD in a long time to be LGA which is land grid array or means the pins are on the motherboard not on the CPU which are typical typically used to seeing now these motherboards were designed with backwards compatibility in mind sort of like the motherboard I just showed for Intel the difference being if you have to use a cooler that requires the removal of the AMD backplate to use the Cooler's own backplate it will not work let me repeat that this back plate piece right here on the back of the am5 motherboard on many AMD motherboards in the past am4 am3a and three plus would require you especially water blocks and such would require you to remove the back plate the four screws that are on there and then these two plastic retention clips that are on here would remove and you'd use their back plate and pass-through screws and you would just get rid of the Andy mounting system altogether that is not possible with am5 because these four screws on the inside of the back bracket are what's actually holding down the LGA mounting system so if you're cooler says you know am4 and requires that you require remove the back plate it will not be compatible and that's something that was causing a lot of confusion when am5 was New because AMD said it's compatible with am4 coolers and that's only true if they use the amd's clip mounting system which is what's pre-installed on there one thing to keep in mind though is the am5 only uses ddr5 so don't make that mistake of thinking that you can upgrade from ddr4 to a new platform and not get new memory am5 ddr5 just match the fives and you're good to go our momentum regarding cooler compatibility though another common mistake people will make is this one it'd be very difficult to make this is the chromax air cooler from noctua if it has a little plastic cover like this and has pre-installed thermal paste you're probably going to be fine but if it's the kind of cooler that wants you to install the thermal paste that comes separately and it doesn't have a plastic piece it might have a piece of clear plastic on the base of the cooler make sure you peel that off usually it will say remove before use it's still easy to install it without removing 30 plus years and I've still done it a handful of times just in the last few years alone remove the plastic before you install it that plastic makes a great insulator not allowing heat to transfer to the block from the CPU and your CPU will run and it will turn on but it will instantly throttle and you'll just be like why is my computer running like that until you could take it off and then you go oh now moving on to Ram this is where things are becoming much more picky and I don't mean picky as in like people are picky I think most people would just be happy using anything that works these days ddr4 and ddr5 especially as we move on to ddr5 is extremely extremely picky with qvl now qvl is basically the list that says this Ram with this speed and these timings is compatible with this motherboard and compatible with this CPU to be able to run in their optimized speeds remember the speed that is printed on the ram whether it be ddr2 DDR3 ddr4 maybe not ddr2 but anyway DDR3 four and five the XMP or the Expo that they call it now on AMD which was docp in the past but now it's called Expo these are actually overclocks these are overclocked timing they are tighter timings and overclocked frequencies that are designed uh above and beyond the base spec of where Ram operates ddr5's base speed is 4 thousand megahertz ddr4's base speed was 2133 and then it became like 2400 as it matured if you had like a 3600 megahertz stick of RAM and you just put it in your system and don't touch it it's going to run at the 2133 or ddr5 is going to run at either 4000 or 4800 depending on the motherboard itself keep in mind the moment you push enable Expo or enable XMP it is going to be applying an overclock to the memory controller to run the speeds that are listed what that means is a couple of things one it may not even be stable it may not run that is dependent on your cpu's silicon lottery winnings and the memory controller itself and the listed qvl compatibility between your particular sticks of RAM and the motherboard so it's very important to always cross-reference the part numbers of the ram you're trying to use with the motherboard you're picking to one make sure that the motherboard has bios support for that particular Ram set if you're choosing a ddr4 build today it's very unlikely that it's going to be a problem because we've had so many bios revisions with motherboards to create a vast supply of compatibility now with different RAM ddr5 on the other hand is still building out that list you'll find that motherboards that run ddr5 5 are getting nearly monthly updates these days to support Ram as it comes out because as the ram gets faster it has to be supported now a couple things that qvl will also teach you is not just what speed RAM and what capacity of RAM is going to be supported because believe it or not the capacity itself is also a limiting factor on compatibility the more RAM the faster it goes the more hard it is on the memory controller now one of the things that you'll find out too is if you were running a dual Channel motherboard which is pretty much any motherboard these days with the exception of anything xeon-based or threadripper based it's going to be two channels Channel a channel B just because there's four sticks of RAM on the motherboard does not mean it's a four Channel Ram or four Channel motherboard a lot of people get that confused it just means there's two sticks per channel so you have Channel A1 and B1 and channel A2 and B2 so what a lot of folks will do is sometimes accidentally install the RAM sticks next to each other instead of leaving a space in between them if you don't reference your motherboard manual you might be sending this into single Channel mode which is actually giving half of the memory bandwidth available to the CPU which is going to affect everything with your computer if if you're one of those people right now that look at your RAM sticks and you see two next to each other and two empty you're running yourself in single Channel mode right now if you were to pause this video turn off your system switch one of these sticks to another Channel where there's a gap in between doesn't even matter if it's the two outside or the two inside because it can run in Channel A1 or Channel A2 it'll be fine you would see an instant increase in peppiness of your system responsiveness app loading times everything would get better a lot I see this all the time in our reactivity stuff as I see sticks of ram next to each other like this and it's like stop doing that um the other thing is if you want to occupy all four sticks of ram because you want Max Capacity you may not even be able to activate your XMP or your XPO at all there's a lot of ram compatibility issues when it comes to maximizing all four sticks and running XMP as the memory gets faster and faster again qvl will tell you everything that you need to know about whether or not you're wasting your money you'd have to decide too does your particular use case of your system deem that having maximum storage is more important than maximum speed then you can probably occupy all four and it'll work fine again verify with qvl some motherboards if you occupy all four it won't even boot which leaves you going why the hell are there four sticks there's slots available anyway we've experienced that where you put four sticks in it doesn't even turn on but the other thing too is if you want to occupy all four and you find that like okay qvl says I can run all four sticks you'd be surprised too that sometimes your system will not run if you run two sets of dual sticks of ram that are identical same part numbers same speeds same timings but they're two separate kits of two sticks putting them together oftentimes will not run it's again qvl will tell you all of this so it's a specifically XMP and Expo may not run it's it is what it is it's been this way now since ddr4 it's been this way always but ddr4 as the speeds got faster it really started showing and ddr5 with them being like ragged Edge speeds from day one um you'll find that it's just running four sticks more often than not is not the right way to go in fact it's why a lot of high-end motherboards have started only using two sticks one stick per Channel especially if it's an overclocking motherboard because that's how you get the max stability um obviously double check too that your matching ddr4 and four and five and five when it comes to your motherboards and stuff as I've already mentioned the notch itself is different double check that Notch is lining up it's harder on ddr4 than ddr5 ddr4 5 it's nearly centered so you might think you're lined up and it's not ddr4 it's much more off-centered double check that before you go just shoving it down you don't want to be this guy foreign let's move on to Storage storage is simpler these days than it used to be there's a lot of storage options I mean you've got so many Brands out there now with all different types of nvme drives you got SATA ssds and we still have obviously our hard drives a lot of folks out there that still just I'm dude no reliable spinning drive and then just spit on that new stuff I'm sorry if you feel that way someday you'll come around anyway drives especially ssds nvmes and two and a half inch data drives have really dropped in price and vmes are a lot more affordable than they've ever been but yes they are still somewhat expensive when you're installing Windows you disconnect the drive you don't want Windows to be on this isn't so much of a problem if you're running different size drives and you're smart enough to remember what size Drive is what for instance I have a 500 gigabyte nvme SSD right here this is pretty small by today's standards and also pretty affordable you could probably get this drive for like 35 bucks which would make an amazing Windows drive an SSD especially in nvme Drive makes an amazing Windows drive you know it doesn't make amazing Windows drives these days spinning platter drives now let's this is a one terabyte Toshiba right yeah just a high performance p300 super basic Drive um if these were both one terabyte drives though after the partition space and whatnot they might both show up as like 980 gigabyte or 968 gigabyte drives whatever it ends up being you get into the windows installer and you're just like oh whatever you just click the top one you might accidentally be installing Windows on your spinning drive but that would have been a problem if it wasn't plugged in at the time of installing Windows so what I do is if I have multiples of the same size Drive in there and they're all nvme I don't personally care because of the fact that I'm not going to go in and unplug my nvme's install Windows and then plug my nvmes back in especially if there's a graphics card in the way or it's vertical mounted and rigid tube whatever nvme's as long as it ends up on one past that I don't really care but if I have mixed drives like Skunk Works was I had just a weird pattern of drives all over the place and when you go to install Windows you'd see like 92 drives showing up and a lot of them were the same size so I really had to get used to unplugging the drives I didn't want windows on also too sometimes windows will put the bootloader on one drive and then the drive Windows OS on another Drive which that if you ever take the bootload or drive out and then the OS won't post anymore it's it's weird so a lot less of an issue today as long as you keep drive or keep track of which drives or which kind of an honorable mention there something that is still throws a lot of people off today all right let's go and talk about power supplies for a second here this is another one where I I see a lot of people really just had the wrong mentality of a power supply there are so many more things to consider in a power supply than its wattage power supplies are not created equal it's the whole reason why the 80 plus thing even came about and it wasn't just 80 plus doesn't tell you just about the efficiency of the power supply it tells you about the quality of the parts inside the power supply because there's a reason why those efficiency ratings go up the quality of parts go up with it so what I have right here is just a basic 80 plus 500 EVGA it's like there's it's just 80 plus it's like not even like 80 plus silver which is or even bronze which used to be like the start it's just it barely makes the 80 plus now there's nothing wrong with this power supply in fact we use it as our test power supply quite often but more often than not you know you're going to be giving up things like modularity as you can see this is a non-modular power supply as you can see it's ketchup and mustard cables with like a transparent non-fine mesh it's just ugly but because it's 80 plus I would trust this with anything that needs up to 500 watts but I wouldn't trust it if you were on the edge and the reason for that is a lot of power supplies can provide power beyond its rated spec that it's showing if the quality is there but you should never expect your system so that you're on the edge of the supplied rating of the power supplier they see advertised rating of the power supply so for instance this is an RM 850x from Corsair I can't remember what the 80 plus on this one is I think I want to say it's gold I believe it's gold you can often find the same power supply in multiple ratings not so much these days almost everything is gold now when you see a bronze it's really rare almost everything's gold and platinum now but what you get was something like a higher end power supply is not just a higher wattage you get the modularity of being able to unplug the cables that you don't want you get individually sleeved cables as like just that's the way that they came at least from Corsair um and just overall the build quality is better fortunately power supplies are getting smaller you can get a power supply this size that's 1200 watts now whereas this is an 850 look how much longer it is the longer power supplies take up more room in the bottom of your case uh which means less room for cable management and just less room for things and it's like you know you should never spec your system for the minimum because of the fact that you give yourself zero expandability in the future and power supplies are something that can live on for a long long time in your system through multiple iterations multiple upgrades as long as you don't spec it too small let the 30 series and 40 series be a prime example 250 Watts for graphics cards was the norm for the longest time then came 30 series with the 320 watt 3080 and the 350 watt 30 90. then came the 450 watt 40 90 Tia or 3090 TI and the 450 watt 40 90 which can easily pull over 500 watts if you even start to play with the slide writers whatsoever 500 watt power supply would have been enough for what 250 watt graphics cards and 85 to 90 watt CPUs needed back in the day this clearly wouldn't be enough to be able to run something like an RTX 4080 or 4090 in the future if you were trying to carry that power supply over which means you'd have to upgrade your power supply now speaking of power supplies and I talked about Cable Management momentarily one thing I highly recommend and I've I've taken a lot of people on their first PC building experience I don't mean those of you watching that are like hey I built my first PC because I've watched your videos no I mean people that I've literally brought here never made videos about and I'm like hey you want to build yourself a computer come to my shop we'll do it I'll help you learn we'll have a great time I see it a lot people will plug their cables in and then start yanking on the cables to pull them tight and zip tie and cable manage the problem with that is you start putting a lot of pressure on the headers the 24 pin header the eight pin EPS header fan headers RGB headers if plugged in especially the USB 3.0 or USB 2.0 headers those are fine cables on the 2.0 you could easily rip those out and you start putting all kinds of unnecessary tension on those headers and you could potentially Bend or break off or at the very least partially unplug and then you're troubleshooting your system going why are certain things not working why is my power button not working well because You Yank the front panel connector so hard you pull them off then you're going through and doing a lot of troubleshooting and if you've zip tied everything down like it was some sort of a horror movie like I do in my builds then you're having to undo 6200 zip ties just to be able to plug back in your front panel button so things that you should keep in mind don't bundle it too tight don't Yank on it too hard to try and get everything cable managed because you need to think about serviceability in the future when it comes time to unplug things if you're gonna need to change out a component you need to troubleshoot if you're trying to clean the system or do any sort of deep cleaning having a little bit of slack on all the cables will still look fine but it will allow you to be able to unplug cables when necessary and not sit there and and potentially cause damage to your headers on your motherboard because if you ever try and price out how much it costs to get a header fixed or replaced bycenium to someone like Lewis Rossman or Chris fix or whoever is is repairing these systems it's not super cheap not to mention down you have to mail it you have to hope it doesn't get lost in the mail but doesn't get damaged in the mail and then hope that they can even fix it that you didn't like rip pads off with it like I would do if I was trying to fix it don't bundle it too tight okay it's not like a man bun you don't have to yank it super hard although man buns shouldn't exist anyway comment down below if you have a man bun and you're triggered now let's talk about fans here for a second fans are not hard to understand I see a lot of people that still like which way does the fan go I don't know that's just which way you know and it's not difficult most fans will put a header or or at least an arrow on the cage that shows one the direction of airflow and then two the direction of this the fan spinning 99 times out of 100 the air is gonna flow from the open side of the fan which means the side that does not have the Hub support stilts through those supports okay that means it's going to go from the open side of the fan out the cage side of the fan 99 out of 100. every now and then you'll find some fans like we showed with the Monte Sky 2 case that have what's called a reverse fan which means it's actually backwards it's pulling air through the cage and out the other direction that exists simply because of the fact of the side that the RGB ring is on they make it so that it's always facing the interior of the case so you can see it those are very one-off in fact of all the years I've been doing YouTube those are the first fans I've seen listed as reverse I didn't know what the heck it meant until we looked into it and then we realized what it was but I see it all the time where folks will have like on the front of their case it's like this or it's like one intake one exhaust because they just mounted it up and didn't think about it I myself have done it a million times where like usually it's the rear fan where I'm just like ah crap but I'm doing it and turning it around and then getting adjusted so the cables on the right side and all that but fans don't have to be difficult the front of your case should almost always be intakes the top of your case should almost always be exhaust by the way it's called exhaust not outtake an outtake is when I say something stupid and then filled up intakes on the front exhaust on the top exhaust on the back when it comes to the amount of fans we always prefer positive pressure around here but modern cases have so much ventilation these days it's almost always going to be neutral pressure in some way anyway if you have more intakes then you do exhaust that's positive pressure which is fine it helps with dust if you have more exhaust and you do intakes it'll start pulling in air through gaps and other ventilation and such but most cases have a mesh on most of those intakes and stuff anyway so there you go those are some of my 2023 don't make these mistakes building tips for you guys this is Roy look there you we could make hundreds of these hundreds of things that you shouldn't do and this is where you should sound off in the comments below what is your number one building mistake that you learned the hard way that you also think that uh people could learn from I think an honorable mention should be before any of this bench test your stuff put your CPU in your motherboard put your cooler on it put your RAM on it put your power supply in it put your graphics card on it set it on the motherboard box plug in the monitor do you get an image does it post that's the first thing you should do before you build your system because if you need a Motherboard BIOS update most motherboards have bios flashback features and stuff built into them now but at least you know it works before you get it in your case and if it doesn't work after you get it in your case you start looking for pinched wires or unplugged stuff so at least you know it's not bad componentry all right guys sound off with your best advice you have for a beginning builder of don't let this happen to you and also don't let not being subscribed happen to you because I don't know that's just what you're supposed to say as a YouTuber subscribe and like and all that stuff

Channel: JayzTwoCents

Views: 185,556

Keywords: pc, building, mistakes, pc building mistakes, how to build a computer, how to build a pc, how to build a gaming pc, how to build a gaming computer, gaming computer, gaming, pc gaming, pc repair, pc tips, pc building tips

Id: C55X3sw1x40

Length: 25min 56sec (1556 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 28 2023