How to Build a Gaming PC in 2020

hello and welcome to my 2020 gaming PC tutorial have you ever wanted to build a gaming PC well you've clicked on the right video so we're here in Tustin California at our wonderful sponsor micro centers location we're not only going to pick out all of our components for a build but I'm also going to show you step by step how to actually build it so even if you maybe built a computer before come along with us shall you shall we shell us and shall we build a gaming PC when choosing components for a build the place I always like to start with is the processor now this is going to dictate a lot of my other choices for picking different components from my build and really when it comes down to the processor there are a couple of major choices AMD and Intel now for this specific build I think going to be going with your isin 530 600 X so for this build I'm going to be using the assist tough beat 450 m+ now analysis a solid mid-range board which is Micro 8000 this is micro ATX the one I was looking for is our infirmary the thing I like about this is that not only is that a solid mid-range board that will fit in our case which I'll show you in a second but on top of that it will support our rising processor you have m2 slots basically a lot of the things that you would typically look for in a motherboard this has it and thanks to our wonderful sponsors at micro Center they have a combo deal so I get like 20 bucks off when I buy this as well as the riser processor together the next component I like to go for is the case now once you have your motherboard selected which in our case is a micro ATX board it means that you can pick what size case you want so there are a couple of options with our specific build we could go with a smaller micro ATX chassis however if this is your first time building a PC I actually do generally recommend going with a little bit of a larger chassis and because this is the H 5-10 means that we have a nice clean aesthetic it's all white it actually does a good job of kind of hiding your cable management so it's a little cleaner and you have a tempered glass panel not bad for 70 bucks I mean when it comes to building a gaming PC arguably the most important component is your graphics card this is really what powers all of your gaming performance it is a very crucial component now for this bill because we are aiming for something mid-range I think Andy's brand-new Radeon 5600 XT which I very conveniently have right in front of me is going to be perfect its $280 this should be plenty for well literally 80 1080p gaming you can think up and even 1440p if you really want to push once you have your graphics card selected and you make sure it will fit in your case which shouldn't be a problem unless you're working with a very very small case the next choice to have pick is your power supply so this is where something like this power specs hundred fifty watt unit is going to be perfect now it depends on your specific sort of system on what kind of wattage and there's actually a couple of features that you should pay attention to with the power supply so one of the which is the actual size so there are a couple of different models so there's SFX which is generally again for very small systems a smaller power supply generally a little bit more expensive or you can go with something like a full-size ATX supply which is what 95% of people are probably gonna wanna do now this is actually really solid option at only $60 you're not only getting an 80 plus bronze rating you always want to look for 80 plus on your power supply if it's anything lower than that you're likely getting something very low-quality and that's a little benefit with this is it as a semi modular supplying again to a little bit of that later but essentially it means that your cable management will be a lot cleaner because you only plug in the cables that you actually need as opposed to stuffing a giant pile of cables in some corner of your case when you're not needing them usually this is much better the next thing to look for is ran now this is an area which actually is fairly straightforward so first of all and you're les you're building a very budget system I would recommend at least going with 16 gigs of ram and beyond that if you're using an Intel processor the speed is not incredibly important ddr4 is pretty much all you need but if you are opting to go with an AMD horizon system like we are you do want to get something at least a little bit on the faster side of things not necessary it will definitely work with lower speed memory but you can get something like this right trident is Zinio it's 3600 megahertz it will significantly speed up your performance and importantly it also has RGB so there's that the next thing you'll need is your storage now this is totally up to you if you want to use an old-school mechanical hard drive by all means go for it you are going to get a lot of capacity but they're really slow and at this point I don't really recommend it unless you want it as a secondary drive you really should pick up some kind of SSD for your main boot drive they have a couple of options here they're the older school SATA style which is a bigger kind of SSDs you have to mount inside the case they're generally going to be a little bit cheaper but they are going to be slower however if you're building a new PC today pretty much every motherboard should support m2m vme standard and you'll find that over here Nellie is that a much smaller SSD but importantly is going to be significantly faster which is why we're going to be going with the inland premium SSD the 512 gig model which is only 67 99 is well really fast and really good for sixty seven ninety-nine so that's all you need to build the gaming PC itself however you're probably going to want a few extra things so first of all you're going to need peripherals so I've opted to go with HyperX stuff this time around so I have the pulse fire surge or GPM else I have the alloy origins keyboard as well as the cloud singer headset it's really speaking mouse and keyboard definitely needed and so it is time to actually build our PC so we are here at micro Center we're actually taking advantage of their workspace although realistically all you need is a decent-sized table and a very rigorous set of tools Phillips screwdriver literally so a big reason why I chose to go with this case is because it is so wide open on the inside so even though the motherboard won't even fill the entire thing up it's really easy to run cables behind the back of the motherboard and specifically our power supply has a nice little basement to live inside so the PC opened up our next step is to work with the power supply now this is the semi modular supply that I was talking about earlier and there's a good reason for that so you see all these extra cables that comes with now depending on your build you a actually want to use some or all of these but odds are you're probably not going to want to plug all of them in and if we don't have to say plug in five hard drives we can easily just not use that it will make our cable run a lot cleaner when you stole a power supply you need to pay attention to where the fan is so with a case like this we could actually theoretically put the fan up or down however because if you look on the bottom of our case we have a dust filter we should have the fan facing down so all this might look complicated and confusing however it's actually not that bad let me walk you through a couple of the power connectors that we're going to be using for this build so we look for the really big fat guy this is the 20+4 pin this goes into our motherboard every single PC built is going to need one of these right next up we have our CPU power so this is a 4 plus or pen most of the time you're going to want to put these together in this also to the motherboard what for some boards you may only need the four pin and that's why it breaks apart you can see it has a little clip on it so it only goes in one way if you're building a gaming PC the next connector is something you're almost certainly going to need and that is the PCI power now this is a six plus two pin so again depending on your graphics card it may need six it may need the full eight and in many cases you're actually going to need multiple feeds installing our power supply is very straightforward so there fan facing down what we do is literally just slide it into place if you look inside your power supply box you should find four tiny little screws now this is all we need to use actually mount the power supply so if you come a little bit closer here you can see it there are four different holes so I actually line it up line it up correctly there's a hole here here here and here and all you do is just screw it in now one tip this is good for PC building but it actually applies to a lot of things is to use a cross pattern on your screws so don't do it super tight and then instead of just sort of going around in a circle now that I've got a top left end we're next going to screw the bottom right the reason why I use a cross pattern when you're installing power supplies or really any kind of PC component is it applies even pressure so if you do like the left side first the entire supply might actually be slightly misaligned this is this you're just good general advice if you're putting on like a car tire you should use a cross pattern you shouldn't just go kind of like around in a circle before we start building with the motherboard let me give you a brief tour of what's going on here because at first glance well there's a lot of stuff so number one thing to pay attention to is this this is the CPU socket it is slightly different between AMD and Intel but regardless you essentially you just drop your CPU in here and I'll explain that in just a second now to the right of that are our memory channels so these are our den slots as the kids call in these days Ram dims so it's really straightforward open up the little slots and this is where we'll be installing our memory to the right of this is our power character so this is that 20+4 pin the really big guy that's why that gets plugged in and if you look on top of the CPU socket this is the 8 pin power supply so again from the actual power supply you're plugging two things in here the 20+4 pin and the eight pin that's it this is our PCI slot this is where you will install your graphics card now you actually have a couple of other slots and generally speaking you can use these for things such as if you're doing a really crazy build multiple graphics cards but usually you'll plug in things like you know a capture card or maybe like a Wi-Fi card or something in here the nice thing to pay attention to is our m2 slot now depending on the motherboard you may have multiple of these sometimes they're actually on the back or like underneath some kind of cover this one is thankfully right in the middle and this is where you will install your m2 nvme SSD the one thing to pay attention to though are these little screws right here so you'll see 22 42 22 16 20 to 80 and 20 to 110 now based on what size your SSD is it's almost always a 20 to 80 you'll want to plug in a screw or screw in a screw into one of these holes and that screw will come with the motherboard so that's the only thing that kind of gets a little confusing because you definitely need that screw to keep it in otherwise it falls out and then you don't have an SSD so the thing I want to focus on first is our processor Andy's actually done a good job recently of shipping pretty solid coolers in the box and especially considering that this entire set is not particularly expensive it actually makes a lot of sense for a semi budget build so you can see it's a fairly beefy he think now one thing I will say is on the bottom of any of these coolers Andy Intel whatever the case is they'll have pre applied thermal paste this is great we don't have to deal with any sort of tubes or whatever we can just drop this right on however don't touch this when it comes to a processor this is actually one of the more fragile components of the build so generally speaking grab it by the sides and do not under any circumstances touch these tiny little gold pins on the bottom and because this is an Andy processor it has a lot of these pens and if you've been any of these it could very easily kill the CPU all we do is lift up a little metal retention arm you'll see the entire stock it moves back so take a processor there's a Tangled gold arrow which has a corresponding little notch on the actual socket all we do is line it up again do not force it just gently arrest it down and look at that see if he's installed push the little arm down done something right I know it can be scary right I may or may not have bent a pen or two on a CPU in my lifetime however long as you're nice and gentle do not push it into the slot let it rest it's lined up it will slide down and you'll be just fine now we need to toss on our cooler which actually should be pretty straightforward because this is an AMD board and we're using a bit of a larger cooler we actually do need to remove these four screws on either sides remove these little plastic pieces the reason to bring that up is if you actually look on the back of the motherboard we have this little metal retention plate this actually needs to stay here that we're just gonna remove these guys don't worry about that backplate too much because it's not gonna go anywhere if it's oh holy what kind of robot was having a bad day with this man oh yeah one little tip so they're actually a two ways this can go on he doesn't matter at all except that you've got this little AMD logo I've accidentally done it wrong where it's upside-down so just keep in mind which way you want to do it but essentially we have a window on our case so this is the point where if you make bad decisions people will judge you this cooler is very easy to install so always do again try not to touch that thermal paste and just line it up with the screw holes that we have right here it should just rest right into place and with that then we'll just start screwing it in now another reason why you want to make sure that you're applying even pressure is because we want to make sure that thermal paste on the actual CPU is making a nice solid firm attachment this is starting to look like a thing right we have a big cooler and a CPU very important components so you'll see that there's a little cable that attached to the fan so this is a four pin header now there usually will be pretty close so for example ours is right here a little CPU fan header it's really easy to install you'll see it there a couple of notches here so it means it only goes in one way all you do is just line it up and drop it right into place boom we're ready to CPU SOTA comes to installing Rams that are a couple of things to keep in mind so because this is ddr4 you'll see there's a little notch in the middle and the entire thing is actually slightly curved so that means that you're only going to be able to put it in one way line that notch up with the corresponding notch on the motherboard if you try to put it down it's not going in you're probably doing it backwards now the next thing to keep in mind is which slots to use so it's actually a little bit complicated on Intel it's fairly straightforward on AMD it depends so you'll see here that we have four dimm slots which is the standard so we have these two black so it's one in three and then we have these two gray which are two and four for AMD you want to take advantage of these two in fact actually if you look really closely you'll see these little asterisks behind beside b2 and a2 these are the preferred memory slots drop it in the slot and then three two one push and there is where I'm installed look at that we're like halfway there don't worry about the other look we're almost there I'm almost there and the next one's even easier it's our SSD so install this SSD is very straightforward so you can see it's tiny it's literally like this size like a stick of gum now to install it's very straightforward but you do need to keep in mind that we need a little bit of hardware from the motherboard box which I don't thank you no yes I did okay so it's really easy to lose this you see this tiny little screw and a little adapter this is what we need to install our SSD so for this it does help if you have a little bit of a finer Phillips head screw just cuz it's really small but essentially what we need to do is install the little load you call it's like the the it's call I didn't know like the little screw guy so because it's a 22 ad SSD the vast majority of SSD that you will be using are 20 to 80 need to install this thing you're tight in there we go and now installed SSD it's literally gonna take us like three seconds so we line it up with the slot so I usually put it in by it with a little bit of an angle kind of work it in to make sure it actually slides so there we go the next step is to take our SSD screw out and then just literally lean it down use the little screw to screw it into place to make sure it doesn't pop out of the socket you know look we installed our SSD literally like 18 seconds that's it so now it's time to bring back our case and now we have to just install the motherboard now something that will very much vary between your cases is how you actually do this and specifically what standoffs you use so I put this guy over what you'll see is there a series of little brass standoffs so these are painted black sometimes they're actually gold you can see there's standoffs on the top there also some stand-ups in the middle and especially this NZXT case has a little post here this is really nice because it'll help us line it up there also some standoffs on the bottom the important thing here to know is that it's actually very straightforward to install it's the only thing we need to do before actually installing the motherboard is put in our i/o shield now this came with the motherboard and especially we open it up here it just slides into the back of the case so you'll see here that this is where your ports will surface and you just want to make sure that this case is or this little shield is here to make sure that it looks nice this is like she's a little bit of an annoying thing because essentially you have to kind of push it until it clicks so I usually kind of work the corners until I see it not wanted to jump out of my hands click for me Mike for me hey so now all we do is put our motherboard into our case no yet because I'm using this NZXT case I've got that little post in the middle so it's long gonna get it kind of roughly lined up perfect love it and then if we can get it on the peg here which we can oh yeah well the board is in place now we just need to screw it in with like 300 screws that are helpfully labeled in our NZXT little baggie and this will be very close to done surprise surprise the way to do this best and I'm sure you can't see us at all on camera is using the cross method so just start with one corner get it screwed in then go to the next corner the next corner and kind of work your way around to make again you're applying even pressure and with that we have a motherboard installed into our case so if you flip it upside down or right side up it hasn't all come crashing out and we're actually getting pretty close the next step is to install the graphics card which we so helpfully have right behind the case it's almost like I planned it out like that look at that this is our PCI connectors so this is what will attach the graphics card to the motherboard which will go into this slot right here and then if we look around on the backs of the card you'll see that we have a single 8 pin power connector so with the help of our little video lights you can actually see what's going on the next thing we need to do is actually install that graphics card so you'll see right here our PCI slot the only thing we really need to do is take a look at that and you'll see it corresponds to these little metal connectors here so these PCIe slot covers we just need to remove based on where the motherboard and the graphics card is same so we need to just remove this little cover on the back so not all cases actually use this although it's becoming a more popular thing in WoW what jacked up robot crank this screw and hold ball so remove this little piece and the next step is to remove these top two screws which should be pretty easy now it comes to install in graphics cards this is a very difficult process which is going to require a lot of concentrate I'm just kidding you just literally line it up push it it's really easy so just line up with a slot click it boom done look at that now I'll use my giant screwdriver to put this little PCI cover back in place and we're next going to jump into cable management oh boy the least favorite part of any PC build so one thing I am gonna do is because this already has the cables sort of pre run for the fans I'm going to plug these in first just because if I don't do them first I'm burying them and I won't be able to touch them again so one of our fans is actually perfectly sized to fit into this channel fan right here that's actually either really good engineering or really lucky now just like when we plugged in our CPU these fans that are up top and on the back they are notched so they're only going to go in one way these are three pen as opposed to four pin but it doesn't make a difference there's only one way to plug them in so you see we have a little bit of extra slack however I'm just gonna pull that around back right now and we will forget that exists or deal with it later whichever one I feel like so I just then the 20+4 pin the really big guy and I'm so happy right now because look at this little cable channel all I have to do is just wrap it around here go straight down and that's it once I'm done with everything I'll velcro it in and this is making my life easy so you can see right back here I plugged in the four plus four pen CPU power connector now it's a little bit of a tight fit especially in this specific case however I've run the cable up on the top basically just keep in mind that as with most of these connectors there's a little notch on it so it's only going to go in one way next up we have our eight pin PCI power connector now because this only needs the one we have the extra leave will just deal with that later we'll just like cable tie it up but again we'll just line it up look at the place when that's it okay so we have a few different cables coming from the case itself so we have a USB 3.0 lead this is annoying because it will get stuck and you can easily break it so just be careful we also have our audio so this is for our front panel audio and what I'm really excited for our front panel connectors so these are typically separate so what you'll see is you'll have a bunch of little tiny individual connectors which would go to things such as like the power button and the reset and the LEDs go over NZXT will kind enough to provide one all in a single little break so the first thing is we're going to install our HD audio so you'll see this a little AAFP connector here and there's one little pin knocked out on the top there's a corresponding pin missing here which means I want to do is light it up and easily just plug it in like so next we have USB 3 which is this guy right here it's the sort of larger connector and it's got the notch in the bottom which corresponds here again it's pretty easy to install but just if you ever have to uninstall it it's a pain because if you likes to just get stuck and the next thing is the front panel connectors again these are the ones that usually suck however because I have my little notched sort of input I can just do this and live a happy happy life so with that we've built ourselves a gaming PC so before we do any kind of proper cable management before we start putting the sides back on or anything let's first connect to a monitor and make sure it works all right so we had set up our computer we plugged in our USB peripherals from HyperX as well as we have our headset here we have our monitor connected we have remembered to flip the switch on the back of the power supply which I don't see anything oh yeah we see some RGB action that's a good sign okay we have power to our peripherals and we have a successful post as soon as you see this the first thing you should do double check everything's correct so we have a risin 530 600 X 16 gigs of ram these keyboards mice hit f1 and make sure everything is successfully showing up but as soon as you see it post that is a very very good sign there we go we see our 2 8 gig G skilled ends which will have to change the speed up and everything later all of our fans are showing up 3,600 X now from here you want to a couple of minor things so we do want to go ahead and actually set up DCP so we have our 36 66 megahertz memory and beyond that pretty much good to go so we can start cable managing get this thing all sort of buttoned up install coffee of windows and you've successfully built yourself a gaming PC congratulations if you fail this tutorial helpful definitely be sure to subscribe to the channel if you're interested in any of these parts definitely be sure to check them out at the link in the description and again huge huge thank you to micro Center for sponsoring this video and allowing us to crash their space and give you guys a hands-on tutorial a real look at what it's like to build a PC

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Views: 6,794,239

Rating: 4.9345193 out of 5

Keywords: how to build a gaming pc, how to build a pc, building a gaming pc, how to build a computer, gaming pc, gaming computer, pc, computer, gaming pc build, building a pc, pc build, 2020, austin evans, this is, tutorial, how to, tech, micro center, gaming pc parts

Id: E9-x3jRSQvQ

Length: 22min 2sec (1322 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 29 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/cyberbooster]

Components choice is meh