You did it! You finally built or bought a brand new gaming PC, except there's one small problem. Right now, it's the most expensive paperweight you own. How do you make the computer compute? Well, doing it right takes more than just plugging her in and letting her rip. Like, ooh, what's this button doing? What the heck am I looking at here? How do I get past this? Well, for starters, you're gonna have to get past today's sponsor, Thorum. It's Valentine's Day. Do you know where your gift is? Get yourself or your loved one a unique and stunning ring this Valentine's Day and make it extra precious for your precious. Just go to the link down below and use code LTT to get 20% off. Our goal in making this video was to be as comprehensive as possible. So while we would recommend watching it all the way through the first time, we've added convenient chapter markers if you ever wanna come back for a topic-specific refresher. We'll begin with the physical things that you need to set up, starting with location. Now, obviously, easy access to your ports is critical. So depending on your case, you might prefer it on the right or on the left. But what's less obvious is that your PC's position can have a big impact on future maintenance requirements. The main way that dust enters your case is by being sucked into the front or the bottom intake fans. Keeping those off the floor means that your system will require far less frequent cleaning. This is especially true for carpeted flooring, which not only acts as a pet hair magnet, but can also starve your power supply of fresh air depending on its orientation. If you must have your system on the floor, though, at least do yourself a favor and put it under the edge of your desk. Even with top exhaust fans, a shocking amount of dust can settle down into your system if you have an open-top grill. If your system has an antenna, it should be in line of sight with any Bluetooth peripherals that you intend to connect later, and it should be clear of anything that might block the signal to your Wi-Fi access point, like a dense concrete wall or granite countertop, or even the PC's chassis itself. I mean, you know what they say. Distance makes the RF signal stronger. Now you're ready to plug in, and the first cable is gonna be power. This ensures that your equipment is grounded and protected from electrostatic discharge. As for the other end of the cable, well, good PC power supplies can handle a wide range of power conditions before supplying anything to the rest of your PC, but plugging into the wall or into a dumb power strip can stress it if your wall power is noisy or prone to voltage sagging and brownouts. This is especially true when other high-power appliances are running, like, say, an air conditioner. A UPS or premium surge protector can help clean that power up a bit before it hits your PC or display, but failing that, I'd recommend at least a basic surge protector, which can help protect your computer against voltage spikes from things like a lightning strike. For desktop peripherals, I'd recommend plugging your keyboard and your mouse into the slowest USB ports that are connected directly to your motherboard's chipset. They're not gonna use the extra performance of a faster port anyway, and plugging them into secondary controllers or into add-in cards can sometimes cause them to stay inactive until the system is finished booting or experience delays and hitches. You can check the block diagram for your motherboard if you're unsure which ports are connected to what. The same is true, by the way, if you're using a USB headset or a desktop DAC and amp. Pretty much every time I've seen someone report issues with these things, it's because they're connected through a hub or something. Do yourself a favor, connect directly. Now, if your audio device uses an old-school headphone jack, you can either use the front panel once, if your case has them, or you can use the ports on the rear. They'll usually be color-coded green and red for the headphones and mic respectively, or else they'll have symbols next to them. Some modern motherboards will actually prompt you for what you've plugged in, and they'll work regardless of where you plug things in, but they may not work optimally. On that subject, some cases and laptops might not have two separate three-pole jacks, but rather have a single four-pole jack. In that case, you're gonna need to get a Y cable like this one, unless your headset includes one in the box. Next up is display. Most gaming PCs come with a dedicated GPU installed in a PCI Express slot, and you should always plug your main display into that, rather than the ports on your motherboard's IO panel. Those ones are routed to your onboard graphics instead. Now, with the right UEFI BIOS configuration, we'll touch on that in a moment, your system may support connecting extra monitors to both of them at the same time, but if you run your game off of the wrong ports, it will have a negative impact on your gaming experience. As for which cable to use, HDMI, DisplayPort, or USB-C, that boils down to what your monitor supports and what your graphics card supports. When in doubt, DisplayPort is usually the more correct choice for PC, thanks to its generally higher bandwidth and broader support for extras like variable refresh rate gaming, but you should also refer to your GPU and display manuals to see exactly which features are supported. One last thing, if you're using a desktop with built-in Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, and you intend to use it, please make sure you screw in your antennas. Unlike laptops, desktops often don't have integrated antennas, and while you might be able to see nearby networks, you will almost certainly struggle to stay connected to them. It usually doesn't matter which one screws into where. If you've got wired ethernet instead, then you'll often have one place to plug it in and you're good to go, but if you have to, it's probably worth checking your motherboard's manual to find out what's what. Sometimes they're the exact same thing and completely interchangeable, but other times, one will use a slower, but maybe more broadly supported controller, while the other might use a multi-gig controller that's faster, but requires additional drivers once you're booted into Windows. These multi-gig ports can be a huge boon to creatives and to storage enthusiasts who have network-attached storage devices, or actually even gamers who have balling out internet plans, but if they're plugged into a typical network that has gigabit ports everywhere else, they're gonna be limited to gigabit speeds anyway. With everything plugged in and in place, now's a good time to tidy up your cables. You can use zip ties in a pinch, but hook and loop cable ties are a better solution for future maintenance. Lttstore.com. Also, we have something even better coming soon. Sign up for an in-stock notification for our cable management arches at the link below. Now that that's done, it's finally time to fire it up. Flick the switch around back on your power supply, give it a second, and then hit the power button. If nothing happens, you can refer to our last PC guide you'll ever need for some helpful troubleshooting tips. Before you do that, though, make sure your surge protector is plugged in and turned on too. It's actually a more common mistake than you think. Is it gonna power on first try? Oh, crap. Oh, power needs to be on. Oh, even for us. Now that fan spin is achieved, it's time to game, right? Not yet. Nearly every modern computer has what we still refer to incorrectly as a BIOS. The more modern term is UEFI, but we're old school, so BIOS is the screen you go to when you power on your PC, and it usually has the logo of the manufacturer. It's not just an ad, though. There's a whole menu buried in here if you press the right key before your operating system starts to boot up. Sometimes the key you need to press to access it is listed on the screen, but it'll usually be Delete, F2, F10, or F12. If you're unsure, check your manual. Failing that, just mash all the above. That usually gets the job done. The exact layout of this setup screen will vary a lot, depending on the manufacturer and model year of your system. There are DIY motherboards from a decade ago with full graphical interfaces, while some modern machines have almost retro-looking interfaces with no mouse support. Whatever the layout, the first screen usually has information about the hardware installed, the date and time, and sometimes the order of the storage devices the PC will check for an operating system to boot. Before continuing, make sure that everything is showing up as expected. Missing RAM, for example, could mean you need to reseat the module or the CPU itself. Even if you've been around the block a few times, you should check the manual to familiarize yourself with the layout before changing anything. After all, new platforms bring new features, and new features bring new headaches. It's at this point that you might want, or sometimes need, to upgrade your BIOS to the latest version on your motherboard or PC manufacturer's website. The exact steps for this vary greatly by manufacturer and by era, but the gist is this. Turn off the PC, download the BIOS from the manufacturer, and unzip it to a flash drive, which often must be formatted FAT32. Once that's done, eject it, plug it into your PC, again, on a motherboard chipset port, get back into the BIOS, and usually you'll find an option here with Flash in its name. Nine times out of 10, this is what you want. Select the flash drive, choose the file you downloaded, confirm, then kick back and hope that the power doesn't go out. Your system may reboot a couple of times during this process, which is normal, but if it suffers a power loss, it's quite vulnerable as being bricked, so if you have a battery backup of some sort kicking around, please do use it. There are sometimes ways to recover without this backup, but the exact details vary by vendor, and you do not want to find out that yours doesn't have one after the fact. Read your motherboard's manual to be sure. Once it's done, it should say the BIOS was updated and settings were reset, allowing you to enter setup to continue. Now, there are a few options of particular interest inside the BIOS, starting with XMP and XBO, the memory overclocking standards that were also previously known as DOCP on older AMD platforms. The location of the setting does vary a little bit, but many motherboards will have it on the main page because it is such a common thing for enthusiasts to enable. If you've got RAM that's rated for high speeds, this is a one-touch way to hopefully reach those speeds. Enabling it will correctly set all of the relevant settings in your motherboard BIOS, including voltages and something called the memory ratio. You don't need to fully understand what that means, but for best performance, one-to-one is ideal on Intel, and on AMD, you often want to see the F clock match half of the memory speed. Don't worry too much if it doesn't line up, though. Fast RAM is usually better than the alternative. Now, this is technically overclocking, though, so it's worth noting that this might not work in every configuration. If you have very fast memory or if you have more than two modules, for example, your CPU may have trouble running at the rated speeds. If you're worried about stability, you can go ahead and leave this step till last then when your system is fully set up. That way, you could even benchmark the before and after if you happen to be a turbo nerd like me. If you do enable XMP and find that your system fails to boot or is occasionally unstable, manually dialing back the memory speed or slightly increasing the voltage might make the difference. Worst case scenario, you can disable memory overclocking entirely and everything should work normally. If it doesn't, you could be looking at a warranty replacement. Next up, if you've got a beefy enough cooler, some BIOSes let you toggle a setting like Core Enhancement or Precision Boost Enhancement. This can help eek a little bit more performance out at the cost of additional heat and power draw by making your CPU turbo more aggressively or for longer. This one is less likely to harm stability, but again, if you experience problems, I'd recommend just turning it off. Our next stop will be Resizable BAR, a feature that boosts GPU performance by giving the system more efficient access to its onboard memory. This is usually gonna be somewhere in the advanced section, often under a heading for PCI devices. If you don't see it, it's possible your motherboard doesn't support it, but it's also possible that you need to enable above 4G decoding in order for it to show up. Unlike memory overclocking, this setting has no real downside, so you might as well enable it. It won't do anything if your GPU doesn't support it and on some modern GPUs, it is basically essential for proper performance to the point where the very newest motherboards as of writing might ship with this on by default. Another option we wanna make sure is enabled is virtualization. On Intel, this is often called VTX, while AMD calls it SVM. Along with letting you run virtual machines if you want to, with very little performance penalty, virtualization technology is used by operating systems to enhance security by sectioning off parts of the system, which is generally considered to be a very good idea, TM. This is often buried inside the CPU configuration setting section, and like resizable bar, the newest motherboards may ship with this on by default. A related setting is the Trusted Platform Module or TPM. Windows 11 mandates it as the second part of its virtualization-based security feature and for improving Windows Hello biometric login and BitLocker disk encryption security. For that reason, it's usually best to keep it enabled or enable it if it isn't already. Otherwise, no Windows 11 for you, at least not officially anyway. You'll also officially get no Windows 11 if you don't enable Secure Boot, which helps guarantee that nothing malicious slipped in between the BIOS and loading the operating system. This could be a simple toggle, or you might need to select the option to install the default keys like on this board from Asus, but if that option doesn't show up anywhere, it could be that CSM, or Compatibility Support Module, is enabled, which puts the computer into a sort of old-school boot mode, and Secure Boot doesn't roll that way. So unless you know that you actually need it, it's usually best to disable CSM. One hot tip that might save you some headaches later is to determine what onboard hardware you don't need. For example, motherboards with built-in wireless, secondary LAN ports, or any other extras will have them all enabled by default, and they can sometimes be excessively chatty. This often manifests as stuttering or hitching, even when the system isn't even close to fully loaded, because the CPU has to drop whatever it's doing to listen to your Wi-Fi card go blah, blah, blah about the signal strength of your neighbor's Wi-Fi that you're not even using. So take a moment and disable anything you're 100% sure you don't need. Just remember you did it, so you're not tearing your hair out later trying to figure out why your serial port drivers won't install. There are a handful of other features you might wish to play around with. For example, you might want to reorder your boot devices or set up custom fan control if your board supports it, but for the most part, you should leave the rest of the stuff in here alone, especially voltages, unless you're sure you know what they do and accept the risks. For now, if you built your own PC, it's time to install your operating system. Or if you bought a prebuilt, it's time to install your operating system. I mean, you don't, strictly speaking, have to, but since so many machines come with bloatware pre-installed on them, it may actually take less time to just load up a fresh one than to sanitize what you've already got. Step one then is to download your OS. We're gonna use Windows 11 as our example, but most of this also applies to Windows 10. Microsoft provides a free tool to download an ISO that can either be saved so you can burn it or used to automatically build a USB installer. We're gonna have that linked down below. Download it, grab your USB flash drive, and make sure that anything you care about on it is backed up, because this is gonna wipe it clean. Go through the prompts. The recommended version is almost always what you want, and choose USB flash drive. Select the drive, and it's off to the races. While you wait for this to finish, I would strongly recommend downloading your hardware drivers from the manufacturer's websites. In particular, you are definitely going to want your network driver, and some systems might also need the storage driver in order to get through the Windows setup process. I usually just grab it all, because storage is cheap, and I'm not doing anything right now anyway. Once the Windows flash drive is finished, unzip the drivers to it. I like making a drivers folder with individual folders for each driver to keep them easy to find. Then eject it and pop it into your new PC and restart it. It should boot right into the installer, but if it doesn't, you should be able to choose the installer from the BIOS or through a boot menu, which is usually accessible by mashing F8 or F12 on the BIOS screen. Fun fact, did you know that you can open a command prompt at any time during Windows setup by holding Shift and pressing F10? A fun little pro tip is if you do this and then type diskpart right at the beginning and hit Enter, then list disk, you can see all the drives that are installed on the PC. That way, if your storage device isn't showing up, it's a faster way to know, and you can quickly reboot the system and troubleshoot it. And if it is showing up, you can type select disk followed by the number next to it and type clean to remove anything from that drive. If you want to be really sure and you have some time to kill, clean all will crawl the drive and directly set every single bit to zero, which is basically a secure erase, though that takes a while, especially with higher capacity drives. Once you're done, type exit twice, hitting Enter both times to close the command window, then proceed through the prompts. If you come to the part where you need to select where to install Windows and nothing is there, it's time to put that storage driver to use. Click load driver, then find the folder on the flash drive that you unzipped your storage driver to. With any luck, the driver will pick up your drive and you can proceed as normal. In some situations, by the way, Windows does a thing and splits your install across two drives. Most often, if one of the installed drives has an existing Windows partition on it. So if you have an old drive that you're planning to copy data from that has an operating system, I would strongly recommend shutting down the system and removing it until you've finished the setup process. Now, most people will want to select the unallocated space for the drive you want to install Windows on and continue. But if you only have one drive and you want to separate Windows from your documents, games, et cetera, so that you can wipe Windows clean without worry later, then you can create a new partition for just that with this button. This will steal the amount of storage capacity you choose for it from the Windows drive. So you'll have to make the call on how much to assign to Windows and to your storage drive based on what you expect to need installed on your Windows drive. You can then click the remaining unallocated space to install Windows to it. It'll set up everything on its own. When you're satisfied, click next and make a sandwich. Quickly though, because this shouldn't take too long on a modern PC. After a reboot or two, you should see the screen to get connected to the network and download updates. If nothing comes up here, this is where those network drivers come in. Press shift and F10 again, then devmanagement.msc and hit enter. Find the unknown devices called ethernet controllers, right click them and click update driver. Again, browse to where you extracted the drivers to your USB drive and it should pick them up. Unfortunately, Windows doesn't give you an easy way to know which one is which. So there might be a bit of trial and error with selecting the right driver for each controller if you have more than one. Or if you get bored of this monkey business entirely, you can just bring the command prompt back up and type UBI backslash bypass NRO. And then you can just deal with the network drivers once you hit the desktop. Fun fact, this also removes the requirement for an online Microsoft account. If you're successful installing network drivers however, your yellow exclamation point should disappear from device manager, allowing you to proceed. That's the end of the hard part. So we're just gonna mostly skip over the rest, just noting that we would suggest turning off most of the analytics options and oh, make sure you take a note of that restore from backup option if you did use a Microsoft account. You're gonna learn what that's for later. Now that you're on the desktop then, now what? Well, first order of business is drivers. Some systems will offer to install them automatically using built-in software. And some of those let you thankfully disable that feature in the BIOS if you don't like software you can't control lurking inside your system. But more importantly, it can also lead to extra bloat being installed on your machine. For now, you should install all the drivers you downloaded previously, which might take a couple of reboots before you get through them all, but should be fairly straightforward for most driver packages nowadays. If all you have is a cab file and an INF file, you might have to go to the device manager and use that update driver trick that we showed you earlier, but that shouldn't be a big deal. Once everything's installed and your yellow exclamation marks are gone, go ahead and grab Windows updates until there aren't any more, then right click the taskbar, go to taskbar settings, then remove search cause it's pointless and left align the start menu because you are a man or lady of culture. Now you're ready to start getting settled in. If you have any Bluetooth devices that you wanna connect, you can do that through the Bluetooth icon in the system tray. Just click add device, choose Bluetooth and make sure that your device is in pairing mode. It should show up in a few seconds and then all you need to do is select it and follow the instructions on screen. Some devices will connect right away while others may need you to press a button or key in a code to confirm. Once the device is connected, it should reconnect automatically every time it's turned on. If you later pair it with another device though and it no longer works with your PC, just look for it in the devices list, click the three dots to forget it and go through the pairing process again. Once you're satisfied everything is connected, it's time to check your network config. Windows has a firewall built in to protect your PC from unauthorized access from your network, but it has two modes that define how strict it will be. The first, nowadays the default, is public, which treats all incoming connections with suspicion unless you specifically allow an app to accept them. This is great for connecting to unsecured public Wi-Fi at your favorite coffee shop, but if you have a home network and you'd like to share files, you'll wanna change over your connection to private, which relaxes security to allow connection from your local network. You can change this by right clicking the network icon in the system tray, then clicking network and internet settings. Click on the network connection you wanna change, then toggle either private or public as desired. The next thing you'll wanna do, especially if you're sharing files on the network, is to set up your power options in the settings app under system, then power. Here you can set when your PC goes to sleep, when your screens go to sleep, and how aggressively your PC should try to optimize for performance or power usage. By default, Windows will set your PC to sleep after 10 minutes, but if you're a fan of accessing your PC remotely through an app like TeamViewer, Parsec, or Tailscale, or sharing files like we mentioned earlier, it'll be inaccessible while it's asleep without some very specific steps. In that case, you might wanna set your PC to never sleep, though that does mean you'll be missing out on those sleep power savings. You can, however, tune that power drop by searching for edit power plan in the start menu and clicking the change advanced power settings link in the vintage window that pops up. There are a bunch of settings here, ranging from when to turn off spinning hard disks, and how many power saving features are enabled for your Wi-Fi, USB, and PCI Express devices, as well as the ability to set the minimum and maximum performance of your CPU. These options can also be useful for troubleshooting things like periodic dropouts and disconnections. For example, if your USB cable is good and the port is good, try turning off USB selective suspend, or if your Wi-Fi is unreliable, you can try setting it to maximum performance. Now that your devices and core settings are set up, you'll wanna tweak some of the more common user settings. For example, most gamers don't like mouse acceleration, and the easiest way to find this is by typing mouse in the start menu search and then selecting change the mouse pointer display or speed. In this window, click pointer options, then uncheck enhance pointer precision if it's enabled. You should generally leave the cursor speed where it is and use DPI switching that's built into your mouse or mouse software for that instead. You can change the other options here to taste or lack thereof, but for now, just hit okay. It's a good idea at this point to set up some file explorer settings by hitting these dots here and opening up the options window. Here, among other things, we can choose whether to see the default home view with recent documents or the this PC view where only drives attached to the system are shown. If you'd like to avoid getting duped by the way, like when we had our channel hacked recently, you should then go to view and uncheck hide extensions for known file types. I will never understand why this is enabled by default. There are some other options in here like showing hidden files, restoring previous windows when restarting and so on and so forth. So go ahead and modify to suit your tastes or click on restore defaults if you can't find that one option that you changed that you ended up not liking. One more thing you'll notice in this window is the apply to folders button. What's that do? Well, if you right click empty space in an Explorer window, you're gonna see a view option with a bunch of different layouts. Here's what each of them looks like and here's the available columns to sort with the details view. Regardless of the view, you can sort or group by these criteria. Grouping by date, by the way, is a great way to sort your downloads and your photos. If you get it set up just right and you wanna use that layout as the default for all folders on your PC, that's what the apply to folders button does. If you want a specific folder to show large icons or thumbnails, you can set it separately, which is pretty neat, right? And don't worry if you mess something up, the reset folders button is always there to help you. Speaking of folders, did you know you can change the locations of these main folders here? Just right click on them, click properties, and then look at the location tab. Click move and you'll be able to choose a new spot for them. It doesn't work very well with OneDrive, but if you've got a separate drive or a partition that you'd like to use for your files while keeping Windows separate, this is for you. When you click okay, it'll even ask if it should move any existing files over to the new location, which is super handy if you're doing this on a system that you've already kind of moved into. Of course, there's a more fundamental way to personalize your PC. If you right click the desktop and click personalization, you'll find options to change the background, colors, and more. You can even have a group of background pictures that will change periodically if you use slideshow. Under colors, you can choose whether you're on the light or dark side, enable or disable the microtransparency effect on some windows, and manually select an accent color if you don't like what Windows chose to match your background. Oh, and you can choose whether it should apply to the taskbar and to Windows too. A special note here is the contrast theme section. This can be really helpful for people with visual impairments or just to look cool if you dig the aesthetic because it applies everywhere and you can edit the colors that it selects yourself. There's some other useful stuff in the accessibility section of the settings app too. For example, you can make scroll bars always show if you hate the auto hide stick, you can turn off Windows animations for faster navigation, you can change the size and style of your cursor, and importantly for people who don't use them, you can disable the keyboard shortcuts for sticky keys and filter keys. Oh, that toggle keys function can be helpful too. It plays a beep whenever you enable caps lock, num lock, or scroll lock, so you don't have to look down at your keyboard to see if they're on. A common problem for monitors is that either HDR or high refresh rate aren't set up correctly by default, even though your display supports it. You can fix that by right clicking on the desktop and clicking display settings. HDR settings can be found in the brightness and color section and clicking on it gives you the option to enable HDR as well as auto HDR, which will cause non HDR games to pretend their HDR with honestly mixed results. You can also adjust how SDR content will appear when you're in HDR mode using this slider, which will also affect the brightness of the desktop. If you have multiple HDR monitors, congrats you fancy pants you, you can adjust them independently of each other. Also, HDR or not, if you have multiple monitors and they're not in the right order and you haven't already fixed it yourself because of how infuriating it was, you can drag them around in the display settings window like this and even rotate them if you like having one in portrait or even one upside down using the display orientation dropdown. You can see which is which by using the identify button to make this a bit easier and you can choose which one is your main display, so the one with the system tray using this checkbox here. One little pro tip by the way, is that if your cursor jumps as you move between the displays, you can tweak the alignment in this menu like so. If your monitors are different sizes and resolutions, you're not gonna be able to get it absolutely perfect, but it'll at least help smooth things a little bit. For refresh rate, you're gonna need to scroll down to advanced display. From here, you can choose each of your monitors individually up top and then select the refresh rate down below. Now Windows is usually okay about selecting refresh rates, but overclocked monitors, including monitors with overclock functions right out of the box, will often report the non overclocked refresh rate as the best one. And that is just factually incorrect. So if you still don't see your refresh rate, you might need to use your GPU's configuration utility or try a different cable. Another thing Windows guesses at, sometimes with comically bad results, is the size that you might prefer for your windows and for your text. If you want things larger or smaller, just look for scale about halfway down the display settings window. A 27 inch 4K monitor will typically be set to 150%, which is roughly equivalent to how big things would look if it were 1440p. If you were to set that 4K display to 200%, it would look like if it was 1080p at that size, just sharper and so on and so forth. If you've got multiple monitors, you can select each one independently at the top of the window and then choose different scales. So for example, 100% for a 1080p gaming monitor and 200% for a secondary 4K content consumption monitor could make things on screen appear to be the same size, assuming that they're the same size physically. You're gonna have to experiment with it a little bit and see what you like. And it's worth noting that you might have to log out and log back in for it to take effect in every app. Rather not enter your password again? Well, good news. If you're using a Microsoft account, you can enable Windows Hello. What's it do? It enables you to use your fingerprint, a pin, or your face with a compatible camera to log in without your password. Why would you do that? First, forgetting your password sucks and getting locked out of your PC sucks more. Second, it can actually be more secure because typing out your password means a key logger or a particularly nosy housemate might be able to read your keystrokes. This way, Windows Hello makes it so someone gaining access to your PC doesn't also gain access to your Microsoft account. To secure your PC even better than a password alone ever could, you can use BitLocker. BitLocker encrypts your entire drive. And while by default, it will only protect against someone cloning or removing your storage device, you can optionally lock it down with a pin, a password, or a USB flash drive key that's required before your PC ever gets to the login screen. It's best to enable BitLocker shortly after you install Windows so the encryption doesn't take forever. But once it's encrypted, it's super fast to encrypt and decrypt on the fly on modern hardware. Your apps will barely even notice. Speaking of apps, how do you install them? Well, you could go to every website and download the installers individually like some kind of cave person, but you could also use tools to make things simpler. A classic is Nineite, which lets you batch download and install a wide variety of apps in one shot. It's a huge time-saver. Here's some of the stuff that we might select for ourselves for a new install. Just one pro tip here, please don't install multiple anti-malware shields if you value your sanity or your performance. One is fine though. There are some other great options for managing software too. One of which is to use the Microsoft Store. And I know, I know, before you say it, I know it's loaded with crapware and requires a Microsoft account, but there are plenty of normal apps on there, including a lot of the ones installed by Nineite. And as a bonus, they're updated automatically along with all your other store apps, so you don't need to keep on top of app updates individually. Here's a bunch of our commonly installed apps that are available on the Microsoft Store. Another bonus is that they're automatically redownloaded if you have to reinstall, which is pretty sick. If you have more selective taste in software or you just want to install everything in one place, you can make use of a little known Windows feature called WinGet. We brought this up previously along with a third-party alternative, Chocolaty, but with either of them, you can search for the software you want, copy the exact name and shove that into a batch file with commands to install or update them. That can be a little tedious to maintain, but the upside is you can keep that batch file on a flash drive or cloud storage, so the next time you need to install Windows, you can get back up and running extremely quickly. And like with the Microsoft Store, you can schedule it to automatically check for updates for you. Steam is a special boy though. It's like an app store all on its own. Once installed, you've got Steam library folders that contain anything that you download to them. And if you have a separate drive that you'd like to use instead of your Windows drive, whether it's a partition or a physical one, you'll need to go to Steam settings, then storage. Click the plus next to your C drive, select your other drive, then click add. It's gonna show up right next to your C drive. Click the three dots and select make default to make sure that Steam install software to that drive instead of your main one by default. Then you're off to the races, which is great and all, I hear you say, but I've got these peripheral things and my RGB is out of control. What do I do? Well, many peripherals these days do come with driver software, but if you want my humble opinion, you should be asking yourself if you really need it before you click that download button. Even the most reputable vendors software can be very resource intensive. And if you're not married to a single brand for all your peripherals, you could end up with three or four different programs just to control your devices. But okay, if you've got to have them, what you can do to help with this is to install them, then disable them from starting automatically using task manager's built-in startup items section. Just fire up task manager. There's a few different ways to do this listed here, but the pro move is of course, Control Shift Escape. And then with this method, you can, for example, set up your mouse DPI switches and all of your lighting, save it to the mouse's onboard memory, then close the software for maximum gaming performance and only run it when it's necessary to make your stuff work. It's actually a good idea, by the way, to check this list from time to time and disable anything that you don't want or need. The same goes for companion software that's installed by your hardware drivers. This stuff can add up. I'm talking sound control panels, temperature monitors. I mean, the list goes on. Let's be real. They're usually not very polished despite the alleged R&D budgets of these companies. So maybe try some third-party software like the Piece Equalizer APO GUI or Hardware Info instead, which can give you much greater granularity and aren't tied to specific hardware. Oh, since we're on the subject, by the way, Hardware Info is a great tool for double-checking that all your devices are actually showing up and for making sure that you didn't make any mistakes while you were installing your cooler. A simple combination stress test like Cinebench and Firmware while monitoring your CPU and GPU core temperatures will quickly reveal any critical errors in your build, hopefully before they become a long-term problem. Anything under 90 degrees here is probably fine, but we'd like to see 70 to 80, though, of course, there are exceptions, like some high-performance CPUs, for example, are gonna target 90 to 100 degrees or more, whether you like it or not. Speaking of like it or not, RGB, it's there. And I think the one thing we can all agree on, love it or hate it, is that the control software is a CPU hog. For best performance, then, I would recommend leaving that RGB alone, either rainbow bar or off. But if you must adjust it, there are alternatives to the many vendor-specific RGB control apps that are out there, and Windows 11 even recently got control for this, albeit with limited compatibility as of writing. But if you wanna try and consolidate your RGB into a single app, just try OpenRGB or SignalRGB. OpenRGB tends to be lighter but less flashy, while SignalRGB is more capable, but will make your CPU work for it like the others will. Like we had to work hard for this segue. To our sponsor, Thorum. It's Valentine's Day soon, and as an iconic artist once said, don't be mad once you see that you want it. If you liked it, then you should've put a ring on it. Check out their handcrafted rings made from unconventional materials like wood from whiskey barrels and World War II rifle stocks. Every ring comes with an American walnut wooden ring box and a free Thorum silicone activity band so you can put a ring on it twice just to be safe. Thorum even makes minimalist watches using some of the same unique materials like koa wood from Hawaii and Gibeon meteorite from space, two of the most romantic locations, by the way. Matthew McConaughey has, of course, been to both of them. Best of all, they ship to most areas worldwide and all their products are covered under their lifetime warranty. So make this Valentine's Day extra special with Thorum by going to the link down below, that's thorum.com. Just make sure you use code LTT so you can get 20% off. If you're watching this and you don't have a PC yet, maybe go check out how to build a PC, the last guide you'll ever need. It really is the last guide you'll ever need so you can build your PC and then come back and watch this one and you're gonna be ready to go. Then you'll never need our channel again.
