 I'll be the first to admit that a lot of the upgrades we do around here are completely unnecessary, taking perfectly good hardware and replacing it with state-of-the-art hardware just because we can. Now I actually upgraded my home theater PC slash VR gaming rig quite recently, replacing the 980 Ti with an RTX 2080 Ti, but what I didn't upgrade was the CPU. I'm running a Core i5-4570, which honestly was fine until the moment that I tried to game in VR while streaming at the same time. Almost immediately, I was getting frame drops, and this is with the NVENC new encoder that were causing dizziness and nausea and basically making it impossible for viewers to enjoy the stream. So today we're going to be doing the thing that we do best, upgrading a computer, but this time with a purpose. Instantly see your current and past network activity, detect malware, and block badly behaving apps on your PC or Android device with GlassWire. Use offer code LINUS to get 25% off GlassWire at the link in the video description. The problem with streaming is that even if you're using resources on your GPU to encode the video, the CPU still has to manage that, and I'm using a neat little third-party app called OVRDrop in order to embed the Twitch chat into my stream, and that ends up using, I think it's about another, nine or 10% of my CPU here, so as soon as I start recording and try to actually play the game, you're going to see my CPU spike up near or at 100% utilization. Now we are going to take some shortcuts in the upgrade today, but while they aren't ones that I would want to go out there and recommend, they are ones that you can probably get away with if you want to save a little bit of time and even a little bit of money, so you can buy a water bottle on LTTstore.com. So rather than unnecessarily replace any of the parts in this machine, we're going to reuse as many of the things that we can, including our Silverstone case here, which I absolutely love. This is their SG13, if I recall correctly, and it strikes a pretty nice balance between size and accessibility, so it's reasonable to work on, and it accepts full-size components, including the graphics card, 3.5 inch hard drive, as well as a full-sized ATX power supply. Why a hard drive, you might ask? Well, because the hard drive is actually going through its either third or fourth upgrade cycle at this point, and I use it for my game library because most of the games on this system get launched once every blue moon, and it's just not worth investing in solid-state storage for something like that. Of course, it's got a boot SSD. As for the power supply, we don't want to replace that. I just put this Focus Plus Gold 750 watt power supply in when I upgraded to the RTX 2080 Ti a little while ago, because the old one that I had in here did not have enough PCI Express connectors, and it was not something that you want to hook a brand new top-of-the-line graphics card up to. The graphics card stays because what would you upgrade an RTX 2080 Ti to? Oh, it's all good. Okay, I did say this case is relatively work-on-able. You do have to take off the front panel in order to get at the graphics card. There we go. Once you do, it just slides out like that, though. By the way, if you guys are enjoying this hydro-dipped RTX 2080 Ti, we did a video about that recently, and we're probably going to do some more arts and crafts later, so make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss that. We're not even going to bother to reinstall our operating system, which again is not really recommended, but sometimes you can get away with it, so we're going to give it a shot, leading us to the things that we are going to replace. So that right there is... This is not actually passively cooled, so this is kind of a clever arrangement, if I do say so myself, where I use the fan on my power supply to draw air through the heat sink and then exhaust it. Actually works surprisingly well, even if it probably is going to hurt the long-term longevity of the power supply. And then we've got our motherboard in our, I think it's 16 gigs of DDR3, if I recall correctly. So that definitely needs an upgrade. Also, I might replace the Silenex fan that I've owned for 15 years and modded by painting UV green about a decade ago. I don't know, it's pretty brutal. Look at these flakes of paint coming off it. I gotta say, one thing I'm really noticing as I'm taking this apart is I've never really pushed it that hard before. Like even most modern games, they're using a couple threads at a time. We were talking full four core load and spiking as high as 100%, while streaming, it was even pinned at 100% at times. So this thing was working freaking hard, which is not necessarily the best thing for a system that's running in a really confined space like this one, which is where the upgrade component choices come in. So it's a little overkill. I mean, I did say I needed the upgrade. I didn't say we wouldn't still be going overkill. We're going to be using an ROG Crosshair 8 Impact. So this is a mini DTX motherboard that I am sincerely hoping is going to fit in our mini ITX case. We've got a Ryzen 7 3800X. So we are doubling our core count as well as improving our per core performance. We've got a 16 gig, I think. Yep. 16 gig kit of DDR4 3200 memory and a new cooler that is hopefully going to be low profile enough that I will also be able to fit its fan on it. Otherwise we're going to have a bit of a hard time with a nearly a hundred watt CPU in here. You can see that in spite of my best efforts to keep dust out of that compartment with the dust filters that are built into the bottom of it, clearly a lot of dust still makes its way to the PC and even past the fan filter. So I've treated myself to a Noctua industrial PPC 2000 RPM fan. And I got to say, I've got some wrongs to right in this build. Cable management was terrible. I only had three screws in my fan. I can do better than this. I mean, on a radiator, yeah, I'd probably use two, but I'm trying to do some decent cable management this time around. Ah, realistically, it's not going to happen. First up is installing our CPU in the socket. So we just need the golden triangle to the triangle, bippity boppity, and we are done. It looks pretty straightforward. We throw the back plate on, got a nice heavy duty back plate. Although I'm not a hundred percent sure why. AMD does include their own back plate. Put some thermal paste on our CPU, chuck this bad boy onto here. Oh, I really hope this fits. Oh, we're good. Okay. Then we just put in these four screws from the back. Man, I got to say, this is a cool little board. It's incredible how many features they packed onto this thing. You got your super robust VRM, including two cooling fans. Though I do have my concerns about them being loud. You've got their SODIMM.2. So that's how it handles M.2 installation. A lot of the time you'd see that on the back of these little compact boards, but it's really hard to get cooling back there. So I like this approach. And this thing not only supports two NVMe drives, it's even got two more fan headers and another five volt addressable RGB header on it. PCI express 16X Gen four, a separate daughter board for the onboard sound. That's pretty sick. So there's your front panel audio connector, front USB, built-in buttons, which is pretty sweet for SATA ports, USB three and the new type C USB three front panel connector and a couple dim slots. But all of that comes at a cost. It's not strictly speaking ITX, which is square. It's the same width as ITX, but it's actually a little bit taller. So as long as your ITX case has an extra PCI slot to accommodate a dual slot graphics card, there's a very good chance that it'll fit. But I have not actually tested that yet. This is where I find out if I'm going AMD. Oh, oh, it's perfect. We're going AMD. In goes our memory. Oh yeah. I never even talked about the rear IO, BIOS reset, clear CMOS audio, wifi six, a bunch of USB three ports, freaking awesome. And spit if, if you're still into that sort of thing. Is it multi gigabit LAN? That would be sweet. It's not especially on ITX boards. It makes the biggest difference because realistically you can't install a 10 gig LAN card if you want, because where would you put it? I mean, if I really wanted to, I could use the sodium dot two and then one of those M.2 slots and I could take that out to a PCI express card expander and I could like put it somewhere. I'm not that desperate though. Okay. So with that in there, now we're just building a computer. It's the thing about small form factor machines. It's like everything looks so clean and compact and you got to wire everything up. The whole day ruined. Like why did Silverstone put cables this long on the USB three connector? Why? It needs to go this far. Does this even have front audio? Did I cut it off or something? Now I'm breaking one of my own cardinal rules here and I'm installing the graphics card. Oh shoot. I went and I put the front panel on before the graphics card. In this case, the graphics card goes in quite early. Dang it. Of course I put in all four screws. Now one funny idiosyncrasy of this build is that it uses an internal fan header to run the fans that are in the cabinet around the computer. So I just need to run these out the top of the PCI slot cover here before I put the power supply in. Not the most elegant thing ever. You know, in fairness to me, this is actually pretty darn tidy for a compact build. Let's go ahead and run our power supply cables. Then we'll install the power supply. I usually find that's a little bit easier. And this is where the cable management all goes completely to hell. Oh, that's really tight. Sorry fan cables. What did we do to deserve this? No, no, help us all please. I don't understand why this power supply won't go in. I am legitimately super confused right now. I have no idea what's going on. Certainly not the glamiest machine we've ever done, but look at that clearance in here. As long as it cools okay. I guess we're in pretty good shape and there's lots of room for the fan. So hopefully we're not restricting airflow too much. I mean, I wish this 24 pin wasn't right across here. There's nothing we can really do about that. This is stupid. Oh boy, this would slow us down a lot if this machine wasn't booting. I don't even have any way of looking at the post. Maybe I could use a mirror. I always say it's bad luck to close up the panels before you test to make sure the system works. Okay, well I can see post codes now. Wait, what? You got to be kidding me. All I did was take the panel off. You got to be kidding me. I'm afraid to put this on now. So we've turned our memory to its faster profile. I am setting it to boot to our SSD. Where are my drives? Okay, why are our boot devices not showing up? Let's go to easy mode. Maybe I'm just, maybe it's too advanced for me. The system cannot find any bootable devices, but it's right there. CSM is disabled by default on this thing. So I think it's just a matter of going in and setting it to legacy support. Hey, there it is. All right, we good. Let's get booted into Windows. All the devices are detected. Our CPU is turboing up to 4.2 gigahertz in spite of our wimpy cooler that we've got on it. We'll see how it holds up when we're actually gaming. Let's find out how it handles it. So theoretically, I should be able to record gameplay with absolutely no compromises in terms of performance now. Well, I'm happy. Feels good. Looks good. The recording is, wait, the recording's not going. That's it for the excuses. If I ever screw up during my stream, I'm going to have no one to blame but myself, which isn't to say I won't still try and find something. And I am super happy. Happy to tell you guys about our sponsor. FreshBooks is the all-in-one business solution if you need to do your accounting and your invoicing and all that business-ing. It's designed to be simple and intuitive to you so you can spend less time on paperwork. 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Oh, for those curious about the encoding settings that I'm using, we're at 60 FPS, 1080, 6000 kilobit per second, and I'm using NVIDIA NVENC NU.