 See, Sonic may have sponsored this exhaustive guide, but we won't specifically be recommending them today because this is designed to give you the tools to identify the patterns that make for a good build, not the exact components themselves. Those always change. The process does not. So without further ado, how to build a PC. Step one, picking the parts. To start, you need to ask yourself some questions. What am I going to do with this computer? Are you a hardcore gamer? You're going to want to allocate more of your budget to your graphics card and maybe CPU. Are you a content creator? Maybe you can ease up on the GPU a little bit and splurge on CPU and RAM. Are you just using it as a glorified NAS? Then you'll be looking for a motherboard with lots of IO and a case with lots of drive mounts. And maybe you'll want to splash out on a specialized redundant power supply. No matter what your budget is, this is the question you need to answer before going any further. So I'm gonna roll that intro while you figure it out. Now that you have your answer, ask the question again, but deeper. What kinds of games do you play, Mr. or Ms. Gamer? RPGs and visually complex games where exploration and sightseeing are priorities mean you'll probably want a high resolution display for the best experience, preferably with HDR. Peripherals may not matter as much to you. And in fact, you may prefer to get a console controller for some of your games rather than a typical PC gaming keyboard and mouse. Do you prefer hardcore competitive shooters though, where every millisecond counts? Well, now you'll want a premium mouse for sure. And maybe even a high-end keyboard, not to mention a high refresh rate display. Even if that costs you some resolution or some color accuracy. The games you play will also affect the number of CPU cores you should get. Since different genres of games tend to utilize them differently. A good rule of thumb for future proofing your build is to make sure that you have at least as many cores as a current gen console. If you wanna stream or record your gameplay, then maybe throw on two to four more and make sure that you've got a GPU with a high quality hardware video encoder built in. As for the content creators out there, what should you focus on? Well, it depends on what you create. A digital artist might not need anything special for a GPU, but would definitely benefit from a drawing tablet. A musician would want tons of RAM to load up on instrument patches and samples without slowing to a crawl. A video editor needs at least a modest GPU, a lot of RAM, and a buttload of storage, preferably fast so they can review their footage at full quality. A 3D modeler needs a reasonably fast CPU and GPU for rendering. A GPU capable of real-time ray tracing helps tremendously in prototyping and previews. An engineer might sacrifice raw horsepower for validated hardware like a Quadro GPU to ensure pain-free operation. A programmer wants a hefty CPU with a lot of threads for handling frequent compilation and a lot of RAM to go with it. Whereas a writer really only needs a keyboard, a decent display or two, and a quality water bottle to stay hydrated. lttstore.com. Is this a NAS or home storage of some other sort? If so, what is it for? Cold storage that won't often change, like backups, ripped media, or game installs won't need high speed to be usable. Instead, you'll want higher capacity hard drives. Warm storage that changes frequently, like a document or photo dump, is where you'll want a balance of capacity and speed. Hot storage, like a footage ingest or for use as a network boot device, will demand higher speed, increasing cost. You may also need a fast CPU depending on the scale of your storage space. Adding additional roles like Plex increases system requirements. So while slower computers can get by as a basic file server, you're gonna need to account for CPU overhead, especially for transcoding. Now let's talk about form factor. Computers are available in all shapes and sizes from complete PCs the size of a pack of gum to entire racks that contain only the storage for a bank of machines elsewhere in the data center. The most common variants, or form factors, are as follows. ATX is your classic. It's the big beige box size. It usually features at least five expansion slots and a taller chassis. You can find these in mid-tower and full-tower configurations, which basically just indicate height. Full towers tend to be easier to work with, but are much more difficult to move around and find a home for, so they've been falling out of fashion. If you're not sure what to buy, an ATX form factor case can accommodate any smaller size motherboard, although installing an ITX motherboard in one of these seems more than a little silly. Although maybe that is an aesthetic that you want to embrace. Micro ATX is smaller than ATX with at most four expansion slots, and for most people, that's totally sufficient. But you should always check to make sure that you've got everything you need. You'll find some of the more interesting case designs in this size, like these cute cube-shaped ones. Like ATX, you can fit smaller form factors like DTX and ITX in here, and it won't look as silly if you do. Mini ITX and DTX are the smallest mainstream sizes with only one and two expansion slots respectively. These are the boards you'll find in the tiniest builds and can often pack impressive variety of features into their diminutive size. However, their IO can be somewhat limited, and if your goal is to go as tiny as possible, you'll either want to get a couple of larger builds under your belt first, or pay extra careful attention to your case manufacturer's documentation. A DTX board may fit in the ITX case, but also may not. And if you have a larger GPU or cooler, it may not fit in your case of choice, at least not without some difficulty. The next big question is arguably most important. What's my budget? If your answer is anywhere from less than I'd like to I'll take what I can get, then your best bet is often to buy used. You can find off-lease business machines available for a fraction of their original price. As we've shown a number of times in the past, these can be a great starting point for a new build. Most of the work is already done for you, and many can be improved for a relatively small budget. Another option is to look for previous gen hardware. You can sometimes find killer deals as retailers clear out old stock to make way for the next big thing, but this is mostly applicable to used gear. The good news is that solid state components with no moving parts like CPUs rarely fail, and components with worn thermal compound or bad fans can have those repaired. I nearly always start my builds around my CPU and GPU because apart from being the most expensive components and therefore taking up most of my budget, they also dramatically narrow down the other parts that I might select. For example, I won't be able to buy an Intel chipset motherboard if I use an AMD CPU and vice versa. And I won't be able to use a small form factor case if I've got a gigantic triple slot graphics card. When shopping for a CPU, there are a few things to keep in mind. First is that across brands or even different generations of the same brand, specifications like clock frequency and cache are not likely to be useful indications of performance. You can find out more detail about this in this video, but that doesn't mean that you can ignore them outright. Let's say you've decided on a CPU series, but there are literally dozens of options. Obviously choosing the best one is easy. Just sort by price, high to low. But is it really that much faster? Is it worth it? Well, this is where the specs can help you make direct comparisons between multiple products in a single lineup. Take for example, Intel's Core i9-11900K. This is an eight core CPU with 16 threads that runs it up to 5.3 gigahertz. That's the turbo speed of course. Its base frequency is just 3.5. Meanwhile, the Core i7-11700K is also an eight core 16 thread CPU that only runs at up to 5 gigahertz. Meaning that the real world performance between these two chips is 6% at most, but with a price difference of over $100. There's more to picking a CPU than raw power however. Sometimes you want integrated graphics. Sometimes you want more or faster PCI express lanes. And sometimes you just want less heat and noise. There's still debate as to whether PCI express gen 4 really matters that much to consumers. But the fact is that gen 4 is double the speed of gen 3 on a per lane basis. And likewise, gen 5 is double the speed of gen 4 on a per lane basis. This means that a CPU with fewer, but faster lanes can avoid bottlenecks that otherwise might harm performance. It's worth pointing out that some motherboards and chipsets might differ in their PCI express version support. So pay close attention. If your first choice has put you over budget, it's time to experiment and bargain hunt. For Intel users, an F series CPU might be a good option as those lack integrated graphics and costs a little less to buy. While for AMD users, paradoxically, buying the G series CPUs nets you integrated graphics and a decent savings over the more expensive X series without sacrificing much performance. If you end up going back a generation or two to make your budget work, be mindful of which CPU socket and motherboard chipset you end up with. Locking into something older might save you a ton of money and still result in satisfactory performance, but it could limit your ability to upgrade to a new processor later on. Other parts work in much the same way. When the GeForce RTX 2080 came out, its price was higher than the cost of a GTX 1080 Ti while offering effectively zero performance advantage and a new headline feature that hadn't even been used in games yet, let alone proven. Savvy shoppers were scooping up 1080 Ti's for great prices left and right, and the only drawbacks ended up coming later with more limited support for software features like RTX voice ambient noise cancellation and in the longer term, probably an earlier driver support end date. At least that's the way things used to be. As of writing, the world is in the middle of a silicon shortage that isn't likely to let up anytime soon. And we're in the utterly unique situation where many discontinued GPUs are worth more to scalpers than their original MSRP. Unfortunately, there's little to do in times like these other than to hold on. And if you absolutely must get something today, try to snipe a GPU at a retail location or pick up an older GPU that's not being scalped to heck and back so that you can limp along while you wait out the storm. Now, as with CPUs, you must read reviews to evaluate the performance of a graphics card. Do not be tempted to draw a conclusion based on clock speeds and memory. Do look out though for features like hardware video encoding, real-time ray tracing support, and anything else that your game or your application might be able to use. Take for example, DLSS, which increases performance at a small cost to visual fidelity or the Blender Optics Renderer for Nvidia. And on the AMD side, there's the Fidelity FX Suite, which has some pretty cool stuff in it as well. Now, if you have a choice between two otherwise identical GPUs, but with different amounts of onboard memory or frame buffer, I would recommend the one that has more, but be careful that it's not slower memory. Both AMD and Nvidia have been caught putting large amounts of crummy memory on entry-level GPUs, sometimes even mid-range GPUs, seemingly in an attempt to make them look more enticing, even if it comes at the cost of extremely poor performance. Motherboards are a contentious issue because it's easy to go for the biggest, baddest board around, but the reality is that unless you're the kind of master overclocker who gets all their boards sponsored anyway, you're unlikely to see a big performance difference between low-end chipsets and the higher-end ones, much less between two models that use the same chipset. That's not to say you should just buy the cheapest thing. A lower-end chipset will usually have some artificial limitations on things like RAM speed, overclocking ability, or PCIe bandwidth. AMD's A-series chipsets, for example, don't support overclocking as of A520 and feature fewer expansion ports, while their B-series and X-series chipsets do have much more expansion, including the ability to bifurcate or split PCIe lanes for multi-GPU or high-speed storage support. The bottom line is that while some people get bogged down on details like voltage regulators and cooling them, the reality is that a mid-range board with good user reviews that has all the slots, sockets, and RGB ports you need for other hardware is the path of least resistance, and there's no shame in that. System memory or RAM can be both straightforward and incredibly deep depending on who you ask and what you plan to do with it. It's usually labeled according to three main values, capacity, speed, and timings. The higher the capacity, the more concurrent tasks your system can work on, but the more memory you have, the more strain on your CPU's memory controller, which usually means reduced frequency and increased timings, both of which are bad. Frequency determines how often information can travel from the memory stick or module to the CPU and vice versa. Higher is better, while timings determine how long the wait is for actual memory chips to respond to a given request. Lower is better. It's important to note that there are points of diminishing returns for all of these attributes and that some CPU's prefer certain memory frequencies because they can lock their memory controllers to match, such as AMD's Ryzen 3000 and 5000 series CPUs, which tend to work best at memory speeds of 3,600 or 3,800 megatranspers per second DDR4, after which point it's better to drive down latencies than go for more speed. And it should be noted, most of the fast kits on the market are overclocked, meaning both the memory modules and the CPU's memory controller will be pushed harder and with more voltage than usual. Ryzen 5000 and Intel's 11th Gen Core and later CPUs support up to 3,200 megatranspers per second DDR4 natively, after which you're in overclocked territory. Regardless of speed, you'll want to buy your memory in matching pairs for dual channel motherboards, triplets for triple channel and so on. And while you're at it, for best performance, you'll want to make sure your memory is also running dual rank. Now rank is essentially one or more memory modules that receive commands as a group. If all of the memory sticks memory is in one group, that's single rank, while some larger memory modules come split into two, which is dual rank. The advantage is that while each rank has to be accessed separately, no matter what, they can still split the load between themselves for better performance. If you've got a matched pair of dual rank memory, you'll get the benefits by default. But you can also install four matched single rank modules for the same effect if your motherboard has four slots. Generally speaking, larger modules tend to be dual rank, but you can usually tell single rank and dual rank apart by one hour or two hour in the model number. One more thing to consider for memory is error correction code or ECC memory. This has recently become a pretty hot topic due to the per chip error correction that's making its way into DDR5. But there's a difference. Full ECC memory has an extra chip that allows it to detect and correct errors, even when the data is moving to and from the CPU. DDR5's error correction is only making sure that the data inside each chip is safe. This lets DDR5 vendors still offer overclocked memory kits, while you'd be hard pressed to find anything like that for full ECC. The more robust nature of full ECC memory, meanwhile, has made it a favorite for servers and high-end workstations where stability is key, even if it comes at the cost of some performance. So if that's you, then you've got some things to untangle first. True ECC can come in three flavors, unregistered, registered, and load reduced. Unregistered memory, also called UDIMM, is the same kinds that goes into your desktop and notebook PC. So your CPU will access the memory chips directly with nothing in between. Registered memory, also called RDIMM, includes a go-between chip that the CPU talks to that manages the data coming and going from each memory chip. Load reduced memory, called LRDIMM, takes this one step further by replacing that register chip with an ultra-fast buffer. This buffer reduces the amount of chatter required to communicate with the memory, allowing the CPU to access as many as eight ranks per module. That's how servers can have multiple terabytes of memory in them. The trade-off, of course, is higher latency. Don't go thinking you can just mix and match, by the way. Consumer motherboards almost exclusively accept UDIMMs and not much else. And while some motherboards can support both RDIMMs and LRDIMMs, this is no guarantee. So check the manual for your motherboard for information on what it can handle before you pull the trigger. Most motherboard manufacturers will have manuals available online in their support section. Storage drives can be divided broadly into two categories, old-school SATA and PCI Express-based NVMe drives. There are different connections for both of these, with this being the most common for SATA and this being the most common for NVMe. Your motherboard manual will include a list of these ports that tells you exactly how many you can install. Mechanical hard drives are for bulk storage on the cheap and typically use a SATA interface. We'll talk a bit more about these later. Solid-state drives or SSDs are more expensive but are recommended as a boot drive for your operating system and for key applications at almost any price point due to their much higher performance. They are available with SATA interfaces but have mostly gone NVMe at this point in the M.2 form factor. Remember that term? It means size and shape. Even among NVMe SSDs, there is an obvious broad performance spectrum and with Microsoft's upcoming implementation of direct storage, a premium PCIe Gen4 SSD or greater might offer a clear performance benefit. But for most average users and gamers, the main things you want are a DRAM cache and some kind of manufacturer indication of endurance, which is a measure of how many times the drives can be written before the cells wear out. Drives with short warranties are probably best avoided and even quality drives should be backed up regularly. Now let's talk cooling. Enthusiasts tend to instinctively gravitate towards custom loop liquid cooling and this is usually the absolute best you can get with outgoing sub-zero, which isn't sustainable long-term, if you're a coward. But from a cost to performance standpoint, it rarely makes sense. Liquid cooling is a topic all in itself but the short version is that your primary concerns are going to be the water blocks and the total surface area of your radiator setup. Generally speaking, surface area is king. More fins on your cold plate means more heat transfer from your CPU and more radiator surface area means the more heat you can remove from your liquid or if you like more silence, the slower you can run your many fans. Materials are less intuitive though. Copper is the superior conductor but it's more expensive than aluminum, which might make you think you could get away with copper for your GPU and aluminum for everything else. But if you try to mix and match them, it's gonna be terrible. I give you my Linus Tech Tips guarantee that galvanic corrosion will ruin your day sometime down the line. You can try out those like, you know, anti-corrosion mixtures, don't do it, it'll be really bad. Some metals can be mixed relatively safely. Here's a chart of what's safe to mix and what's not. Most people don't want to deal with all of that though and AIO solutions are all in ones are both cheaper and easier to work with. The general rule is that a 240 millimeter radiator will be fine for most CPUs with only the most exotic requiring a 280 or a 360. The main drawbacks of AIOs is that they are more expensive, less reliable and offer questionable performance benefits compared to large tower style heat sinks. That's why for most people we recommend a large heat sink for hassle-free long-term operation. The only drawback of these that due to their size, some consider them unsightly, they're wrong, and they can be a hazard during transportation due to their immense weight. At the end of the day, whatever comes of your CPU is fine for most people, but it might run hotter or louder than you want. Thermal compound for most people doesn't matter as long as it's a decent brand and it's not some just bulk stuff you got off of Wish. But there are a couple of things to consider. If you're not going with the easy to use but not thermally amazing graphite pads that cover your CPU like a cozy little blanket, you're going to want to make sure that whatever you get is electrically non-conductive. And the best way to do that is to just look at the label. Most companies exclusively carry non-conductive compounds with the exception being liquid metal. Thermal Grizzlies conduct or not, for example, is an actual metal alloy called gallinstan that's fully liquid at temperatures as low as eight degrees Celsius. It's both electrically conductive and potentially reactive with aluminum parts like heat sinks. And this reaction is not a good thing. While an aluminum oxide layer is usually present on aluminum, a tiny scratcher scuff is all that's needed for the gallium to work its magic and turn your cooler into a crumbly mess that doesn't even look real. If you decide to try liquid metal, make sure you're using copper or nickel plated coolers. If you're content with cheaper traditional compounds, then you've got nothing to fear. There are some things you just shouldn't cheap out on, however. Power supplies are a major one. While early on, it was pretty easy to figure out whether a power supply was decent by just looking at its 80 plus rating. And it is 80 plus gold. That is the real draw for this power supply series right there. It is so easy to hit the 80 plus standards these days, but it's not really a useful measure anymore. The good news is Cybernetics Lab has stepped up to build a more meaningful certification system that addresses both efficiency and noise levels, and hopefully more in the future. Beyond that, the main feature you need to decide if you need is a modular interface. It costs more, but as connectivity standards evolve, like the new PCI Express Gen 5 power connector, for example, it means that you have a chance of replacing just a cable rather than using an adapter or replacing your power supply. And power supplies have reached a level of reliability that I wouldn't really consider one with a warranty shorter than five years now. See, Sonic even goes as high as 12 years on their Prime series. Power supplies, like motherboards and cases, have different form factors that you need to look out for though. This consideration is mostly important for small form factor builds, where the SFX standard provides a smaller footprint in order to accommodate tinier builds. While SFX defines a maximum depth for a power supply that sort of makes it look like a flat rectangle, SFX-L relaxes this to a square shape. And while it doesn't necessarily offer more connections, you'll actually find that usually the more powerful small form factor units are SFX-L, and they have the added benefit of using larger fans, so they tend to be a little bit quieter. Just double-check your case's compatibility, because not all cases that support one can also support the other. Another class of power supplies that has grown in popularity over the last 10 years is DC-to-DC converter power supplies. These use an external brick, just like some monitors or your laptop, and then have a super efficient DC-to-DC conversion, hence the name, that takes whatever the input voltage is and splits it out to all the voltages that you need internally. They tend to be fanless and extremely small, though it does come at the cost of that external brick. Now, there are other esoteric form factors, like TFX that is often used in rack mount servers, but for nearly everything else, you'll be fine with an ATX form factor power supply. It's big, it's chunky, and it's the standard that we've had since not long after the Windows 95 days. These offer the highest wattages on the market, with the largest assortment of peripheral and 12-volt plugs for CPU and PCI Express devices and drives and all that good stuff. But buyer beware, the ATX form factor only specifies the width and height of the power supply at the back plate. It says nothing about the depth, so you will need to take into consideration whether your power supply will fit your chosen case if it's not in the typical square footprint. Make sure you buffer a little extra if you have a modular interface, because those plugs take up a little bit more space. Now, cases. This is where builds can get very interesting. There are options that can be found for as low as $20 on sale, and there are options costing well over 10 times that much, or 100 times, who cares? Just keep going if you want something truly unique. We've already gone over the different major form factors, but even within these constraints, there is an incredible amount of variety out there. Because picking a case on its own is so personalized and situational, we're just going to go over a few basic things to keep in mind while picking one out. First and foremost is airflow. Regardless of whether you're after a quiet rig or an extreme cooling rig, you're going to need airflow, and there's no substitute for a mesh front panel. Counterintuitively, they tend to even offer better acoustic performance than closed front panel cases because the fans don't need to ramp up as high. Not everyone is into that aesthetic though, so vendors like Corsair have come up with options with glass front panels instead, with spacing and even extra intakes on the motherboard side panel to keep things looking pretty while maintaining solid airflow. Secondary to airflow should be ease of maintenance. If your case has great airflow, but it's a pain to clean once it's sucked a bit of dust in, you're going to have a bad time. Removable dust filters and easily accessible front panels help tremendously with maintenance, and most good cases will come with these features. Finally, expansion. What you get will depend on how much of what kind of stuff you want to cram in, plain and simple. Then beyond that, it should ideally be well laid out for cable management and open enough that it's easy to work in. Of course, you won't have any cooling without fans, so what do you buy? There are several considerations here, including the fan's diameter and bearing type, whether the blade is optimized for airflow or static pressure, and of course, whether or not it has addressable RGB. Bearings are what let the fan blade spin freely, so the better quality of the bearing, the more efficient and less noisy a fan can be, and there are three major types. Sleeve bearings are cost-effective and quiet, but tend to wear out quickly because they rely on a lubricant to keep them going. Higher quality sleeve bearing fans can last for years thanks to better seals, but that lubricant will expire, and once it does, so does the fan. Sleeve bearing fans are also designed to run vertically to prevent the lubricant from pooling, making them unsuitable for use in the top or bottom of cases. Ball bearing fans are far more reliable and much more expensive to match, but they tend to be louder because they utilize actual physical ball bearings to overcome friction instead of a lubricant. This also means they're much more likely to survive high temperatures than a sleeve fan, so they're common in servers and other reliability-first environments. More advanced sleeve-style bearings, called fluid dynamic or hydrodynamic bearings, are positioned as a bridging gap between traditional sleeve and ball bearing fans. While their mechanisms are similar to sleeve bearings, they're typically filled with pressurized oil and higher quality seals than a regular lubricating grease. Not all fans that use these bearings are good, but Noctua, for example, exclusively uses their SSO series bearings, which are hydrodynamic and very well regarded. I think coasters are also pretty good too. There are other bearings like Maglev, which use magnetic levitation for effectively zero friction and are thus extremely quiet, long-lasting, and they also cost significantly more than other types of bearings. Corsair famously has a Maglev series of fans in their ML lineup, but they tend to have fewer RGB options and cost significantly more than their other fans. Regardless of the bearings, fans tend to get graded on two major criteria, static pressure and airflow, with some designs leaning further one way than the other. Corsair's SP and Noctua's P series fans are optimized for static pressure. The higher the static pressure, the more air that can be forced through a restrictive filter or fins of a radiator or heat sink. On the other side of the spectrum, Corsair's AF and Noctua's A series are examples of fans that are optimized for pure airflow. So don't put it in front of your radiator, but at like the back of your case with no obstructions, they're really great for that. You'll often run across different diameters of fans, ranging all the way from diminutive 40 millimeters all the way to behemoth 200 millimeter and beyond. As a rule of thumb, the smaller the fan, the faster it needs to spin to push the same amount of air as a larger one. And the faster a fan spins, the louder it will be, which is why 120 to 140 millimeter fans have become the go-to, thanks to the amount of air that they can push while being relatively quiet. 80 and 92 millimeters used to be commonplace in older computer cases, and you can still find mounts for these in some small form factor rigs and on smaller air coolers like Noctua's U9S. Thickness is another thing that can vary. And again, the thinner the fan, the less air it can push at a given noise level. A full-sized 92 millimeter fan, for example, will actually push more air with more pressure than a 120 millimeter slim fan. You'll only really wanna use thin fans for small form factor builds where you have absolutely no alternative. Then there's the connectors. Some fans have three pins on them, and some of them have four. What gives with that? Well, practically speaking, they both work the same, but the three pin variance speed is controlled by changing the voltage being delivered to the motor. The four pin variance, on the other hand, use a control scheme called PWM, which means that the motor exclusively receives 12 volt power, but it gets it in bursts, so it's rapidly turned on and off depending on the speed that is requested by the user. In short, PWM fans tend to be more efficient and offer finer control over their rotational speeds. But it's more important to match your fan type with your controller than to choose one over the other. Most of your fans are gonna be plugged directly into your motherboard, but if you have a truly ridiculous number of fans, or you just wanna control and cable manage them all from one place, you can get controller hubs from companies like Corsair or NZXT that provide significantly more connectors to suit your needs. And depending on your needs, you might wanna add one or more hard drives to your system, either for long-term storage, or maybe to give storage tearing a go for a blend of high performance and low cost. Whatever the reason, there are some things you should be aware of, like the RPM, cache size, noise level, and cost per gigabyte or terabyte. It used to be common to just pick a 7,200 RPM drive no matter what for extra speed and lower response time, but it's actually becoming more of a liability for the drive's long-term health now that high capacity SSDs exist. Higher RPMs mean more noise and critically, more heat. So before committing to a high speed hard drive, you should consider whether it's needed at all. And when you do install one, be aware of its operating temperature so that the platter stays spinning for as long as possible. For everybody else, a 5,600 or 5,900 RPM hard drive should suffice and should be significantly quieter and kick out less heat. Finally, if you wanna really class up your build, you're probably gonna want RGB. And that means you're gonna need to learn what to look for. Currently, there are three major types of controllable RGB, non-addressable, addressable, and USB. Non-addressable is inexpensive and is the original RGB header that uses 12 volt power and four pins. Each device in the chain, be it a light strip or a fan, plugs into the header on a motherboard, a splitter, or into another RGB device in a daisy chain. Every LED in this chain will show the same color of your choosing, which is fine for ambient lighting or for when you don't really care about patterns and animations. But if you do care about those, addressable is your new best friend. Because like its name suggests, it allows each individual LED in the chain to be controlled independently. It typically uses a five volt three pin header that's the same physical size as the non-addressable type with the pin blocked off to differentiate it. If you have a lot of LED strips, you should be aware that only a limited number of strips can be run off a single connector without running into problems like dimming at the ends or the inability to control all the LEDs. If this all sounds complicated, well, it kind of is. That's why some companies like Corsair have devices that use their own method via USB. This lets them know exactly what devices are connected and how many LEDs each of them has. These will usually plug into a USB header on your motherboard. And while cable management can be more complex, overall setup is much simpler. Frustratingly, unlike the non-USB options, they're usually not cross compatible. So you'll probably have to choose your favorite and use the same vendor for all your RGB or else deal with adapters. This especially sucks because some companies offer LED strips with different styles that might be more in line with what you're going for visually. Like Phanteks digital RGB neon strips. Finally, finally, you'll probably want some cable ties and to make sure that you have the tools you need to set everything up. If you go for zip ties for a lower profile cable management job, you'll need to make sure that you have flush cutters for the cleanest look. Whereas if you go for hook and loop ties, like the ones you can find on lttstore.com, then you don't need anything special. You should consider though, whether optional stuff like custom cables will be in your build at this point. They're pretty costly, but they're a cool way to jazz up your rig if you've got the cash to spare and you're after a specific look. If not though, don't sweat it. Not everybody is out to build an art piece and there is no performance benefit to them whatsoever. And besides, building a PC yourself is already a bigger step towards making it yours than most people will ever take. Once you've settled on a build, you can go ahead and click through the checkout process and wait for the parts to arrive. Or if you live near a computer store with all the stuff that you need, lucky you, you get to haul it all home yourself. Assemble the boxes in a photogenic pile for a quick social media pick and finally you're ready to begin. Step two, setting up your work area. Are we only on step two? Jeez, all right, don't worry guys. The hard part's over. Things are gonna go a little faster now. Clear your desk or table. You're gonna want a well-lit area with enough space to be able to easily move around your case, whether it's laid flat or upright and grab any tools you'll need. A Phillips head screwdriver is a must and if it's got a long neck, a magnetic tip and a ratcheting mechanism, that'll make things a lot easier. One or two coffee filters and some isopropyl alcohol is optional but useful for cleaning surfaces without leaving behind lint. Paper towels will work in a pinch. Just be careful about the little bits that might get left behind. And for when you're finishing up, another optional item is a microfiber cloth to get rid of all the greasy fingerprints that you might leave behind. Less optional is a flashlight of some sort, even if it's just the flash on your phone since it can otherwise be tough to see what you're doing when you're trying to get that one last wire installed after everything else is in place. Now, set aside completely any food or drink while you're setting up your machine. This is build time, not snack time, Anthony. And make sure that there's nothing around that could fall if it's bumped accidentally. An anti-static mat or a desk pad is ideal here to prevent scuffs and scrapes, not only on your desk, but also on your new machine. Now, this next bit is a bit contentious, but if the air in your area is dry, then you will definitely want an anti-static wrist strap. We did show that it takes a lot to outright destroy PC components in this collab with Electroboom, but what we don't know is what kind of minor damage might have been done internally with each of those zaps. It is possible that each one of them took a year off of our victim's life. And no, by the way, wireless anti-static wrist straps do not work. Your strap needs to be connected to a proper ground, and the same goes for an anti-static mat. That's what that connector on the end is for. To do that, the most foolproof way that works in any country is to plug your power supply into mains power and clip your anti-static lead to its chassis. Just make sure you're not using one of these. Never use one of these unless you know exactly how to use one, because if you're not actually grounded, you're doing all of this work for nothing, to say nothing of the safety risk. If you don't have a strap, it's a lot better than nothing to plug in your power supply anyway, and then periodically touch it, especially if you move your feet around. If you are using a strap though, a pro tip is to wrap it around your ankle instead of your wrist, so you don't end up yanking things around while you're focused on building. Step three, motherboard and CPU install, AKA the delicate part. We'll start by unboxing our motherboard and placing it on top of its box, a convenient and free static safe surface. If you want to power on your system before you put it in the case, which I highly recommend, you'll want to use the box. It pulls double duty by letting you slot in a GPU, which wouldn't be possible if the motherboard was flan on a desk or an anti-static mat. Now your motherboard may have one of two types of sockets as of today, a pin grid array or PGA, where the pins are on the CPU, or a land grid array or LGA, where the pins are on the motherboard. Why is this important? Because if your motherboard is LGA, you need to inspect the pins before you do anything else. If you bought the board at a brick and mortar store, then they'll often get you to do this step at the store to cover their butts in case you come back with bent pins, because this is something that's typically not covered by the manufacturer's warranty. To do this on an Intel socket, push down on the retention latch and pull it out away from the socket. If you're dealing with a high-end desktop socket, there could be a secondary latch for the retention mechanism that comes out the same way, and they'll only open in the correct order. When you ease up on the clip, it should want to spring upwards. This is good. Pull it upwards all the way, and the retention clip will come up, revealing the socket beneath. Don't worry about the plastic cover plate for now. For AMD Threadripper and Epic SB3-derived sockets, you'll need to undo these three screws in order with the included torque wrench, and then let the retention clip flip open. The CPU's carrier will need to come up next, which you can easily do by pulling up on these tabs. Finally, remove the plastic cover plate to reveal the socket beneath. For Intel's high-end server and workstation Xeon motherboards using LGA 3647, the socket is only covered by the plastic cover plate. The cooler screws down directly into the retention plate. With the pins visible, it's easier to spot damage if you angle the motherboard, so the pins are reflecting light directly back at you, and rotate it around to make sure that everything looks even. Any pins that are bent will need to be dealt with before you go any further. You can refer to this video we did on LGA repair here, but the short version is you may need to use a magnifying glass and a pair of fine-point tweezers or similar instrument to try and straighten it back out. Fresh out of the factory, a motherboard shouldn't have bent pins at all, but if you bought open boxed or used, it's a possibility. Once you're satisfied your pins are okay, it's time to unbox your CPU. For most CPUs, the outer box is expendable unless you wanna put it on display, but make sure you take care of the inner plastic clamshell that actually contains the processor. Not only do you not wanna drop it under any circumstances, you'll also want to keep it for future in case you need to RMA or sell your CPU to someone else. Regardless of your CPU, you want to avoid touching any of the exposed gold contacts, be they on the flat underside of an LGA CPU or the fragile pins of a PGA CPU. We'll get to those, but first, we're gonna keep going with consumer style LGA. Line your CPU up with the socket. Usually there will be a triangular arrow or dot or other indicator to help you figure out which orientation is correct. Intel, for instance, has notches on the side of its CPUs that only allow you to insert a compatible CPU and only in the correct orientation, so you can line up with those. I like to line up the bottom edge of the CPU with the bottom edge of the socket as a bit of an anchor point, then gently lower it in. Give it a little wiggle once it's down to make sure it's seated completely before closing the retention mechanism and pushing the latch down. If it feels a little stiff and creaky, that's okay. It's supposed to. And then the plastic socket cover's gonna kind of pop off. That's normal too. Keep going until you can hook the latch back into place, then store the socket cover somewhere safe, like in the motherboard box. You'll need this in case you need to RMA your board or sell it later on. If your CPU is PGA, take this time to make sure that your pins are all straight. It should be as easy as looking at it from two different angles to make sure that you can see through straight rows of pins. If any of them are bent, your best bet is to use a mechanical pencil or a very thin piece of metal, like a razor or an iFixit Jimmy opening tool to gently nudge them back into position. Too much force though, or too much back and forth, and these can easily snap off, making for a very difficult repair job. So make sure you have steady hands. Once you're satisfied, lift the locking arm and line the CPU up just as we did with LGA, using the indicator on the CPU and the socket to determine the correct orientation. On PGA CPUs, you can also just have a look at the pins and the holes in the socket. Typically, the pins are arranged so that there's a corner with fewer pins so that it can only drop in one way. And it will drop right in. So if you encounter any resistance at all, do not push. Check your pins, then line it up and try again. A few more seconds of your time now is worth it compared to hours for totally mashed pins. Once the CPU is in place, I like to press down on it to prevent it from moving while I close the lever. If you're a high roller and you've got a more exotic socket, you'll be surprised to learn that it's actually pretty easy despite how complicated it looks. Before you begin, some high-end motherboards have support for dual CPUs. These are usually Epic or Xeon. If that's what you're building and you only have one CPU, you'll need to consult your motherboard's manual for which socket to use and which RAM slots are connected to said socket. If you have two, then just double up on the CPU installation instructions. Trust me, it's exactly as fun as it sounds. For AMD SP3-based sockets, remove the plastic dummy CPU from the carrier arm, then grasp the CPU's plastic tabs and gently guide it into the carrier rails. It helps to pull back a little bit on the tab while you do so in order to make sure the CPU stays aligned with the top of the arm. You'll know what I'm talking about if you end up slipping. Once it's almost all the way in, it'll stop moving freely and you'll need to push it down another notch before you're ready to start closing things up. Lower the carrier arm to the socket until you can't move it freely any further. If you've guessed we need to push it a little more, you're right. Each corner clicks into place, and with that done, all that's left is to close the retention mechanism. If you're using the screwdriver that came with the CPU, this is easy. Take note of the close order and screw in the screws in that order. It makes things a little easier to get them all started a tiny bit before tightening them down all the way. It's important not to over-tighten the screws. However, this is where the included screwdriver is great. Once it reaches the right tension, the driver will snap to let you know. You're done when the last screw is down. Intel Xeon sockets are pretty simple too. It's an intimidating looking mechanism at first, but in fact, it's so simple that you aren't even supposed to install the CPU into it. Wait, what? Yeah, you install the CPU onto the cooler itself first, and then the cooler is the carrier that lines the CPU up onto the socket, which thanks to this pattern of screw holes and posts means you can't really misalign it unless something goes very, very wrong. The way this plays out is like so. You have your CPU, cooler, motherboard, and classic CPU carrier. The CPU snaps into the carrier by lining up the golden triangle on one corner of the CPU with a triangle cut out on the carrier itself, then angling it in like so. You might need to bend the carrier a little to make it snap together, but once you do, it'll be a firm hold. Then after applying thermal compound, more on that soon, align the triangular cut out of the CPU carrier with the heat sink and clip it into place. It doesn't matter which orientation you use, but if you're using a liquid cooler, you'll wanna pay attention to which side the tubes will be coming from to align with the socket. Once you're ready, line up the triangle on the CPU carrier with the triangle on the motherboard socket and place it down. The posts automatically align everything for you, so all you have to do here is tighten the torque screws until they stop. We'll come back to the cooler in a moment. First, we wanna deal with RAM, because depending on your cooler, it could be anywhere from a little bit to a lot easier to install it now rather than later. Unbox your RAM and lay it out in front of you. Depending on your motherboard and your priorities, you might have anywhere from one stick to 12 or 16 sticks of memory or even more. The ultimate authority for which slots to use will be your motherboard manufacturer, so check your manual to be sure. You never know when some engineer is gonna get a fun new idea for how things are supposed to be color coded, but we'll go over the most common configurations anyway. If you look at your motherboard closely, you'll usually see silk screened labels for the memory channels. On ASUS, for example, DIM-A1, DIM-B1, DIM-A2, and so on. The letter here indicates which channel the slot is connected to. So for two sticks in dual channel, you'd install each module in the same numbered slot, one in channel A and the second in channel B, dual channel. Now we've mentioned before that dual channel operation is usually best for consumer PCs, but if your motherboard only has two RAM slots, you might have opted for a single large stick today so that you've got room to upgrade later rather than two smaller sticks adding up to the same capacity that will need to be discarded. This is a valid strategy, and if that's you, then you should install your memory module in the slot that is nearest to the CPU. If that sounds weird to veteran builders, that's because they're used to dual channel configurations with two sticks of RAM. Usually, unless you're filling out all the slots, you should leave the slots closest to the CPU empty in order to improve the stability of the system at higher speeds. This is because the farthest slots from each channel are where the channel itself ends. When you have something in the near slot, but the far slot is empty, signals can reflect off of the empty slot and mess things up in fun and unpredictable ways. The same principle applies to triple and quad channel setups, they're just usually that many more RAM slots. Although the exact layout can change from board to board, so for these setups, it's almost always best to RTFM. Multiple CPUs get weirder still, with two entire rows of memory slots with potentially opposite channel arrangements due to the orientation of the CPU. Again, in this scenario, RTFM, do not skimp on RTFM, do it. Are you still with me? Good. Here's how you actually install memory. First, push down the tabs at the ends of the slot that you're installing the memory into. Some boards will have two tabs, one on each end, while others will have just one, which can make things a little bit easier if you have clearance issues with a large graphics card. Next, look at the pins on the memory module itself. There'll be at least one notch, as shown here with DDR4 memory. This is offset from the middle of the module, and there's a matching post in the slot itself so that it can only go in one way. Hold up the module so the notch is aligned with the post, then line up the module with the grooves on the slot, getting one lined up at a time is often easiest, and push down until you feel resistance. At that point, press a little harder until the tab or tabs lock back into place on their own. You should hear a distinct click if it's done correctly. Then repeat these steps for any more memory modules that you have to install. Here's a pro tip, by the way. You can skip figuring out subsequent modules' orientations by looking for the label side of the stick you already installed and matching against that instead. Keep in mind though, for some motherboards with RAM on both sides of the CPU socket, one side will often be flipped. If your build has an M.2 SSD, now's the time to install it. It's pretty common for the slots to be hidden under heat sinks, so if you don't see any, you'll wanna check your motherboard manual to figure out where these slots might be hiding. Some M.2 slots only support NVMe, while some only support SATA, and some support both. Your motherboard manual, again, will help you to identify them. So if your SSD is SATA, you should purposely avoid an NVMe slot that's labeled as going to your CPU to leave it open for a faster NVMe SSD later on down the road. But it really shouldn't matter as long as the slot supports SATA. On the flip side, if your SSD is NVMe, you should avoid slots labeled as going through the chipset or PCH, because these could bottleneck the drive's performance compared to a CPU-connected slot. If you have multiple NVMe SSDs and don't really have a choice, you'll wanna use the CPU M.2 slot for the faster SSD, if applicable. Thankfully, because M.2 slots have the same installation instructions regardless, you don't need to take any of that into consideration when it's time to actually put it together. Remove the heat sink from your motherboard, if applicable, and for the love of all that's good, take off the protective film on the thermal pad now, so you don't forget. Next, make sure that the standoff is in the appropriate position. Most M.2 SSDs use the 80 millimeter long 2280 position. It may already be installed here, and if so, it may also have a very small Phillips screw inserted into it. You'll need to remove that Phillips screw before going any further, if so, but if you don't have a standoff at all, you'll have to find it in your motherboard box. Usually, it's in a little baggie along with the tiny Phillips screw. Free it from its prison, twist it into place on the 2280 position, and you're up to speed. Visually line up the SSD's pin side with the slot, taking note of the notch that's cut into it. This should line up perfectly with a tab on the M.2 slot and typically results in the SSD's label facing out. It's okay if your SSD has two notches, but your slot only has one. This key means that the SSD is either SATA or supports two PCI Express lanes rather than four. A special note for if your SSD has its own heat sink, the connector side will almost always be on the bottom of the heat sink, with the fins facing outwards. If your motherboard has a heat sink for this slot, you might want to remove the heat sink from your SSD now in order to use that instead. There's usually some clips on the sides that you can just prise apart to release it. There will be a gummy thermal pad on the inside that sticks to it, but no one I'm aware of glues these together, so it shouldn't be a big deal to peel it free. All right, enough foreplay already. Angle the SSD by about 30 degrees or so relative to the slot and line it up. It should slip in easily with a little bit of pressure, and once you can no longer see the pins, it should stand up freely on its own. From here, it's easier if you get the tiny Phillips screw on the tip of a magnetic screwdriver before going any further because you'll need to push the SSD down flat against the standoff we installed earlier and hold it there while you screw it into place. Now you want to be careful with this screw. It's very thin, very fragile, and very easy to misplace. It also offends easily. Line it up and twist it counterclockwise until you feel a little click, then start turning it clockwise to tighten it. It only needs to be snug enough that the SSD no longer moves when you let go. Now you can put your motherboard heat sink back on if applicable. Now there are other ways to install an M.2 SSD, including on a PCI Express card or ASUS Dim.2 interface, and these are conceptually similar to connecting directly to the motherboard with the exception of how they slot in. Dim.2 installation is identical to standard RAM modules. Open the tab, line up the keyed notches with the slot, then align yourself with the vertical posts, push down, and click into place. The PCI Express card is the same as any other expansion card, and we'll take care of that later. For now, it's time to move on to your cooler. If you've got an all-in-one liquid cooler, this step will be just installing the appropriate bracket, but if you have an air cooler or a CPU block for a custom loop, both of these will be installed now. Most coolers use similar mounting mechanisms in theory, but often the actual install will be pretty different. For air coolers, Noctua's Secufirm system is by far one of the easiest for consumer processors. No matter what socket, it consists of two pieces of metal with screw-down posts on the top side that screw into a back plate. There are spacers fitted to make sure the vertical alignment with the socket is just right for optimal mounting pressure, and the cooler itself screws down into these screw posts right here for a secure connection. Let's see what that looks like in practice. On Intel consumer systems, Noctua provides a back plate since that socket actually lacks one out of the box. So instead of screws going down into it, the back plate has posts that stick up through four holes in the motherboard, along with a little notch that allows it to clear the retention bolt on the lower side of the socket. Spacers are added per the instruction manual, double-check the color, and then the appropriate bars are put on top. Now, because Intel's cooler dimensions are symmetrical, that means they can go in either orientation depending on how you want your air to flow in your case. In most situations, you want your cooler to blow air towards the rear of the chassis, so you would install these bars laterally, then screw them down with these reverse thumb screws. On AMD, because a back plate is included, the spacers simply fit over the parts of the back plate that stick up through the motherboard, which means that your first order of business is to remove these plastic clip adapters that come standard on AMD boards. Make sure you keep those, by the way, because some coolers do require them, and losing them is pretty bad for resale value. Then your mounting bars go on and get screwed down in the same way. Now, because AMD's cooler holes are asymmetrical, there are two sets of mounting bars, one long and one short. The short bars are what most people will use, as these are installed laterally, so the cooler can exhaust air towards the rear of the case. Once it's screwed into place, you're ready to go. Intel's LGA 2011 and 2066 sockets are a little more straightforward. Simply screw in the four nuts, slot the mounting bars over them in the orientation you prefer, and tighten them down with reverse thumb screws, similar to LGA 11 5X or LGA 1200. Finally, Threadripper and Epic sockets are simpler still. The cooler just bolts down straight onto the socket's own retention mechanism. Because of the socket design, the cooler can only go on one way, so make sure to align it properly. One side is spaced narrow, and the other side spaced wide. But that mechanism is so simple that we're getting ahead of ourselves. We need thermal compound first. Many coolers come with some compound pre-applied, and feel free to use that if you like. It's usually fine, and it's easier than cleaning it off to apply something different. But if you do want something fresh, that's where rubbing alcohol and coffee filters come in. Wet the bottom of the coffee filter with alcohol, then rub away the thermal compound from the cooler in a circular pattern, until most of it is wiped away. Then go over it one more time with some fresh alcohol on a clean part of the filter. To make sure any finger grease and dust is removed, you should repeat the last step with the CPU itself, too. With the surfaces clean, you can grab your thermal compound. Most of the time, it'll be in a syringe like this. So twist off the cap, then hold it at an angle against the CPU like so, making sure it's flat and perpendicular to your work surface. Perpendicular. I think we should just leave that. I agree. I actually prefer that. Slowly squeeze the plunger until the thermal compound flows. The amount you want and where to put it varies by CPU. Intel consumer CPUs need about as much as a cooked grain of brown rice. From there, LGA 2011 and 2066, and AMD's AM4 processors get about a pea-sized blob, and it's up to you if you wanna just plop it down in the middle or go for the line or the X method. It really doesn't matter that much at the end of the day. For large CPUs like Threadripper, Epic, and Xeon Platinum, however, you're gonna need a lot more. You can go with two pea-sized blobs and hope for the best, but the recommended pattern looks like a five on the die with a series of small dots like so. In theory, this gives the best possible coverage, but Gamers Nexus testing in 2017 showed that a large X pattern can also work very consistently here. The main takeaway is just to make sure you use enough to completely cover the cooler's integrated heat spreader or IHS. That's the metal part on top of the CPU with its name lasered onto it. Once you're satisfied with the amount of thermal paste you've used, you can press the tip flat against the CPU to break the surface tension of the paste so it doesn't come up off the CPU when you lift the syringe away. Don't forget to recap it. Of course, if you're using a thermal pad, don't just plop it down on there. Make sure you buy one that's sized for the CPU you want to use it with. You might need to use multiples for a big rectangular beast like Threadripper. Now that the thermal compound's sorted, just bolt down your cooler. For an Octua air coolers, you'll first want to unclip the fan from the cooler like so in order to access the screws. Then it's as simple as aligning the heat sink with the screw posts and tightening it down. It's best to tighten one side a little, then the other a little more, and then keep going back and forth until you can't go any further. This way, pressure is being applied evenly, helping spread your thermal compound around. For coolers that have four screws, like the custom loop CPU blocks and air coolers like the Hyper 212, you'll first want to make sure there's no sticker on the cold plate, and then you'll want to screw them in in an X pattern. It helps to get all of them started partway first, and start tightening them down a bit at a time by alternating to the opposite corner until it's tightened down all the way. If you're using an air cooler, now's as good of a time as any to attach the air part. Depending on the configuration, you might have one fan, two fans, or zero fans if you're one of those passive types. You lock and just ignore the spin. You can also ignore it if your fan is integrated into the cooler, like with a stock one. Fans are directional, and we'll talk more about this later in the case fan section, but here is all that you need to know for now. Some fans have markers that show the direction the air will flow from them, but if you're unsure, the side with the sticker part that doesn't move usually indicates that's the side the air will come out of. When installing a fan into a cooler, it's tidiest to have the fan's power cable coming out towards the motherboard. So take that into account while you're fan-daggling it back into place. Tower coolers like the NH-D15 and NH-U12 come with wire clips that hook into the fan's mounting holes in order to then clip it to the cooler itself. It can be a little tricky, but it's basically just a matter of placing the fan in the desired orientation and stretching those wires over the grooves in the heat sink. It'll clip into place, and you're good to go. Repeat as desired if your cooler takes more than one fan, but be careful about the orientation, and especially note any clearance issues with nearby motherboard heat sinks or memory. You may need to either mount the fan a bit higher than you otherwise would, or just scrap it entirely. It's still fine. One fan will do it. Once the fans are in, look for the four-pin header labeled CPU fan on your motherboard, or similar. This is almost always right next to the CPU socket, and for Asus motherboards, it tends to be on the top edge, as seen here. Line up the tabs on the cable with the one on the motherboard, and press it into position. Either a three-pin or a four-pin fan can function perfectly plugged into a connector like this, and as we said previously, all the fourth pin does is add a separate pin for a finer fan speed control via PWM. So four pins are ideal, but not necessary, and in the case of liquid coolers, there might actually only be one wire to sense the RPM of the pump, because it will draw power from a separate Molex or SATA connector. So that RPM sense wire is just to ensure that in the event your pump fails, your motherboard can either set off an alarm or initiate a safe shutdown. Now, if your cooler has two fans, you're gonna wanna check for a CPU opt, or two header. If there isn't one, the cooler will often include a Y-splitter that lets you connect both fans to a single header. Usually it is no problem to have two fans on one header, but don't go overboard, because there are current limits through those connectors. With that done, we're finished with our motherboard for now, but now is also an excellent time to power on our system and make sure that everything's working while it's easy to access. For you air jockeys, you get to relax while the all-in-one liquid cooler users awkwardly hook their coolers up now outside the case, only to uninstall them again once they're done and reinstall them yet again when everything is inside the case. Yes, it is a pain, but it's a small price to pay for not having to tear everything down if it doesn't work. Now, most liquid coolers simply have a bracket that twists on and off depending on the socket that you're using, and then screw straight down onto the mounting bracket that you installed earlier. If that's you, make sure you tighten them down in an X pattern, going a little on each corner, one by one, until none can go any further. There are unfortunately some vendors, like Cooler Master, that use clips instead, and this is where those standard AMD plastic clip things come in. It's inelegant in the modern age, but it ensures that coolers remain compatible backwards and forwards to an absolutely ludicrous degree. So you can't really blame AMD for this. Slide the clips through the holes on the block, start the retaining thumb screws enough to keep them from falling out, and then put the whole thing in place and make sure the tabs were captured by the clip. Then, while holding the clips in position, tighten it all down. It's gonna feel really delicate, but stick with it, and eventually it'll all be okay. Consider this a practice run for when you don't have so much room to maneuver. As for those of you who just have a water block and nothing else right now, well, you could fill up your loop on the bench, and that is what I would recommend, but if all you wanna do is verify that it's working, you can slap the block on without water in it and power on for just long enough to see the post screen, about 10 to 20 seconds. It should be fine. Let's get into what that looks like. Step seven, pre-build test, AKA, the part where it going horribly wrong is a good thing, because if you don't find out now, you'll definitely find out later. In order to do a quick test, you'll need three things. Your power supply with accessories, your graphics card, if applicable, and a screwdriver. First, if you have one, install your graphics card. This is significantly easier to do while the system is outside the case. Make sure that the tab on the long PCI Express X16 slot is pushed down, then grab your graphics card. Pull off any protective covers on the card edge connector, then light it up with the slot, giving it a gentle push until the retention clip is pushed into the locking position. Make sure it's in straight and you can't see any pins, because outside of the case, there isn't anything to hold it down. Once it's in, one trick to make it a little bit more stable is to use the motherboard box's flap to anchor the card in place, if it does have a flap that you can kinda slide it into. Next, grab your power supply cables. At a minimum, you'll need the 12-volt CPU connector, which is usually eight pins, but sometimes four, a 24-pin connector, and if you're running a GPU, you'll need as many connections as your GPU requires. Most won't work without them. Expect to see a combination of six and eight-pin connectors, although sometimes there are 12 volts on newer machines, but note that these eight-pin connectors are not the same as the eight-pin for the motherboard or your CPU. Do not force anything. Mining these up outside the case is easy. Make sure the tabs line up, then push them down until they clip into place. If your motherboard has more than one 12-volt CPU connector, usually the one marked as one is the primary one that's actually required, but it's good practice to install all of them if you can. These cables can often be split into two groups of four if, for example, your motherboard has an eight and a four-pin connector rather than two eight-pins. With all that done, connect up your keyboard and display, making sure, of course, to plug into your graphics card and not your motherboard if you have a graphics card installed. Then you can flip on the power switch on your power supply and, wait, where's the power button? About that. There isn't one. Not always, anyway. This is where the screwdriver comes in. Find the front panel header for your motherboard, often in the lower right corner, and then find the pins labeled for power switch. What now? Stick the screwdriver in. Yes, seriously. Your screwdriver doubles as a button. Who knew? Wow, what else can screwdrivers do? LTDStore.com, maybe? Someday? Anyway, if you have a boot screen, mash the setup key, which is usually delete, until you get into the BIOS. Check to be sure that everything's been detected. All your memory, your CPU, your fans, and your M.2 SSDs should all be visible either on the main info page in the system health section or in a storage-related menu like NVMe configuration or SATA configuration. If you're using an empty water block, this is as far as you want to go. Your CPU is probably already getting toasty. However, for anyone else, it's worth making sure that your temperatures are okay here. Let it sit powered on for a few minutes and see where the temperatures get to when it's warmed up a bit. Some CPUs will idle pretty hot in the BIOS regardless of the cooler, and that's normal. What you're looking for is temperatures to stabilize and for them to not get any better or worse by pushing down on the cooler. If they do change, that's an indication that your cooler may not be making proper contact with the CPU. So what you should do now is shut it down, pull off the cooler, check the pattern of your thermal compound to be sure that it's spread evenly, then repaste and try again. But what if every novice builder's worst nightmare happens and nothing shows up on the screen after powering it up? Thankfully, there are often ways to understand what's gone wrong. Some motherboards have LED displays that show a two-character hexadecimal code that should help identify which part of the boot process failed, and you can look up what those mean in your manual or online. Often, another LED indicator somewhere on the motherboard is present, either instead of or alongside that help make it even more clear. ASUS, for example, tends to put a kind of stoplight type of array of LEDs that show red to indicate CPU tests, orange to indicate memory tests, white to indicate storage, and green to indicate graphics. With these, you can tell at a glance exactly where the issue is, even if there's nothing on the screen. Other vendors have LEDs that light up each section of the motherboard as they're tested at startup, so check around your CPU socket, RAM slots, or graphics card to see if there's anything lit up. The most common cause of no video is, of course, having plugged the display cable into the wrong port. It doesn't really matter where on the graphics card you plug it in, but if you plug it into the motherboard, especially for AMD systems without integrated graphics, you're not going to get anything. Failing that, make sure your graphics card is fully inserted. Re-seat if you aren't sure, and do the same for memory. If you have more than one memory module, try removing all but one, and then if everything works, try adding them back one by one. If none of that helps but the PC turns on, you may need to try re-seating your CPU, and especially check to be sure that there are no bent pins, and that there's no lint or anything in the socket that might prevent a good connection. It's rare these days, but some computers won't boot or stay on without the CPU fan header connected, so that's one more thing to try if the rest doesn't help. If nothing happened at all when you press the power button, I'm sorry, the first thing you should check is that the motherboard is getting power. Usually, there will be an LED or two that turns on when you flip the power supply into the on position, assuming, of course, you've plugged it into the wall. You checked that, right? I'll wait. Okay, good. If there's still nothing, then turn off the power supply and make sure your cables are properly connected. The 24-pin connector can often split into a 20 and four-pin connector for compatibility reasons, so it's possible that some or all of one part hasn't been fully inserted. Push the clip holding it into place and pull it out. Then make sure it's all lined up and try again. Same thing can happen with the 12-volt EPS connectors, so triple check those, too. And of course, make sure they're all plugged in to the proper power connection points on the power supply itself. Most modern power supplies should make it impossible to plug these things into the wrong connectors, but you never know. Failing all of that, there could be some compatibility reasons your system isn't firing up. Some AMD motherboards in particular might require a BIOS update to enable support for certain generations of CPUs, or it might be too far forward and you need to roll it back for your generation of CPU. Just look it up in the motherboard manual. You may need to contact the store you bought it from or AMD directly to arrange to have that done. If none of that helps, then you'll need to do some more advanced troubleshooting, preferably with a different computer or sets of components. Check the LTT forums for more info there. Once you're satisfied that everything's powered on and working, flick off the power, disconnect everything, and then put it to the side. It's time to make your case. It might help to lay down a blanket or a towel or something so you don't scratch up your case or your desk while you work with it. As a bonus, it'll reduce the friction of the feet so you can rotate it around more easily while working. Every case is going to be different in terms of layout, build quality, and cable management, but there are some general notes to keep in mind when prepping. First, take off your side panels and store them in a safe place. The box the case came in is a good candidate. Depending on your case, the side panels might need a screwdriver or have thumb screws if they're plastic or metal, or they might have side screws or even be held in magnetically on a hinge of their tempered glass if they're fancy. With your case open, remove the hardware box if it's stored inside the chassis and put it aside for now. If your motherboard comes with an I.O. shield, you should install that now. Line up the I.O. shield with the back of your motherboard to determine which orientation it should go in. The flat end faces towards the motherboard. Then align the I.O. shield with the cutout in the rear of the case and snap it into place using one corner as an anchor. It may take a bit of force to get it in just right and cheaper cases may flex when you do this and cause it to pop back out. But don't get discouraged. Keep at it until you're satisfied it's not going to pop out when you look at it the wrong way. Another thing you should do now is move any cables out of the way. Sometimes they'll be tied up with a twist tie or zip tie, but generally you wanna get them on the other side of the case so you don't have to worry about pinching them or getting them trapped under the motherboard when it's installed. It also makes it much easier to cable manage later. Now let's talk standoffs. Some cases will come with some or all of these pre-installed and if not, everything you need will be in the hardware box that you removed earlier. They're essentially just extensions for the screw holes on the motherboard tray to prevent the motherboard from shorting out on the tray. And they screw in the same way that a normal screw would, just, you know, without a screw head. You can check the hole pattern on your motherboard to determine where the standoffs should go and which extra ones might need to be removed. Hand tightening these is enough to build, but I've run into issues disassembling systems that were only hand tight, where the standoff will come out instead of the motherboard screw. Just be careful if you do decide to tighten them with a five millimeter hex socket driver, because cheaper cases will often just strip the threads or skip back out instead of just tightening down. If you're trying to remove one and you don't have an adapter or driver or your fingers just aren't cutting it, then pliers can give you quite a bit more leverage, but this will damage its finish if that matters to you. A sacrificial paper towel or microfiber cloth can help mitigate this. You'll notice that there are more holes than there are standoffs. What's up with that? While there are standard layouts for these for each form factor, not every motherboard will use every mounting point, or some may use non-standard ones. While you don't strictly speaking need a standoff for every mount point on your motherboard, let's just say it's highly recommended and it's absolutely critical that there are no extras. A standoff placed where there isn't a mount point could short something out if you aren't careful, or worse, it could cause your motherboard to flex and potentially break something if you screw the others in and the motherboard ends up flexing. Once you're satisfied, you can do a test fit. First, count the numbers of standoffs in the case and the holes in your motherboard. Watch out, some motherboards actually have holes that are hidden by cosmetic covers and SSD heat sinks these days. If they match, gently lay your motherboard into the case and align it with the standoffs. You should see screw threads for each hole. If you don't, then make a note of which is missing, remove your motherboard and rearrange the missing standoffs until you've got everything lined up. If everything looks good, then now is a great time to hook up your eight pin 12 volt cables for the CPU. These are also called EPS connectors. These things are notoriously difficult to get plugged in when the motherboard and especially the cooler are installed. So if your power supply is modular, go ahead and attach the motherboard side, then feed the other end through the cable management hole that is probably up here. Otherwise, you'll just have to drape it across the motherboard. With that done, it's time to screw your board down. Now each case is a little different, so check the manual before proceeding. But if you don't have one, then usually the larger 632 screws are used for this rather than the smaller finer M3 screws. You can safely test this by threading one into a standoff with your fingers. If a 632 screw doesn't tighten easily, then you need to use an M3. And if it's loose with an M3, then you need to use a 632. It's easiest to start with the central mount point, if present. This will anchor the board into place and help keep things aligned while you're screwing everything in. Hence the peg version that some cases come with. Align the screw in the hole, twist counterclockwise until you feel a click, then go clockwise to screw it into place. Pro tip, by the way, don't fully tighten this screw yet. Leaving a little bit of slack helps you reposition the motherboard as you're putting in the rest of the screws. Next, get the corners. And if you did everything right, the motherboard should now be perfectly aligned and you can tighten everything down completely. If you've got more mount points to screw down, keep going until they're all done. Ideally, you would populate every mount point with a screw, but in the event that you can't due to a clearance issue, a missing one isn't gonna hurt anything. It's easiest to wire the front panel header now while there are a few obstructions and cables in the way because you're dealing with small one or two wire connections. Before doing anything, grab the whole bundle of them and make sure they're not tangled up in anything else. They should hang freely from where they enter the case from the front panel. From here, you'll want to find a hole that's close to where they need to go. As mentioned before, the front panel header is often located in the lower right corner of the motherboard and there are often silk screened markings on the motherboard to indicate which pins are for what. If you don't see any markings for it, consult your motherboard's manual. If your case has cable management guides, it's best to use these now so you don't have to rewire anything when cable managing later, just because of how fiddly these can be. Be conscious of how long the wires are and how far they have to go and try to make sure that they don't cross anything that needs access. You don't want to knock them loose by accident later. At a minimum, all computers should come with a power switch lead that needs to be plugged into the front panel header, but they may also come with a power LED, HDD LED and reset switch. Very occasionally these days, you may also have a speaker or buzzer in the hardware box and this is also where that goes. The usual layout is to have the power LED plus and minus on the top left, power switch immediately right of that and PC speaker plus and minus to the right of that on the top row. The bottom row usually goes HDD LED plus and minus then reset switch. Sometimes there'll be a second three pin wide power LED plus and minus to the right of that for compatibility with older cases using a wider power LED connector. Of these connections, you might note that three have plus and minus or polarity. That is it matters in which orientation you have them. The connector will usually have a positive and negative indicator silkscreened onto it or even be separated into individual wires. But if not, they should be color coded and the white or black wire is usually the negative. For LEDs, the polarity needs to be correct or your lights won't function properly. The good news is that if you put them in wrong, it won't hurt anything, just flip them around. The PC speaker header follows the same black equals negative wire convention, but these are becoming so rare that you may never see one while building a computer for yourself. Its primary role these days is to provide feedback during boot. Beep codes can be useful for troubleshooting, but have largely been replaced by diagnostic LEDs. It has other uses, but it's mostly just a relic of a bygone era. Two of the front panel connections absolutely do not matter which orientation they go in and that's the power switch and reset switch because unlike devices like LEDs or speakers that need to draw power, these are simple switches that close a circuit. Still, it's needless to make sure that they line up with the other cables if present. Once you've wired up the front panel, gently pull the slack back through the rear panel. It's a good idea to also wire up USB and front panel audio now if present. Front panel audio may have two connectors, AC97 and HD audio or Azalea. Both are keyed the same way. That is, they have a blanked out pin on the connector that allows them to go in only one way, but how they work is different. The TLDR is that AC97 is a mostly dumb connection that doesn't provide any feedback as to what's plugged in. And HD audio or Azalea allows for things like jack sensing and reassignment. Most computers since the mid 2000s will have support for HD audio. So use that unless your computer is really old. The header for this is usually on the lower left corner of the motherboard, but if you don't see it there, check your manual to locate it. Like your front panel wires from before, make sure they're completely free of obstructions, then use the cable management guides now if you have them to reduce the need for rewiring later. Find a hole close to the header, then go through it. For an ATX motherboard, you can usually get away with pulling it through this little channel here, even if your power supply will go right up against it. And that will give you a very clean look. A common mistake when plugging these in is to only plug in one row. Make sure there are no pins hanging out directly above or below your connector when you plug it in. It can only go in one way, yes, but only if all the rows are aligned first. When it's on there, pull the slack through and move on to the next one. Front panel USB is broken up into three types, USB 2.0, USB 3.0, and USB 3.2, often used for the Type-C ports. USB 2 connectors consist of two rows of four pins, with a fifth pin on only one row to make sure you don't plug it in the wrong way around. Usually, but not always, there's a plastic shield around these on the motherboard to make sure it lines up exactly when it's plugged in, but it's usually pretty easy. And they can share this design with both serial and FireWire. Make absolutely certain that you do not plug a USB into anything that's called FireWire, FW, or 1394, because it uses a much higher voltage and will destroy USB devices plugged into it. Usually, the right headers will be labeled with USB, sometimes followed by a port number and the headers that correspond to it. But if it doesn't say, or you aren't sure, consult your motherboard's manual. Follow the same procedure as front panel audio for these cables. Make sure they're free from obstruction, use the cable management guides, and find a hole close to the header for it to go through. Remember, it can only go on one way, so don't force it and mash up the pins. Pull the slack through for the cable management later and repeat as necessary. But what about USB 3 and 3.2? These are much larger, stiffer cables, and usually you'll find their headers on the right edge of the motherboard or at the bottom edge. They're quite wide and sometimes difficult to get through cable management channels. So if you haven't been paying attention to cable management, pay attention now, because these are the worst. As before, find a hole near the USB 3 header on the motherboard and line it up, but don't connect it just yet. Listen first, USB 3 connectors are very fussy, and it's easy even for a professional builder to mash the pins due to the way that it's installed. The connector easily contacts the pins before it is fully aligned, and the force required to plug it in is much higher than the other connectors we've seen so far. That basically means that you won't know if it's aligned, and you won't know if you've mashed anything by feel alone. If you do manage to bend a pin, chances are it won't unbend without snapping. So very carefully line it up, and don't apply pressure until you are reasonably sure that the pins are aligned. If all goes well, it should snap or click into place, and you can breathe a sigh of relief. Unlike the other cables, this one is very stiff, so cable management should be done with a very gentle touch. If you accidentally pull it out, you'll probably end up bending all the pins in the header at the same time, and at that point, you can just say, goodbye front USB 3. USB 3.2 is a lot easier, but has the annoying quality of being both very stiff and standing straight up off the motherboard most of the time. Usually these connectors will be found near the 24-pin power connector, and are keyed to only go in one way. You don't have to worry about mashing pins on this one, thankfully, so you can just plug it right in, but it does have the annoying tendency to kind of rock out of place. So again, a light touch is needed for cable management. Now there are other older headers that you might come across even today, like serial, firewire, parallel, and more. And you can think of these the same way that you think of the USB 2 or front panel audio connectors. Just make absolutely certain that you are connecting to what you think you are. Serial, for example, is often labeled COM, parallel will often be labeled LPT, and firewire may be labeled 1394. Just keep this in mind if you're hunting around for more USB headers to plug into. Oh, a fun little aside, is if you run out of internal USB 2 headers, you can actually get hubs that will expand them, since that's a thing that USB can do. If you have any 2 1⁄2 inch or 3 1⁄2 inch drives, now's a good time to get them installed. Most modern cases have dedicated trays behind the motherboard or elsewhere for the smaller 2 1⁄2 inch type, usually with the expectation that you'll be using them with an SSD. And let's face it, you probably are. These are almost always removable with a thumb screw or something like that. Just remove the screw and slide it free to get access. Your SSD will also have fine threaded M3 holes that screw onto the bottom of the tray, as well as the sides. Some trays use one set or the other, and there will be countersunk or flat screws for this purpose included with the case hardware box. Align the SSD with the holes, then screw it in place. When it's solid, go ahead and slip it back into position by aligning the tabs and using the thumb screws to secure it. If you got more, go ahead and repeat the process. Most cases come with removable trays for 3 1⁄2 inch hard drives these days, usually clipped in with two tabs like this. Pinch them and slide the tray out to remove it, and like the 2 1⁄2 inch sled, it may have holes either on the sides or the bottom, depending on the manufacturer. The drive should face label up with the PCB on the bottom, and its connectors should be on the side without tabs, so that when it slides back in, they're facing the motherboard tray side of the case. Many of these will have shock absorbing rubber grommets through its long course threaded 632 screws from the hardware box are inserted. These are the good ones. Some, however, are completely tool-less, and these can be kind of annoying because you need to kind of stretch it around the hard drive to get it to clip into place. It never feels quite right. Regardless of the type, most modern 3 1⁄2 inch trays also have 2 1⁄2 inch mounting holes for SSDs too, which follow the same installation steps, unless they don't have grommets, in which case you're just gonna screw it directly in like the other 2 1⁄2 inch drive sleds we mentioned earlier. Assuming that's the case, screw in the fine threaded M3 screws from the bottom with the label up and the connectors facing the rear. Repeat these steps until all of your drives are installed. If your case is an older design with fixed mounts, as is common with extreme budget builds, then you'll need to angle the drive into place and then line it up on the rail with the connectors facing inside of the case. Yes, it is as messy as that sounds. When you line it up, two mounting holes for coarse threaded 632 screws on each side should be visible through the cutouts. And while some cases give you some leeway from mounting it further forward or rearward, you're limited to these holes. A lot of people neglect the screws on the other side, but you're not like them, are you? You're not one of those. No, of course not. I mean, if you need to mount a 2.5 inch SSD this way, that's fine. They don't have any moving parts and they're not all that heavy, so you can even just like double-sided tape them to wherever you want if it comes to that. But heavy 3.5 inch hard drives need to be screwed in properly, at least if you want it to last for any period of time. You're probably wondering how the computer talks to these drives at this point, and that's where the data cable comes in. Serial ATA has made things dead simple, and most motherboards will come with cables for it in the box. Sometimes they'll have locking tabs on them to keep them in place. While installing them, they'll kind of clip in automatically, but to remove them, you need to press down on the clip to pull it out. Regardless as to whether or not they clip though, they're keyed in an L shape that makes it very obvious which way is the right way to insert them. Line the L on the cable up with the L on the drive, just plug it in, making sure it's flush with the drive. Then route the cable through to your motherboard. Sounds simple, but these are stiff cables that are tough to cable manage. So you may need to get a little bit creative when hiding them, especially if the corresponding connector on your motherboard isn't facing the edge like this, and instead sticks up like this. Like the USB 3 connector, you'll want to be careful while cable managing these. If you accidentally overdo it, you can break off the L block on the drive, rendering it useless, unless you've got some pretty mad soldering skills. I mean, I guess it's not that difficult, but you don't want to do it. Anyway, go ahead and connect the other end of the cable to the drive now. You should check with your motherboard manual which port you're plugging into, because some may actually share bandwidth with PCI express devices, especially M.2 drives. So you may either get worse performance or completely lose the ability to use these ports in those circumstances. It's worth mentioning that you'll sometimes get serial ATA cables with right angle ends and some with straight ends. What gives with that? Well, right angle is usually cleaner for hanging off the back of a hard drive that's installed in a removable tray like this. While straight cables are almost a necessity for 2.5 inch SSDs mounted on a dedicated tray behind the motherboard, or anywhere else they mount flush with the case. They're way cleaner this way, and depending on the orientation, it may not even be possible to connect a right angle connector on one of these drives. So saving the straight ones for flush fitting drives is a good idea. What's that other connector for though? Power, we'll get to that soon. But first, this is an excellent time to wire up any case fans you might have. And for builds with liquid coolers, this is where those come in. If you're going to use a fan controller, then you should find a centrally accessible place for it to go. Usually they'll come with an adhesive backing, so you can just find your own spot for it and hook it there. Just don't cover up any holes or cable management holes if you can help it. We'll deal with the power for that later. For now, let's get to the fans themselves. Whether you're replacing existing fans or installing new ones, you'll need to pay close attention to the direction the fan will blow. Some people prefer a balanced approach to airflow with equal number of fans pulling air in then pushing it out. While others prefer to have more fans facing in, resulting in a slightly positive pressure environment inside of the case. Combined with filtered intakes, this can help control dust and debris. The opposite, negative pressure is not recommended. Regardless, you want to have a direct path for air to travel with fresh air being pulled over your hottest components. So ideally drawing air at the front and bottom and exhausting it from the top and rear. Also make sure you don't have any intake and exhausts on the same side. How you install the fan will be determined by what the fan is going to do. If the fan is strictly for a case airflow, then it's as simple as lining it up with the correct set of holes in the location you want it and screwing it in with these chungus fan screws or little rubber doodads like these ones. Be sure to keep the fans cabling clear of the blades and chassis while you do this. And it's optimal to have the fan cable sticking out of the corner closest to the fan header that you expect to use it with. Usually towards the back panel. It helps to not tighten down all the screws until they're all at least a little bit in. And you'll want to do opposing corners first to stabilize it so that it doesn't slip around on you while you torque in the screws. Some cheaper cases by the way, might warp while you do this leading to the unfortunate situation where your fan blades will brush against the chassis, which is both irritating and not great for airflow. You can try to bend out the metal, but the best solution in this case is to undo the screws a little bit or better yet, find something to use as a spacer. Rinse and repeat for every fan you need to install. If these fans are part of a liquid cooling setup, then your radiator is gonna go in now. And you can put away those chungus fan screws in favor of slimmer, but potentially even more chungus screws. Where the radiator goes is up to you. Some people like to have it exhaust air out the top of their chassis, while others like to have it pull cool air through the front. But at the end of the day, you're probably going to put it wherever it fits best, which is usually in the top of the case. Now from a performance standpoint, it doesn't really matter whether your fans pull air through the fins or push air through the fins. But what it does affect is maintenance. I always recommend installing fans in a pole configuration that allows easy access to the radiator to clear off dust. For aesthetics, you may decide to take a different path, but just remember that in two years, when you're taking your whole cooler apart so you can get the cat hair out of it, I freaking told you. Another important consideration is that AIO coolers are quieter and last longer if the combination pump and cold plate is below the area where the tubes connect to the radiator. You want to make sure that any air that might be trapped in there rises to the top, and that top is not your pump. This isn't as much of an issue for custom loops because the pump is usually going to end up at the bottom of the case anyway. But if you didn't know this, now you do. Put your pump down low. Lining up the radiator with fans on the outside is a major pain in the butt, which is why some fans like Artix Bionics can daisy chain together with a bridge connector, which helps hold them in place. Regardless, you want all of your cables to be clear with the fans and the radiator. Pinching them here and having to redo the whole thing sucks. Line everything up like so, and then use these long screws to secure each corner, then the other, and then each corner of the fan until you've got them all secure. If you're lucky, your case will let you detach the radiator mount and make it so much easier by just doing the whole thing on a bench and dealing with the completed assembly after. It gets much more awkward with the front panel mount where you need to basically hold the radiator and fan together like this and screw them in one at a time so they don't just fall around everywhere. Again, if your case lets you remove this bracket, your life will be so much easier. Another key benefit to a pull configuration is that it usually allows you to screw all the fans into the radiator ahead of time, then mount the radiator to the case using these little screws. Now we're not gonna revisit cooler and thermal compound application at this time. Please go back and refer to that section from earlier if you need to, and don't forget to check your manual, as many all-in-one coolers have their own little installation quirks, like for example, the inclusion of a dedicated pump power plug or an extra USB connection for controlling RGB lighting or even a little built-in screen or an integrated fan splitter that's controlled by the AIO through software. I'd recommend using that by the way if you've got it because it'll let your pump and your fans work together when they need to cool your CPU during a heavy gaming session. Now let's power up the rest of our fans. If you want them to be controlled by the motherboard, you'll either need to plug them into a fan hub that is plugged into your motherboard, some cases include these by the way, or directly into the motherboard itself. Either individually into their own headers or using splitters. Now, depending on how many fans you have, you may run out of fan headers on the motherboard and you might need to use Y splitters. They won't harm anything, but they do tend to look a little messier. Most of the time, there's at least one case fan header to the lower left of the CPU socket, and there are usually at least another two on the lower right edge of the motherboard. But motherboard manufacturers do strange things sometimes. So if you can't find your fan headers, of course, check your manual. Plugging them in is the same as any other fan, like we already did for the CPU. Just align the tabs on the cable with the tab on the board. Cable managing them though, can be a bit of a challenge. For the exhaust fan next to the IO panel, you can usually run it through and bundle it up against the motherboard's IO section for a clean look, but intake fans can be trickier still. Do your best with it. RGB wiring can also end up really messy. Look at all the cabling that requires. Hope you like cable management. Most of this can be hidden behind the motherboard tray temporarily, we'll come back to this later. For now, step 12, power supply. If you're counting, this has been many, many more steps than 12, and you're probably sick of wearing that anti-static strap. Well, good news, it's time to get the power supply in to ground the whole dang computer. If you've been following along, your power supply is already out of its box and connected to the wall. Go ahead and disconnect it now. Turn your case around and look at the power supply cutout. Are there thumbscrews? If so, remove those to free the back plate. This plate and plates like it sometimes make it a little bit easier to install later. The orientation of the power supply determines which screw holes you'll end up using. And the ideal is to have the fan facing downward, pulling air up through a filtered intake at the bottom of your case. If there is not an intake there, you'll want to mount it fan up unless you want to starve it for airflow and, spoiler alert, you do not want to starve it for airflow. Begin plugging in your power supply cables if you've got a modular unit now. The end for the power supply will usually have a PSU marking to tell you where it goes. First, grab the power connectors for your GPU if you haven't already. It'll be some combination of one to three six pin or eight pin connectors, or it might be one of those newfangled Nvidia 12 pin connectors. In which case, you'll need to grab the adapter included in your GPU box if your power supply didn't come with one. It's worth noting that these daisy chain connectors and six plus two pin connectors aren't inherently bad. It's just preferred to use individual cables with actual dedicated conductors for each pin, if possible. Once you're satisfied with your choices, clip them into place and route the cables somewhere accessible for now. It's time to install the PSU itself. If you've got a back plate, go ahead and attach it to your power supply now using core threaded 632 screws. Most of these back plates are going to have enough clearance to put in all four screws, but if your switch gets in the way, for example, don't stress, you can put in three screws. It's gonna be okay. Once it's secure, feed the wires through the power supply mount on your case and slide the power supply into position. It's at this point that you'll wanna connect your 12 volt CPU cables to your power supply if you've got a modular unit. Next, if you've got a back plate, all you need to do now is tighten the thumb screws. But if you're raw dogging it, this is where you'll screw the power supply into the back of your case. Pay attention to which of the mounting holes on the case have screw threading from the power supply behind them though. It is very easy to make the mistake of accidentally screwing into one of the honeycomb shaped holes that are for ventilation on the back of the power supply that is not actually secure. If you don't have a modular power supply, handling the 12 volt CPU cables will be a little trickier at this stage, but if you've got small hands or a high pain threshold, you can make it work. Line up the tabs and click them into place. Make sure that they're in there before moving on by the way, because if you really can't get in there, there is no shame in pulling off your CPU heat sink temporarily now and putting it back on when you're done. At this point, the instructions are the same between modular and non-modular power supplies. It's time for your 24 pin ATX connector. Separate that cable from the others and fish the cable out through the nearest cable management hole to your motherboard's 24 pin connector. From here, it's just like before. Line up the tabs and press it in until it clicks. With that done, you can use the peripheral cables to wire up power to any drives or fan controllers you have installed in your system. Usually these have just enough spacing between the connectors to line up neatly with hard drives stacked in a bay like this. Plugging these power cables in is the same as plugging in the SATA data cable. Just line up the little L shape and press it into place. These ones usually don't have locking connectors though, so make sure it's on straight before moving on. This will also tell you if you've accidentally half connected it upside down, which is a thing that you can do. Even today, you'll need to occasionally install these Molex connectors instead of SATA power connectors. And they're a bit of a pain because of how big they are, but on the bright side, they're really difficult to install wrong. You can also use them for just 12 volts and five volts to connect up to your projects if you really want to. They have a beveled edge on one side and they fit quite snugly, so much so that they'll sometimes push the pins out of things like fan adapters. If this happens, slip the pin back into place. It's just clip in there, then try again. Just be patient and line it up correctly. Finally, your power supply might have come with a button like this one. This is usually for hybrid fan control. In the out position, the fan will only power up while load or heat levels are high enough. While in the in position, the fan will just always be on. There's little reason to have it in the in position, unless you're counting on your PSU contributing as a case fan. So just leave it out for lower nose levels. But wait, did I say finally? There's still something we haven't plugged in yet. The GPU, if you're lucky enough to have one, that is. Or if you're watching this in the future, when the great silicon shortage slash skullpocalypse is over. If that's you, then now's the time for the centerpiece of any gaming PC. First, you need to figure out which slot you should use. For ITX motherboards, this is going to be obvious. The slot, the one you get. But things get a little murkier the larger you go. As a rule of thumb, the top most slot is usually the best. It's almost always connected directly to the CPU for maximum bandwidth. And you'll often see this pointed out in your motherboards manual as well. Once you've determined the right slot, you'll need to remove the corresponding slot covers, usually by simply removing the screws that hold them in place. But on some cheaper cases, you'll need to break them off instead. And if so, be careful. It's simple enough to do. You can push it down with a screwdriver and then finish the job with your fingers. But if you're too aggressive, you could slip. And when it finally snaps off, that's a bad time. I've gotten bit by cheap cases before. And there was a mess for a while. Be patient and just use a gentle up and down motion. Don't twist, push or pull. It'll come free before long. You just fatigue the metal and it'll just come right off. Now that the covers are gone, make sure the tab at the end of the slot is pushed back if there is one. Then line up the card with the slot and press it in. It should slide in relatively easily and the clip at the back will snap shut once it's all the way in. Next, line up the GPU's bracket with the holes on the case that used to hold in those slot covers and use the screws you either removed previously or retrieved from your accessories bundle to secure it into place. A coarse threaded 632 screw is usually the right one for the job here if you're not too sure, but some cases are a little bit different. If you have a multi-slot GPU and you find yourself with only one screw for some reason, put it on any other slot than the top one for best results. You still have all your screws though, right? By the way, this is the GPU section. But what you just did should work with any PCI Express expansion card. Unlike most cards, some big GPUs might sag a bit even after you've secured them into place. And some cards even come with adjustable anti-sag brackets or spacers that you can sit on the bottom of your chassis. This isn't strictly necessary, but it just keeps everything looking nice and reduces the risk that something will break if you move your PC. Just slip it into place and slide the bracket up until it's holding your GPU at the right height, then tighten it so it stays there. Other solutions may involve drilling into your case or some cases even include a sag bracket on their own. Now it's time to run power to your GPU. We already determined which cables we need and how many when we install their power supply. So grab those and route them through the appropriate cable management hole according to your preference. Some people like to come in from behind the GPU and others like the cables coming straight from the basement like me. Whichever you choose, you should make sure you have enough slack to get them into position. And that is clear of all the other cables to simplify your cable management. Just like with the 12 volt CPU connectors, PCI Express connectors are key to only going one way. Although a six pin cable can be inserted to an eight pin connector if you're not careful. This won't harm anything, but the GPU will probably complain and prevent you from booting if you try. Regardless of how many pins you're looking at, just line up the tabs and click them into place. If you've got a six plus two connector, make sure it's coupled so all the pins are flush and the two pin wire can't move once it's all plugged in. Congratulations, you've just finished building your PC. Except you haven't really finished, not quite yet. If you've been following the guide up until now, congratulations, it's been a marathon. And also you should have reasonably well managed cables at this point, but they're all gonna be kind of loose and not very tidy. On most modern cases, you should at the very least have little hoops to slip zip ties to, to provide a solid anchor for the cables that are running all around your case. The platonic ideal of cable management is a single trunk of cables where little branches come off and go wherever they need to go with no overlap. Unfortunately, cables are finite in length. So unless you pre-measured and picked up some custom length cable mod cables or something, you'll almost always have to improvise. We've actually got a full video on cable management that you can go check out here, but for now let's get to tidying. Troubleshooting is a whole other kettle of fish, but here are some quick things that you can do if you don't get any output and you're sure that the power supply and the outlet it's plugged into are both switched on. Check all your cables first. These are the most likely culprits. Then check your RAM and your expansion slots to make sure that they are properly seated. If your PC is powering on, but you're not getting any display, make sure you've plugged your monitor into your graphics card rather than into your motherboard directly. You can also check the diagnostic LEDs on your motherboard. ASUS has a little stoplight that goes along with this where red means CPU, orange means memory, white means GPU and green means good. Others might have LEDs that light up for each section of the motherboard that's been initialized as well. You just might have to look them up in your motherboard's manual to figure out exactly which codes and which numbers and letters corresponds to what. One of these codes is 00. If you get this one, you should try reseating your CPU and firing it up again. If your system simply isn't powering on, but is getting power, you might have a short. This is an annoying problem to diagnose, but the most common culprit is an extra standoff between the motherboard tray and the back of the motherboard or some errant piece of metallic something sitting bridging two pins. If you're still having trouble, you can always hit up the linustechtips.com forum to get more help. Now that you've got the UEFI BIOS setup screen, the very first things you should do in order are check your CPU temperatures, check that all your RAM is showing up and check that your storage is showing up. If all of that looks good, then you can continue on. Otherwise, you'll need to power down and reseat your cooler, memory or storage devices until they all show up. One unintuitive thing is sometimes you might have some memory that's not showing up and it's actually caused by your CPU not being seated in the socket correctly. So you might have to reseat that. And with that, your PC is now built. Whoa, hang on. Your RAM's not running at the right speed. What's up with that? Time to adjust some common settings. First things first, you should enable XMP, also called DOCP or memory overclocking. This will set your memory to the timings and frequency rated on the package rather than the defaults and is almost certainly what you want unless you're running ECC memory. Next, check the status of the multi-core enhancement setting. This is usually an advanced option if it's even present on your motherboard, but turning it on can improve performance at the expense of heat and vice versa. Stock operation is with this setting disabled, but if you have a beefy cooler, you might want to use it to get a little bit more oomph out of your hardware. Most other settings can be left at their defaults. Although if you're installing Windows 11, you should make sure to enable the TPM and secure boot modules and disable the compatibility support module or CSM. Exactly how to do that varies by vendor, so check your motherboard's manual to be sure. Finally, your operating system's installer should automatically boot after inserting the flash drive, but if it doesn't, you can usually hit F8 or F12 on the first boot screen to bring up a boot menu and select it that way. If it still doesn't show up there, go back into the UEFI settings and make sure that the legacy USB devices setting is enabled. You shouldn't have to enable this under normal circumstances, but sometimes having it disabled is enough to disable USB storage altogether. Most operating systems should just boot at this point. Now your PC is built. Big thanks to Seasonic for sponsoring this video. This is easily the longest video that we have ever done, and quite frankly, if they're paying by the word, they've got a big bill headed their way, ayy! Good thing they make great power supplies so they can sell lots of them to people like you and afford to pay us to sponsor more videos like this. We're gonna have links for more information about their products in the description down below. Thanks for watching, guys. If you're looking for something else like this to watch, you absolute mad freaking lads, you, then maybe check out one of our classic build guides. That's really how we wanted this to go, but then we kinda got off the rails a little bit. Let us know how we did once you're done watching, by the way. You're rolling, right? Yep, sick.