 🎵 Welcome to the first full build guide that we've ever done on Linus Tech Tips powered by Intel today. We're going to be showing you guys step-by-step how to build your very own gaming system in the better class. So that means we're spending around $1,500 on the tower, so if you subscribe to that good, better, best way of thinking, which means we're not really compromising any features and any performance, and we're not spending so much that it's sort of just for bling and bragging rights either. We're going to be installing Windows 8, we're going to talk about some of the benefits you get from Windows 8, including in some games, better performance, and we're going to be pairing it with a touchscreen and talking about some of the ways that touch really makes Windows 8 come to life, whereas the mouse and keyboard do not. Part of getting the best bang for your buck is overclocking, so everything we've got in front of us here is overclocking optimized in some way or another. Now I want you to think about your gaming experience kind of like Pi, because the two most important things for Pi are crust and filling. So I'm going to go ahead and say the CPU is kind of like the crust. It supports the rest of the system. If it's not fast enough, you're going to end up with bottlenecks, so if you spent like a thousand dollars on a graphics card and a hundred bucks on a CPU, that graphics card would never reach its full potential anyway. So in this case, for our crust, we've gone with a 3570K. It performs just slightly less than the 3770K in gaming applications because it doesn't have hyperthreading, it's a Core i5, but because it's a K-series skew, you can overclock it to really squeeze the most performance possible out of the architecture. We're going to be aiming for anywhere from around 4.4 to 4.5 gigahertz on our CPU. The graphics card is kind of like the fruity filling. It doesn't work at all without the crust, but it really makes the experience, particularly from a gaming standpoint, enjoyable. This is what enables all those visual effects, and we've gone with the GeForce GTX 660 Ti Power Edition from MSI. It's an overclocking optimized card with a dual fan cooler, and I mean it performs great at stock too, so if you're not comfortable overclocking, you can always run it that way. If the CPU and graphics card are kind of like Pi, then I guess the rest of this stuff is sort of like ice cream because it definitely makes the experience better, and you can't really have Pi without ice cream, and you can't have a computer without all this other stuff. So I think that's where the analogy sort of breaks down, but for our motherboard, we went with the Z77A G45 from MSI. This is for a couple of reasons, it's extremely inexpensive. It's Z77, so it's overclocking ready, and it is Crossfire and SLI ready, meaning we are able to have a ton of flexibility in terms of graphics upgrade options. Speaking of flexible graphics upgrade options, the GS700 from Corsair has a three-year warranty, a single strong 12-volt rail, meaning you can hook up whatever you want to it without worrying about it having an overcurrent protection shut down because you've connected everything to the wrong connectors. Don't worry about any of that. It looks great, and you can change the colors from red to blue to white to completely off to match your build depending on what route you want to go. The memory choice might seem a little bit weird because you probably know that more than 8 gigs isn't really necessary for memory, and we've gone with 16 gigs of Corsair Vengeance DDR3 1600 memory. So the reason for that is pretty simple. If you buy a dual channel kit, you're going to buy two sticks to get the most out of the bandwidth available to your CPU, okay? If you buy two 4-gig sticks, then you're going to be limited to a total of 16 gigs for upgrading unless you want to remove those sticks and add in a completely new set. So the reason we've done this is because it gives you the potential to upgrade to 32 gigs without running into compatibility issues by mixing and matching DIMMs down the road or being stuck at a maximum of 16 gigs. Now you might think that the computer case is all about aesthetics, but the CM Storm Scout 2 from Cooler Master does more than that. It's got great cooling, it's very rugged, the durability of it, the build quality of it is outstanding considering the price, and it's very portable. It has a handle in the top that's so strong that when I did my unboxing of this case, I was able to hold the entire case up by the handle and shake it around without any flex and without it breaking. It means you can haul your rig around to LAN parties without worrying too much about it, and it looks really good. So yes, there's aesthetics as well. It is a factor. For cooling, we've gone with SP120 Quiet Edition fans from Corsair. I personally find that static pressure is more important than sheer airflow when it comes to getting the most out of your system, so I do prefer SPs in almost all scenarios. And for the CPU, we've gone with a Hydro Series H100i Liquid Cooler. This is going to allow us to reach that overclock that we wanted, and because it comes with Corsair's LINQ software, we can monitor things like fluid temperatures, system temperatures, and fan RPMs using software. Keeping close, close tabs on our system to make sure it's running at peak efficiency. The storage subsystem really comes down to personal choice, but what I'll do is I'll explain why we went with what we did. So we've gone with an Intel 300 Series 180GB SSD. We didn't have a big enough budget for a 240GB SSD, and rather than going for a 520 series, we sacrificed a little bit of performance to get a bit more capacity, because I personally find that 120GB is not quite enough these days if you're running a pure SSD boot drive for all of your OS, application, and gaming needs. We also added a Seagate Barracuda 3TB drive for mass storage, because let's face it, SSDs aren't at the point yet where they're inexpensive enough that you can store everything on them. This gives us a couple of interesting options. We can go with a 180GB drive and 3TB for storage, or if you find that 120GB is enough, you can go with a 120GB boot drive, partition away 60GB of it, use it as a cache using Intel Smart Response Technology, which is built into your Z77 board, and you can have a super speedy boot drive with a few key applications, then a cache SSD accelerated mass storage drive where you can install things like games. So your most frequently used applications will be much faster than if they were just stored purely on a mechanical drive. When it comes to peripherals, things get real personal real fast. For our monitor, we went with an Acer T232HL. This is a 10-point multi-touch touchscreen monitor. Remember, we're talking about the Windows 8 experience and how touch really makes it come to life. It's also an IPS screen, which means better viewing angles and better color reproduction, which I personally will prefer to the faster response times but lower color depth of a TN panel. Not everyone will agree with me on that one, and that's fine. For our headset, we went with the Vengeance 1300 from Corsair because they're relatively inexpensive, they sound pretty good, and they're lightweight and comfortable. However, there are more premium options out there, such as the Siberia V2 from SteelSeries. This one in particular also matches our build pretty well with a white and blue color scheme. For the keyboard, again, this is personal choice. Not everyone believes that you even have to spend a lot of money on a keyboard for gaming, but I personally find that a mechanical keyboard really enhances the typing experience, and I prefer it for gaming. And this is the Quickfire Pro from CM Storm. This particular one has Cherry MX Brown switches, but you can choose almost any switch under the sun you want. And what I like about the Quickfire Pro is it has great build quality, and it comes in at a very, very reasonable price point considering the budget of the rest of the components we're looking at here. For our mouse, we went with the Vengeance M65. You could go with the M95 if you play more MMO games than FPS games, it has more buttons and stuff. But what we liked about the M65 is it's got the latest laser sensor offering up to 8200 DPI. It's from Corsair, so, you know, can't really go wrong. And it's white, which matched the rest of our build without being overpriced. For our mouse pad, so last but not least, we went with a SteelSeries QCK. This is just the standard sized one, you don't have to get a huge mouse pad unless you're a low sensitivity gamer. And it's available not only in the plain black one you see here, but also any number of different configurations with cool gaming artwork and all that kind of cool stuff like that. The actual tools you need to build a computer are pretty straightforward. I use a big Phillips screwdriver and a small Phillips screwdriver. For one, I can't get access to those hard to reach areas. The most important thing really is a static free workstation. That means no carpets, no cat, Hi. And most importantly, no clothes. Actually, wait, no, sorry, clothes are okay, but no carpets and no cats. Now, techs who do a lot of work, might have a dedicated static resistant test platform for making sure that components work before you install them in the case, where some issues can occur. But let's face it, you guys are watching this video, you probably don't have one of those. So in a pinch, a motherboard box is an optimal place to test the components before you actually install them into the computer. And then you can put them into the chassis. Before we can assemble our ghetto test bench, we gotta remove the motherboard from the box. Now the only pieces I need are the IO shield and the SATA cables. Other than that, we're gonna leave everything inside. If we were running SLI, for example, we would also take out the SLI bridge. Next is the motherboard itself. We remove that from the ESD bag, this protects it during transport. Put that inside the box, and being careful not to touch any of the sensitive electronics, you can see I'm actually holding it by the heatsink and the back plate here. We put that onto our makeshift test bench. Installing CPUs is so easy now. Lift up the retention arm, lift up the hold down plate, no need to remove the protective plastic cover yet. Align the little gold triangle on the top of your CPU with the triangle on your motherboard itself, like so. Close down the hold down plate, close down the retention arm, little bit of strength required here, and check that out, the plastic cover will pop off and your CPU socket pins were never exposed. In order to make use of dual channel memory, take your two memory sticks, remember we're using two so that we have expandability for later, and install them in the color-coded memory slots by pushing down firmly on both sides after opening up the tabs on the side. Now, I personally prefer to install them in the slots furthest away from the CPU socket, however because we're using a liquid cooler, we don't have to worry about any clearance issues, but if you were using an air cooler, then this is definitely the recommended way to do it. We're only going to need this for the out of the case testing, but I do recommend installing that stock heatsink that came with your CPU, the pins are already in the correct position out of the box, the only thing to watch out for is make sure you've got enough length on the four-pin connector to reach the CPU fan header on your motherboard. Push them down in a cross pattern, one, two, waiting for the click, then plug it in, we're going to use this to make sure that the system posts before we proceed. Now, don't worry guys, I'll show you all of these steps in detail once we do the proper assembly of the computer, but basically all I've connected here is 24-pin power, 8-pin power, two 6-pin power adapters, to the video card, I've connected a DVI cable so we can find out if the system boots, and I have plugged in a keyboard just in case we have to press anything in order to confirm that yes, indeed, we do want to boot up. So let's go ahead and this board does not have on-board switches, so we can use a key, a screwdriver, or anything else metallic to short out the power switch, and now we'll find out if our components are working. So press F1 to run setup, and we have at least basic functionality. Time to proceed with the full build. Preamble's over, folks. Time to actually build this thing. So you can follow along step by step, and I guarantee you anyone will be able to build the exact computer that we're building here today, and most of the principles can be applied to pretty much any custom machine that you would build at any time. Step one, inspect your case for any damage because you're going to want to let the retailer or the manufacturer know if anything bad happened to it during transit. Step two is to take off the side panels. Even though many cases ship with thumb screws, often they're too tight from the factory to remove by hand, so you have to loosen them with a screwdriver. Put all the screws you take out somewhere safe, such as in a little tray, and I recommend putting the side panels somewhere safe because you guys wouldn't believe how many times I've put a side panel down somewhere and tripped over it as I go to do something else, scratching it. So the place I recommend keeping it is in the box that your case came in with the styrofoam pieces in between the two side panels so that they don't get damaged. A lot of people ask me what screws and adapters do I need in order to build my computer. The simple answer is your case comes with all of that stuff. Most cases come with either a box or a baggie inside that contains the screws you need to completely outfit that case with whatever hardware it happens to support. So in this case, in this case, we've got a cardboard box that was mounted in one of the three and a half inch hard drive cages that has, here we go, all the drive rails and speakers and zip ties even that you'll need to assemble your computer. In most high quality cases, the cables inside that are pre-wired are going to be tied up in some way to keep them from scratching up the inside of the computer. So you can free all of them, free them all. Don't worry, we'll do cable management later so that you can make sure that they're all going to reach the places where they need to plug into. Now, I don't like to have my motherboard lying around, so it's the first thing that I'm going to put in my case when I'm building the new computer. You need nine motherboard standoffs. These are the little golden guys with the hex shape and Cooler Master includes a convenient little tool that allows you to drive them into the motherboard tray with a Phillips head screwdriver. So you're going to install them assuming you're using an ATX board that is a full length board. You're going to be installing them in holes A, B, C, D, E, F, J, K, L. The other holes on the motherboard tray are for different sizes of motherboards. You can consult the manual if you're not sure which one is right for yours. Putting in I.O. shields can be a little bit tricky. Just make sure that you press on all four corners firmly to ensure that it's actually in place before you try to install the motherboard. Before putting the motherboard in, make sure you've got the right screws by doing a quick test fit to ensure that the threads match up with the threads of the standoffs that you just installed. Hold the motherboard by something that's not going to damage it. This is why I recommend having the stock heatsink on there. We're going to remove it later to install our liquid cooler. And, approaching at an angle, line up the I.O. ports at the back. Then hold the motherboard in place while installing at least one screw so that it doesn't move around because that can scratch up the back of it. You don't have to wrench it super tight, it just has to not move. Are you powered up? Actually, you're not powered up at all yet because you don't have a power supply in your computer yet. When you install your power supply, you have two main options for a bottom-mounted power supply. You can either mount it with the fan on top, which will draw air from inside the case and exhaust it out the back. The advantage is that you're drawing more air through the case and out the back. The disadvantage is that you can be more likely to accumulate dust because you don't have any dust filter right next to it, which you would if you mounted it the other way. And the other disadvantage is that you're using warmer air to cool the power supply. The other option is flipping it fan-side down. So in this case, our Storm Scout 2 has a filter on the bottom which should keep the insides clean. But the disadvantage is if you put your case down on a plush carpet, it might suffocate the power supply and it might not get enough fresh air. So think carefully about how you're planning to deploy your computer before installing the power supply. I generally go fan up because particularly with our graphics card, we're going to draw some of that heat away from the graphics card and out the back of the case using this additional fan for cooling. Line it up with the back of the case, install the four screws, and it actually takes less time to install a power supply than it takes to think about how to install a power supply. At this stage of the game, although building a computer is no game, I recommend plugging in whatever connectors you can because as you fill the computer up with more components, it'll get hard to get at some of those little finicky ones. So we're going to start with the main connectors that go into the motherboard. The Scout 2 has built-in cable management so we can run our 24-pin through this gap right here and then bring it up right next to the connector on the motherboard, making it so that you don't even see the wires really. The 8-pin connector can be routed in much the same way, going through that cable management hole in the bottom, up behind the motherboard tray, through the little hole, and then into the 8-pin connector up at the very top left corner of the motherboard. Guys, if at this point you break open the user manual or the quick start guide for your motherboard, there is no shame because installing these front panel connectors can be a little tricky and while many motherboards have labels directly on the board for what's what, often they're actually not very clear, so feel free to check it out in there. We're going to start with USB. USB 3 is an easy connector to plug in and it's easy to find because it's very distinctive looking. Also, it's keyed so it only goes in one way. On our motherboard, we have a right angle USB 3 connector so there won't really be any strain on the cable or on the fragile pins inside, but not all motherboards have that so make sure that you don't have it wrenching on the connector itself. USB 2 is a smaller connector and the way this one works is there's a blocked off pin on the bottom of the lead coming from your case and there's a missing pin on the motherboard itself. As long as the blocked off pin corresponds to the missing pin, you won't have any issues. Just make sure you're actually plugging it into a USB header because it looks quite similar to some other headers. Next is front panel audio. Usually this is located on sort of the left hand side of the board near the bottom left corner. This one has a blocked off pin but it's in a different position than USB 2 so as long as you make sure that that corresponds to the missing pin on the connector, you won't have any difficulty with that one any either. Plug in HD audio if you have the option. Only very old motherboards rely on the AC97 standard. Which brings us to the trickiest part. Power switch, reset switch, power LED, and hard drive LED. For the power switch and the reset switch, the orientation is not important. It doesn't matter. Don't worry about positive and negative, just plug them in. And this is what I mean about some motherboards not being clearly labeled. The power and hard drive LEDs do rely on being plugged in a certain way and on this particular board the positive and negative terminals aren't labeled so I'll have to consult the manual to make sure I get them right. Don't worry though, if you plug them in wrong it's not going to damage anything. Your LEDs just won't light up so you can crack it back open, reverse them, and they'll work just fine. Okay, we could have used the fans included with the H100i but they wouldn't be so sexy like these ones with the little white mod rings on them. Corsair includes white, blue, and red rings in the box so you can pick whatever you want for your color scheme. We went with white to go with our white case. Now not everyone would want to use an H100i in this case because it's a bit of a weird mounting situation where what you do is you remove the top plastic plate here and you mount the radiator a little bit externally. Now if you're into the sort of modded hot rod look then you might like that. If you're not into that, go with an H80i instead. It doesn't perform quite as well because it's a single 120mm radiator but it still supports Corsair Link. It's a thick radiator so it performs about as well as a single rad can and it's going to keep all the components inside. So what we're going to do is we're going to start by removing the stock Intel cooler now that we don't need that anymore. We're going to pop out that top piece of plastic on the case using the tabs inside. We're going to get the radiator in position, screw the fans in from the inside, then it's time to mount the CPU block and pump combo unit to the processor itself. The trick with mounting the fans to the rad with the H100i is making sure that you get the right screws. So there's a lot of screws in the box, you can consult the manual if you're not sure. Otherwise find the one that looks like what I'm holding at because we're going to go through the fan, through the top of the case, and into the rad. Make sure as you're positioning it you leave the leads, the three pin fan connectors, somewhere near the back of the case so you can hide them and not have unsightly wires cluttering up your build. The other thing is this is where you decide whether you want to push air through the radiator or pull air through the radiator. I prefer pull because it allows you to clean it more easily without removing the fans first. Lining up the screws and the fans and the radiator can be a little bit tricky, and to avoid the risk of cross threading, I recommend starting them with your hands to make sure that you're not putting it in wrong before you tighten them up with the screwdriver. The last benefit of the SP fans that I didn't mention before compared to the stock ones that come with the H100i is the fact that they have rubber noise isolating mounts, meaning they'll pass fewer vibrations to your computer, meaning less noise. Because we mounted a stock cooler, we will need to remove the thermal compound that's left on the CPU. However, we don't need to replace it. The thermal compound that comes on our H100i is extremely high quality. So if you ever do need to remove thermal compound, use a lint free cloth for the final stage, but you can clean the bulk of it off with toilet paper and 99% isopropyl alcohol. The higher percentage for the alcohol, the better and the more clean it's going to be. Now the hardware you need is extremely sturdy. This is why I like the H80i and the H100i, but there are a lot of pieces. So we need the Intel magnetic hold down. This is why I love it. It's brilliant. You just click it on like that. We need the Intel backplate for everything but LGA 2011. We need the four mounting posts that are going to hold the backplate onto the motherboard. And then we need the four thumb nuts, which are going to hold the magnetic mounting plate down to the mounting posts, which are attached to the backplate. That's what makes it secure. And that's what makes it, once you've done it a couple of times, pretty darn easy to do. Now, believe me when I say, guys, I'm as happy as you that we're getting close to the end of the little tricky parts, but we're not quite there. In order to control the fans in the system using Corsair Link, we use the included adapters that come with the H100i to plug into the CPU block and pump unit. Again what we'll do is we'll connect all of our fans to these. And in this case, we had to get one additional splitter in order to hook up the front fans on the case. There we go. Then we can use software for our controls. Next up, we'll have to plug the USB connector into the side of the CPU block and then into a header on the motherboard, just like we did before with the front USB 2 connectors. And last but not least, we're going to plug in the leads that are built directly into the CPU block, which is the fan RPM monitor or pump RPM monitor and a SATA power connector that we can run through the back so that it actually powers the pump itself. Throughout any kind of system build, it's important to think about cable management if you want to have a chance of having it look tidy when you get to the end. So this is the first time we're plugging in a power connector other than to the motherboard from the power supply. So it's important to make sure that we route it somewhere that we're going to be able to tie it up tidily later on after the fact. It's great that we're using Corsair Link and the H100i in order to plug in all of our fans, but we have to actually plug in that SATA connector that I showed you before. So we're going to route this sort of on this side of the 24, but on this side of the A pin in order to make it so that we're going to be able to close our case easily once we're finished. So now by plugging this in, we have provided power for all five of the fans in our case. We're going to leave the front fans. They're white LED fans. They're wired into the case in such a way that you can turn them on and off with the push of a button, which is very cool. But we're going to replace this last rear fan with one of our SP fans so we have a more consistent look to the inside of our build. All you got to do is remove the four fan screws from the back. It's probably going to like fall out here. There we go. That wasn't so bad. Keep those four screws because they're the same kinds for pretty much all fans. We're going to take our SP fan again, making sure to orient the connector so that we can easily route it behind the motherboard tray for maximum tidiness and software control. Then we're going to put those four screws back in. And now we have a nice consistent look to the inside of the system. Look at this. We're getting there. It's time to put in our storage devices. So we've got our SSD for which we will need. I just use two screws because I'm lazy and it's an SSD. It's not like it's going to get damaged if it falls around or whatever else. And because the CM Storm Scout 2 supports SSDs natively, all we have to do is grab one of these two and a half inch drive sleds, screw it in on the bottom with two of the included screws that come with the case. There we go. There we go. Just like that. Looks good. Let's put it back in. And our SSD is installed except for the power and say the connectors at the back. For the hard drive, things are a little bit different. We're going to use the sleds. So the rails that were included in that cardboard box, we're going to plug these in with the tabs towards the front. That is where the connectors are not on the drive. And then the short ends where the connectors are at the back. We take that whole assembly with the two sled rails and the drive itself and we slide that in until we hear a nice satisfying click. So let's get all those fans connected. Now we used one splitter on one of our four fans that we can plug directly into the Corsair Link module. So those ones are going to be our two front fans. We're going to plug those directly into that splitter. We're going to control them at the same time and we're not going to be able to monitor the RPMs of both of them. So that's okay because if one of those fans fails, it's really not the end of the world. Whereas we're going to dedicate a full connector to each of the fans on the H100i because if one of those fails, it could be a problem for us in terms of CPU overheating, especially if we've overclocked it really far. For our rear 120 millimeter fan, that one gets its own fan header as well so that we can control each of the zones of the case separately using the software. We're also going to plug in our front drives. So power is routed with another one of our two SATA harnesses that we have on this power supply giving us four SATA connectors so we can easily plug in our hard drive right here. Then we can use the next connector for our SSD, which is right here. This gives us two more connectors that we could use for additional drives without using any adapters. Now we need those two SATA cables that came with our motherboard, both of which are right angle cables, which is fine because we can use the angled side on the back of the drives. Then we can use the straight side to go directly into the already angled connectors on the motherboard. The only real thing to watch out for is as you can see on this board, it clearly states use SSDs in the top two ports as opposed to the other ones. Don't worry, it's not going to break anything if you use a different drive, but you'll get the best performance if you plug your SSDs into the native Intel Serial ATA 3 or 6 gigabit per second ports. Now it's really no secret I'm not the master of cable management by any stretch of the imagination, but I want it to at least look decent from the front. So we're going to take our Molex harnesses, which we didn't end up using a single four pin Molex connector. We're going to hide those on the other side of the motherboard tray. What's great about this case is there's lots of room for hiding unneeded cables. We're going to turn this around so you guys can actually see what I'm doing. There we go. We're going to hide this in the front just like that, just find somewhere to tuck it. It doesn't really matter. Then what we're going to do is we're going to take some of those zip ties that came with both our power supply and our case, and we're just going to organize these cables on the back so that they're not in the way of anything when we try to close the side panel. I'm not worried too much again about them being super gorgeous. So I'm going to take this bundle and I'm going to kind of tie it up like this. Then I'm going to take this bundle and I'm going to kind of tie it up like this with the objective being to keep things flat so that the side panel closes without any difficulty. You don't want to tie things too tight because then you're going to end up with undue strain on the connectors which can damage them over time. If you've hung with us this long, you're almost at the end. All that's left now is to install the graphics card. So the first thing we're going to do is remove the two thumb screws that correspond to the PCI Express 16x slot. Now PCI Express 16x slots are not all made equally. There's physical and electrical specifications. So if you're not sure which one's the right one to get the most performance out of your graphics card, it's usually the top one. If you're still not sure, consult the user's manual and it'll tell you what each of them is wired up for. So once we remove those two screws and the two PCI slot covers that are in there, all we have to do is align the PCI Express 16x interface at the bottom of the card with the PCI Express 16x slot on the motherboard. Push down firmly until the connector locks into place. Then put the thumb screws back in and then it's time to connect the power cables. We're going to route these much the same way we've done before along the back of the motherboard tray, which now looks a little better than it did before with some of the zip ties that we've put in place. These are going to come out right near the graphics card itself, which is what's so great about these modern cases with cable management. I remember back in the old days, we didn't have that and we walked to school both ways uphill and it was snowing and there was fire and brimstone all over the place. And anyway, I think I'm off on a bit of a tangent here. So this particular graphics card requires two PCI Express six pin connectors, which we will plug in and our build is now almost complete. Still got to power it on, make sure she works and close up the side panels. Now I'm about to do something that's incredibly bad luck. I haven't booted up the machine yet and I am going to close one of the side panels. Usually when I close the side panel before I make sure it works, it doesn't work on the first crack and there's one small thing I have to fix. But I'm hoping that since we've, you know, gone to great lengths to make sure that this is an awesome build that you guys can follow along with that we haven't actually made any mistakes. So our right side panel is on our left side panel. Check out what that looks like. Isn't that a gaming rig that you'd be proud to call your own? All right, we're going to remove the little plastic cover on the windows inside here. We're going to try. It's on there pretty good, hey? There we go. There's one. We'll take off the outside one once we're done putting it on. Helps to have it oriented the right way there, folks. Do recommend doing that. And she is closed. This is what our $1,500 gaming machine looks like and it's time to fire her up. Don't forget your thumb screws. And everything's working. Or is it? Now that we've got the system booted up, it's really important to run a couple basic utilities to ensure that it's firing on all cylinders before you call your system done. Because the last thing you want is to find out that there's a slight instability somewhere down the line in the middle of doing something critical only to have it go and turn off, power down, reset, have corrupted data, anything like that. So we're going to walk you through the basic stuff that we run to ensure the system is working at peak efficiency. Now the first three utilities are mostly for your CPU and they kind of go hand in hand and face or other hand. If you had three hands, then that's what they would do. And they're mostly important if you're overclocking. In our case, we overvolted our CPU to 1.32 volts and turned the multiplier up to 44 megahertz because it's unlocked. So overclocking is that simple these days. More voltage, more megahertz until it stops working. So in our case, we got to make sure that it's working. And how do you know? Well, CPU-Z tells you if the overclock actually took. So you can see right here, we're running at 4,400 megahertz, which is 4.4 gigahertz. So that's awesome. That's working. Next up is Prime 95. So you go into Options, Torture Test, Small FFT, and then press OK. And it'll run this test for at least, I would recommend, 24 hours to ensure that your CPU is not making any calculation errors. That tells you that it's actually working correctly even though you've amped the frequency way up. The last one that you want to use is right here, RealTemp GT. And as long as your CPU is staying at around, I'd say, 85 degrees tops. And this is under load. This is under an intensive, artificial load. You'll never see a load like this in the real world unless you're doing some pretty intensive stuff like folding at home, for example. So you want that to stay under around 85 degrees to make sure your CPU doesn't throttle. Thermal throttling is when the CPU slows itself down. It's like, whoa, I can't handle this. I got to slow myself down to keep myself cool enough that I can handle it and not die. So we're not reaching that point, which means our overclock is good to go and our Prime 95 is stable. There are other applications you can use instead of Prime 95, but it's the one that we've always been using and we just kind of like it. So there you go. There's my tech tip. Now speaking of the importance of temperatures, graphics card temperatures are huge. What if something went wrong with your graphics card or a fan failed, for example, or it wasn't mounted correctly, it got jiggled loose in shipping or something like that when you got your graphics card? So you want to make sure your graphics card's running right before you start firing up games on it as well. So we use a couple of programs called MSI's Afterburner and Combuster. And Combuster is spelled very uniquely, so don't mind that. But we use these to make sure that the graphics card is running correctly so we can load it up with Combuster. Then we can monitor our temperatures. We can see that it's running at about 76 degrees, which is more than okay for these graphics cards. Anything up to about 90 to 95 degrees is actually okay for a modern graphics card. And that tells us, again, so besides our CPU, our graphics subsystem is running correctly as well. The last thing that I'd really recommend running, but I can't show you in Windows here, is Memtest 86. You load that onto a USB drive, throw that in your system, and that'll test your memory to ensure that nowhere within your system are any errors being made. That way you know you can trust it to be 100% stable. Here's another software tip for you guys. Head to Ninite, N-I-N-I-T-E dot com, as the first thing you do with your system once you've made sure it's working correctly. Select all the stuff you want to install. You want web browsers, Chrome, Opera, Firefox, you want iTunes, Skype, Java, dot net, Air, Shockwave, Dropbox, School Drive, all that good stuff. All you gotta do is select all the things you want, get installer. It avoids all the bloatware that comes with the programs, and it does an automated install of all of them with default options without you touching it at all. And there's one really important one you Windows 8 users might want to check out. Under utilities, get classic start because it is a fantastic start menu that adds, dun-dun-dun-da, the start menu to Windows 8. Not only that, but you can decide which kind of start menu you want, and there are a ton of settings that you can change and reconfigure and make the start menu not only there in Windows 8, but better than it ever was before and more customizable. That way, you get the benefits of all the touch features of Windows 8, like swiping in in order to do a search or multitasking between applications like this, with all the benefits of previous editions of Windows. So you guys saw me fire up Angry Birds there. Yes, Windows 8 is great as a casual gaming experience. You can get games from the Windows Store, you can install regular games that run in touch screen, but it's not just about the casual gaming experience that your kids are going to want to enjoy or whatever else. I mean, it's cool having a big touch screen like this basically means you've got like a gigantic tablet that lives on your desk. Very neat, but you can use the other multitasking feature here. So we're going to open up the desktop. All the major online gaming store platforms, Steam, Uplay, and Origin, all run just fine on Windows 8. And not only that, but we observed some tangible performance differences between Windows 7 and Windows 8 due in part to the fact that Windows 8 uses less resources than Windows 7 on your system and actually handles the way that core scheduling works on the CPU a little bit more efficiently in some cases as well. So Battlefield 3 was an example where it ran about the same in our lab, 3% improvement over Windows 7 for Windows 8, but we'll call that margin of error. We'll call that the same. Dirt 3 was one example where we found that Windows 8 performed 10% less than Windows 7. However, in Far Cry 3, Windows 8 performed 32% better than Windows 7 and in The Elder Scrolls 5 it was about 3% better. So in general, we saw more improvements than we saw performance decreases or it's the same. So while Windows 8 might be criticized by some gamers as not optimal for hardcore gaming necessarily, that is actually not the experience we had at all. Once you get around a couple of little finicky things, make sure Games for Windows Live is installed before you try to run any of your games and make sure you got the latest drivers. I mean it's pretty basic stuff beyond that Games for Windows Live tip. So whether or not you feel that touch belongs on the desktop or whether it should stick to tablets and notebooks and phones and all those other devices, you gotta admit the idea that you can go between playing Jetpack Joyride on your 23 inch 1080p screen and then switching out and enjoying content on said screen or even going and playing a quote unquote real game is pretty darn cool. I hope you guys have really enjoyed this ultimate build guide for our $1500 recommended system and I'd love to hear your feedback. Post under the video and let us know what did you think you could have improved with a $1500 budget and do you really think that with a touch screen you still need to be investing in high end gaming grade peripherals such as the ones that we've chosen here today. We're gonna close out the video with some glamour footage of our finished system and I hope to see you guys next time in our, yes there will be more of these, next build guide.