 Whether it's you or a member of your circle, if you're a gamer, it's pretty much a guarantee that you've seen the effects of the ongoing shortage of key computer components like power supplies, processors, and especially GPUs. I've seen countless stories from gamers who've saved for months or even years to buy their dream machine, only to have it pulled out of reach thanks to scalpers and commercial crypto miners, not to mention unprecedented demand. Thankfully, we have a solution, a DIY gaming rig that is readily available today and at a reasonable price. And this video is brought to you by MSI. We'll kick things off with the heart of our build, one that perfectly encapsulates its underlying theme, an Intel Rocket Lake Core i7-11700K. Now, its eight cores might be a little low by today's standards, and it might not be the fastest or the most power efficient, but it's got a really important ace up its sleeve that we're gonna talk about later. And gosh darn it, it's tough to walk into a computer store where they've managed to run out of stock of these puppies. Now we just need to install it in our motherboard. Open the latch, line up the old golden triangle, and seat the CPU into the socket. Give it a little wiggle to make sure it's in correctly. Close the latch and make sure you hold onto the socket cover in case you ever need to arm in your motherboard. Now for our board, we've chosen MSI's Tomahawk Z590 Wi-Fi. It's got a built-in IO shield, so you'll never forget to install it, a six layer PCB, two and a half gig land for lightning fast local file transfers without having to replace your Cat5e cabling, Wi-Fi 6E if cables aren't your thing, and PCI express Gen 4 support. That's right, ladies and gentlemen, Intel finally got there. Not that it matters for us today. Some of the best M.2 SSDs on the market are still enjoying lower power consumption and lower prices thanks to their use of slower, but still really good Gen 3 controllers, like the Intel 670P and Crucial's P5, which uses TLC-NAND for better longevity, but is priced only a little higher than some QLC drives. To install this puppy, all we've got to do is remove the armor, grab a standoff and M.2 screw from the motherboard accessories pack, add the standoff, slot the drive in, screw it down and replace the armor. For memory, we've chosen two eight gig modules from Crucial rated for 3,200 megahertz CL16. They're not overly expensive, but their compatibility is excellent and RGB is always a nice bonus. Just open the dim slot clips, line up the notches with your modules and push them down into place, making sure that you hear a distinctive click on each side. And if you've got just two sticks like we do today, use slots A2 and B2 for dual channel operation for optimal performance. By the way, if you guys are enjoying this video, make sure you get subscribed so you can check out our upcoming Intel Charity Build Stream, where I build you, yes you, a computer. Now let's get to the case. We're using a Phanteks P500A, because it's got plenty of room to build in, a tempered glass side panel, and some great cable management runs with straps built into the back. Really it's just a fantastic case with tons of features for a reasonable price. Bringing us perfectly then actually, to our second product from our sponsor MSI, the Meg Core Liquid K360. Now we actually complained a little bit about the mounting system of this cooler in our recent RGB build guide, but it seems like MSI has been hard at work ironing out the kinks since then. This one looks a lot simpler and with a 360 millimeter radiator, we'll be sure to be able to keep even a rocket lake CPU cool. Of course, before we worry about that, we need to get our motherboard installed in the case. And Phanteks does such a great job of making this more intuitive for new users. So inside their accessory package, you actually find all the screws you're gonna need in a nice handy dandy little plastic compartmentalized. Do hickey. To install your motherboard, you'll need nine of the short M3s with the circular skirt. That's the easiest way to identify them. Thankfully, the Intel bracket comes pre-installed. So just grab your LGA 1200 back plate, mounting bolts and thumb nuts, then align the back plate and push it into place. Screw in the mounting bolts, remove the plastic cover from your block and then mount it with the thumb nuts. Now, fewer wires coming out of this thing would definitely make cable management a little easier, but if you run them all together, it's actually not too bad. So just pull everything coming from the block over the top of the motherboard, bring it around to the back of the case. Ooh, there we go. And that gives you easy access out of the way so you don't have to look at any of it to get it all wired up. But we'll talk about that later. First, now is an excellent time to grab the eight pin CPU power connector out of your power supply box and run it up around the motherboard tray here and plug it into the top left of the motherboard before that area of the case gets too crowded later on. Now, this next part's a little tricky, but the best way to mount your fans and rad is in the top of the case with the long screws going through the fans as they pull air through the fins and then exhaust it to the outside. Now, push versus pull doesn't affect performance, but pull is so much easier to clean. So I prefer it. It like does not come off. Once you've got all 12 fan screws in, hopefully you oriented your fans so that the cables come out toward the back of the case here, you can go ahead and plug them in to those cables that we routed away from the CPU block before. Conveniently, MSI provides nice little labels on these things. So fan one, great. But wait, I haven't even done the most important part yet. Included with the CPU cooler is this one to three addressable RGB splitter. So we're gonna use that to go off of the male connector off of the block and plug into all three of the female connectors for our fans. While power supplies are in somewhat short supply right now, most of the issues are actually with a thousand watt and up power supplies, which coincidentally is the range that is typically targeted by crypto miners. So you shouldn't actually have any trouble getting your hands on our third and final MSI component, the MPG A650G power supply. It's 80 plus gold rated, it's modular, and this lineup is available with up to 850 Watts which is plenty of juice for what we're doing. Speaking of juice, our circuit board water bottles will hold up to 40 ounces, lttstore.com. Before we put this in though, I'm gonna go ahead and pre-attach the handful of modular cables that I'm gonna need. This right here is my 24 pin motherboard connector. This one here is a PCI express dual six plus two pin. So I'll plug that into VGA one. This one right here is a quad SATA connector. And then finally, there's the A-pin that we actually ran before. Just like so. I'm gonna have my fan down and I'm gonna just gently put all these through the thing and then realize that I have done screwed up and I needed to take this back bracket off first. Ah, that's better. With the power supply installed, all that remains is to run our cables to where they will ultimately live. Our 24 pin ATX goes somewhere kind of around there. Our SATA connectors go kind of down there in the bottom there. And our six plus two pin PCI express. But we don't need no stinking PCI express connectors getting in the way of this ultra clean build right here. But just in case we need them later, we're gonna go ahead and run them just under here so we can grab them and plug them into a graphics card later. Finally, we pull around our cables for front panel audio, front USB three, front USB 3.1, our front panel switches and LEDs. And then we just need to plug in the last two connectors for our AIO. The SATA power that I alluded to before, which is just down in the bottom and the front panel USB two that is going to allow us to control the RGB that is built into this. I love that, this still amuses me. I just like magnets, you know? And after some beautiful cable management and making sure the thing actually freaking boots up, all that remains is to throw our side panel back on and address the elephant in the room. We didn't need our PCI express power cables because it is so freaking hard to buy a graphics card for a reasonable price right now, unless you get one as part of a pre-built system. But from our point of view, that's no reason to miss out on the joy of PC building, which we scientifically proved is a real thing. Truly, it was worth it. So as crazy as it sounds, this is not a terrible recommendation for today. If you go Rocket Lake, you can game on a combination of its Xe graphics and cloud services like GeForce Now while you sit on a wait list or try to snag a GPU from our verified actual gamer program. So let's see how well it handles that, shall we? To be clear, I'm not saying Intel integrated graphics are perfect by any stretch of the imagination. We plugged in via HDMI and got a bug where Windows was reporting that it was running at one Hertz when it was clearly running at like 60-ish. So we're gonna switch over to DisplayPort and see if that sorts it out. We're gonna get away with medium, what do you think? Okay. GeForce Now it is. We're on a wired connection now, which is gonna make a big difference for GeForce Now. You wanna be on wired connection. And seeing all those pictures, especially of like half-finished Ryzen machines that had no GPUs in them when we did the roast my setup video. You don't have a graphics card because of the shortages. And he doesn't even know if the rest of his computer works. Very sad. Cause at least if you go Intel, you've got the onboard graphics. To be clear, it's not like I wouldn't go Ryzen if I had a choice, but if you got no GPU, you got no options. With that said, AMD is finally bringing their 5000 series APUs to North America. They're in pre-built almost immediately. And then they're coming to the channel, I think later in the year. So at least we'll have another option. Okay. Having the extra latency with GeForce Now, it's not the best thing. Fortunately, more sightseey type games, like Witcher 3, which we're looking at right now, don't rely on the same kind of Twitch reflexes that Counter-Strike Global Offensive does, and are very easy to enjoy using a service like GeForce Now. So thanks MSI. We know this machine isn't exactly ideal, but you gotta make the most of the situation, okay? And MSI has got basically everything you need to make the most of your next PC, from power supplies to AIO coolers to motherboards, and even graphics cards, usually. Some of which they actually generously already contributed to the verified actual gamer program. So again, thank you, MSI. Now the question for you guys is, how many of you have caved and overpaid for our graphics card recently? Let us know in the comments below. And if you haven't yet, check out our more detailed video on how to game without a GPU, where we checked out not just GeForce Now, but most of the major streaming services.