 All right, you got the music, Qued? Here we go! Woo! This right here is Michael's new rig. Michael stood out from the other contestants in ROG Rig Reboot 2019 for doing what nobody thought possible, creating his very own laptop. It was terrible. Dude, next time can you please stand out in a good way? I'd do my best, but that was the best I had. That's fine, it worked out for you. So you haven't even seen what we're building for you yet, have you? Not at all, no. I will show you. I will show you. I will show you. I will show you. I will show you. I will show you. I will show you. I will show you. I will show you. I will show you. I will show you. So Michael, where are you from? I'm from- It doesn't matter. My name is Michael Goughlin. I live in a small town outside of Boston called Bolton, Massachusetts. Have you ever built a computer before? I haven't actually. All right, do you know what this is? I believe that's a CPU. That is the CPU. You are going home with a Ryzen 7 3800X. That is an eight core CPU. Great for gaming, great for video editing. And Lord knows you need it because your editing was not great on that video. That's okay, you were made up for it in creativity. I can't take credit for that. Your brother helped you with that, right? That's right. At least you got a trip out of it. It was definitely a collaboration between my brothers and I. I did a lot of the scripting. My brothers had various ideas about which pieces to do. So I couldn't have done it without them for sure. Yeah, we actually had like a wall. Then we put sticky notes on the wall with like ideas and like spliced the whole thing together and had a storyboard. Well, my brothers and my cousin actually had a couple of friends that they wanted to see more regularly. So they started doing a weekly LAN party at my cousin's house. And I wanted to spend more time with my family. So I started playing the games that they play. So I had a ROG laptop that I was using. I don't even remember what model it was, but I bought it on Craigslist for $400 a couple of years ago. And a couple of weeks ago, the power brick just died and then it didn't work anymore. Do you know what this is? I'm guessing that's a motherboard. That is a motherboard. That's an ROG Crosshair 8 Hero. This has basically all the freaking bells and whistles, overclocking, crossfire support, all that good stuff. All right, so we've got our power supply, ROG 4 850 watt platinum. There was a cooler in there as well. Your graphics card, which you did get and your Aura terminal, which honestly, I don't even know what it is. Oh, RGB lighting control. Very important. You missed the most important part. It's gonna be pretty. ADATA helpfully provided us with a one terabyte SSD and a two terabyte SSD. Which one would you like? Just kidding, you get both of them. What? I think it's gonna be fun. I haven't ever built a PC or really watched a whole lot of videos on how to build a PC, but I have a general idea of like the sequence they should go in, but I definitely don't know how to do it in the most optimal way. So tell me something, Michael. How did you prepare yourself for your build challenge today? Well, I asked my brother, who has a lot more experience with this kind of thing, what I should do to prepare. And he said, you're probably best just going and letting them show you how to do it properly. Did you watch any previous ROG Rig Reboots? I didn't. Did your brother watch any previous ROG Rig Reboots? He did. Yeah, he's seen everything. Oh, so he was just messing with you. Probably. Because I put everyone on the spot. Oh boy. You're supposed to study up. Woo! With faith in my brother, he can do it. He can do it. All right, so let's find out if he can do it. What parts do you think we need first? Well, I think we need a table first. Yes, yes, and a Livestrong bracelet. Let's move on from the Verge edition of building a PC. We also need a case. We do have a case. Okay, actually we have the ROG Strix Helios. That's a pretty freaking awesome case. But what do we actually need to do first? Open the motherboard and put it in the case. Put it in the case. Put it in the case. I always recommend plugging your components in and powering your system up once outside of the case to verify that the system posts or powers on and outputs to a display. Open the motherboard. You know what? I'm gonna let you do it your way. Okay. This is like Burger King building. Right. Have it your way. And if it's all a sparking, you know, pile of- Mangle mess at the end, well, that was your way. Hey, it's your build, your way. He's definitely high energy and that was exactly the way I expected it to be. You can tell when he's being sarcastic or cutting. It's really just for the humor of it. So there is no problem with that for me. Oh, hold on, hold on. This is actually, this is kind of a two, this is kind of a two person lift here, but check this out. So you actually said in your requests that you would like something portable. Now, we didn't get you something particularly light, but we did get you something with carrying straps. Excellent. Sweet, right? That's awesome. All right. So the cheapest, fastest, easiest way to ground yourself, protecting your hardware from electrostatic discharge is to touch a grounded object. Right. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna unbox our power supply, throw our power supply on the table and plug it in. And in case the power supply is grounded, so. So every time you move around or wrestle too much or whatever else, if you periodically touch that, you should be fine. You should be fine. Awesome. I wouldn't manufacture microprocessors with this method. Sure. Should probably be wearing a full bunny suit in that case, but for just building a computer, this is a simple, easy way to make it a little safer. Cool, thank you. You don't have to hold it. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. Question for you. Yeah. Is there anything that you'd like us to etch on your side panel window? Like a gamer tag or like a favorite meme or? I think the Linus Tech Tips logo would be cool. Linus Tech Tips logo. You know, you don't have to suck up. You already won. Yeah. Kellerflame is my usual gamer tag. Kellerflame. Yeah. Okay. I'm gonna ask you to send Jono an email with the exact spelling and capitalization you'd like for that. You got it. I think we can probably do that for you. You found stickers. I found stickers. Those are pretty cool stickers. These I think are the mounting screws. What about those? These mount something else. So when it comes to screws, we've got mounting screws. And mounting other things. And mounting screws. Yes. Careful. So when you're, yeah. Ah, okay. That technique was not bad. So when you're repositioning the motherboard, it's very, very important that you're not just sliding it around on the standoffs in there. You wanna kind of lift it up while you're repositioning it. Otherwise, it'll scrape the back of it. Nice feature of this case. It's got a little nub in there. So see the board won't accidentally slip around. Would you like somewhere to put those screws? So that would be awesome. Thank you. This video is not brought to you by iFixit.com, but I still recommend their hardware. Boom, right there. See now they won't move too much. Thank you. I'm not here because I'm judging. But you are just a tiny bit. Oh, I'm not done with that one. Far too loose. I can show you a little trick to go a bit faster. Now that I'm impatient. So this has a knurled thing here on the ratchet. You just go like that. And now. And now, probably should mount the CPU. Sure. Think of it this way. If you break the CPU, you will have no fewer CPUs than you walked in here with. That's a good point. So you have nothing to lose really, except everything that we're giving you. There it is. There it is. I know it goes there. Oh yeah. Now there's a couple of things we need to know to install a CPU. One is where's the golden triangle? It's a quest of the golden triangle. I'm serious, find it. Yeah. It would be right here. That is an AMD logo. I'm gonna need a triangle, sir. So that piece of the arrow is not the- No, I'm sorry. It's also not golden. Right. Right there. Yeah, it was a difficult quest. So you have to find the corresponding triangle on the CPU socket. That is really small and really hard to see. So I'm gonna do it once, and then I'll let you do it after, okay? We hold the CPU by the edges of the heat spreader. That's why there's these little indents in the packaging. Cool. Then we line up the triangle with the triangle. We insert it with no force whatsoever. This is called a ZIF socket, zero insertion force. So you can see I'm not inserting it. It's just falling into place, and we lock the arm. Cool. Now your turn. No pressure, but this is kind of the moment where you can really screw this up. You were so close. All right, that's it. Your CPU is installed. I'm groping in the dark here. So anything I do after this is guessing. Ooh, groping in the dark, you say. Right. So I would probably go with the memory next. Sure. It only goes in one way, and you can kind of cheat because mine is already in the right way. Give it a good crunch. A plus crunch, love it. You're the captain of crunch now. I don't believe you did no studying. I think you were trying to set the expectations very low. Where would you like to put it? That is the question of the day. I'll give you a hint. This motherboard from Asus has support for two M.2 SSDs. He's like, is this an M.2? I presume it is. It can actually even do PCIe Gen 4, but that's not what we have with us today. I don't see a port that seems to match that connector. That's good. If you did, I'd be really worried that your prescription was a little off. Right. We need to take the cover off of it. This is another little bit of a tricky install. So they've got a handy dandy little thumb thing here. Now this SSD is high larious because it has RGB lighting on it, which actually means it won't fit in one of the M.2 slots down here with the like built-in heat sink and stuff, which is great. So you put it in a bit of an angle, pop it in like that, and then push it down and put in that screw. Who's gonna use a screwdriver? I'll give them that. Michael, thanks. It's gonna go down here where the second M.2 is. No, it's not going there. Oh shoot, dang, what? That's a different kind. Mm-hmm. Goodness, what are we gonna do with that? So there's probably a cable, or not. So there's two cables to go to this, and one goes to the power supply. Yeah! Cool. I knew he studied. I don't think it goes back here. Would you like a lifeline? I would. A Linus line? It can go anywhere your imagination wants it to. You just run a cable anywhere you want. You can double-sided tape it here or here. Actually, I wouldn't put it there. There's a lot of heat on the back of the CPU. Or here, but where it's actually intended to be installed is here. Now what would you like to do? Probably the CPU cooler. Sure. Okay, here you go. That's not the cooler. Didn't think so. Here's the real cooler. Thanks. How do you think it goes in? So I know this goes over the CPU, but we need some thermal paste to make the thermal link better. That's okay. It has thermal paste on it already. All right, with the pad. Yep. Cool. These have to come off, because it's gonna go on these screws. Not bad. I like it. Okay, so how important is it to you that the logo is right side up on your CPU cooler? There's only one correct answer here. It's not important to me. That is not the correct answer. All right, now I have a special job for you. I'm ready. I need you to get out that baggie of hardware from the cooler box that I said we didn't need and grab the big thumb nuts. They go all the way until they stop. Nice. See, how much better is that? Now that the ROG logo here, here, and here are all aligned. So this is a judgment call. So you can have it here or here or here. Let's go that way, because- Okay, and at the far end? Through less kinked, yep. Okay. Okay, so Michael, I'm gonna let you in on a little secret. We are actually shockingly close to being done. Awesome. We do still have some things to do though. First, we need to plug in our pump and RGB nonsense for our CPU block. So this is great. Michael, I'm gonna pass you the fan connectors from the radiator fans. Yep. And you can go ahead and throw those on the hub that is built into our case. That's a handy feature. Got it. Okay. Wow. What do you wanna do next? So probably graphics card next. Cool. All right, here's your graphics card. Not falling for that twice. All right. Ah, yes. That's the useful stuff. So you're gonna be rocking a Radeon 5700 XT. So you've got support for FreeSync. You've got their new anti-lag mode support, which is basically just a way of making it so that there's less delay between when your GPU draws the image and when it's actually displayed on your screen. You've got support for FreeSync. So if you wanna run variable refresh rate, whether it's on a monitor or a TV, that whole ecosystem has really exploded over the last few years. And of course, because you've got this beef-tastic Strix cooler on it, you can actually run at zero decibels when you're not actually gaming, or in some cases, even under very, very light gaming loads. Wow. Well, are you gonna put it in? Oh, okay. I actually wouldn't do that yet. Sorry, I will step in. You should do the GPU yet. So we're gonna need our Aura terminal, which we're gonna power with this here adapter doodad. So it's gonna go like that. Then we're gonna get a signal to it with our USB connection here. Then we are going to plug in to header one and run this to our RGB strips. Now, because we've got plenty of cable management room on the back, we can basically stick this anywhere that we want back here. So we'll just chuck it on the back of the motherboard tray and call that good to go. How about right there, what do you think? Works for me. Okay, good. Michael, hit me with what you think is next. Well, it looks like we're getting close to the power supply. Let's do it. So I know it goes in the back on the bottom. Cool. Probably need to take the screws out first. Cool. So what are you gonna do next? Well, I think it'll probably be pretty hard to plug cables into the back of it once I put it inside. So I'd probably like to plug them in out here and then slide the power supply inside. I like it. So go ahead and plug those into the back of the power supply any way you like it. All right, inspection time. Not bad, not bad. Your 24 pin is not plugged in. Other than that, you're in great shape here. Now what? Now they go in there. I'm trying to decide whether I think it's better to plug them all in and then slide it in or slide it in and plug them all in. I would slide it in and then plug them all in. All right, time to play computer veterinarian. Get that whole arm in there. So is there a cage that stops it from pushing in too far? Am I holding it in my hand? Yes. Okay, so now it's time to power this thing up. You ready to plug in the 24 pin? I think so. So it's just like on the power supply side, except make sure you plug it in. Otherwise identical to what you did before. So this is a little tricky. Yep. Basically on some motherboards, you're gonna have a four and an eight pin. You can plug them both in, but you actually don't need to, just the eight pins enough. So you're gonna turn around a little something like that and then that'll go in like that. Cool. All right, do you need any hints here or have you done this before? I haven't done this before, but there can only be so many ways it can go in. But I don't know what any of them are. All right, so first we're gonna wanna remove this protective cover. That would explain why I couldn't figure out where it plugged in. Yeah, and then now I think you can probably sort this out. Probably. Does it matter which one? Cause it looks like there's two. Yes, okay. So your top one is gonna run at 16x speed. That's like ideal. So what's your intention with this gaming machine anyway? So actually most of the games that I play are with my brothers and family and friends. So I mostly play games with friends. I play a lot of multiplayer games to spend time with people I actually wanna hang out with. Right. So basically you're just not any good. There's that too. I'm not ready to play online. No, that's fine. That's fine, I get it. I get you. Hey look, the bottom of the food chain needs people to populate it. All right, do you wanna go ahead and plug in the power connectors for the graphics cards? Does it matter which one goes where? It does not. Cause it's power. Yep, well because they're both eight pins. Sometimes you'll have an eight and a six pin. Woo! That was it. Do you wanna see it turn on? I really do. Well, let's hope you put it together right then. I don't know if we ever actually went through this, but you are not just taking home a gaming system. You are also taking home a complete set of gaming peripherals, including this 144 Hertz FreeSync gaming monitor. So we're gonna set up the whole thing. So your first gaming experience on your new rig is gonna be as it's all going to be together. Ooh, this one has that fun feature where it's got a little LED in the bottom and you put a little lens in here and you can like draw a smiley face or whatever you want on the bottom of it and it'll project it onto your desk. You know, things the gamers want. It's also curved. Okay, moment of truth time. You ready? Sure. Okay, last test. You gotta find the power button. Leave it straight here. He doesn't know this, but if you can't turn it on, he doesn't get to keep it. Ah, he wins. So we've got our 3800X eight core processor, 32 gigs of RAM, our M.2 drive is showing up, our SATA drive is showing up. Everything here looks pretty flipping exactly as we'd expect. Let's throw on our DOCP, which runs our RAM at 3600 megahertz. We're gonna reboot that baby. So while we're installing Windows then, what game is it that you wanted to try, you know, when you fire it up for the first time? I've been looking forward to Boralance 3. Okay, I think that could be arranged. Let's get some Boralance 3 loaded on here. So here we are. We're almost at the point where you're ready to experience it, but there's a minor detail we have to sort out first. What's that? No, I'm kidding. Alex, bring it in. Your panels are ready. That's awesome. Oh wow, really seriously, Alex? What? What does this say? Family is for life, gaming is forever. Keller flame, okay. So have you actually played Boralance 3 yet? Not at all. Okay, have you played on a high end modern gaming rig at all? No. Have you ever tried a high refresh rate monitor? No. Wow, this is gonna be something else. Give it a shot, dude. Any first impressions? It's so much smoother than I'm used to. Well, I can actually track them when they're dodging instead of having to wait for them to stop moving. That's kind of nice. What a technological innovation. The computer works, and that's really the bottom line question. I think that means we did a good job. When you look in from the motherboard side, seeing the three ROG logos there, I think that's really cool. The RGB is nice because you can then see stuff like that, but having the unified branding instead of kind of a hodgepodge of whatever you could throw in there is really cool. So what's the most graphically intensive game you can run on your current rig? Probably Ghost Recon. Yeah, but which one? Right, Wildlands, I think. That's the previous one. Yeah, and I'm playing it on low settings. So, and it's even on low setting, it's definitely... Does this look a little better? This is so much better. If I played Ghost Recon with this computer, I would be a lot better because I can actually see things and then try to shoot at them instead of just shoot blindly into the blur. It is way beyond what I thought I was going to be getting. It's so incredible, and the video that it's able to push on that monitor and the monitor itself is just so far beyond anything that I've used to this point. I don't even know how to quantify how far ahead of where I was before it is. It's just insane. I just wanted to say thanks Linus Tech Tips and Asus ROG. This was a great experience. I really enjoyed being backstage with the entire team and getting to meet everybody and interact with people that I'd seen online, but now I get to know them as people. Huge thanks, Michael, for coming out and participating in ROG rig reboot. This is it, this is your new rig. I'm so excited. Flippin' awesome and hand built by yours truly. I'm sorry. And a massive shout out and thank you to Asus for providing, well, everything. The parts, the experience, the ticket out here, and just generally being all about supporting the gaming community and doing this now three years in a row. So you're gonna find the link to where you can find all the great Asus ROG hardware down in the video description. Thank you guys for watching, and we'll see you at the next ROG rig reboot.