 Friends simply have enough to solve. You guys have asked for it and we are delivering it. This is our very first value oriented system build guide and our very first AMD build guide. So we're going to be going through the usual stuff. So that is best practices when choosing your components, best practices when building your system and of course because we're going with an APU from AMD, we're going to explain some of the benefits of an APU versus a more traditional CPU. As always our configuration starts at the heart with the CPU. Actually this is an APU. So a traditional CPU has general processing cores built into it that communicate with your system memory and do most of the things that your PC needs to do. Now over time this has begun to change and what an APU does is it integrates Radeon graphics cores and what AMD is really calling DirectX 11 discrete grade graphics into what would normally be a traditional CPU. So in addition to the four traditional CPU cores in here, we've got a bunch of Radeon cores that are great for running games and for other applications as well. So for example rather than just being good for games, integrated graphics can now be used to accelerate OpenCL compatible applications and in the transition towards HSA or heterogeneous system architecture which is a way of saying that all of the processors are not going to be differentiated the same way that they used to. So okay well this is a CPU and this does this and this is a GPU and this does that. They'll be able to work together to reach a goal at the same time rather than you know say for example waiting around for each other to do work until it becomes their turn to work on the same task. It's going to amount to better performance for your system overall although it was a little bit complicated to get the whole thing going because we needed hardware support and software support and it's all got to kind of happen at the same time. Now for our system we chose the A10 6790K which is a new model. We chose this because of its great balance between price and performance and the fact that it includes very powerful Radeon graphics. So lower end APUs will tend to have less powerful graphics in addition to less powerful CPU cores. So for some of the OpenCL demos that we're going to show you this is going to be quite important. For your APU system you may find some other very interesting choices with either lower prices or even better performance than this one so don't feel like this is the only option. It's just what we went with to demo this platform. For memory our usual considerations pretty much come down to well the size how much RAM we need and then how many channels we need it to run in whether it's dual triple or quad channel. However for an APU there are some special considerations. Speed becomes much more important because graphics cores that is the the Radeon cores built into the APU require higher bandwidth for optimal performance than traditional CPU cores do. So we went with 8 gigs of AMD's Radeon series memory in a dual channel configuration for our value optimized config but another option if we were willing to sacrifice some performance particularly in gaming and OpenCL applications now for better upgradability in the future would be to get a single 8 gig stick and then throw another 8 gig stick in later on down the line and run it in dual channel then because our motherboard only has two slots. Now why did we go with AMD memory? Frankly there is no difference in terms of performance between AMD memory and some other memory that's running at pretty much the same speed and timings. The key difference here is compatibility because AMD is the one building the memory controller that's on the chip itself and they're the ones validating the memory for it you know that it's going to work. With that said there are many other reliable memory brands out there and if you buy something from you know Kingston or Corsair or whoever else there's I mean there's a very very slim chance that it's not going to work it's just what you're comfortable with. They have several series of memory including their entertainment performance and gamer series modules and you can find a capacity and speed that's going to work for you pretty much regardless of your needs and your budget. We went with a very value oriented option for our motherboard in order to demonstrate the potential cost effectiveness of an APU based system. With some of the lower cost APUs and a motherboard like this if you don't need or want much in the way of expansion and you just want performance for your dollar it's pretty hard to beat it. I mean this one right here this is the FM2A55M DGSR 2.0 from ASRock doesn't have many frills it doesn't even have USB 3 for example but it only costs about 50 bucks. You can take small steps up in terms of features and robustness you can add USB 3 here and better audio there all the way to fully featured gaming grade boards like this one but I guess the point of all this is that the choice is up to you. So this is a G1 Sniper A88X it's a fully overclocking ready gaming ready crossfire supporting motherboard on the FM2 plus socket which is going to have support for upcoming Kaveri APUs and so everything in between this and this totally exists. So let's be clear about the power supply and case choices we made here there are much less expensive options you can spend about a third of what we did on a case that has a bundled power supply that will fit all this stuff and it'll probably work just fine at least in the short term. It's just that that's not necessarily the only way to go about it so we wanted to show off what you can get in terms of a case with great ventilation great compactness and very reasonable build quality for about 40 bucks with the Fractal Design Core 1000 but ultimately the choice will be up to you with a value oriented build a lot of the time the difference between 20 bucks and 40 bucks is a lot so it'll come down to whether you're going to be doing any upgrading in the future and you want that expandability whether it's worth the additional investment. As for the standalone power supply versus using the bundled power supply that might come with a case we never recommend using that bundled power supply even if it came with your case throw it away and get a real power supply you never know what's inside them and just because it says 400 watts on the outside doesn't mean that it's actually capable of outputting 400 watts only use bundled power supplies if they're from a reputable brand like Antec for example. For our PSU we went with a Seasonic 400 watt OEM unit. Seasonic is great they build quiet reliable power supplies and are often available for less than other brands this one right here has nothing special about it on the outside with non-sleeved cables and like an ugly metal housing but it's like the Millennium Falcon it's got it where it counts nice quiet 120 millimeter fan nice solid weight to it which is usually a good sign for a power supply because it means there's actual components inside versus it just being a metal box and of course 80 plus bronze efficiency is still something we care about because it can be an indicator of the quality of the components inside. Storage is always a tricky one for us to talk about and there are a couple of options here so for 60 bucks you can get a WD blue 1 terabyte drive which has mediocre performance and decent capacity it's 1 terabyte but you could also spend a bit more and get something else so you could either get a WD black 1 terabyte which will give you better performance and still good capacity or you can get a Kingston V300 120 gig SSD if you don't mind planning for a quick upgrade to your storage because that will give you lightning fast performance but only 120 gigs of storage which isn't going to be enough for you know massive video collections or a bunch of games or anything like that so we opted for the blue drive just because we wanted this to be a pretty inexpensive rig but I wanted to talk about those other options as well. Talking about graphics with a computer like this is another tough one because we set out to build a good all-round performer and to do an APU build guide here and because an APU has decent onboard graphics there's no compelling reason to add a dedicated graphics card unless we were serious about gaming. Now if we were serious about gaming there are some fantastic options out there in terms of graphics so for example we've got the R7 260x that is fully supported by our motherboard, by our power supply and by our case thank goodness for custom rigs right the actual ability to be able to upgrade them is awesome and adding something like this will take our gaming experience to the next level. There are however a couple of reasons I can think of to go with an APU out of the gate even if you do intend to upgrade to a graphics card later because remember guys there are AMD CPUs on the FMX platform that are a little bit less expensive so if you were to put a graphics card right in you might not want to do that. So number one reason is maybe you're not sure how much you're going to gain the APU this one right here will handle Battlefield 4 at 720p with medium details so at least this gives you the opportunity to play it and make a decision later on down the road about whether or not you want to have a graphics card and it is less expensive to go for an APU versus a CPU than it is to just buy the graphics card outright. Number two is maybe you just plain old don't have the budget right now with an APU you can get the system up and running and decide later so that's tied in very closely to reason number one. Reason number three is maybe the gaming aspect of the PC just isn't even for you. You can still benefit from the APU from a compute perspective more on that later and the system will at least be capable of having a little bit of oomph when you know the grand kids come to stay for the weekend and they bring a couple of their games with them for example the last thing you want is a situation where it just flat out doesn't run the APU is not going to give you nearly the gaming experience as a dedicated graphics card like this but at least it brings the system to within gaming capability range without costing a whole lot more. Onto our peripherals choices we went with the H236LBID for our monitor and the MK120 for our keyboard and mouse I mean the Logitech MK120 is nothing special it's very inexpensive but a cheap mouse and keyboard we can kind of live with especially if we're not gaming and especially when you consider how much more you really need to spend to get a great keyboard and mouse so we'd be spending probably another 10% of our total budget on something like a K30 from Corsair and an M40 from Corsair which would deliver a great gaming experience and actually most of the performance of even higher cost solutions than those ones but just is a little bit more than we're willing to spend if we're not gaming. Now if you're serious about gaming and you do opt for the GPU upgrade for example then maybe you can add something like that later on down the road. For the monitor though I really believe that you should purchase a monitor more like a piece of furniture. Everyone benefits from a better monitor it's less fatiguing on your eyes and things just plain look better they look like the content creator wanted them to look like. The great thing about monitors is that unlike something like a graphics card where you buy it now and it runs all the games really great and then two years down the road it doesn't run anything very well anymore a monitor performs as well as it does pretty much throughout its lifetime so if you buy a good monitor you'll be looking at a good image five years from now and if you buy a lousy monitor you'll still be looking at a lousy monitor five years from now so we went with an IPS monitor because the experience is so much better it looks better and it really just doesn't cost that much more when you consider how long you might keep it but this is a very personal thing look at your desk how long have you had that monitor if it's more than three to five years and it's lived through a couple of full system upgrades and you skimped last time maybe think about getting something a little nicer for yourself this time around on the other hand if it doesn't bother you at all then that's great but I personally find it very frustrating particularly with for example low-end TN panels when you're in something like an email application even and the red versus unread messages are difficult to distinguish from each other because you can't tell the difference between pale yellow and white now that drives me crazy and a better monitor makes that a non-issue for our OS Windows 8 is the obvious choice for a machine like this because it actually provides better performance on an APU versus Windows 7 this is getting fairly well documented and I'm interested to see how things continue to progress in this direction in the future well it's time for the actual building now so start with a safe static free workstation as always an anti-static strap I like to keep mine on my ankle to keep it out of the way because I find when it's on my wrist it just get caught on things and I'm more likely to make a mistake and then beyond that all we really need for assembly is a multi-bit screwdriver now I always recommend building the system outside of the case to ensure that there are no issues with something getting shorted out and to make sure that everything is already working before it's all jammed into a case and it's difficult to swap things in and out and troubleshoot it the motherboard box makes for a very handy non-conductive test bench however this is a very very common mistake don't use the anti-static bag that's on the outside of your motherboard on top of the box okay once the power is actually applied to the board some of these bags have conductive outer coatings and can actually short out the board if it's powered on so guys just to be very very very clear when the board is not powered on on top of static bag okay when the board is powered on on top of rather on top of anti-static bag not optimal I would rather have it on something like a piece of cardboard like the top of the box so we're going to start with CPU installation first carefully remove the CPU and heatsink from the box the pins on the CPU are extremely fragile AMD has the pins on the processor not in the socket versus their competitor so we're going to leave the CPU inside the plastic shell while we determine the correct orientation next we're going to lift up the retention arm on the socket then align the small golden triangle on the corner of the CPU with the small plastic triangle on the corner of the socket finally we're going to place the CPU down onto the socket until it falls in on its own we don't push the CPU into the socket with any kind of force just give it a little wiggle to make sure it's in there okay and once that's done you can lower the retention arm and your CPU is installed in the socket just a couple things to consider when you're putting the heatsink down on the CPU number one is to make sure that the metal clips on either side of the heatsink are positioned correctly to hook over the bracket around the CPU socket and number two is make sure your fan wire is as close as possible to the CPU fan header that is usually labeled on your motherboard so first now that it's in position is to take the clip that's on the side that does not have a plastic arm on the heatsink and put it over the bracket around the CPU socket then turn it around and this metal clip does have a plastic retention arm so we're going to go ahead and put the metal clip onto the CPU bracket then take the arm and turn it pretty much a full 180 degrees this requires a little bit of force until it locks into place finally guys take your fan wire and I recommend twisting it up a little bit here so that the wires don't spread out and get into the way of everything and then plug that into the fan header which should be again clearly labeled now please note guys that I recommend better CPU cooling than the box cooler that's included if your objective is to have an extremely silent computer or to run beyond stock speeds by overclocking your processor neither of those things are very appropriate with our config here and a better motherboard would be required in addition to better cooling to make that possible DDR3 installation is simple especially in a motherboard that only has two slots so you don't have to worry about which ones are right for a dual channel operation or color coding or anything like that all you do is take the modules and align the notch in the module with the little notch in the socket open up the clips position the module in the socket then push down firmly on both sides it should be noted guys that we're installing gamer edition memory from AMD and we had talked about using more value optimized memory in this system don't worry the way high-end memory works is it's just rated at being able to operate at a higher speed what we're going to be doing for our performance numbers later on in the video is turning it down manually to simulate what you'd be able to get with entertainment class modules hey now we're ready to start putting stuff in the case so first we're going to remove the two side panels by using the handy dandy thumb screws that come included on this case then we're going to take those side panels and put them somewhere safe where they're not going to get lost speaking of keeping things safe and not losing them a really handy trick that I use all the time is when you take out a screw put it back where you got it so that you're not going to lose it so all those thumb screws can go back into the case once we've taken off the side panels just don't get confused when you're trying to put the side panel back on you're going to like oh why doesn't it fit back on oh there's a thumb screw in the way so I've definitely done that before next thing just another sanity check type item is take your IO shield and make sure that it matches the motherboard and that it is oriented correctly before you go ahead and install it into the back of the case by aligning it and then firmly pushing in all four corners until it is poking through a little bit and sits in place without falling out so the thing about a power supply with no packaging is that it doesn't have any screws included or anything like that don't worry guys it doesn't matter in spite of the fact that the handy dandy box full of mounting hardware that comes with your case doesn't list power supply screws on the back of it they are indeed included and they look a little something like this the next step is to take your power supply and decide on the orientation when you put it into the case oh wait no because we have a top mounted power supply in this case we only have one orientation that it goes in with you can actually see that there's only one set of screw holes so the reason for that is that while on a bottom mounted power supply case you can decide to pull air away from your graphics card area or to pull air through what is normally a filtered intake on the bottom of the case with a top mounted case if we flip this power supply around it would have nowhere to draw air from because the top of the case is completely solid so it's for the safety of the power supply itself that it only has one option another handy thing about this orientation is that our cables are now at the back of the chassis where it's a little bit easier to route them and manage them behind the motherboard tray so all that's left is to slide it into position and then do up the four screws that we pulled out of that unlabeled box and that's pretty much it the power supply is in to install the motherboard in our case we're going to need the little brass standoffs as well as the little black screws with the tight threads on them that are required to actually secure the motherboard to the standoffs now before you put the standoffs onto the motherboard tray in the case you're going to want to make sure you're putting them in the right place because there are some options depending on the kind of motherboard you have so we have a full length MATX board but it is narrow so we only actually require six standoffs all we got to do is hold the motherboard up and we can see which holes the motherboard standoffs need to go into so once we've determined that there are a couple of different ways to install them number one is if you happen to have one of these handy dandy little screwdrivers you can go in ahead and install them with one of those but unfortunately this case it doesn't come with one of them the other option is to install them by hand and then tighten them the last little bit with a pair of pliers or something along those lines once all the standoffs are in carefully position the motherboard over them but not touching them because you don't want to scratch the back of it I usually hold the motherboard by the heatsink itself because it gives me something firm to grip onto that won't damage anything then inserting at an angle to ensure that we're not scraping the board across the standoffs as we put it in we go ahead and put the IO through the back of the case then lay it down flat and put in at least one screw right away so that the board's not going to slip anywhere and slide around all over the place again we don't want to damage it finally finish up by installing all six of the screws that secure the board in place and that's pretty much it your motherboard is now installed with the motherboard physically installed now it's time to install all the wires and cables and connections because this is the point in the build where it's easiest to get at them all so we're going to start with the 24 pin connector this is the large thick connector with well 24 pins it only goes in one way so if it doesn't seem like it's fitting turn that baby around and put her in followed by the what would normally be a pin connector on a high-end board but this board really doesn't need that much power for the CPU it's very efficient so we can break away four of the pins and we plug in the four pin connector above the CPU socket here that is followed by the front panel connectors so this is our power switch our reset switch our power LED and then our drive indicator LED the power switch and reset switch the orientation is not important as long as you get them on the correct pins which are often labeled on the board but if not you can check out the motherboard manual that's in the box whereas the power LED and the drive activity LED the orientation does matter so make sure that the colored wires correspond to the positive pins on the motherboard the last one is the speaker this one the orientation is important as well so same thing colored wire to positive terminal and if you get any of those wrong in the first place in the light so the speaker don't seem to be working don't worry about it just flip them around it's not going to damage anything next up we've got our front USB this case supports a single front USB 3 connector but unfortunately our board doesn't so we weren't able to plug that one in but it does support front USB 2 so we just want to note where the pin is missing on the connector where the pin is missing on the header and then go ahead and plug that in front panel audio is installed in much the same way there's a missing pin in the brick and a missing pin on the board just like that you go ahead and plug that in and you're pretty much ready to rock the last thing now is the fan so there's a front fan in this case that gives us positive airflow inside or probably about neutral when you factor in that the power supply is going to be exhausting some air as well which is lots of airflow as long as we're running you know integrated graphics or a low-end graphics card otherwise I would recommend installing maybe a rear exhaust fan or something like that but since we don't have a rear exhaust fan we're going to use that space right there to manage some of our wires so because there's no room on the back of the motherboard tray on this case for cable management we are going to just kind of secure these wires to each other most important of all is getting them out of the way of the CPU socket area and the VRM area which is that area to the left of the socket so that you don't have any overheating in those areas and then making sure there's a little bit of clearance between them and the power supply so that there's no interference with the airflow that needs to happen there and then finally we're going to do a little bit of you know strapping together of these wires at the front to make sure that that front fan has an unobstructed airflow path to the inside of the case for the hard drives we need very specific screws ones that have threads on part of them and then just a straight part that actually goes through the rubber grommets that are pre-installed in the hard drive mounting plate that is positioned vertically and kind of a unique way so you can either put two three and a half inch drives on the rubber mounts or you can position three two and a half inch drives such as SSDs if you space them out correctly and you don't already have a three and a half inch drive installed otherwise you can do one three and a half inch and one two and a half inch it should be noted that there's also a converter up in one of the five and a quarter inch bays that can support either three and a half or two and a half inch drives now one of the things I like about this case is how clever the hard drive mounting system is most people buying a forty dollar case don't need half a dozen hard drives so it's designed to not only well be targeted towards the right people yeah they're probably just going to have a couple drives but also deliver a great experience for those people by allowing much more airflow over the drives in order to keep them very very cool compared to most cases in this price bracket which are just going to have your typical standard hard drive cage in the entire front of the case that really obstructs airflow a lot so it's a it's a smart design that I quite like now in terms of actually hooking up the drive once we've screwed it into the plate we've just got our single three and a half inch drive we're going to run a SATA cable directly from the motherboard over to the hard drive there's not a whole lot of cable management to be done given we've only got one drive then we're going to run a SATA power cable from our power supply down to the drive and then we'll do a little bit of cable management with them to get them mostly out of the way and that's it now I can't emphasize enough how optional this particular step is it's more of the kind of thing where after you build this system if you realize it's time for a graphics card go ahead and do this so all you got to do to install a graphics card again because this case and power supply and motherboard all support this kind of an upgrade is pull out the top two PCI slot covers by just uninstalling the two thumb screws then position the graphics card in this case it's an R7 260x over the PCI Express slot that's a 16x slot push down firmly until it locks into place then screw the two thumb screws back into place and finally plug the PCI Express power cable into the back of the card now you will have noted probably that this card only has a single six pin PCI Express connector required in order for it to function but because this 400 watt power supply is a good quality one and comes with two six plus two pin PCI Express connectors we could actually go ahead and install even much higher end cards without any difficulty because we have that flexibility that we built into our initial system with the side panels back in place our system is pretty much ready to be well fired up but there's still some software stuff that we're going to have to do so we'll start with BIOS configuration go ahead and mash on delete to get into the BIOS and there's a couple things to double check so let's make sure that AHCI mode is enabled for our SATA ports and also ensure that our components are all detected and our memory is running at the correct speed in this case we're simulating DDR3 1600 because that's sort of what would fit within our budget next up Windows installation is a snap if you know how don't worry about the lack of a disk drive in this machine installing off of a USB is as simple as finding a friend with an optical drive copying all the files directly off your disk onto your USB drive and then throwing that into the system booting from it and you're ready to install in a simple system like this there's only one drive to install Windows 2 so it's pretty much click click click click click name your PC click click click click and you're done the system will automatically reboot a couple times and you'll be dumped at the desktop now drivers are something that many people struggle with once we're at the Windows desktop but it's not too overwhelming if you break it down even devices that already have drivers installed automatically from Windows update I would still recommend checking the to make sure you have the latest ones from the manufacturer website as rocks website should have the latest AMD chipset drivers LAN drivers and sound drivers but it's never a bad idea to double check by going directly to AMD site real tech site or whoever else is the actual manufacturer of the chip of the component that's on your motherboard if you're having trouble finding a driver for something here's a trick that I use go to device manager right click the component in question then go to details and use the drop down box to go to hardware ID Google the VEN underscore number dev underscore number string and it will usually tell you exactly what it is and often there's a link to where to download the driver so the conclusion of this video is not so much about the system but more about the future of the APU on the desktop moving forward okay so AMD has made it very clear that APU is sticking around and the evidence is starting to really increase to indicate that we don't necessarily need the best CPUs to have a great computing experience if we can augment it in other ways so let's have a look at how our system actually performs starting with gaming in battlefield 4 at 720p with medium details it's as advertised it works it's playable and of course we can add our 260x graphics card to it and all of a sudden it's a great 1080p capable gaming machine but at least it functions out of the box other applications that can take advantage of the GPU that is built onto the CPU the APU so to speak are things like winzip or batch filter processing scripts for photoshop for example these were able to perform much better with the APU using open CL acceleration versus just relying on the CPU all of this sounds particularly awesome and promising when we compare it to other options available in the market like older PCs that are not able to leverage their GPU compute in order to improve performance or things like gaming consoles that are a little bit locked down in terms of their functionality the value of a value PC I guess we call it value PC but we don't often think about it that way is you know the additional functionality web browsing a vast number of supported apps upgrade ability and all the things that we can change about the way we use it in the future speaking of the future AMD has got some pretty exciting things coming for the APU platform including support for true audio better graphics and compute performance with their upcoming Kaveri APUs and the continuing evolution of the processor technology that's on them towards HSA which is the equivalent of having your CPU and GPU working together on a Google Doc at the same time to get work done versus them like making revisions to a word document and then emailing it back and forth to each other then waiting for replies I know I actually already talked a little bit about HSA earlier in the video but they wanted me to use that analogy but I liked my construction versus growing one better so I compromised by putting them both in whichever works best for you let me know in the comments and until next time peace out guys and don't forget to subscribe here's some glam footage of our value and the APU system really hope you guys enjoyed the video like it if you liked it dislike it if you disliked it leave a comment if you know something you know compels you to leave a comment and as always don't forget to subscribe I think I already said that but I'm just basically buying time here while you guys check out some of the glam footage of the system yay and no credits