 Buy an Intel NUC barebones PC and get a limited edition t-shirt and in-game items for Planet Side 2. Click now to learn more. So it's finally personal rig update time. It's actually been done for kind of a while. So I have my glass window on there. You can actually even tell in video. Hi Slick. Hello. You can actually even tell in video how much clearer that makes the side panel window. So I'm doing a couple small upgrades. Number one, and people ask me why I use such a ghetto water cooling setup with curved tubes and you know, like it's not the nicest looking water cooling in the world. The reason is because I do things like this. I'm going to swap a motherboard without actually changing any of my tubing and without making my life more difficult than it has to be. Mine is upgradable, which if you have a really, really tight runs and you have like, you know, perfect, you know, curved fittings and then straight tubing runs or whatever else, you can't really, you don't really have that same flexibility. So I'm also upgrading my graphics card. So I'm going to be going from the GTX 590 that's in there to this GTX Titan. And that is for one reason and one reason only because 590 is still a beastly card, great performance. But the thing that's missing is support for streaming to Nvidia Shield, which is something that I want to be able to do. So we can go ahead and pull the side panel off. Oh yeah, these are something that I actually added since the last update. So these are just little decorative, hey, focus, piece of junk. Yeah, there we go. Little decorative knobs. They don't actually hold anything on. The glass is held on by an industrial strength adhesive in here. So yeah, those don't do anything. They just are for looks. And they're like the cheapest possible thing that I could find at Home Depot that didn't look absolutely terrible. So there's a look at the insides. So I've got crucial ballistics, tracer, tactical, whatever, with the LEDs, memory. There's that gold CPU block, so boss. And then there's the graphics card that I'll be pulling out. All right, so I roped Slick into holding the camera for me for a minute here. So I'm just on the last screw to pull out the motherboard here. So I just got to find somewhere to hold it by. I'm going to go with this heat sink. There we go. And this, my friends, is why I do things the way I do them. Because I can extract my motherboard just like this. And probably what? I've been doing this maybe what? Six, seven minutes? Maybe, yeah. And you got all those cards out too. And I got all the cards out. So I can extract the motherboard just like that. That's not a card that you can hold it. And that reveals the, oh shoot, okay, there's one thing I missed. That SATA cable. Yeah, come on. Yeah, locking SATA cables. Love that. All right, so we can go ahead and put that down. Okay, now this is where things are going to get a little bit tricky because I got to drain this graphics card in order to swap in this graphics card. And that's one thing I haven't looked that closely at is how well the barb positions are going to line up between these two cards because I don't want to redo my tubing if I can get away with it. So let's just kind of try to visually line these up. That's pretty okay. That's not bad. Yeah. Yeah, that's going to be okay. So we're going to use this bucket right here as a drain bucket. We're just going to pop one of the fittings off of the graphics card. We're going to undo it and then just drain into here. I don't have to fully drain the loop, which is great because I just have to drain the part that I need to swap in the new graphics card, put that in, and then it means that it's going to be much quicker to bleed the air out of when we're done. In fact, I may not even need to top up the reservoir in order to get it back up and running. So this is extremely unorthodox. I don't really recommend doing this, but what I'm doing right now is I'm loosening one of the plugs here and we're just going to drain just the card and anything that would sit above it while we swap it out for a different one. Now they know the funny conversation Slick and I just had about GTX 590. He's all like, hey, I would take that card off your hands. I'm all like, hey, are you sure? And he's like, yeah, sure. And I'm like, no shadow playing. He's like, oh crap. GTX 590 is probably the best card that just makes absolutely no sense right now from a features perspective. Performance wise, if you're not planning to stream to a shield or use shadow play, so a game streaming on Twitch or anything like that, man, it's such a beast. I'd actually kind of forgotten that I was looking it up the other night. This thing owns the 680. I'd completely forgotten about that. It just stomps all over it in terms of actual FPS performance. So still a good card. Just got to move over to something else. I mean, raw FPS, I don't think Titan's going to be that much faster. It might not even be at all. Having the bigger frame buffer will help though, because GTX 590 is going to be held back by each of the GPUs having only one and a half gigs. So if you wanted to go higher than two and a half K probably, or even higher than 1080P in some of the more modern titles, then that might hold you back a little bit. I think that was pretty much all the water we're going to get out of it. Wow, that was pretty painless. Might be speaking too soon here though. You never know. I've been known to do that from time to time. Oh, this is going to be tricky. Here's something to watch out for guys. So if you're ever trying to do a ghetto water cooling loop upgrade like this, watch out for this. So when I disconnect this, I'm going to have to secure it above the U bend down here somehow, because otherwise all the water from that reservoir will come dumping out of it and that'll be a problem. So I'm just going to watch out for that. So the crazy Russian gave me this a little while ago and I had kind of a nostalgia moment just for lulls. I mean, remember guys, between the best decent thermal compound on the market and the worst decent thermal compound on the market, we're talking a few degrees. So just for lulls, I'm going to be using OCZ Ultra 5 Plus thermal paste on my 3970X. And I've decided to change the order of operations a little bit here. So I was going to do the video card swap first, but instead I think I'm going to put the motherboard in first because that'll allow me, that'll give me somewhere to put the video card once I'm done so that it doesn't just kind of flop all over the place. So I'm going to get that put in right now. This is a relatively small upgrade, but I'm actually ditching the killer Nick. It's just causing driver issues again, even though it has a really cool red LED on it and stuff. And I'm throwing in an Intel server Nick. So I'm going to go that route instead. It's a bit of an older one, but it supports everything that I need it to support and at least take some of the processing load off of the CPU. Not that it doesn't have plenty to spare, but you know, every little bit counts, right? Putting the RAID card back in for those of you who haven't seen it before, that's running to eight Corsair SSDs that are running in RAID 0, giving me a total of around 900 gigs of SSD based storage. I don't know how this always happens, but like my build log videos always end up with things I don't recommend in them, like jamming a pen in a piece of tubing to keep it from spraying water all over the place. I used to have proper tubing plugs that I used to use for this stuff, but I don't really have them anymore. Then like twist tying the block up here so that this doesn't drain into the rest of the system anyway. Here's the new graphics card. That's going to be going in and yeah, GTX Titan, Coolant's block looks absolutely beautiful. Here we go. So as you may or may not have noticed, the computer is now upside down. We have a bit of a problem. I dropped my back plate behind the motherboard, so I gotta go home, see my family and stuff. So we're going to call that it for today, but it's like I flipped it upside down and I did manage to get it to come back, so that's good news. I don't have to pull the motherboard out. Other good news is the graphics card is now installed. The fittings are on and we're going to be pretty much ready to rock as soon as I get that CPU block mounted and get these expansion cards put in. Very, very excited. All right, so I got it sorted out. A fair bit of picking away at the back. I also had to completely destroy what little I had done in terms of cable management back here in order to access the back plate, so that's going to be a bit of a mess to fix now. So the expansion cards are all in. There we go. Oh, that one needs to be cleaned. Zonar Zents from ASUS with that Sennheiser co-branding on it. There we go. Maybe that's a little bit better now. Ah, that gleam. There we go. All right, so there's the LSI9268I. There's my Intel whatever it is, that gigabit ethernet card as well as sound card and graphics card. All that's left here is to... Oh, this is something I did not think of. Uh oh. I don't need one of the two pins anymore. So this extra two pins I do not need. That's fascinating. I guess I'll have to figure out somewhere to hide those. Good thing I still have that other side panel off and I haven't done anything with the wires. All right, so there she is with the board swap done. Got a bit of a better angle. What I love about this board is it has tons of PCI Express expansion. So you can still add like another PCIe 16x card, potentially something else down here if I was willing to move this down a little bit. I wanted to give it a bit more room to breathe than it had before though. So yeah, I can still put a couple more PCIe 8x cards in here which is pretty darn impressive. So now I just gotta fix things up at the back a little bit, close it up and then we're good to go. So the ultimate first world problem is like having too many SSDs piled up behind your motherboard tray so you can't close your chassis anymore. See that they actually stick out quite a bit. Over here you gotta mush them down flat there. So what I have to do with my system is basically lay it down on its side. This is why I don't like taking off this side panel. You can see there's quite a bulge here and I just gotta... It's quite a tight fit now that I had it painted because it changes the tolerances a little bit. So fitting together... oh and I gotta slider shut like that in order to contain everything. But other than that... Let's just... Close it up. Okay. Whoa. Now... You did it. Now she's done and that is what the inside is in theory supposed to look like. So that's a little bit gimpy right there. That's SATA cable there. I guess that's not too bad. I feel bad because like the backs of the cards are dusty and stuff but it's not exactly a new build in the same way that it was new when I put it together like months ago. So time to take it home and fire it up and get some shield streaming gaming going on here. Alright friends. This is the moment where we find out if she boots up or powers on. Boots on. Alright let's see how that water level is doing in the res. Looks like she's not bleeding perfectly. Okay so let's... Oh looks like it decided to take another crack at things itself. That's interesting. Okay. Come on pump. Come on postcode. Keep doing things. Whoa that's a good sign. Alright so she boots but I don't see anything that looks like particularly good water flow in there so we're going to shut her down. See if we can let some of that, the air bubbles that are stuck in the pump bleed out. Alright so I'll be back when we try this again. And that my friends is why I always recommend a variable speed pump and not cheaping out and getting the B version of the D5 because I'm able to tweak the speed in order to just jar loose the bubbles and I'm able to get things running. So it looks like I didn't even lose enough fluid during the refill to completely drain my res so all I gotta do is top this baby up and we're pretty much ready to rock. I hope she boots up. I guess we'll... Might as well find out together right? I think that's the whole point of this vlogging thing. Oh that doesn't look like enough drives. Oh there they are. Okay good. Normally it's only one on the second page so I guess this board does it differently for some reason. That freaked me out a little. So you can see my raid zero has been found. Nine hundred gigabytes. Okay please boot up. Please boot up. Hmm. Oh it might not be set to the correct boot order. Oh okay. Well the RAM is detected. That's good because officially on paper this RAM is not compatible. I have one tender set up. We'll spare you guys the suspense. And there she goes booting up into Windows with the fresh changes to the hardware. It looks like we are good. So thank you for checking out. Build log number... I guess this is part 16 of the personal rig update that I guess is finally sort of done. I still want to do kind of a you know like a glam video showcase of the rig or something but I'm not quite done with my setup yet because as you can see I'm still running an older monitor. This is like an ancient BenQ 1920x600 thing. I've got a new monitor that I've had on order for a while. I've had people asking me also for a little while here what I use for peripherals. So this is my replacement Ikari laser. This is my third one now. So that I mean I guess I use it a lot but you know I guess they die but I can't get used to anything else. I've tried. This is a Mionix Xybul 60. This is Cherry MX Blacks which are not generally my favorite switches but I like this particular keyboard. These are my SteelSeries 7H's that I use for when I'm sitting here and when I don't have something else to plug into the Essence 1 external USB sound card and DAC. I use Corsair SP2500 speakers and just to show my total non-biasedness I balance out my Intel swag with AMD swag and this is actually a Ruby sword so he sits here with all that stuff which I think is kind of funny. That's my little swag guy and there's my Star Citizen citizen card or whatever they're called and I guess that's pretty much it. Full tour, proper tour and some glam of the system coming when I get around to it. Thanks guys for watching as always don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings, reviews and other computer videos.