 Hello, welcome to Dennis Tech Tips. This is happening. Today I'm doing a build guide that I invented a new thermal paste that I can actually use it to apply directly to the socket. Let's see. So you just do this very very gently and just put the CPU on the thing. Hey, what's going on? You doing a build guide? Yeah, I'm doing a build guide. You know Linus said those were dead, right? You know Linus is dead, right? You sure you want to go with that one? It's Dennis Tech Tips. Okay, never mind, never mind. I'll go, I'll go. But please subscribe if you want Dennis Tech Tips more. Hmm. Yeah, okay. I guess with Linus out of the picture everybody wants to get on front of the camera. But you know it has been over a year since our last PC build guide and I know you guys really want them. The problem is that we had sponsors before but guess what? Linus isn't here today. I've got the company credit card and it's high time we fixed that. So let's get cracking to build the best bang for buck 1440p 60fps gaming experience we can muster without triggering the fraud alert. He won't know what hit him. And once he's done freaking out of the statement, he can think about saving money on his IT infrastructure with GlassWire. With GlassWire you can instantly see your current and past network activity, detect malware and block badly behaving apps on your PC or Android device. Use offer code Linus and get 25% off GlassWire 2.0 at the link below. Now before we get our hands dirty, we should first make sure that our hands are clean and static free. We can do the form with some soap, but the latter will require being grounded. Now some veteran builders will tell you that if your environment is humid, ESD isn't a great danger, especially with today's thicker PCBs and protection circuitry. And this is true to some extent, so in a pinch simply touching something metallic that's got a path to ground regularly will do. But if you're building a PC, you're going to want to invest in an ESD solution. Now they aren't expensive and we don't recommend continuing without them. When you do use an ESD strap or ESD mat, bear in mind that they must be connected to ground via an outlet or something metallic with a path to ground in order to be effective. Noticing a pattern? It's all about the path to ground. No ground? Then there's no ESD safety. As for our other tools, our handy-dandy multi-bit screwdriver is our best friend. We'll use this magnetic parts tray for screw management. Magnetic project mats also work great here, and you can even use a pill sorter to pretty good effect. That takes care of the pre-build prep and tools. But for cable management, and you are going to manage your cables, right? The most useful tools we have are Velcro ties like these handy-dandy Linus Tech Tips brand ones. A pair of side cutters like these. And a handful of tweezers. Oh, sorry. I mean zip ties. Needle nose pliers can help when using these in tight spaces, but they're not strictly necessary because as you'll see, most of our zip ties are going to be quite accessible. Now, as always, it's a good idea to plug in all of your components for a dry run before you fully assemble your build. Now, this is a good way to troubleshoot any issues that may arise, such as an incompatibility or a DOA component. So you use your motherboard box as a case. It's non-conductive and usually sturdy enough to handle the weight of a board, cooler, and GPU. So if your machine powers on and transmits to the display, you're ready to move on. When it comes to CPUs, we're spoiled for choice thanks to AMD and Intel playing tit for tat over the last year or so. For us, the best value for our money is the Ryzen 5 2600 Non-X from AMD, which unlike Intel's price competitors, the Core i5-8400 or 9400F can be overclocked. It also has twice the number of threads, which newer games like Apex Legends can take full advantage of. So with that in mind, AMD steals the show at this price. Compared to their own previous-gen Ryzen 5 1600X, the 2600 is slightly faster on average thanks to Precision Boost 2, and typically has more overclocking headroom for a price difference of just about $6 at retail. To install the CPU, lift up the retention arm on your motherboard. Line up the triangle on the chip, which is right about there, with the triangle on the motherboard. And gently, yeah, there we go, place it into the socket. It should just drop in if the pins are aligned correctly, so just visually make sure that the CPU is flush with the socket before pushing the retention arm down and lock it in place. You may also want to gently press down on the chip while you do this to ensure it doesn't shift around, but gravity really should do the job. Now our CPU comes with its own cooler, AMD's own Wraith Stealth, and we'll be using it here to save money. For more than a mile overclock, we'll want to replace it, but for now, we can go ahead and install it by first removing these two plastic clips on the motherboard, which helpfully just use standard Phillips head screws. Once that's done, remove the cooler's plastic shield, covering the thermal compound if necessary, this one just kind of fell off. Line it with the socket like so, the thinner gauge here should go towards the top, and then we just screw it into place where those plastic clips used to be. Now you don't want to immediately tighten these screws, because if you do, then it'll make screwing the other ones in more difficult for one. And two, you're going to want to try and use an X pattern to evenly distribute the thermal compound here. From here, all we need to do is plug its fan cable into the CPU fan header on our motherboard, like so, and our CPU and cooler are now fully installed. On to the memory. Now, fast memory is something that Ryzen, like me, loves to chew on. But because fast memory gets expensive quickly, we're primarily focused on gaming performance, there are diminishing returns. At the time of writing, G.Skill's Aegis DDR4 3000 16GB kit is the sweet spot based on what's available as it's priced and around the range you typically find 2133 or 2400 kits. Unfortunately, since it was... Oh boy. Okay, that's going to make it in. Unfortunately, since it was backordered when we went to buy it, we had to get the parts in time for this video, we had to settle for this G.Skill Ripshaws 5 at a similar price. If we wanted to grab a 3200MHz kit though, we'd be paying another $25 for the privilege for not much real world game. If you've never installed RAM before, then good news, it's super easy. But there's one thing you want to keep in mind. If you want to take advantage of dual channel, and with Ryzen you probably will, you'll need to make sure that you install your memory in alternating slots, so 2 and 4. Just pull these tabs back, line up the little notch on the memory with the notch in the slot, and insert. Now you'll need to push down a little bit until you hear a little click, and on the other side as well, it'll take a little bit of force, but not a whole lot. You don't really need to worry about breaking anything, but you might feel like you're putting too much force in. So let's do that with the other stick, and just visually inspect that we can't see the pins, and that everything is flush. Now, we've been plugging stuff into this thing, but we haven't really gone over what it is yet. We've gone with the ASRock B450M Pro 4, an inexpensive Micro ATX AMD motherboard with 4 RAM slots and crucially, the ability to overclock our CPU. Now, because the B450M Pro 4 happens to have decent VRMs for power delivery, we should be able to obtain reasonable results with our Ryzen 5 2600. Otherwise, it's actually pretty unremarkable with no official support for SLI, just Crossfire, and a fine array of I.O. that includes a VGA port, DVI port, and HDMI port that are only useful for an APU, not for us. Now, to be clear, we could have gotten away with a $50 board instead of a $70 one if we didn't care about overclocking support. But where's the fun in that? We are going to use this guy. We literally chose the cheapest case available. Okay, fine. I'll talk about it. This is the Rosewill SRM01, a Micro ATX case that's about what you'd expect for its common sale price of $20. Difficult to open box, for one. It doesn't weigh anything. What is going on here? So, for $20, you get a case that weighs nothing with very data aesthetics. It's got a single underside dust filter, limited cable management, a single front USB 3.0 port on the side, with the rest being 2.0. This thing is not going to be easy or fun to build in. But that's not the point of this build, is it? The point is to get the best bang for the buck. And if it doesn't improve performance, we're just going to have to live with it. Thankfully, we do have thumb screws. One thing that it does have is this drive tray, and yes, that is what it is. So if we take out these two screws here, one on the bottom and one towards the top, like so. Ha ha, it swings out of place. So, yeah, we can get a GPU in here if we want to, which we'll have to. So this gives us all the room we'll need. Although, just barely. Now before we move on, we need to get the case ready to actually work in. First, we'll need to use these thumb screws to take off both side panels. Yes, the rear one too. And yes, they actually gave us thumb screws on the rear. With that done, we'll remove the front panel. So we need to grip this little slot down here and just pull outward. There's no latch. It should just pop right off. And from here, all we need to do is just pull these cables through gently. They aren't held in with anything. They're just routed right through. Now, there's not much in the way of cable management on this front panel. There's nothing particularly special about it, but it does have these screws with wide rims that hold everything into place. So we're going to want to take this one off next to the LEDs. And that'll free them up, but we don't want to remove them. What we want to do is take these for the power and reset switch and route them down with them. And from here, we'll want to take the LED wires and pull them through here until they're about the same length and loop the slack like that. What we can do from here is replace that screw, and that has all of our front panel connections at pretty much the perfect length to reach our motherboard. As for the USB 2.0, front panel audio, and USB 3.0 cables, these are relatively easy to figure out. What we can do is just push them through here and then out through this cable management port for the power supply. It can be a little bit tricky because these wires are thick, but once we get it through, we'll route our front panel back through and close it back up. It should just snap on once you get the posts aligned. And there we go. So why did we go through the effort of doing that? So doing it this way means that our cables have just enough slack to go where they need to go without having any extraneous length that we need to deal with later on for cable management, which will be a chore. Speaking of the motherboard, we can't celebrate yet because we still need to install that. This is where we run into our first real problem with keeping out on the case. If we look in this baggie here, there are actually only six brass standoffs included. There are no other standoffs and our motherboard has eight mount points. That means we're going to have to choose where we need the most support. So we need to determine where and this is why people don't like wearing ESD straps. In this case, it looks like we're going to need the most support in the top left, the top right, everything in the middle, because that's where our GPU is going to go. And probably the bottom middle here where our front panel connects in. And unfortunately, that means the rest of it is going to have to hang loose, which means the bottom right here, bottom left and the top middle are going to sag a little bit if you try to put any pressure on them. So with that mapped out in the standoffs go. Now, if you do decide to use a screwdriver for these, be very careful because these are made of cheap brass and this is very thin steel. It will strip and you're going to have a bad time. Better to just use your fingers to tighten them. You know, I probably should do this with a screwdriver. Once we're done with that nonsense, we won't forget our I.O. shield, which snaps into place from the inside. But we want to make sure that it's oriented correctly. In this case, the audio ports will be on the bottom. Now we can finally get our motherboard installed for realsies. Now a pro tip for anyone building in an older design case like this, install your front panel connectors now while the motherboard is still outside the case. This little lip down here is going to cause so many problems if you try to do it afterwards. Now you'll want to check your motherboard's manual just to see where everything plugs in. But typically the power switch is going to go into the top right. The reset switch will go right beneath that. Then hard drive power that'll go next to the reset switch to the left. Positive usually is to the left, which I believe that's what the silkscreen says. And we'll do the same for the power switch or power LED. All right. So with our front panel installed, let's get our motherboard in. So we'll get it down under here, hold this out of the way so it doesn't get trapped underneath and line it up with our I.O. shields. So if we align this laterally, you'll see the brass standoff show through, which will tell you that you have all of your standoffs in the right positions. So since we can see them, we can count them to make sure we have them all in the right spots. So we have one, two, three, four, five, six. So with the standoffs aligned to the screw holes, we'll take these fine threaded screws and screw it down, starting with the center to keep everything aligned. Don't mind me. I'm just going to keep screwing these in for the rest of time. Haha. Yeah. I done f**ked up. This is such a pain. Do you remember how I said you should plug in the front panel before you put the board in? I forgot to put in these front panel connectors. Oh, yeah. Oh, and then I forgot my own advice about lifting this stupid cable out of the way. There we go. Now let's get those screws back in. Okay, that was a lot of work just to get the motherboard in. But the fun's only just begun because we haven't gotten to the power supply yet. Just rethinking my life decisions right now. Anyway, you might expect that we cheaped out on the power supply too, but it's actually quite important for a variety of reasons. The most important of which being the longevity and stability of your computer's components. For that reason, we set a stipulation that the power supply we chose would be 80 plus bronze or better, capable of 500 watts or higher continuous output, and come with a five year warranty at minimum. The least expensive power supply that takes all of these boxes is the Corsair CX550, which, given the lack of modular connections, means our case choice is about to kick our proverbial butts. Because unlike most modern cases, the SRM01 from Rosewill mounts the power supply up top, which means not only do we have to line it up manually, but even though it does have a lip for the power supply to rest on, we still need to hold it in place while we screw it in or it could fall. I want to go home. It's probably obvious, but we can't actually get this power supply in here until we get these cables routed. So let's do that. This little hole in the back here is quite convenient for routing our power supply cables. Oh, and by the way, because this power supply mounts up here, it acts as an exhaust. It's actually what it's designed for back in the day. So we're going to want the fan on the bottom. Yeah, so you just gotta screw it in then. Power supply's in. So this mess is why we couldn't install the power supply lying flat, and it's also why we couldn't install the 12-volt EPS connector while the motherboard was outside of the case like we normally recommend. We could have maybe installed the power supply first, but that wouldn't really have made our lives much easier. So let's go about routing these things, shall we? The ATX cable is pretty easy. Just go into this little hole here. Thankfully, the 24-pin just has these extra four pins here. It's the 20-plus-four ATX connector, which helps in managing these cables. Just make sure they're clipped together and push it down until it clicks. All right, so now for the 12-volt EPS connector, and that's going to go through this little hole here. Once it's through, snap it together, then line it up, which can be a little bit tricky. Thankfully, we've got plenty of clearance. So with it in slot, just push down until you hear the click. Now, the next thing we're going to want to do is pull all of the slack from inside the case to this side of the case, and that will leave as little as possible for us to deal with on the inside. We'll also probably never need these cables here, at least not right now, so we can push those back through. If I had been thinking ahead, I would have just not routed them through. But, yeah, that's not what we're doing today. So since we'll basically never need these, we can tie them off and leave them in this conveniently located 5-1⁄4-inch bay that we'll also never use, because who owns an optical drive anymore? So into this little drive bay these go, and we never have to look at them again. Speaking of storage, we chose the WD Blue 250GB M.2 module for its low profile and low cost. Now, I know you can get cheaper SSDs, but this was the cheapest that included a DRAM cache, which is extremely important for performance as we've seen in the past. Now to install the module, we're going to have to find the M.2 slot on the motherboard for our drive. The problem is that the one in the center of the board here, labeled Ultra M.2, is only for NVMe, meaning that our SATA SSD needs to go in the other slot, which is conveniently located down at the bottom right of the board. So we'll line up the notches on the end of the module with the key on the slot. And it should go right in. We won't see any more pins. So we can then take this retaining screw, screw it down, and we're nice and secure. You'll notice that it covers up the bottom middle motherboard screw, which is why we didn't install it before. Now, 250GB of solid-state storage isn't enough for everything we want to run on this machine. I mean, individual games commonly can be up to 50GB or larger these days. I've seen some that are like closer to 100. And that's why we've got this 2TB Seagate Derracuda, which critically is a 7200 RPM drive, meaning that while it's more power-hungry than the slower 5400 RPM options, we'll be loading our games more quickly. Plus, since it's an older model, it's just as cheap. Now, we've got a couple of options for mounting the drive, and neither are very good. The first option is to just install it into the bottom of the 5.25 inch bay, where the guide rail is provided, but unless you have a long neck screwdriver, you're just not going to get a solid mount. With that in mind, we'll be mounting to... This. Yes, I am serious. Now, the manual says to mount the drives here with their connectors facing the rear of the case, like this. But, we'll get much cleaner cable management if we mount it like this, with the connectors facing the front. We can hide those cables through the front panel, or via the 5.25 inch bay. In case you're wondering, yes, we could mount the drive, or second drive, to this bottom half here, but that would interfere with our GPU's PCI Express connectors when we go to install them, as you'll see. Speaking of connectors, now it's time to cable manage this thing. We've been kind of doing that the whole time, but now that the drive is securely mounted, it's time to tidy up the cabling in preparation for the GPU, which will be the last thing that we install here. And, of course, we need to get the drive wired up. And, yeah. You know, if I were thinking more clearly, I probably would have done the cable management before the drive, but, you know what? Since our Velcro ties are actually too big for the loops that are provided here on the case, I'll go ahead and run these now, and then cable management them afterwards, just to tidy things up. Thankfully, we only have the one that we need to run. I don't need this to be hanging out here either. I'm not very good at this. Remember that SATA cable chain that we left out? At this point, this is where we need it. Going to cross it over like this with one of my handy dandy tweezers. Clip this off. Or not. There we go. And now, we've got just enough length. There. Oof. That hurt. To feed it down through this hole here, it's a little difficult to see. There we go. As a bonus, we can fish this up through that same hole. And we can send it out through here. But then we can go back down here with the rest of the front panel cables and plug directly into the motherboard. Then we can close it back up. Now, we have a fully connected drive with basically no mess. So, taking care not to cross over any cables, we'll slide our USB 3.0 header into here. And plug it directly into the board. Like so. I kind of hate those connectors, but we will have to pull the slack back out. But gently. Because these connectors have a tendency to either break or pull loose with very little force. So, with that done, now we can start tying these up. Now, this step isn't terribly important, but it's important to me. Flatten out a little bit. Alright, so we need both of these, but we only need one of them to have all of their connectors. So, we can tie one of these back just for the sake of neatness. So, then we can fish both of these through here. Then I can tie this down, like so. Now, I need to figure out what to do with this guy. That'll at least keep it in place, more or less. Although, I would really like another cable management point. Now, one thing you might notice is that it actually isn't flush with the sides of the case. But that's not actually a bad thing. Because our panel has this nice, big bump on it. Which lets us just slide it on. Okay, and the front looks pretty clean too. Which is a good thing, because now we need to install our graphics card. Our goal for this build is a 1440p 60 capable machine. So, for that, we're turning to the GeForce RTX 2070 Gaming OC card from Gigabyte. It's about $12 or 3% more than the standard gaming card. But it's clocked a good 7% higher. Which means it's a trade-off worth making in the pursuit of absolute best price to performance. At this budget, anyway. And yeah, let's get this in. To install our GPU, we're first going to need to break off these tabs that cover the PCI Express slots. Now, this is a hallmark of cheaper cases and nothing to be concerned about. You can just gently stick a screwdriver in here, like so, to kind of get it out of its position. And then you can just kind of bend it up and down a few times. Like this. And they just break right off. Now, we already have most of ours free. Because I did do a test fit in this. But, for you guys, you're going to have to pry these free. So once the slots are free, it's time for the main event. Now, the first thing we should do is make sure that the tab on the back of the slot is in the down position. It was already there. But if it's up, just push it down. That will unlock the retention clip for our GPU. Which can go in like so. Now, one more thing to note. This case has basically no room back here. Install your PCI Express power connectors first before you do anything else. Now, angling this in is a little bit tricky in a case like this. But once you have it aligned, all you need to do is give it a little press until you hear the click. Now, what we need to do is screw in our retention screws. Now, once you've tidied up the PCI Express cables and gotten everything nice and organized. It's time to take a step back and admire your work. It's been rough, but we're almost done. It's time to go ahead and slide the side panels back on. And secure them into place with the thumb screws. Like so. So now, we'll plug everything in. And wait the longest few seconds of our lives. It's powered on. Will it post? Oh, keyboard lit up. Hey, ASRock. Helpfully, ASRock shows you exactly which key to mash. So we just mash delete or you can hit F2. Now, most of this stuff in the BIOS. We'll probably want to leave it defaults for now. But primarily, what we want to do here is enable XMP, which can be done by going over to the OC tweaker. Then going down to XMP setting. And choosing XMP 2.0 profile 1. And we should see that our RAM is now running at the proper speed, which is great. So we will go ahead and do save changes and exit. All right. Looks like Windows is installed. I won't go into the step by step on how to do that. But for those of you who are stuck and do want to install Windows, grab an 8 gigabyte or larger USB key and put it into another computer that's already running Windows. From here, you can download the media creation tool from Microsoft, which can automatically set up a Windows installer on your USB key. Once that's done, just plug it in reboot. It should automatically start the Windows setup process. And once that's done, you should already have all of your drivers installed out of the box. But you'll want the latest Nvidia driver along with the AMD chipset driver, which you can grab from their respective websites. Now, as for how this thing performs. Well, I've already loaded up the drive with a bunch of tools and games to test drive. So let's give it from spin, shall we? Let's do Cinebench, I guess. OK. Yeah, that's about what I'd expect. Linus likes Doom. Let's do Shadow of the Tomb Raider and run the benchmark. Yeah, it's pretty good. High 60s, 1440p highest, up above 70 now. It'll probably drop down to like the low 60s at minimum. Yeah. Wow. OK. That's actually more impressive than I thought it would be. So there you have it. An unassuming box, well wired and filled with nothing but the best bang for buck components you can get for a thousand dollars or less. Absolutely no fluff. Displate makes magnet mounted metal prints that are durable and don't require any power tools in order to hang them. They've got over a quarter million different artworks spanning a bunch of different styles and influences. And with their easy magnetic mounting, there's no holes in the wall and you can easily replace them. They plant 10 trees for every display purchased and you can use code LTT to save 15% through the link in the video description. Thanks for watching, guys. If this video sucked, you know what to do, but it was awesome. Get subscribed, hit that like button, check out where to link to order by some of the stuff we featured in the video description. Also linked in the description is our merch store, which has cool shirts like this one and our community forum, which you should totally join. Also, let me know. You guys want to see more of us writers being in front of the camera more often or would you rather Linus or would you rather some kind of combination of the best of both worlds? No more Linus. Yeah, we win. Linus is retiring forcibly.