 It's all about finding balance in life, right? So somewhere in between me trying to speed build a computer in 17 minutes and it taking me five attempts to get my time down to that point and me being like sweating at the end of it and not having any time to give you guys any instructions or insight about what I'm doing and taking six hours to swap out a motherboard in my personal rig, there's going to be a happy medium. And that is exactly what today's build is all about. This my friends is the happy medium machine. Now our goal was to build a respectable gaming rig for the modest price of 500 US dollars, not including peripherals and monitor and all that kind of stuff. Now admittedly we did go a little bit over our budget. We ended up closer to the $580 range, but there are definitely some places where you could trim a little bit of fat in order to hit that price point and then easily upgrade later. Like for example, we did include a hard drive so that we can actually install a decent library of games on it, assuming we're playing modern AAA titles, some of which are a hundred plus gigs per game. But you could scrap that, you could install and remove your games as you play them and then just kind of wait to build up some budget to upgrade your storage down the line. So we're still calling it a $500 gaming rig and we are going to get started building it right now at a happy medium pace. So we're not going to speed build, but I'm also not going to take like an hour to build this computer. And it's brought to you by Ridge Wallet wants to redefine the wallet with its compact frame and RFID blocking plates. Check out how they can help keep your wallet bulge down and use our offer code Linus to save 10% and get free worldwide shipping. And we're back. Yes, that's the way that we do that. All right. So the first thing we need to decide is whether we're going to go with the windowed or non windowed version of the MG120G from Cougar. Rawr! Which one's the windowed one? The G. All right. We're going to go with the non windowed one because this build is all about modesty and doing things that actually make sense. If you are spending $500 on a gaming rig, you should be saving the $5 or $10 Delta between the windowed version of the case and the non windowed version of the case. And you should be spending that on a graphics upgrade or a CPU upgrade. Something that you're kind of stuck with for an extended period of time versus something that can be easily upgraded down the line, like for example, storage or system memory. Now I took a lot of flack when we did a budget build recently configuring it with a single stick of memory with the intention, of course, of upgrading to dual channel later. People said, hey, you know, the performance sucks. But I'm of the mind that any performance that I give up today, like let's say I save, you know, 5% of my budget by going with a single stick of memory, but I lose 5% of my performance. That's a trade off that doesn't cost me anything in the long term. It's just sort of like deferring that performance and cost to a later time. I fully understood that that was not the ideal configuration and that dual channel makes a big difference to system performance these days. It's just a matter of whether that's a system performance compromise that I'm making that is going to cost me more down the line or whether it's one that I'm making that I can just say, hey, you know what? My performance isn't enough today. I'm going to go to the computer store and buy another stick of memory and put it in my system because, you know, I've saved up my lunch money. My parents gave me lunch money and I decided not to buy lunch and I just stashed it so I could buy cool stuff that I want, not that I'm speaking from experience. Let's go ahead and install a CPU. So for our motherboard, we went with the ASRock B450M Pro. This is just such a great balance between performance and cost. It's MATX, so you don't get some of the expansion that you might expect from a full-size board. You've only got three PCI Express slots, but let's face it, when you're using a B450 board, you don't have the same degree of chipset features anyway and an MATX board, I feel, is a really, really good compromise there. So we've got our socket AM4. We've still got four memory slots so we can load this puppy up. We've got two M.2s and then, of course, the PCI Express slots and actually a pretty reasonable mix of I.O. with six USB 3 Plus ports. 10 gigabit ethernet, it's not until you step up to B550 that you're going to start to see things like two and a half gig ethernet on these more value-oriented boards. Let's go ahead and switch to our top down here. For our CPU, we've gone with a Ryzen 3 3100. This thing is just an outstanding balance of price to performance. And I know that we've said some things about it in the past, like that we don't think it makes necessarily the... Oh, wait, no, sorry, I'm actually thinking of when we got slammed for a completely different video. Yeah, Ryzen 3100 is... We actually gave it an extremely positive review. The one thing that we did get criticized for recently about it is, yes, I know that you can step up. Okay, so you can step up to a 3300 and that does make a big difference to performance, but I still maintain that even if you're going to end up with a little bit of latency due to the 2CCX design of this one, it's at a certain price point, not the kind of thing that you're going to notice when you're pairing it with a 1650 Super. That's something to bear in mind about the way that you typically benchmark hardware versus the way that people actually deploy it in the real world. If you want to pop in here, I'm just going to go ahead and install my CPU. Just lining up my diamond with the little... You can see that little arrow on the edge of the board right there. We got the arrow? Nice. Thank you, David. I've already got float plane chat being like, why not 3300X? Okay, all right. I just talked through this. Not 3300X because I think that when you're trying to hit a price point, there are cases where look, if you're pairing it with a 1650 Super, realistically, 3100 ain't going to be the bottleneck in that system anyway from a gaming standpoint. This is a gaming focused system. I think it's fine. Speaking of things that are just fine for cooling, we're going stock cooler. In fairness, AMD stock coolers these days are actually pretty legit. They are literally double the mass of Intel's. I still remember when Intel did away with the copper plug down the middle of this style of heat sink that they've also used for many, many years. If I recall, we might have actually done... We either did a video benchmarking the difference between the new... I mean new and not improved. The new and not improved all aluminum version and the version that had the copper slug down the middle. We used to be able to see it through the fins back in the LGA 775 days. It kind of had like a... It was like a copper tube and then the aluminum fins were all attached to it around the outside. We either did a video about it or did some testing. I just don't get it. Like the amount of savings that Intel must have there, I don't see how it's worth it. AMD clearly doesn't see the point. They still include decent coolers with their CPUs and I commend them for it. I am going to need to take the brackets off. I'm going to not put my thermal compound on and I'm going to go ahead and just use this screwdriver that I want you all to not worry about. Just don't worry about the screwdriver. You should have no worries in your mind about the screwdriver. Why are you guys being so worried about it? I just don't really get it. Everyone's stressing out, you know? I actually have been tempted to pick myself up a nice little utility belt or tool belt ever since I was doing a bunch of network cabling running in my attic and installing security cameras in my house. I've actually been doing a bunch of home upgrades and I found myself needing to carry... Here, let's get correct thermal paste application up in here. I'm just going to do kind of a fat boy grain of rice here. I found myself needing to carry hammer, drill, crimp tool, side cutters, some RJ45 ends. It's gotten to the point where even my stretchy Costco jeans just can't contain it all. Look, I can store an AMD stock cooler in my front pocket, but it's not quite enough at a certain point. All right, let's go ahead and install this puppy. You're good, David. I love... This is another thing that AMD slash AMD's partners don't cheap out on compared to Intel boards. I love that AMD, even on their consumer platform, still has a backplate. There have been boards that I've seen that have just these plastic, like these little plastic bracket things, and then they just use pushpins to go through the board. But unless you're buying some super random board on AliExpress or something, the vast majority of them have a backplate. And I just love coolers that mount with a proper metal backplate compared to ones that use plastic pushpins. I've just seen such terrible things happen in shipping. I mean, recently, we had the PewDiePie Creeper PC get destroyed in shipping, even though everything was mounted with metal. That should give you some idea. I have seen systems come back after being shipped across the continent with a pushpin style cooler. And it wasn't really stock coolers back in the day, because this was when I was at NCIX. We didn't ship a lot of custom systems with stock coolers. So there was a particular Arctic cooling one. I want to say like Freezer 7 or something like that. This was way back in the day. Anyway, it used pushpins. And people kept configuring their systems with these things. And NCIX's philosophy was kind of like the Burger King of custom computers, right? Like you have it your way. We'll build whatever you configure. So that thing was a great value because it was like 20 bucks. And it was like a tower cooler at a time when those were usually quite a bit more expensive than that. So people kept configuring their systems with these bloody things. And we'd configure them. And I'd see these systems come back that looked like they had been kind of like picked up and drop kicked repeatedly down the length of a football field with this cooler having popped off and banging around inside the system. We're talking graphics cards that were like ripped out of the slot but still screwed in back here. So the slot is just like, like, daping open. None of the pins are making contact. We're talking hard drives getting, getting knocked out and like putting like not dense. I'm not talking dense. I'm talking like you can see through the PCB holes in the motherboard. I've just seen such. And as someone who, especially at that time, really had basically no money, right? Like I'm working as a sales rep at a computer store two days a week. I'm going to school at the same time. I pretty much had no money. I like loved hardware. Like it was all that I lived and breathed. And just like seeing those things actually traumatic. Like looking at, you know, a $3,000 gaming rig that's just, you know, SLI and this cooler came off and just like knocked both of the video cards out and they were banging around inside the case and like the power supply survived. It's still screwed in. But like the back of the case is now bent from the weight and it's scratched all over. Like I just had to steady myself, you know, sorry. I said this stream wouldn't go on for too long. So let's go ahead and plug in our CPU fan here. So it's pretty typical these days. I just, man, ASRock has done such a great job of their budget boards. Come on in here, David. It's pretty typical these days on what used to be high end boards having a feature where you have two CPU headers. One for the CPU fan if you've got a conventional setup like this. And a second for if you've got an AIO and you've got sort of one connector for your fan or fans and then a second connector for your pump. So you just want to watch out. Just watch the labeling because you'll usually have CPU fan one, CPU fan two, or CPU fan and CPU fan opt. Yeah, so this one is labeled CPU fan two slash water pump. Unfortunately ASRock and their infinite wisdom put the silkscreen under this heat sink for the VRM. So you actually can't read it, but it's probably in the manual as well. So that's it. Our CPU cooler is install-am-a-lated. King in the North, I've only been live for about 20 minutes or something like that. Half an hour, half an hour. What? I've been live for half an hour? We've got to build a computer here, ladies and gentlemen. All right, we're not installing an M.2 SSD today. We're going to be going SATA. So we're pretty much done with the motherboard now that we've got... Oh yeah, no. We can go ahead and install our RAM. I love that in the time since AMD Ryzen launched, we've gone from DDR4 like 2400, 2666 being affordable to... You can actually put DDR4 3200 RAM for not much more money in even like a 500 to 600 dollar class gaming rig. It's great because even though the performance delta might not be huge in some applications going from 2666 to 3200, some things, it will be big. And I for one, love getting the most for my money. That's what it's all about, is not leaving performance on the table unless you absolutely have to. And it wasn't that long ago that in order to hit this kind of price point, we would often tell people, hey, yeah, you're probably better off just getting a single stick of RAM today to give yourself more room to upgrade in the future. Because that way, if you have enough money for let's say eight gigs of RAM, instead of buying two four gig sticks, which is about the same price typically, and then limiting yourself to 16 gigs of total upgradability, you can buy a single eight gig, then a single eight gig, you get your extra performance. And that gives you up to 32 gigs before you have to start throwing things away or flipping them on Craigslist in order to get back some of your budget. All right, let's go ahead and open up our case. I'm just gonna open up the super chats here. Best thing that came out of these live streams are... I'm glad you guys like the live streams because honestly, it's a lot of fun for me too. I actually kind of enjoy just like building computers. I find it relaxing. But I'm at the point now where I don't need any more computers. It's like, what a struggle, you know? It's a bummer. I just want to build computers. I mean, that's ultimately why I got the job at the computer store. I wanted to be a tech, but I understand now why they didn't allow it. I simply didn't have the relevant experience at all. Yeah, I get it. So they put me in sales, but I would still hang out in the tech room whenever it was slow in the store. And sometimes Andrew... I don't know if you're out there, Andrew. You're a good dude though. Sometimes Andrew would let me work on some of the systems. He was willing if I made a mistake, which I don't think I ever did, but he was also a super nice guy and he might just not have told me if I made a mistake and he had to cover for me. But he would help me out if I made a mistake putting something together. I ended up being really good at sales though. Go figure. Gift of gab. So I ended up spending most of my time doing that even if I did want to work as a tech. Probably just as well because the transition from sales to the business side of things was a lot easier than I think the transition from technician to the business side of things. And that ended up being a really good career move for me. All right. So pretty simple case here. MATX, really compact, single included fan. That should be enough cooling for our configuration. This is just a Ryzen 3100 and a 1650 Super. It's amazing to me though how far budget cases have come. On the one hand, I lament sometimes the loss of the cases of old. I mean, we're talking cases that weighed like 20 pounds on their own. You know, they've got cross braces everywhere. Like you grab onto these things and you're like, wow, there is no flex in this whatsoever. Whereas I've seen modern cases that you basically have to screw the motherboard in in order to give the case structural rigidity. You know what I mean? So I lament that sometimes. But the number of features that you can get in a budget case these days. Where's my, do I have a price, like a price list for this thing? On the Trello card. All right. There we go. Like how much did we pay for this puppy? $50. $50. Love it. And even the non-tempered glass version does have just at least, you know, like a see-through front panel. It looks kind of gamery. I'm not a huge fan of restricting airflow in the front of a case like this. But again, for this kind of build, it's not a major concern to me because you've got this, again, magnetically filtered. Absolutely love it. You've got this magnetically filtered top that is going to end up being used as an intake, even if that wasn't the original intent. Because we're going to end up with probably negative airflow or negative pressure inside this case. If I was building this for myself, what I would probably actually do, as crazy as it might sound, is, you know what? Let's just do it. I'm going to, I'm going to go out on a limb and I'm going to say, this is what I would do. So remember, I'm someone who's trying to hit a price point here. I don't have a bunch of money to spend on extra fans. It's shocking how expensive fans are when they're not included with your case or with your AI liquid cooler, if you want anything that's decent quality, right? So I would probably pull this out and I would throw it in the top of the case where I have a nice filtered intake and I'm going to put it towards the front so it's blowing air right down where the graphics card is going to be. So yeah, I'm going to go ahead, I'm going to put it right here, just reconfigure my included fan. Like, there's no real reason that it has to be in the back like that, other than that's the Intel ATX specification. Oh, fun fact. I was reading an article on Nontech the other day about a new power supply standard that apparently, I think it's Intel championing it, where basically we're going to do away with the 24 pin and we're going to do away with 3.3 volt and 5 volt all together coming out of the power supply. So the computer power supply is just going to handle AC, so that's your 120 volt to 240 volt AC to 12 volt DC and then splitting out 12 volt into 3.3 and 5 volt is going to be done on the motherboard level. I'm really interested to get my hands on it and I just got a shipping notification. So I actually am going to have both a motherboard and power supply for this new standard coming fairly soon and I'm really excited to check it out. The main play here is just simplifying the power supply and improving efficiency because DC to DC conversion is more efficient than AC to DC conversion. Now a lot of modern power supplies actually do that internally anyway, so they'll just do DC to DC conversion from 12 volt to 3.5 and 5 volt anyhow, but presumably there's some kind of benefit to moving that onto the motherboard and I look forward to talking to some of the engineers who are working on it to find out exactly what those reasons are and bringing that knowledge to y'all. Okay, so that's where I want to put my fan. This is powered by either 3 pin or 4 pin molex, so I'm just going to rip this molex connector off because molex connectors suck, what year is it? And we're going to plug the 3 pin into the motherboard when we get a chance. Let's go ahead and install our IO shield. Uh oh. Where's my IO shield? Oh there it is. And I never miss these when I get to work with motherboards that have them included, but it's also a small price to pay for spending often times 20, 30, 40, 50 dollars less on your motherboard. I've been for a long time an advocate of getting the motherboard that has the features you need as opposed to worrying about every theoretical mad gain you're going to get from some kind of more robust VRM solution. It's like yes, if you're a professional overclocker, you're going dry ice, liquid nitrogen or whatever the case may be, there's absolutely a benefit to your $400 motherboard or whatever. But if you're someone that's just going to basically say okay I'm going to enable multi core enhancement, I'm going to put some decent cooling on this thing, make sure I've got good airflow over it, I'm just not convinced that it's worth the A, the money, and B, the extra time. We've actually got a really fun video coming soon where Anthony and I went head to head in what we're calling the tech triathlon. What do you think? Fun competition? Oh yeah. Okay. So David helped us film that one and what it is is building a gaming PC, overclocking said gaming PC, and then actually gaming on said gaming PC. And I can tell you guys a fair bit about it now even though it's not something that we're ready to release yet. I just want to come close up here, I'll just show people where I do need to put some motherboard standoffs in. This one doesn't have them all pre-installed unfortunately, just actually it's kind of a weird setup that it's got because it's got the four ITX ones and then one MATX one over here but not this one and not anything over here so it's kind of bizarre. So it's a timed event and we go from building a computer, obviously as fast as we can, the faster you can do it the better, to overclocking the system and every percent of extra performance you get gives you a 2% time bonus overall and then we have to play the first level of Doom Eternal on I think it was Nightmare or Ultraviolence? On Ultraviolence. And neither Anthony nor I has played that game extensively and I can, okay one thing I will spoil a little bit is that's definitely going to show in my performance in the gaming segment but one of the things that I was sort of, that I thought would be an interesting takeaway from that video is how long, aside from the extra money that you spend on tunable components, how much do you have to pay yourself to sit around and tune them compared to if you had just gone okay you know what I'm going to find a side hustle and treat myself to something a little bit faster in the first place. It's just, it's been a very interesting calculation for me ever since, really ever since I joined the workforce because PC hardware choices for me in the past, when I was like a student, when I was a kid, were more about what's the cool new shiz that I want to play with temporarily because I would usually buy it second hand from someone with buyer's remorse, like well it's still current hardware, and then I would flip it right when the first rumblings, like the first rumors start of a new generation coming and then I would just go back to like you know a PCI graphics card for a few weeks while I wait for the new product to come out and then I would take the money that I got back, find someone with buyer's remorse and so on and so forth. So effectively I had cash flow tied up in my computer but I never really actually spent any money on it, if you understand what I mean. Anyway as I moved into adulthood I started seeing, like basically what I had was time but no money and then as I got a job and moved into adulthood I found that I had more money but I had no time because I was working all the time, like even when I was at home, when I was at NCIX, I put in a lot of hours off the clock just because that was the demand, honestly that was just the demands of the job between product management, the PC division and making videos for them as well. So all of a sudden I started to see more value in just like you know getting a good one in the first place and not having to tinker with it and it's just kind of a different mindset, like everyone is at their own stage or in their, so you could see it as kind of like a spectrum. Bart MC Burt over on floatplane says, yeah overclocking is fun until you see blue smoke, yeah exactly. I've actually ruined surprisingly little hardware from like performance tuning or overclocking or anything like that and like you watch me installing a motherboard like this and go, oh really? I find that hard to believe but yeah no surprisingly little. Let's just double check, make sure we've got all of our standoffs lined up, that's really important. Hopefully some of y'all watching this as a VOD are going to be following along so one of the things I find really useful when I'm putting screws into a motherboard is just do a quick sanity count, you know how many are there supposed to be? You got your one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, alright there's supposed to be eight, count out eight screws and then if you have any extras well then you know that you missed one. Not that it really terribly matters, you could put in like two screws in a motherboard and you'd still be alright, so I've counted out six here. Let's go ahead and do some super chatty chats, I'm going to switch to the overhead and give David's arm a break. Sent me a what sorry? Okay great, where would I find that? In teams, alright cool. Some of you are asking about the parts list, if you're watching on YouTube it will be at the link in the video description, unfortunately I don't know if I have that in the float plane one and Twitch doesn't have like a link in the video description so it's over on YouTube, we've got affiliate links for all the parts for this system. If you're trying to follow along with this build one thing to watch out for here guys is there's two types of screws included with the case, there's the coarsely threaded ones with the hex shaped heads, those are 632, you guys can't really see this unfortunately but there's not really much I can do about it and then there's the M3 or M4, I can never remember if it's M3 or M4, whatever the finely threaded ones, it just says motherboard SSD screw in the manual, thank you very much for not just telling me the threading standard, appreciate that, Cougar, I'm not mad though, I love Cougar, Cougar cases, Cougar cases, Cougar lover, wait, hold on, okay, motherboard's installed, wonderful, oh wait, I'm sorry David, I didn't warn David, oh hello there, let's go ahead and install a hard drive shall we, yeah it's been a while, I like installing hard drives, oh well I strongly suspect that this motherboard does actually include a couple SATA cables and that we just don't have them here because we probably used them and didn't put them back, yes, wait, two serial ATA data cables, optional, how interesting, so when you see optional in a manual what it typically means is that it's down to the regional office to decide whether or not to include it according to how they want to position the product and ultimately price it, so it is possible that that board does not include SATA cables but usually they do, so I'm just going to grab a couple from here and we'll pretend that you bought a motherboard that includes SATA cables. I remember I used to get really mad back in the day when there was no consensus on how to pronounce SATA, I was like no we should call it SATA, I just like really cared for some reason and I can no longer even remotely understand why I would have cared about that are these right angle, oh for crying out loud, well that's why I'm finding all straight ones except all right angle ones except this one, not that there's a right angle one, dang it do we not organize, what's the point of labeling the front of it right angle or straight if we're not going to actually stick with it, driving me crazy, alright so we're going to grab one of our hard drive cages, I'm going to go with the top one, I just kind of tend to prefer top cage over the bottom cage, just one of my things and oh that's curious, oh interesting okay so it looks like it does go sort of front of the drive towards the side panel that would have a window if we were using a windowed case and interface towards the back and then you just have to kind of, no wait really, oh okay I thought we were just going to have to kind of, here look, like kind of peeky boo the interface like down there but it looks like it does not go in that way, it's actually what I would consider to be backwards typically, how interesting, where are the little tabs, I'm actually having kind of a hard time figuring out what's going on here, oh interesting so okay there's spots that are lined up where it looks like you could screw in the drive like kind of going backwards which is weird but then there's little plastic tabs that you would use to put it in what I would consider to be sort of the normal way so there you go yes so the interface comes out the back there and we'll plug in the drive like that, perfect and beautiful thank you David, go ahead and run my SETA cable now, go ahead and route this puppy up here, oh actually yeah we can just go ahead and plug that in, man I remember the first SETA cables they didn't lock, now there's a couple different locking mechanisms they can have the little metal latch on them or they can just have a little like piece inside that kind of helps it grab onto the SETA connector but the original ones didn't have the border around them on the board they didn't have the lock on the cable itself and those things came out like crazy it was super annoying, I'm actually gonna go ahead and I'm gonna put this one in the front I'm gonna bring my second one in the back here if you can get a close look at what we got going on here, there we go and then I'm gonna bring that second one you're gonna be right here David right around there, there we go it's gonna give us a little peekaboo, alright this is a little awkward we accidentally grabbed an SSD before we started shooting that does not have a DRAM cache and for if I was just grabbing an SSD to put my game library on or something like that where I feel you know most of the accesses are gonna be infrequent and or sequential I wouldn't even care DRAM cache no DRAM cache whatever it's gonna be faster than a hard drive regardless but when it comes to pulling OS duty so we're actually installing our operating system on it that is not something that I would particularly recommend there are cases where a DRAM-less SSD can perform worse than a hard drive even though it's solid state now that situation is changing a little bit in fact we did a video about a Kyoksia SSD a little while ago little tiny thing it's called the BG4 M.2 SSD that has no DRAM cache but uses or has the capability anyway of using a clever system that allows it to borrow some memory from the system to use as a cache that's pretty cool that could help a lot but this don't got it so we need to make sure that we're going something that has a DRAM cache so that's why I I relabeled this instead of SU 650 we have a link down below to the SX850 it's only a few dollars more and I think it's definitely worth the extra here we're using the same threaded screws that we did for the motherboard so these are the finely threaded ones with the circular tops you've got this David you just wanted to focus on that beard didn't you so beautiful oh thank you you're totally unbiased right I know nothing about what you say David David's a beard he's a beard advocate he's a beard advocate not as much as James do you know how many unsolicited messages and like emails I've gotten from James about my beard why what does he say he'll say things like you know oh hey you've got a I okay I noticed you know the opera lips growing a bit a bit too low you gotta like trim it here or just he'll send me like a random comment from the from the YouTube comments that's like you should keep the beard he's like I second this mission like dang it Nicholas do you mind grabbing that screw sorry I think it's safe to say that between in-person comments emails and like like I am he has sent me at least half a dozen completely unsolicited bits of like beard advice or beard encouragement he is like he's like like a beard like and we even we even call it like like like a like a apostle you know like what's that what's the word I'm looking for like a beard missionary or like a you know yeah yeah yeah yeah spreading the beard gospel now I think I might have made a small mistake fortunately usually when a motherboard includes two SATA cables they include one right angle and one straight and it looks like we do need a right angle cable in order to plug in this drive yes sir I should check my phone oh oh good I mean hi I have not shown anything that I'm not supposed to be showing and if I did I explicitly said not to pay attention to it so how much is it going to cost me this time free shipping free shipping code is free ship all capitals is that like North America only no no no everywhere everywhere everywhere you know how much it costs to ship stuff to like Australia right sorry what's the code free ship okay that's thanks Nick code free ship lttstore.com free shipping orders over 50 it's really easy to put together a card over $50 right now because we actually brought back the elemental shirts and we're doing a four pack for 50 bucks so it's like basically with free shipping that's like $12 each for just like really nice soft comfy shirts that aren't our most popular design but they definitely look decent and even with the right angle connector this isn't going in this is starting to so starting to turn into what looks like it's going to end up being a longer stream why is this not clipping on I don't get it whoa whoa whoa there it is hey nice that is really tight in there can you see that so you can't get the straight cable in there and you can barely get the right angle in because of the way the drive sits and you can see there's a little bit of strain on the connector this way from it pushing on the metal this is something that could have been a little bit better designed about this case there's no clearance reason that I can find down here why these couldn't have just been you know like four millimeters five millimeters further out that way to make it so you can put in a straight connector let's go ahead and get the power supply in now though yes sir oh oh the elemental is not eligible for the shipping code oh that's hilarious okay well it goes to show you what I know right because that's already a loss leader that makes sense you don't stack your loss leaders see business got some got some Linus business tips up in here I mean I wasn't the one who thought of it apparently Nick was the one protecting us from completely losing our shirts pun intended hey I got the chuckle that's all I needed that's all the validation that I needed now you're part of the problem not part of the solution David really yeah you just feel like compelled to laugh if other people are laughing so I've never been funny to you then I didn't say that ouch dang all right well you know what that's fine I'll take it for power supply we're going with an EVGA Wow the most generic thing probably in their entire product lineup 400 watt power supply they apparently didn't even have the budget on this one to submit it for 80 plus certification the one positive thing I can say about it is that it's EVGA so it can't be that bad you know I remember getting an irate email I think it was from Corsair to be clear this was like ages ago like nobody working there now would have had anything to do with this but I remember saying that in one of my videos it's like yeah it's Corsair so it can't be that bad and they were like really and I'm like no I mean that in like I mean that in like a positive way I really do like what's wrong with that if anything to me that's like a that's a positive what do you think David is that a positive like it's a Linus Tech Tips video it can't be that bad yeah see that's like it's not a positive thing or like a bad thing you think it's positive all right you sure you're not just laughing along so I'm going with bottom mounted fan just because again like budget cases man I love them these days we've got a filtered intake on the bottom we've got raised feet so there's going to be enough room even on like a medium pile carpet I think you'll still get enough airflow to your power supply there so I always prefer to have the power supply draw fresh air from the outside when it can and then we're using this time the 632 screws give me a look at that screw well I just check and see who's blowing up my phone nothing important all right perfect it's a thing it's like when you're popular like me you know it's hard to live stream because people are interrupting you you know it's a funny thing because I never really in my life like even having millions of followers on social media I've never in my life thought of myself as popular because growing up I was the farthest thing from it and the thing about social media is that it's really easy for all the people paying attention to you to start to look like just kind of like a number like it especially with how your reach is so algorithmically driven these days rather than driven by the actual number of people that supposedly follow you on Twitter or are subscribed to you on YouTube like that number becomes so decoupled from the reality of how many people are actually watching that it just becomes like this number that you're just you know it's like a game you're playing almost you're just trying to like increase the number and it wasn't until I started live streaming more that I started thinking like oh no these are like people that are are actually like out there you know like a hundred thousand even is just this unfathomable number like how many people are watching this stream right now let me have a look there are 24,000 people watching this on YouTube alone there's probably another fifteen hundred or two thousand on Twitch I don't have the counter up but it's usually around there there's hundreds more on floatplane so to me it's like that is you know fifteen times the total population of my high school just like hanging out and like yeah let's like build a computer it's gonna be like good value or whatever and as long as I was just sort of like shouting into a void like just uploading videos comments seem so much more disembodied I can see when I first got into live streaming I was just doing Q&A's in my kitchen and the only reason I did it was because I was like okay to be we're putting the 24 pin connector here by the way guys it's keyed on the one side you just kind of pop it in right here if you can get close up of that the only real reason that I did it in the first place was because Linus Media Group as a company to be taken seriously I felt we were going to need to have some kind of live presence and so I wanted to make sure that when the time came that it was going to become apparent that live you know mattered all of a sudden we weren't starting from zero so I was like okay we need to have some kind of live offering it was the only reason I really did it now I do it as much for fun as anything else like I was game streaming last night just because like yeah sure why not whatever who cares I can't do that kind of stuff on the LTT YouTube channel because it'll damage it algorithmically but on Twitch and floatplane I actually live streamed reasonably regularly up here we're doing our four plus four pin connector so these separate in case you got a four pin motherboard those are pretty uncommon these days but sometimes you see a supplementary four pin so an eight plus a four not here we just need an eight pin we're going to go ahead and plug that into the top corner I always like running my cable management up the back of the motherboard tray for this puppy you can actually see how I've got the 24 pin and the eight pin routed now even though again this is like a pretty value oriented case you've got these little loops built in here and here oh these are interesting ones they're actually like a three-way loop oh here here you can get a good look at this one so instead of just one way they've got kind of three prongs so you can put a zip tie through it three different ways depending on how you've got the cable running I really like that that's a that's a good idea cougar I have not I've not seen that before cool now we've just got a couple more cables to run I'm a little worried thankfully it looks like EVGA has gone for these relatively short low profile SATA connectors particularly the earlier ones used to be quite a bit longer and I was a little bit worried we weren't going to be able to plug into that SSD but I think it's going to be okay so we're going to run this up through that same cable management hole for the data cable and I'm going to get this turned around so you can get a better look we're going to pop that into the back of our drive can you see that all right good because I sure can't I'm at a bit of a weird angle here so it's keyed so it only goes in one way just look carefully at it you shouldn't have any problems pop that on there and we should be good to go hopefully does that go into the thing did we make it hmm I don't know oh yeah it's in we got it we did it I don't know what happened to the screws that were screwed into the front of this fortunately there's a couple there so I can match those up let's go ahead and pop that on there I am going to confess I do not fully understand how this mounting mechanism works oh no I get it now so there's two little nubbins on the bottom here and then those nubbins go into these holes which keeps these back ones from slipping out I get it now this seems over engineered it's all I'll say about them okay where'd those screws go I got to find exactly the right ones I could use other ones because they're threaded the same but my OCD will not allow that so I need to find exactly the right ones that popped out before Darren Chen asks what is this PC for this is for anyone out there at home who wants to put together a decent little gaming box for 500 bucks and change to follow along at home have some fun building the computer have some fun playing vidya games when they're done that's who it's for that is a weird mount I don't like it I've decided I don't like this SSD mount I think it's I think it's over over complicated alright now the last power connector that we need to do for our drives is this puppy right here I'm gonna go ahead and plug SATA power into the back of the hard drive can you see that all right so once again it's keyed it only goes in one way and this guy oh that's a whoo that's an unfortunate meatball okay one small design I don't know if I want to call it a flaw but I'll definitely call it a thing to consider is that the front of this case is clear which means that if you just jam your extra cables into the front of the case you can't really you can't really see it because of the reflections too well but like they're there they're there they're cabling yeah so I'm gonna have to give a little bit more thought to how I want to hide these cables that I'm not using I think if I jam them under the hard drive cage I should be in better shape ah yes lttstore.com code free ship we're doing free worldwide shipping right now apparently just during the stream that's really fortunate because when Nick runs these promos it helps him hit his his revenue KPIs but it does not help us make money which is what I mostly care about from a company standpoint and you should too why are you laughing David you're laughing along again if we don't make money how do I pay people okay if Nick is giving away all the company money you know on shirts and water bottles how will Nicholas get his paycheck because let's face it we'd keep David just kidding Nicholas you're doing you're doing great you're doing great I mean at this point that Nicholas costs us less than the other Nick if he's giving away all the company money you know on free shipping promos no it's all good it's all good I'm fairly sure that Nick has some kind of calculation rule that he follows to make it like sort of make sense ish I kind of got to talk to him about that though all right so a little bit of a little bit of cable management here I'm gonna run my three pin fan connector somewhere let's see let me give this a little bit of thought oh bloody hell got a bent pin on the motherboard if the last stream is anything to go by it's probably my fault so I'm not gonna blame ass rock oh wow there's okay that's one thing we're compromising on this lower end board there's not a ton of fan connectors oh I didn't see these ones okay yeah we good oh we good okay that's awesome so my fan connector is gonna come up right here get some of that nice fine cable management and plug that right there all right boom not too shabby I ran my graphics card out through the same one here because the graphics card is eventually gonna be right there and it's gonna not have any strain on it other things that I did just now I undid the management straps on the front I O connectors so we're gonna go ahead and run those now we've got front USB 2 and audio these are kind of joined together but that's okay you can just separate them as much as you need I'm gonna run that one under going under that's how we're folding things down actually we're gonna go all the way to this far corner here with this one oh yeah and we're gonna regret it immediately hold on give me a sec we are not gonna regret anything we have no regrets we're living that carpe diem lifestyle okay so USB has got to reach around here all that is really tight okay I don't know how well you're gonna be able to see this but because of that drive mount that again I can't stress enough I would have preferred to have a little bit more towards the panel here that is a really tight fit to get that front panel connector in there but I got it and then don't miss the PC building old triathlon guys especially if you're someone like me with small hands and you'd like to find you know just something anything that we can point at and say hey yeah you know we are we have an evolutionary advantage for this fitting little tiny cables into tight spaces that's uh hey that's our specialty yeah I'll have a look at super chats in a bit here we're gonna run our front USB 3 up right here and we've got one of those connectors right here that's one thing that is missing on a budget board like this is like a type C front panel connector but you also only really find that on the more expensive cases anyway and I don't know about you guys but I don't actually have a lot of stuff that I would plug into the front of a computer with type C do you yeah it's nice to charge your phone faster okay I could see that that's what wireless charging is for faster yeah but also I mean if you want to charge your phone faster couldn't you just have like a wall wart by your desk that's like cable management yeah cable management yeah yeah external drives you have type C external drives okay fair enough but you're a media professional so that's like something to bear in mind I think for a lot of people probably not as much okay so fine David you can go pay the extra for a motherboard with a type C connector you go get a B550 board okay you go get a fancy case for everyone else there's type A still oh Nick would like me to remind people that the free shipping code is orders of $50 and more so you actually you can't just buy like one thing of cable ties and ship it to like Slovakia and and then have it the free shipping be free that would actually be like a net like 40 plus dollar loss or whatever but like I cannot absolutely cannot do that let me have a look here so power LED is the top one okay this is another thing this is my this is my tiny hand superpower watch how quickly I can plug in front panel connectors reset power your sarcasm is deserved but not appreciated what just the power button just power button you didn't even plug the other ones in no I what what because otherwise the lights won't come on lights it's like if you're on oh David oh I hate it have you seen my sausage hands you think I can get inside there I hate it so much after all that talk about oh wow this is really not done after all my talk about putting the right screws in here I actually put in the wrong ones there are some self tappers that are supposed to be in there I accidentally just put in hard drive screws and now I've probably like completely destroyed the threads from the self toppers from last time oh yeah well whatever I'm still putting them back in dang it and people often ask hey Linus why don't you guys start like a PC building company and then we could just buy systems made by you know you guys do you really want one I mean this is okay it's decent but just you know I say I say leave PC building to the professionals you know go go go to the origin PC or Puget or you know whatever yeah uh feel says uh free ship discount code isn't valid for the items in your cart yes it's not valid for the elemental bundle so you might have to get a water bottle or a stealth hoodie or whatever the case may be graphics here we are we went Zotac we went with a 1650 super it's a great budget card for the money just requires a six pin connector it's super small so if you don't have a large case like this one I guess yeah calling this a large case is sort of an overstatement but it is a it is a mATX case but if you have even like an ITX case or like a super compact one you can fit this thing in no problem it's pretty solid cooler for for an entry entry level you know what I would consider to be like entry level but still performance like still gaming all right time to plug our graphics card into the motherboard so I'm just gonna line up our top piece of express oh oh I did the thing I accidentally popped out one that I don't need and now it's just gonna be like a gaping hole in the back of the computer that's a shame is that uh is that like trombone sound like copyright like are you allowed to do that you're allowed to do that okay I don't know you never well thanks David I'm sure glad David the authority on like what series of tones you're allowed to to play and which ones you're not just as long as you don't make that sound and then say let's get ready to blank okay are you allowed to say the words as long as you don't say it in like his trademark tone of voice I actually don't know how it works and if I was smart I would trademark like dropping stuff and then yeah and then people could like like even if they do it accidentally I could be like hey let's prove it was accidental because you can't because people don't believe me when I say it's accidental so this is one of those funny ones apparently it is enough of a cost savings to take this piece here bend it out and then create a separate piece with one two three four oh man I'm not actually a hundred percent sure how they do this one this must be stamped for this one right here rather than dense so one two three four bends and then have someone screw it in later it's like fascinating it's been actually a long time since I've sat down with a case product manager and been like hey you know why do you guys do it this way versus that way so compared to having a more complex back panel it's apparently cheaper to do it this way you see it on a lot of the budget cases alright let's go ahead and plug in our six pin connector to the back of the graphics card here we've got a six plus two and then a dedicated six pin this kind of comes down aesthetically to what you prefer you know if you like to have the six pin plugged in here and then you like to cable manage the extra one sort of back here like that I generally prefer it that way versus if you want to have the other connector just kind of hang in here and plug in the the end one yeah I definitely like it this way better because then you can take a cable tie like this one lttstore.com and just pop that on there and it kind of kind of hides a little bit I think makes it not look as bad available in orange and white oh lttstore.com we didn't intend to create you as a meme it just sort of happened okay oh you know what I'm actually gonna grab on to the 24 pin with this we'll just kind of tighten those up against each other I'm a firm believer that like a tightly wrapped anything looks better than like nothing so you know hey there that's not bad right what do you think David that's okay can I get that's fair that's fair I deserve it I deserve it all right let's go ahead and take advantage of these cool cable tie loops that I pointed out before I would you know what would be really cool I don't know how on earth we would coordinate this but like can you imagine doing a live stream like this except we pre-announce ahead of time what the components are going to be so that people can buy them ahead of time and like we can actually all build the computer together how many people need to build the computer at one time though so that is the problem because we actually did this once but in person so NCIX I think we did it twice not once we called it the PC building workshop or something like that and if you if you happen to be building a computer like at this time and you happen to be available on this day there was like it was either a small additional cost or it was you pay the assembly fee but we don't assemble it but you can attend this workshop where I would sit and like build a computer at the front of the room like a class and like show everyone and then go around and like help them with the weird idiosyncrasies of whatever hardware they had it was a ton of fun it was like actually a total blast it's kind of like a computer building party except I got paid to be there but like you said it's a lot of stars to align like you know everyone happens to need a computer and happens to be available on this day and happens to like want to do this even let's go ahead and pop the panel on not both panels that's bad Jeebies we're just going to do the one panel I should probably also pay a little bit of attention to chat what are the specs for this build we've got them linked in the video description on YouTube but it's a Ryzen 3 3100 we've got I believe it's 8 gigs of RAM 3200 mhz yeah 8 gigs of RAM we've got a 1650 super as rock matx board decent little board pretty inexpensive but not too many compromises it's not one of those ones where you're like oh yeah you know you've got two RAM slots on great you know no upgrade ability or whatever the case may be this is a cougar what is this thing mg 120 case we've got an evga they don't even have like a lineup for it as far as I can tell like it's not B or G it's just EVGA 400 watt okay part number 100-N1-0400-L1 that's it it's as close to a generic power supply as EVGA is ever likely to make what else did we throw in here we've got an SSD that I creatively renamed so the link doesn't match the actual one that we put in but I don't recommend the one that we actually put in so we put in a link for one that's a little bit more sensible we threw in a 1 terabyte hard drive just in case you've got a big game library you want to install well just in case you've got a modest game library these days and you want to install you know five or six games yeah isn't cod like over 200 gigs 170 there you go so you could install the latest cod and then like what we do maternal isn't doom eternal over 100 gigs I think it might be so you can install like latest cod doom eternal and then like battlefield yeah that's another really big one red dead redemption is like 150 gigs isn't it yeah so you could install like half a dozen triple-a titles you know isn't that just not ridiculous I mean I love it give me give me that visual fidelity for sure but I mean you know I still remember back when it felt crazy that a game came on five CDs far cry one baby I still have my far cry one CDs all right let's go ahead and fire this puppy up so what do you think first time post oh wow not too shabby it's almost like I've done this before well yeah but I've done this before enough times to know that it actually is not not a guarantee that it's gonna post the first time all right so all we're really gonna alter in here is loading our XMP profile DDR4 3200 increasing our voltage a little bit tightening up the timings a little bit and hopefully that works one thing to note guys is with these before 50 boards if you're using a third gen Ryzen there is a solid chance that because of limitations to how much data they can actually store on the board itself there's a strong possibility that you'll have to put a first or second gen Ryzen chip in flash the bios for third gen compatibility and then put your third gen chip in now we obviously did that preparation ahead of time but you can't take that for granted and we made it to the desktop all right so what shall we do first just like a good old Cinebench r20 make sure everything's working what do you think oh we need a network connection oh boy hold on a second yeah sure I will take that do you remember which one is hooked up I don't think both of them are well we'll find out soon enough in the meantime we can start our Cinebench run nice it is still so impressive to me how much CPU you can get for like a hundred over dollars like remember when we were stuck with high-end quad cores do you remember that because I remember that yeah it wasn't it weren't actually even that long ago unfortunately okay go ahead and grab that for a second all right awesome whoops so yeah okay 2300 points yeah that's not a ton but if you look at what it's comparable to like we're right up there as we said in our review we're right up there with a 7700k which not that long ago was considered you know overclockable enthusiast gaming processor so personally I'm pretty happy with the improvement all right so here in a fairly demanding scenario we're looking anywhere from 75 to 85 fps this is on high and I remember when you could only turn on like soft shadows and stuff like this on super super high-end hardware where your graphics card alone cost 500 plus dollars meanwhile we got this like tiny pinner little thing over here spitting out 60 plus fps in a game looking like this it's amazing we managed over 60 fps in a couple year old but still triple-a title for 500 ish US dollars remember guys I know it's over 500 but you don't strictly speaking need the hard drive unless you want to play like very modern very triple-a games with gigantic installers thanks for watching and oh yes of course the video is also brought to you by our sponsor private internet access is a tool that masks your IP address and encrypts traffic to and from your devices combined with private browsing tools and safe browsing best practices it can even make savvy websites think that you are somewhere else PIA offers reliable service with over 3,000 servers in 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