 🎵 Well guys, the lab coat's on, which means it's time for another ultimate build guide. This time, it's gonna be the ultimate video editing workstation. So we're gonna be walking you through the mechanics of putting this system together, but more importantly, we're going to be talking about the rationale behind each of the parts we chose, as well as giving a couple of other options, because for professional use, there are often at least a half a dozen options that would all be valid for any given part, depending on your particular needs. Like most rigs, a professional video editing machine starts at the CPU. Now our CPU choice is not the only choice. We went with the 4930K on the LGA 2011 platform, and we did this for a number of reasons. We found the 4930K to be a good sweet spot. It's the lowest end 6-core processor that's available from the Core i7 family. We could step down to a 4820K, but then we'd be losing a couple of cores, even though it is less expensive, or we could step up to a 4960X Extreme Edition, but we wouldn't be getting a lot more performance, and we'd be paying quite a bit more for it. Xeons are also options, but from a price-to-performance standpoint, we didn't find that for our rig, bearing in mind that Adobe can be easily offloaded without even buying additional licenses to a render farm, we didn't find we needed even more processing cores or more than 64 gigs of RAM, which would be another benefit of a Xeon processor, support for ECC memory. Now benefit number two, beyond having more cores of choosing the LGA 2011 platform, is more PCI Express lanes. These are PCIe 3.0 lanes, and it has about double the lane support of the consumer-grade platform, meaning that as you add in bandwidth-hungry expansion cards, like accelerator cards and RAID cards and NIC cards and graphics cards and anything that you want, compute cards, whatever kind of crazy stuff you might want to put on here, you need to make sure that bandwidth's available, and only a professional-grade platform will have that. Benefit number three is more RAM support. Even using consumer-grade modules, such as these Corsair Dominator Platinums, these are clocked at 2133 megahertz, we can get up to 64 gigs of RAM in this board, which is more than we need for our application, although it'll be up to you guys to decide whether you need more than that, but you might end up with something like a dual socket board with even more memory slots or high-density ECC modules. Now let's talk a little bit more about the memory. We went with DDR3 2133 modules, so remember, we did a showcase a little while ago where we demonstrated that anything around 1333 or higher doesn't benefit gaming applications, however, with pro applications where you're swapping massive amounts of data in and out of the memory, that can be a bit of a different scenario. With that said, you still want to find a sweet spot, and you don't necessarily want to spring for DDR3 3000 megahertz or anything like that, so we found 2133 was a good balance. Now why did we go with this particular kit? And really, a big part of the answer is not all memory kits are available in eight-way configurations. So first of all, you have to be able to get a quad-channel kit of whatever memory it is. There's a chance that two dual-channel kits will work together in quad-channel, but if you want maximum compatibility, buying quad-channel kits is the way to go. Remember, LGA 2011 not only supports more memory, but also about double the theoretical bandwidth of LGA 1150. So we had to find a quad-channel kit, then we wanted to find a quad-channel kit that actually has all eight modules in one kit all validated together, because this, again, improves compatibility with your motherboard and CPU, and makes it less likely that you're going to run into any issues down the road. You want a 6-core processor and 64 gigs of RAM? You're going to need a board that supports it. This is the P9X79E WS from ASUS, and don't let the WS fool you. It's not just suitable for workstation use, guys, so if you want to overclock or game on this board, yeah, that'll be just fine, don't worry. But what makes it WS? Well, number one is there's the pure quality of the components. It is an extremely well-built board. It is designed to be used in a professional environment, and yes, those components do cost more and they do last longer. Next up is the expansion. So check this out, seven PCI Express 16x physical slots. Three of them are wired for 8x, four of them are wired for PCIe 16x 3.0. That's supported by that Ivy Bridge-E processor. Wow, lots of expansion. You've also got eight DDR3 module slots, so that'll support up to 64 gigs of regular non-ECC memory with a normal core series processor, or you can support even more if you step up to a Xeon processor, which will cost you a little bit more, and then you'll spend a little bit more on the memory as well, to get even more rock-solid stability and even better performance. Now, it's got other workstation-oriented features as well, such as the dual Intel NICs at the back that increases throughput and decreases CPU utilization when you're working off of network resources, but that is not actually where it really shows its value. Compatibility is where this board shows its value. You could spend half as much, less than half as much, on a motherboard that would give you the same performance. Yes, I'm going to let that sink in for a moment. Less than half as much. So why doesn't everyone just do that? Because when you're buying a professional-grade product, you expect zero downtime. When you buy a new Red Rocket Accelerator card and throw it into your board, you expect it to work. You don't expect to find out that there's a compatibility issue, and you've got to pull that motherboard, eBay it, flip it somehow, buy a new one and replace it. You can't afford that. If you want something that you know is going to work, this is it, friends. WS Series boards are validated to a much higher standard with aftermarket parts than other boards, whether it is the aforementioned Red Rocket card, RAID cards, multi-channel NICs, or whatever else you can fill up these PCI Express slots, Xeon PHYs, Quadros, Teslas, it's all validated in this board. So if you can't afford the downtime, and you're willing to pay an extra premium for that, and you just want what I generally consider to be the best single-socket board on the market, P9X79E WS, my friends. We went with a pro-grade product for the motherboard, but for the power supply, we're going with a bit more of a gaming-branded product. Why would that be? Well, for one thing, the Corsair AXI Series comes with a seven-year warranty, so if you had any doubts as to how well-built they are, there's that. You can also check out the reviews on johnnyguru.com. These are extremely well-built power supplies, right up there with a workstation-grade power supply, and they come with a seven-year warranty. And they come with Corsair Link, which allows you to monitor its usage, as well as its efficiency, as well as your voltage levels, and all that crazy stuff. So we kind of went, well, what's the real difference between this and a workstation power supply? Well, there's the brand name on the front, which isn't terribly important to us, and there's the fact that it doesn't look like an industrial piece of equipment and sound like an industrial piece of equipment. It's very, very quiet to go along with that 80-plus platinum efficiency. So there doesn't appear to be a downside. We went with the AX860i. Now, there's a million different options in terms of storage. There really are. Literally a million. But we're going to walk you through what we went with. SSD boot drive, I still feel, is the most important thing to have in any machine. Gaming, workstation, doesn't really matter. And for us, we went with the Intel 530 Series 240-gig drive. It's got a five-year warranty, so they're standing behind it in terms of the reliability, the durability of the flash. You could spend a lot more and get something like a 3500 Series drive. That would be an option. But because we're not going to be using this drive for any of the real work, we're not using it as a scratch disk, we're not using it to actually store any HD footage on it. We're just basically reading off of it. We did not feel it was necessary to go with a pro-grade component in this case. When working with HD video files or even ultra HD video files, you will need a ton of space. We wanted to try and keep our storage internal to make this workstation as portable as possible without tying us down to an external storage array. So we went with four WD Black 4TB drives. We're going to be running them in RAID 10. We're going to be running them off the onboard RAID. These are not necessarily the only options available to you. Adding in a high-end RAID card so that you can run something like RAID 5 very quickly or some kind of an un-RAID or some kind of a RAID 6, these are definitely options. But by the time you buy a RAID card that's capable of running those types of RAID fast enough for professional usage, you're probably looking at adding another $500 to $1,000 to the cost of the build. So I wanted to present that option, but that's not something that we went with. RAID 10 allows us to take our four 4TB drives and get a total of eight terabytes of fast, safe storage. We get the benefits of RAID 0, so that is double the sequential throughput, and we get the benefits of RAID 1, which means that we can have any one of the drives in the system fail and up to two of the drives in the system fail before any data loss is incurred. This is so important for professional work. Whether you're running a RAID card, whether you're running RAID off of your onboard, or whether you're running some kind of an external enclosure, whether that's network or USB 3 or eSATA or whatever the case may be, redundancy is key. It is not a substitute for backing up, preferably off-site, but redundancy will save you from a hardware failure. Choosing a graphics card for a professional rig is a very personal choice, and I just want you guys to maybe be able to make a better educated one, even if I can't tell you exactly what's right for you. Now, graphics cards in general have always had the hardware oomph to be great for applications like video editing, but the software is still catching up. So, prior to Adobe CS5, for example, if you're a Premiere editor, anyone telling you you needed a great workstation graphics card for better video editing performance was probably trying to sell you a great workstation graphics card that ultimately wasn't going to be doing a whole lot for you in terms of performance anyway. With CS5, that all changed. So we're able to leverage that highly parallelized processor, the onboard memory, the fast interconnects to the rest of the system for wholesale changes to individual pixels. Imagine a graphics card being good for that, such as color correction, scaling, or compositing. So that was with CS5. Now, we're actually continuing to improve. So, for example, in After Effects, in CS6, the Optix ray tracing engine was added. That's GPU accelerated as well, so that instead of fake, kludgy 3D effects in After Effects, now editors can work in real 3D with real depth values. Now, on the Nvidia side alone, you've actually got options in terms of you've got two whole different lines of graphics cards to choose from. So there's Quadros, which I was waving around before, the workstation grade cards, and then there's also the consumer grade GeForce cards. Now, what GeForce cards do is they offer a great price to performance ratio if you're looking for sheer CUDA cores and CUDA performance. If the application that you're running doesn't call for a specifically validated GPU or there's no easy hack, GeForce cards offer great bang for the buck. Now, with that said, they don't undergo the same degree of validation because there's a whole lot of variety in the implementations from different manufacturers. So that means that you've got to make a pretty careful choice for which one you're gonna want to go with. The ASUS DirectCU2 GTX 780 that we've got for our rig is an overbuilt card. It's overclocked, but, you know, not crazy like it's gonna die immediately or anything like that. And it has a fantastic cooler on it, so we'd expect it to have a very long life cycle, even though it's not rated for 24-7 operation the same way that something like a Quadro is. With Quadro cards, on the other hand, performance takes a definite backseat to validation and reliability, the things that workstation users value the most. These cards are all built by NVIDIA with exactly the same components every time, allowing large corporations to validate particular workloads and particular machines with this particular card and know that it's going to be available in exactly that configuration over a long period of time. This is important in a corporate environment, but not necessarily something that individual users value. Now, that goes for software makers as well. This is less of an issue with Adobe software, where they actually do validate some GeForce chips and configurations in addition to Quadro configurations, but Avid, for example, only certifies workstation-grade cards for their Avid software. Now, with that said, there are hacks, there are text file hacks, for both Adobe applications and for Avid that allow you to, you know, clutch in GeForce cards and allow them to be recognized as validated cards, but this is a very homebrew way of approaching it, and not everyone's comfortable with that. Now, for the multi-talented video editor, who also does some 3D rendering work as well, you'll probably just plain old need a Quadro card. Professional 3D rendering applications, such as 3ds Max and Maya, are often only going to work with GPU acceleration with Quadro cards. This is because of the way that the Quadro driver is architected to specifically enable performance profiles and compatibility settings, even down to if that particular rendering application is the active window on the screen, it's making optimizations in the background for the utmost compatibility, and the GeForce drivers just aren't tuned to operate that way. They're going for balls to the walls performance, rather than that stability and validation that Quadro brings to the table. So basically, it comes down to choices. If you're a tinkerer and you're willing to spend the time, you know, hacking things a little bit, and you don't mind if a card isn't validated for 24-7 operation, and if it dies, you kind of go to yourself, well, I spent half as much on this card as I would have on the workstation one, I'll just buy another one, and it'll probably be higher performance by that time anyway. If you're one of those kinds of folks, GeForce can be a great option. If you're building workstations that just need to work and you don't want to ever touch them again, then maybe there's a value to you for the additional stability that something like a Quadro brings to the table. I mean, another example is if you're building a system for someone else, where frankly, it's not your money anyway, and you want them to have a great experience with your system, maybe you just go for the hassle-free solution that doesn't have the hack that you implemented and validated by a driver update that comes down through GeForce experience, and you're kind of sitting there going, well, I wouldn't be dealing with that if it was a Quadro, then you might find that to be a better option as well. Now, with that said, you can't just swap out Quadros for GeForce's and get all of the same functionality. Some of it is just plain hardware. So if you're doing any kind of stereo 3D video editing, and you want to use a pro-grade 3D solution that runs off of a DIN connector, Quadro is going to be the way to go. If you wanted to take advantage of, ah, yes, deep color, so 10-bit panels, more on this PA279Q in a moment, for any kind of serious color work during your video editing process, you are going to need a Quadro because that's the only thing that is going to support the 10-bit output that that monitor can then interpret. And finally, they come in form factors that GeForce cards just don't come in. This Quadro K4000 is a single slot card, giving you a ton of flexibility in systems where you might also have, you know, a Red Rocket Accelerator and all those other things where you can run out of expansion cards pretty quickly. And I mean, for us, it's great because we were able to put a two-slot GeForce card in, sneak a single slot Quadro card in, and still have a lot of expansion for other things as well. So that's yet another advantage of Quadro. For peripherals, particularly for keyboards and mice, we've moved almost completely towards gaming peripherals, not because gaming peripherals are, you know, more professional looking. In fact, they're not, but because the functionality and the build quality of them tends to be designed for more wear and tear than your typical mouse or keyboard. So this right here, my friends, is the G602, and this gets my recommendation. It lasts for weeks in performance mode, and much longer than that in its endurance mode. It has very good precision, and it has a ton of fully programmable buttons, which can be great, not just for gaming and binding to your voice chat application or whatever else, but also for programming in things like keyboard shortcuts. It's comfortable, it's wireless, it's hard to go wrong. For our keyboard, same thing. We've started moving towards gaming keyboards because features like lighting up in the dark, having programmable keys on the sides, having built-in media controls and a volume wheel. Well, these are useful for professionals as well as for gamers. So the G710 Plus gets my vote. It has excellent software. It comes with Cherry MX Brown key switches with O-rings, meaning that it's not that loud, so you're not going to be bugging your neighbor again, the loud system thing. And it's Logitech, so it's extremely well built, and if anything goes wrong with it, you will definitely get a replacement. It's also very well priced for a mechanical keyboard with those features. Now, when it comes to audio, that's where the gaming thing goes completely out the window. Most of our guys here use IEM, so something like Sennheiser's IE8s would be an excellent option, although any kind of closed monitoring or reference sounding headphones from the likes of AKG, Beyerdynamic, Sennheiser or Denon would be great choices. Asus originally told us they were going to send us a new PB 27-inch monitor for this showcase, and I kind of went, okay, yeah, I can dig it. PB is a good value option if you want great monitors that are not factory pre-calibrated, like the PA series, the ProArt series is, and if you want a little bit more value. That's not what they sent. They ended up sending a PA279Q, which is one that I can wholeheartedly recommend for use with this video editing rig or pretty much any video editing rig. Yeah, it's expensive. If you look at it from a gamer's perspective, you go, oh, ProArt monitors, those are really expensive. But when you look at it from a professional user's perspective and you consider the features you're getting, you compare it to something like an HP DreamColor and it starts to look a lot more attractive. This right here is a 27-inch, 2560 by 1440 monitor. It has a 10-bit AH IPS panel. So for those of you who understand what that means, great. For those of you who don't, that means a much, much tighter level of granularity in the colors that it can display. So on your monitor, when you see blocking or bending between similar colors, that will not be present on this monitor as long as you are using a supported graphics card. So in our case, a Quadro with a supported driver, Quadro, and a supported application such as Adobe Premiere. Now you are taking full advantage of deep color. It also has a 14-bit lookup table, so it can actually understand even more than it can actually display to you, giving it an even better ability to approximate those colors. And it's got more features as well. So it's a professional monitor, meaning that the on-screen display has an updated navigation menu with a little four-way switch. It's highly ergonomic. So you've got your height adjust, your tilt, your swivel, your pivot, all that stuff that you could possibly want. It comes pre-calibrated like all PA monitors, and this time ASUS is going for gold because they're promising a Delta E of less than two. And they actually ship a little certificate inside the box that shows you how your individual monitor tested. It supports six-axis individual color adjustments. So that's on RGB, cyan, magenta, and yellow. So you can adjust individual colors without affecting the other ones. It has uniformity compensation, which is one of the big issues with even many pro-grade monitors. And that is to say that the backlight isn't always uniform. So as much as the color reproduction might be perfect, you might still have issues with this corner being a little bit different looking than this corner, and you want it to be as uniform as possible. It comes with compensation for that. Of course, with, you know, a 10-bit panel and all of these fancy features, it has 99% Adobe RGB color support and 100% sRGB color space support and 120% NTSC color space support. And I think I've probably gushed about it enough, but guys, this is a fantastic choice if you're looking for a great monitor for color work and you don't necessarily want to spend several thousand dollars on it. Choosing a case for this was actually a bit of a challenge because what's a professional case? I mean, you don't want to go and spend $300 on a case for a video editing rig unless there's some kind of a compelling reason. Like you need support for 12 hard drives or something like that. You want something that's reasonably portable if you ever had to move it around or, you know, take it somewhere else in order to work on it. I mean, we do that from time to time when we go to shows, for example. You don't want it to be like, you know, covered in like flames and plastic or all that, unless you don't mind people seeing that when they come into your office for a meeting or whatever else. So we ended up with the Silverstone TJ04E. It's clean looking, metal construction. It has great features. It's around $150, which is reasonable, although it's certainly not inexpensive. And it's easy to build in. I like this case. I've been using it for years, actually, back to the old TJ04 model. I don't think Silverstone gets enough attention for how high quality their products are and how reasonably priced they are, especially when you consider how much better built they are than some of the other really, really popular options that are out there. Now, if I didn't want to spend $150 and I didn't mind stepping down to something that has a little bit more of a plastic construction, the Fractal Design Define R4 is a great option. One of the reasons we didn't go with the Define R4 for this build guide is that we've already done a build guide in the Define R4. So I didn't really see much of a value to doing another build guide in the Define R4. The first step, as always, is to prepare yourself at an anti-static workstation, not working on a carpet, preferably using an anti-static strap, whether it's on your wrist or like I prefer to wear it on my ankle. You're also going to need a Phillips head screwdriver, which should be pretty much all we need in terms of tools for this particular build. I always start with building the system outside of the box as much as possible. And by box, I of course mean the case, not the box, but I'm not going to kill the shot just for that. So I've got the motherboard, the CPU, the CPU cooler. On previous build guides, when we've used liquid cooling, installing the CPU cooler prior to putting the board into the case has not been an option. But this time we're going to do that. And if UPS would hurry up and bring the RAM to us, I would have the RAM here as well. Intel uses simple eco-friendly packaging for their 2011 processors. It does not come with a heat sink. So it's a good thing we have an aftermarket heat sink to use. They expect professional and enthusiast users to have their own cooling solution. We open up the plastic clamshell and find the little golden triangle on the corner of the CPU. That's important. So we're going to put it down on our motherboard oriented correctly relative to the little triangle on the corner of the socket itself. Then with LGA 2011, there are two retention arms. First, we lift the one with the hook at the end. Then we lift the one with the kink in the middle and the straight end. Once that's done, we can lift up the hold down plate, position the CPU carefully in the socket without putting any force on it while we're putting it down. If you bend those pins, you will likely be SOL guys because no motherboard manufacturer will warranty physical damage and they're extremely difficult to repair. Now we lower the hold down plate, lower the kinked arm and lower the hooked arm. Then pull off the plastic plate and the CPU is installed. If you follow Noctua's instructions carefully, mounting the NH-U14S isn't going to be too complicated. You'll need all the hardware from inside the Intel mounting hardware box other than the back plate for LGA 2011 that's not needed. And then you'll need some stuff from the accessories box. So it does come with a screwdriver, which is pretty handy. You'll also need the extra fan clips, the extra fan grommets, as well as the thermal compound. The only thing we're not going to use from inside here is the case badge, which is totally optional, and the low noise adapter because this motherboard includes excellent software fan control. Now that we've got everything together, it's pretty straightforward. Get the four little pieces with threads on either side and the thicker thread goes into the four holes around the LGA 2011 socket. Next up, take the two mounting bars and position them on either side just like this. You've got four more nuts that then go over top. I recommend using a screwdriver to tighten these ones into place because this is what's giving you the security and firmness for that large heatsink. Next up is applying thermal compound. I recommend the line method on LGA 2011 processors. Use a little bit more than you'd use on a smaller LGA 1150 processor. Now you have to pull the original fan, which comes pre-mounted to your heatsink, off because otherwise you won't actually be able to mount it. Then position it centered on top of the CPU so that both of the pre-installed tensioned screws are positioned over top of the threads that are on that mounting plate. Now, alternating sides, make sure first that the threads catch, then switch back and forth until they stop and you can't screw them in any further. Put the original fan back on. Then for your secondary fan, which is totally optional and is only if you buy an additional fan, what you're going to want to do is take the thicker spacers that are included in the box with your heatsink, swap off the four spacers that are on the side that is pulling air into the fan, so you can tell from the label of the fan, guys. So here you go, the label should be facing away from the CPU heatsink on that other side. Then swap on the thicker spacers that are included. It's a little bit tricky. You've got to kind of pull the little nubs through the corners, but this will generate a little bit less turbulence when the air is passing first from the push fan through the heatsink and then is being drawn away by the pull position fan. When you're done, it should look a little something like this. Nice, massive heatsink, lots of cooling fans, plenty of space for 64 gigs of RAM. Now, something you might have noticed about this board is in order to achieve its massive seven PCI Express slots, there wasn't a lot of clearance between the RAM slots and the PCIe slots. So ASUS has done the only natural thing, which is to remove the movable clips from one side. So you can see here on the one side, we have clips that snap forwards and back, and on the other side, we have no clips due to the fact that there's no clearance there. So this makes installing RAM a little bit different in this board from most. Also, if you were installing only four modules, please note that you would install them in the blue slots. Because we're installing eight modules, we're just going to go to town. Fill them up on one side, fill them up on the other side. Now, you might have noticed that on the side where we put in the additional spacer on the fan, that is a very tight fit for that first memory module. So it's up to you whether you want to opt for the slightly less turbulence and slightly lower noise operation, or if you want to opt for having a little bit more clearance for your memory. So the first thing is to open up the case by removing the two thumb screws. Then getting the insides basically prepared. So we're going to remove that SSD mounting bracket that's down here in the bottom of the case. We're also going to put our power supply right in. So if you look at these, these are the types of screws that we use for power supply mounting. Four screws. There's a bit of a decision to be made when you're deciding whether to have your fan mounted up or down for your power supply. Fan up has the benefit of pulling air away from your graphics cards and helping cool your graphics cards. But the drawback of drawing hot air into your power supply, making your power supplies cooling less efficient. So we opted instead to go for drawing air in through the bottom of the case. This case conveniently has an air filter down here that you can easily remove and clean whenever you need to. This isolates the heat from your graphics cards away from your power supply and will make it run cooler in the long term. When installing the I.O. shield into the case, do a quick sanity check and make sure you're putting it in right side up. Just align the I.O. shield with the back of the motherboard. Make sure all the ports stick through. Then align it with the back of the case and press firmly on all four corners. This might require some pressure in order to get it to work properly. And it's not incorrectly until it snaps into place and you can put some pressure on it from behind without it falling back inside the case. Now to continue preparing the case, we're going to replace those stock fans and fill her all up with better fans for awesome cooling. So Silverstone includes OK fans with their cases, but that's exactly what they are. They're OK. In the back, we're going to take that OK fan. We're going to take out all four screws and replace it with an NFF12. Now we don't have to use the same stock screws to install that NFF12 back there because premium fans also come with some premium mounting options. So instead, we're going to use these little rubber isolators to have what is what is a very vibration resistant mount. So the way that it's done is you position the fan, then push the little rubber spacers through as much as you can. You won't be able to completely mount them this way. Then if you have room for your fingers, you can pull them through to the point where the fan now is locked into place. And if you don't have room for your fingers, then you can make your life a lot easier by using a pair of needle nose pliers. Once you're done with that, check it out. Very little vibration, if any, can be passed now from the fan with its spinning blades to the case. On the top, there's a top piece that actually acts as both an aesthetic cover for our fans and as an easily removable and cleanable fan filter. We have a bit of a unique configuration for the top of this case. It accepts one 140 millimeter fan and one 120 millimeter fan. In the top, there is not enough room for us to use those rubber spacers unless we were really determined. So in this case, we just went for the old hard mount with screws. It should be noted that, again, premium fan features, these fans have little rubber isolators built into them as well. So they're still not making direct plastic to metal contact with the case, which will reduce vibration. We want to pay special attention when installing all case fans to the position of the cables that are coming out of them with respect to where we expect them to plug into the motherboard or any other kind of power solution that we have planned. In this case, because we're one motherboard fan header short on this board for the number of fans we're going to have in the system, I'm going to be using a splitter off of this top connector right here into these two top fans. So I want them positioned near the back so I can route them cleanly up there without any additional wire clutter. The last fans that we're going to swap out are going to require us to take off the other side panel. And there we go. Two more NFF12s. These are going to be used to directly cool our hard drive RAID 10 array. Now, I want to take a moment here. OK, so yeah, we use slightly different hardware here. It includes more of it, but just to save time, because we're just doing a build guide here. This isn't a permanent build. I'm just doing two screws per fan and diagonals. OK, so maintain the cable management that's there. And I want to take a moment to talk about why I love NFF12s and other pressure optimized fans. Manufacturers will often make the argument you should use an airflow optimized fan for something like a case intake or rear exhaust or whatever else. The negligible performance improvement that you get with an airflow optimized fan versus a pressure optimized fan, I feel is offset by the versatility of pressure optimized fans, because you can do all the planning in the world. And if you go in by an airflow optimized fan that's going to end up being a case intake that sits next to hard drives, pulls air through a honeycomb mesh and pulls air through a fine mesh fan filter, I would make the argument that's more of a static pressure optimized application anyway. And you run into that a whole lot. So I love the versatility of pressure optimized fans. I find them more useful in a wider variety of scenarios. Every manufacturer takes a slightly different approach to which motherboard standoffs come pre-installed. Silverstone has opted for the skinny but full length ATX configuration. So that is six screws, two at the top, two in the middle and two at the bottom. In order to put a standard ATX motherboard or in this case, a slightly EATX motherboard. So it uses standard holes, but it is a little bit wider. We're going to need three more screws or standoffs rather. So standoffs look a little something like this and they screw into the back of the motherboard tray. You're going to also find another piece that has a Phillips head on one side and then a socket on the other side. You can use that piece to screw your standoffs into the motherboard tray. So we're going to install three more, one in line with the two bottom ones, one in line with the two middle ones and one in line with the two top ones. So we end up with a total of nine here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here. Now, positioning the motherboard, it's important to be extremely careful. The last thing you want to do is scratch the back of your board on those fancy new standoffs that you just put into the motherboard tray. So what I recommend is going in at a bit of an angle and positioning the rear I.O. so that it sticks through the back of your I.O. shield back here before you actually lay the motherboard down flat on the standoffs. Now, holding the motherboard in place, put in at least one screw. In this case, we're using the same coarsely threaded screws that we used for the power supply, although this varies from manufacturer to manufacturer and even from case to case. So always do a test fit before you start installing screws into your standoffs or you might cross thread something. Then proceed to tighten in the other eight screws. Now, once you've done that, it's easier to install your motherboard connectors before we move on. So we're going to start with the front panel connectors for the power reset and as well as our LEDs. So first up is power and reset. For these ones, the orientation doesn't matter. So just follow the clearly labeled connectors and clearly labeled pins on the motherboard itself. If you have a little bit of trouble reading those, grab out the old magnifying glass or better yet, just consult the manual because it'll tell you exactly where they are. Next up are your power LED and your hard drive activity LED. For these ones, the orientation of the cables does matter. You want the colored wires towards the back of the motherboard or where the I.O. and the PCI Express slots are on all ASUS motherboards. That way, you're going to have your positive and negative wires in the right place. If you do get them wrong, don't stress out about it. It's not going to break anything. Just switch them around when you realize that the light isn't working. Next up, we've got our front USB 3. For this one, be really careful to install it in the correct orientation. There is a key on the USB connector itself as well as on the socket, so you shouldn't be able to install it incorrectly. But if you did, you would likely bend all those very fragile pins. The USB 3 connector is very large, but the pins themselves are quite small and delicate. Finally, we have our front HD audio. This has been simplified so much since 10 years ago. And now all you got to do is figure out which block doesn't have a pin in it, align that with the one on the motherboard that doesn't have a pin in it, and plug the whole thing in. Finally, fans. We actually have an opportunity here to show you a multitude of different ways that you might install fans. Our rear fan, we have a little bit of extra slack on that wire, so we're going to do my signature knot before we plug it into the motherboard fan header. Next up, we've got our top fans. I needed to use a splitter for these because I don't have enough headers on the motherboard in order to install all of my fans, so the splitter plugs directly into the motherboard. This came with my fans, another benefit of buying premium quality fans, then runs around to the back of the motherboard tray, where, because I was thinking cable management as I was building, my motherboard fan cables are already running, so I can plug those in, tuck them away, and I'm good to go, which leaves us finally with the front fans. These ones are both different, so one of them is perfect. It's a perfect run to one of the remaining plugs on the motherboard. That's the top one. The second one, the bottom one, actually has a cable that's too short. Noctua includes very short cables built onto their fans to allow for shorter, clearer cable runs without having a lot of extra wires to tuck away, so what they also include is extension cables, so I'm going to use one of those extensions in order to make this wire long enough to reach my final fan header, which is down in the bottom of the chassis. Next up, we're going to install our SSD and our hard drive, so in order to do any drives, we're going to have to take out that entire hard drive cage assembly, so four screws, two up at the top, and then two up at the bottom. This handle comes out, and then you can pull the whole assembly out of the case. Now, this is a very strange hard drive mounting system. I've never seen anything quite like it before, but it's also very versatile, so first things first, we're going to install our SSD in the very, very bottom here. We've got to use screws that are countersunk screws, so that is to say they don't have a head sticking up above them, so we're going to use anywhere from two to four of those, depending what you prefer. It's an SSD, so it's not going to be moving or anything, so I usually use just two screws on them. So we're going to go ahead and mount that down in the bottom where it's nice and hidden. Then we're going to have a look at this hard drive cage. It can accept up to eight drives if you're willing to stack them right up next to each other, but the way we're going to install them is we're going to do four WD Black drives, and we're going to stagger them out, so we're going to leave spaces in between them for more airflow in between the drives. However, how necessary this is, I don't know, so we're going to install one screw into each of them on this side, then flip the whole cage over and install two more screws on the other side. But wait, we're not done yet. This is a very unique feature of this case. That's the kind of thing that I would expect to see as like a weird aftermarket option for most cases, but Silverstone instead includes what's probably a couple bucks worth of aluminum in heat sinks for your hard drives. So you can actually mount these directly to up to eight drives on the other side. They're going to be taking airflow directly from those NFF-12s that are coming in on the side, keeping your hard drives much cooler than they'd be able to be if you didn't have heat sinks on them. If you wanted to go crazy, you could get some thermal pads and install those in there, or even some thermal paste if you think you've got a nice tight mount, although you'd have to check and make sure it's actually mounted right up against there. But this is a very unique way to keep your hard drives cool and very unexpected to see as a stock option on a case. So we can go ahead and put a couple more screws into each drive with the heat sinks there, then put the whole assembly together, it's quite heavy now, and slide it back into the case. This is where Silverstone shows yet another great innovation, and that is with these SATA cable splitters. So you can see we're able to wire things up quite cleanly. Now, we weren't quite able to reach that 2.5-inch SSD down in the bottom, however, if this was my own rig, I would either stretch it and see if I could just barely get there, or what I'd do is I'd move that SSD, take the screws out of it, mount it with double-sided tape to get it a little bit closer, and then I'd be able to use those SATA splitters for all of my drives, and I'd only need two SATA connectors to power all the drives in my case. Very, very nice thinking. Now, I've been using a new technique lately where instead of pre-attaching all of the cables I want to my power supply, in this case, we're using a modular power supply, and then running them to where they need to go, I've been pre-attaching all of the cables to where they need to go, and then running them backwards to the power supply. Now, if we didn't have a modular power supply in this case, actually, I'm really impressed. I've never built in this case before, but check this out. Behind the power supply, there is a whack-ton of space where you could put all the cables you need to that you're not using from a non-modular power supply. Silverstone has then put the power supply right up against the side panel, which doesn't matter because it's not like it needs any extra space on this side. Very unique approach. I really like this. Anyway, we started with the 24-pin, plugging that into the motherboard and then running it behind the motherboard tray. Next up is the 8-pin for the CPU up at the top left. This is a no-frills, no-gimmicks, professional-grade board, so there's only one 8-pin, because the reality of it is, guys, you only need one 8-pin unless you're going like crazy, wicked liquid nitrogen, which you're not doing with a board like this. Now, in order to cable management those cables, we're gonna wanna install the rest of the power supply cables, so we'll need to install our graphics cards first. The first stage in installing a graphics card in this case is to remove this little cover back here that gives you access to all the screws that allow you to remove the PCI slot covers, which have extra ventilation in them. Very nice, Silverstone. So we're gonna go ahead, take those two screws off and remove that. Now it is time to consult the manual, because regardless of how experienced you are technically, and regardless of how much you wish you could do things without the manual, this one's important. So the PCI Express slots on this board, they're all 16x physical, okay? But that doesn't mean that you just take any card and install it into any slot and you're gonna get optimal performance. It doesn't necessarily work that way. You wanna check the manual where it will give you recommendations for how many cards you have installed and which ones you should use, so that you can best take advantage of native PCI Express lanes versus ones that are relying on a PLX chip, for example. So in this case, we wanted our cards installed in PCI Express slot one and five. So we're gonna go ahead and remove those slot covers, then we can install the Quadro into the very top one. We're gonna be using this for our display out. The reason for using the Quadro here was that with the back plate on the GTX 780, it was too tight of a fit with this cooler up here. Even the Quadro was very, very tight, and normally I would recommend using even something like a non- any kind of non-conductive, very thin material in between this heatsink and this graphics card. But in this case, there's a chip on the back that is non-conductive that is causing it to not short out. But anyway, I would still recommend slipping something in there to make sure it doesn't short out, because they're very, very close to these fan clips in particular right here. So we installed the Quadro, then next up is the GTX 780. So once that's done, we go ahead and put the screws back into each of these cards. So it's one screw for the Quadro, two screws for the 780. Then we can go ahead and put that back cover back in place, and now we are pretty much done with those. So now we can do the same thing we did last time, where we are installing our PCI Express cables backwards. So this power supply, the AX860i, comes with harnesses that have two plugs, and ones that have an individual plug. So we're going to use an individual plug one for the Quadro, and then we're going to use a dual plug one for the GTX 780. So we only actually have to run two cables. Finally, we're going to use a single four-port SATA harness to plug in our 2.5-inch SSD, and then those two splitters that we were using for power to our hard drives. Remember, guys, we can now easily add additional hard drives without running any additional cables due to those splitters. We can fill this bad boy right up. Now that we have everything run, I usually find it's easiest to take everything that isn't a power supply cable and tie all that down, because they tend to be relatively low profile. So we'll spend a little bit of time tucking things into nooks and crannies and tying cables down. You don't necessarily have to have an anchor point in order to get a cable tied down satisfactorily. You can just take a zip tie even and, you know, tie it to another cable that happens to be running somewhere useful, or tie it to itself in such a way that you fold it so that it's not visible anymore. But either way, I find that it's, you know, worth the time to just kind of play around with those ones, then get started on the power supply cables. So now that everything's installed, we can plug the power supply cables into the power supply. So first, the 24-pin, then the 8-pin and the two PCI Express ones. Those all go into the same spots. And finally, the one lone peripheral harness that we ended up using. This is one of the benefits of a modular power supply, not having all those extra cables plugged in. And finally, we can take those power supply cables and now add them to our cable management system at the back, making sure that we don't stack things up on each other so much that we're not going to be able to close the side panel. There is lots of cable management room in this case, but that doesn't mean that we should, you know, take it for granted necessarily either. Admittedly, if I'd been thinking straight, I would have done this earlier in the assembly process, probably before I installed graphics cards, but SATA data, we have to install our SATA cables that actually deliver data to the drives. So in this case, this motherboard has some interesting options for how we can plug in the drives. The SSD, for sure. We needed a straight SATA cable, so unfortunately, the board doesn't come with any of those, so we had to go scrounge one. But we plugged in a straight SATA cable and we're going to plug that into the Intel controller SATA 3, 6 gigabit per second ports. So that's the very top SATA 3 ports. All right. Next, we've got four Intel SATA 2, 3 gigabit per second ports or four Marvell SATA 3, 6 gigabit per second ports. So we could plug these drives, these WD Black drives into either of them. They both support the RAID 10 that we're going for. And it's just a matter of whether we feel like we need SATA 3, 6 gigabit per second or whether we want the compatibility of Intel RAID. Because if our board ever did die or for some reason we needed to grab all these drives and migrate the data off of them by putting them into another system, if you use Intel RAID, you'll get better compatibility. However, we might see slightly better performance, particularly in burst operations using the Marvell controller. So we opted for the Marvell controller, but you might opt instead for the Intel one. And that's definitely a good option as well. In terms of cable management, we weren't able to move them back around the back of the motherboard tray. So we just ran them up the drives, cable tied them off and then plugged them into the ports where they belonged. Well, there you have it, guys. We're done. And the mystery of whether or not we can put that six two and a half inch drive cage back in when we're done has been answered. The answer is yes. However, I think you'd be hard pressed to cable manage six more drives into that spot on top of being able to have another eight drives here. And you would definitely need to add some kind of SATA or SAS controller card to even be able to plug in all of those drives, which I mean, it's very cool. The amount of capability this case has when you consider its size. So without further ado, I'm going to hand it off to Slick to walk you guys through some of the performance we were able to get out of the machine, as well as sort of his impressions of the overall configuration. All right. So we're going to jump into the BIOS here. And our mission is to change to XMP profiles and to change the boot drive. So we're going to go to is advanced mode and then jump into AI overclock tuner and change it to XMP. Once that's done, we're going to jump over to the boot menu over here, go down 14 times, which is ridiculous, down to hard drive BBS priorities. Don't worry. I know it's not a hard drive. Just jump in here. Change boot option one to your SSD. Ours is an Intel 520. Press F10 to save. You can review your changes and then just press enter for yes. And you're good to go. So once we get into the controller, we just jump directly into the configuration wizard and go down and select all of our drives by pressing space bar and down. Once you've done that, press enter, change to RAID 10, which is just RAID 1 and 0. Keep 64K stripe size as it's a little bit faster and then name it something that probably isn't default. And once you've done that, just go next and you are done. That's all it has to do. Just press Y to confirm that you actually want to do this. And you'll see right there under virtual disks that what you've named is now an actual RAID. So we wanted to talk about the PA279, but instead of just talking about it and how ridiculously good it looks, we wanted to show it off. So this is a 10-bit image sample that we're showing on a 10-bit PA279 panel and an 8-bit panel. You can see on the 10-bit panel that it is extremely smooth. And when you move it over to the 8-bit panel, you can see vertical lines running through it. So while we can talk about how good it looks, this actually shows how good it looks. So we want to show off the raw power of this system. So what we're running is DaVinci Resolve using a source file that was filmed by Brandon and then heavily edited by Edzel. We are currently rendering it using CUDA, although with this system you can use CPU encoding, CUDA accelerated encoding, or even H.264 encoders because of all the options that you have. As you can see, we're using both of our GPUs. The Quadro is at fairly low usage and is actually just being used for GUI, for DaVinci Resolve, and the rest of the general monitor. And then GPU 2, the GTX 780, is actually being used for its CUDA performance. So it's actually pushing pretty hard along with the CPU. You can see temps in here right now. Both the GPUs are sitting right around 50 degrees, which is totally fine. And the CPU is only going around 40 to 50 degrees tops, which is also totally fine and great for this system. As you can see, the CPU is actually running fairly hard, bouncing between 60 and 70%. So with all of that out of the way, a big thanks to you guys for sitting through this entire video. A huge thanks to Intel for making this video possible. These are extremely time consuming for us to produce and with their sponsorship, we are able to bring you guys these fantastic build guides in the Ultimate Build Guide series. And as always guys, like the video if you liked it, dislike it if you disliked it, and if you're not subscribed already, don't forget to subscribe.