 I think I cracked the code. After all this time making YouTube videos, I finally figured out what you guys like to see. PC builds! And you know, I'm a people pleaser. So I'm gonna give you what you want. Thanks to MSI who sponsored our video today to prove once and for all that their competitors aren't the only ones who make a lot more than motherboards these days. Hoo hoo wee! That's a lot of boxes and almost every single one of them is MSI. Yes my friends, it's time for the all MSI gaming PC including their new GeForce RTX 3080 Gaming X Trio. So let's get cracking and build this sweet rig. Intro music Of course, even though they make more than motherboards, that's still where we're gonna start with the MSI Meg Z490 Ace. The key features of this puppy are of course support for the latest Intel 10th Gen processors, 2.5G networking, 3 M.2 slots and enough RGB to choke a horse. Well, it's an expression. You know, it feels like it's harder than ever to choose the right CPU these days. Like that's the double edged sword of having two legitimately good options for a change. If we go Intel, we get called Intel shills, oh you guys don't appreciate AMD enough. But in some cases, if we go AMD, we get people telling us, oh you're leaving performance on the table. Like what happened in our review of the RTX 3080. So we've gone Intel, we're using the 10900K because we're gonna be pairing it with an RTX 3080 which is a flippin' fast graphics card. And right now, this is the fastest CPU for gaming. And I say right now because I'm filming this on October the 6th, not the 8th. So we'll see how things change after that. It changed everything. Next up is storage. We're using a Corsair MP600 2TB M.2 SSD for a couple of reasons. Number one is to highlight that while Intel's 10th Gen processors do not support PCI Express Gen 4, it is expected that 11th Gen processors which will also be capable of being installed on this platform will. So PCI Express Gen 4 is gonna come with some pretty cool benefits once direct storage gets actually implemented into Windows and GPU drivers, allowing similar features to what we've seen on the PlayStation 5 as well as Xbox Series. Reason number two is that we don't have any Samsung 980 Pros in the studio right now. For RAM, we've gone with a couple of 16GB sticks. Of Corsair's Vengeance Pro RGB, that gives us a total of 32 gigs running in dual channel mode. And as for why we went Corsair, well, the cold hard truth, Corsair's competitors out there, is that nobody does RGB quite like Corsair. That is to say that nobody does RGB quite to the extent of Corsair. Now we've reached the point where we're ready to check out our Secura 500X tempered glass kit. Just kidding. I took it out of the box because this thing is so freaking heavy and I didn't want to unbox it on camera. It's got tempered glass pretty much up the wazoo, includes four RGB fans and has a total of a whopping five front USB 3 ports. Who's plugging in that much front USB? Oh yeah, maybe this guy. Brandon? Would you? Oh, all right, fair enough. 100% Easily removable side panels, check. Giant 200 millimeter fans, check. Built-in RGB hub, check. But I do get the uncomfortable feeling that it might be haunted. Like I can hear this voice. Linus, they've got solid materials in front of their fans. I think Steve from Gamers Nexus died and he's in there. We'll find out soon enough if these perforations along the side and on the top here, where it seems air is intended to come in, are enough. Because the system we're loading this thing up with is not going to be very forgiving if there isn't enough airflow. Underrated feature, the little motherboard standoff nubbin right here. Absolutely love it. Just makes installing the motherboard a breeze. Personally, I like to build standing up like this. It's an old habit and it makes it a lot easier. Hey, Colin, how much is this case? It's 300 and 25 bucks. Huh, okay. It's not cheap, certainly, but definitely fully featured. So they include the bracket that you need for a vertical GPU mount. You got these nice little sleds for your three and a half inch drives. Lots of included fans. I'm liking it so far. Not cheap though. Good packing materials, actually. Oh, that's worth mentioning. I get such a boner for good packing materials. See, got that really nice foam in there. And these, oh yeah. Confusing branding though. MSI's got to get their stuff figured out. I know they're the sponsor of today's video, but that doesn't prevent me from trying to help them. You know, I got to help them. What is MPG? What's the difference between MPG and MEG? And what's the difference between MEG and MAG? MAG? Apparently, it's MSI Performance Gaming, MSI Extreme Gaming, MSI Extreme Gaming, and MSI Arsenal Gaming. Happy to clear that up for you. On the subject of MSI Arsenal Gaming, it's time to install our Core Liquid 360R. So this is a triple 120 millimeter liquid cooler that if MSI's marketing is anything to go by, should be a perfect match with our other MSI product. In fact, there are pictures of both this case and this radiator on the back of the motherboard with a clever pinheader location, making them a perfect match. Ew, that's a gross spider. Go away. No, no, don't go under my rug. Well, I don't want to kill it. It's a spider. Spiders are good. They're our friends. I just don't want it here. That's all. This threw me for a bit of a loop here. I saw this thing embedded in the radiator, and my immediate response was, oh, okay. It looks like MSI came up with the admittedly quite cool idea of putting the temperature sensor for the CPU cooler in the radiator so that you could actually adjust the RPM of your fans based on coolant temperature. But what it actually is is a pump. So this is the way that MSI has gotten around that Asetek patent. They also claim that it helps improve the longevity of the pump because it keeps it away from the heat source, which is of course the CPU. The coolant will not be nearly as warm as the CPU itself. With that said, there's a coolant buffer in between the pump and the CPU itself anyway, so I don't think it'd make that much of a difference. But hey, what do I know? I'm not MSI's engineer. That's a pretty neat idea, especially given that it sits right in the dead zone, right under the hub of the fan. You're probably not losing a ton of cooling potential. Oh, interesting. Very interesting. So you're actually using the outer edges of the radiator where your water is hottest, which as Colin found in a recent video, you guys should go check that out when you're done with this one, does make a difference having the most cooling potential where the water is hottest. One thing I don't like that much about this approach is that they've only put a cable management spot over here on this side, see, to get this out without mushing the cable. But what I actually wanted was to have it oriented this way with the cable coming out the other way. So MSI, I would love it if you guys put a slit on this side as well, so I could go out that way. It's fairly minor, but just, you know. There's only one orientation that I would really recommend in this particular case for the fan. So that's pulling air down into the case. And the reason for that is twofold. One, it makes cleaning the radiator pretty simple because it's just two thumb screws to slide it out. Pretty cool little mounting mechanism. And number two, the fans are pre-installed in the top blowing air down and you don't wanna be, you don't wanna have them fighting each other. Also from a lighting standpoint, reason number three, we're gonna have RGB lights here. So there's no point putting the fans up above the rad. We want our RGB lights right here, right? So we can have RGB everywhere. From the front, there's gonna be a sick looking system. From the back, even with all this pre-done cable management, it's gonna be a bit of a challenge. I couldn't help noticing that the built-in RGB hub, which has eight slots on it, only has two of them free. So it looks like for the fans for the radiator, we're gonna need to take advantage of the daisy chaining feature here. If I can figure out which one is which, so that we only use up the one port. Then for the fans, we're gonna have to use the included three-way splitter to plug this into the CPU fan header and then this into all three of the fans and then we'll just like cable tie it down. Okay, I went from happy about the abundance of headers on this motherboard that made it super easy for me to plug in all of my system fans and all that cool stuff to being, son, I am disappoint because there's literally a picture of this case on the back of this motherboard box. This case has two of the older style USB 3.0 connectors. This motherboard only has one of that style header. So two of my USB ports at the front are gonna be dead. Now, I must say I can solve this problem by just including a USB 2 to USB 3 adapter so that I could have two of them just be USB 2, but still work, but it doesn't appear to be included for now. So they could still make me happy. While you might say that an HX 1000 power supply is overkill, we've actually found in our RTX 3000 series testing that Nvidia's recommendations for power supply for the first time that I can remember might not be overkill and in fact, you might be better off going with something even higher than what they say because there tend to be these spikes in power draw that can trigger the overcurrent protection of a lesser power supply. So 1000 watt power supplies for the first time in the 10 years they've existed. They're not pointless. One thing to watch out for, if you've got a longer power supply is look at this. Not a lot of room between this hard drive cage and the back of the PSU. There's no way I'd be able to plug in cables right now. The good news is most people don't have a ton of hard drives these days and you can remove this cage. It looks like there's a couple of screws in the bottom. So we're gonna pop this out to give us some more room to run all our cables. We've got two options here. We can either mash these cables because this power supply is a little bit on the long boy side or we can actually use this cover plate here to fill in the gap. Which do you prefer? Cover plate? Oh, all right. Well, that's easier. The more I use this case, the more I'm kind of rooting for it here. So being able to slide this in and out while I'm working means that it's much, much easier than in some of the other cases I've worked with to get at things like the eight pin CPU power connectors up here. I'm gonna put the Intel bracket on the CPU block now and this is a cool feature. You can actually rotate the logo here to make sure that it's oriented the right way and then you can have your tubes kind of wherever's most natural for you. It's kind of nice. Oh, they're shooting a short circuit on the new Google speaker over there. That's why we got crab rave in the background. Make sure you're sub to short circuit by the way. We do a lot of our like first impressions and unboxings and stuff over there. I love the labels for the five volt addressable RGB headers on the board. So there's two of them, one at the bottom and one at the top and they're called J Rainbow. I cleaned up a few things off camera. So we've got our front USB three plugged in, our front panel headers plugged in down here. Tidy up the cables at the back a little bit. Is that acceptable? Can we accept that? All right, all right. We're going with acceptable. And now it's time for my favorite part, graphics card. It is such an exciting time to be a PC gamer. Not because of the 3080 specifically necessarily, but the whole 3000 series is just turning the existing, you know, price to performance ratio on its head. It's gonna drive, once they're actually available readily, it's gonna drive pricing of last generation stuff down. Like everybody benefits when there's a big leap forward in performance like this. And then of course there's the fact that if you can get your hands on a 3080 and you can afford it, 4K gaming is finally within reach. I'm a big fan of the over the top approach for the PCI express power connectors, because one of the things that helps with is reducing GPU sag. Although MSI does actually include a bracket in the box for supporting it. I don't think I need it though. That looks pretty level, which means it's time for the finishing touch. All we gotta do is put these thumbscrews in, lock the radiator in place. Enough PC building. Let's take a look at our peripherals. Oh! Fine. Whatever I'm over it. This is the MPG 341CQR. It's got HDR 400 support. It's 3440 by 1440. And of course features a high refresh rate, 144 Hertz panel and one millisecond response times. This right here is the Vigor GK50 Elite. It's got individually backlit RGB keys and Kailh blue switches. And then of course, the RGB keys and Kailh blue switches. It's also available with some other different switch types. And this is the GM 30 clutch mouse, which has like a U shaped RGB thing. What are we waiting for? Let's fire this thing up and see the RGB. This looks flipping awesome. Same goes for the top. Damn. Can you see that? Smoked glass and RGB. There's very few things that look better. I like it. They even managed to get the MSI, like tacky dragon shield thing on there and have it not look too bad. Oh yeah. I didn't talk about their wrist rest thing. They included. They really sent over like MSI everything. It's actually really nice. It's like super mushy. Another thing they nailed is enough space behind the motherboard tray that you can actually close the door as long as your cable management isn't horrible. We are on ultra nightmare. Absolutely everything running at 3440 by 1440. And we have not dropped below the refresh rate of this monitor, which is 144 Hertz. But it's smooth. Of course, the question wasn't whether or not this rig was going to run games real well. I mean, it's RTX 3080 and 10900K. What do you think's going to happen? The question is whether the thermals will hold up. There we go. All right. The fans are definitely going now. You can really hear the difference. All right. Let's load a checkpoint. And let's pop open hardware info and see how high we went on our temps here. Our CPU. Wow. Our CPU is pinned at 5.1 gigahertz. Pretty happy with that. Sitting at around 65 to no 70 to 75 degrees. Okay. That's reasonable. With our preliminary results, we're just going to pop back into Doom here, reset the timer. And then what I want to see is after maybe another five minutes of playing, once it's already heated up in there, what's the minimum clock speed we see. So the rated boost clock on this card is 1850 megahertz. But honestly, I expect better. More like two gigahertz if it's actually doing its job. Yeah. Based on how hot that glass is, I'm not sure. Really pleased with every other aspect of this system, but unfortunately I think this case is just going to struggle with this tier of hardware, unfortunately. The glass is hot to the touch. And if we go ahead and pop open hardware info here, we're going to see that our GPU clock went down as low as 1830 megahertz. That is technically within spec, but everything you need to know about how hard this poor thing is working, you'll know when I do this. Hear the fans turning down? Can you hear that? Yeah. Everything else, great. Thanks to MSI for sponsoring this video. If you guys enjoyed this video, we're going to have the parts list down below, along with links for where you can buy them. Thanks for watching and we'll see you guys at the next one. If you enjoyed this video, maybe go check out our ultimate high air flow machine, where we actually used an industrial fan to put the most airflow we possibly could through a computer case. That was pretty fun.