 Hotspot Shield service makes your internet browsing safer, more secure, and fully private. Click now to learn more. So our main video editor is actually getting a new editing machine. So it's more of a Frankenstein together of some existing things and, you know, get some new things. And we're kind of, we're going to end up with what's a very strange rig. So for people who are sitting there thinking, oh, well, this will be the optimal video editing workstation. No, no, no, this is not necessarily what we're going for here. His machine is built for a very specific usage model, which is what he exactly does. And that's that's pretty much it. So I'm going to run through a quick parts list here, starting off with an Intel Core i7-3960X. This is where the whole this isn't necessarily stuff I would recommend thing comes into play because normally for a video editing workstation, I'd probably recommend a 3930K as opposed to a 3960X because Extreme Editions don't really offer a great price to performance ratio. We're going to have 32 gigs of Kingston value RAM, DDR3-1600, absolutely nothing special just because it happens to be validated for the board. That's more important to us than necessarily squeezing an extra 2-3% of performance out of whatever it is we're doing. I'm going to be using an ASUS Rampage 4Gene motherboard. Okay, it's not a workstation board. However, it should be noted that even ASUS's gaming or channel boards go through very significant amount of validation in terms of sort of weird, obscure card operation and stuff like that. And he'll be running a 10 gigabit NIC. Also, it should be noted that ROG boards have very high end VRM solutions. We're going to be building this inside a small enclosure that's not going to have a whole lot of space. So we're going to need something that runs as coolly and as efficiently as possible. And in addition to that, basically it's just as sweet as it gets in terms of micro ATX LGA 2011 motherboards because we want more cores. We're running six cores in this machine, six cores, 12 threads because we need wicked CPU performance. With that said, we also need wicked GPU performance. We need lots of PCI Express slots. So we're going to have two graphics cards in this system. One of them is going to be, I'm just going to reach over here. One of them is going to be a Quadro 4000 and we used to use this for all the CUDA acceleration as well as getting 10 bit color depth capabilities. However, we are going to be changing that up a little bit because this is based on a GTX 470. It's based on an ancient GPU at this point. So it's kind of got to go, which means that we still want it for the better color depth output, but we need something a little bit beefier when it comes to CUDA acceleration. And that's why we're adding a secondary graphics card to the system. So we're going to be throwing in GeForce GTX 780 WindForce from Gigabyte. This should be able to stay cooled adequately because of its massive cooler, even though it's in a very small MATX case and should give us lots of CUDA acceleration performance for applications like DaVinci Resolve or outputting using the built-in H.264 encoding feature in Kepler. Diesel found a, what was it? It's a plugin? Yeah, a plugin that allows it to use that to be much, much faster than relying just on the CPU. But of course, we still need to be CPU because there are lots of things we're going to be doing that will be CPU bound as well. For the power supply, I don't know how borderline this is going to be, but I've got a Dark Power Pro 550 watt. We're going to find out if that ends up sort of reaching the max or not once we finish the build. So if it does, then I'll swap it out for something else. But I went with a Dark Power power supply because they're very, very quiet. And one of the things that happens a lot of the time with particularly Diesel's rig because he's got it running balls to the walls and maxed out all the time is that it runs really, really loud. So I'm hoping this will help a little bit. Although the CPU cooler is going to be a big part of that equation as well. Now, I needed something low profile. And this is again, part of the ghetto-ness of this rig in spite of how awesome it's going to be is that this was the only low profile CPU cooler I had lying around. So this is a Phanteks PHTC 90 LS, which is extremely low profile. Like honestly, this could probably go in like a 1U almost. No, probably like a 2U. But it's got this little tiny fan. It claims to be LGA 2011 compatible and capable of dissipating the massive amount of heat that these chips output. However, I don't think we'll be doing any overclocking with a heat sink this size. So there you go. I guess we'll find out what happens. We might end up swapping this out as well. But if their marketing claims are accurate, then we may end up using it anyway. I think that's most of the components. Oh, yeah, we're using a Crucial M4 SSD just because they're reliable. We trust them. It's not the best performing SSD on the market by any stretch, but we're not really doing anything performance sensitive with it. We've got a Velociraptor 1 terabyte that's going to go in there that just acts as a random scratch disk or sort of temporary storage. But mostly we're going to be storing things off of the machine itself on our 10 gigabit capable NAS server. So that's why we need that 10 gigabit NIC card. So that means we've got a single slot Quadro, a 10 gigabit single slot NIC, as well as a dual slot GTX 780 all in this machine. Now, I ended up with a Silverstone SG01. I was actually going to use what is that thing? I was going to use an SG09. But what I realized is that it doesn't have a five and a quarter inch bay. And I wanted a built in card reader because as you can imagine doing video production reading off of memory cards comes up a fair bit. It also has built in fan control and he's one of the few people I've ever met who actually tunes his fans according to what he's doing. So I'll set that up for him as well. And I think that pretty much wraps it up. So here we go. So the first step for me is usually CPU installation. It should be noted that LGA 2011 CPUs never come with a stock heatsink. I believe you can actually buy an Intel OEM heatsink. Although the cost of it and the performance of it makes like basically don't buy it, please. Yeah, it makes no sense whatsoever. Just get a nice aftermarket one or any aftermarket one and you'll be better off with that. So you can see the LGA 2011 chip is quite large but installs in much the same way that you would have come to expect if you've ever installed an Intel CPU before in an LGA socket. So there's a little golden triangle on that corner of the CPU right there. And then there's a corresponding triangle on the socket itself. Now it is a little bit different in that it has two retention arms. So you lift up the one that okay, basically you can't take out the wrong one because if you pull on it, it's stuck. So you take out the one with the hook. Then you take out the one with the kink in the middle of it. Then once that's done, you can lift out the entire hold down plate. Position the CPU inside the socket. Okay, make sure it's in there. Then put this down, put them back down in the order that they were originally removed in and remove the cover. I only recommend removing the cover once you are done doing the things that you're doing. All right, so we've got some included thermal compound and I do put a little bit more on LGA 2011 CPU simply because they're larger and the dies under the heat spreader are larger than the LGA 1155, 1156 or 1150 CPUs. Now here goes this cooler. So you can see we've got a nice shiny surface on the bottom. It's all brand new. It's still never a bad idea to clean things off with alcohol, but we're not going to worry too much about that in this case. For mounting hardware, at least this cooler has an extremely straightforward mounting system. This is one of the things I like about LGA 2011. It's got a backplate built in, which means that many coolers are just a matter of aligning the LGA 2011 screw with the built-in backplate and screwing them in. You can see the springs on there are going to make sure that the tension is correct. So you should be able to go all the way to the end of the stopper tightening in a cross pattern, not tightening any of the screws fully until you have all of them mostly tight. So here we go. Okay, we're back. So Diesel has seen fit to actually help me with this since it's his machine that I'm building right now. So all we got to do is go ahead and put these under the little... Hold on. Did I do that right? Oh boy. Okay, this is pretty finicky. After careful consultation of the manual, we realized we had the fan upside down. So we flipped it around, installed everything completely the opposite way, and now it makes an awful lot more sense. We should also, you know, since the whole point of this is we don't want it to be super loud, install the little rubber strips that are included. So those should keep some of the vibrations from the fans from being passed to the heat sink itself. So there we go. By fans, I mean fan. There's only one singular. Grammar is important. Even though the world today doesn't seem to think so. I really am getting old. Let's go ahead and hook those on. So it should be noted that many heat sinks have this whole feature where there's a groove here that you can hook the wire clip into. However, most of them have some leeway and flexibility in terms of where you can hook them onto, not this heat sink. So these ones are straight. These ones are grooved. The wire only goes where the wire goes and that is it. So I usually tie the CPU fan cable into a bit of a little knot so that it doesn't get in the way of anything before plugging it into the fan header. So here's Diesel's X79 shuttle PC, which was actually really hot at the back here because he was just editing on it. So the CPU sockets right under there, quite toasty. This was serving us perfectly well, except that limited expansion. So there's that Quadro, there's that 10 gigabit Nick. How do we add something that augments the CUDA capabilities of the system? Well, we can't because it only has the two expansion slots. So that's really the only reason why we're changing this out for something else. So here's the here's the guts. I'm actually pulling the RAM right now more than anything else and Slick took my screwdriver. So I can only take out thumb screws at the moment. You almost done? Almost. All right. So there we'll do a tour of this to stall for time. So there's that single slot Quadro 4000 that gives us up to 10 bit 10 bit output, right? Yeah. Mind you, we only have an 8 bit panel at best. We have a PA246 here. It's 10 bit. I thought it was 8 bit. Oh, okay. Well, there you go. Apparently we have a 10 bit panel. So that's where Diesel does all of his all of his color work. Go ahead and pull these out. There's that 10 gigabit Nick that gives him pretty much unbottle necked access to our rate array. Oh man, this thing's hot. Holy cow. Ow. It says right on it. It's hot. Don't touch it. So now we know. All right. So here's our RAM. Guys, please do note that even though it might not seem like it, I am grounding myself before I touch sensitive components. So you'll usually ground yourself on chassis or power supply or some large piece of metal is usually adequate. If you were going to do things properly, you'd want to use an anti-static wrist strap. Whether you put it around your wrist or your ankle is totally up to you. So here's our Quad Channel Kingston Value RAM memory. I really don't on our internal machines here, we can install this in the RAM page. I really don't believe in spending a ton of money on fancy memory because I have not observed a huge performance difference. However, there are environments where you will see better performance from better memory. ECC would probably be a recommended upgrade for this machine or well for a rendering workstation. I don't know that the RAM page board supports ECC memory, but ECC memory wouldn't be a bad idea for long renders where you don't want any errors, you know, causing it to stop working. You know, if you're running a lot of virtualized, if you're doing a lot of virtualization, faster memory can definitely benefit you. But I mean, for most of these workloads, more memory is still kind of king more than anything else. So here are the drives. I just had dummy ones before that I was using as placeholders. So these are going to come out and this machine is actually going to be inherited by B-roll. So we're going to find some lesser RAM and lesser graphics card to put in there and then B-roll can make do with the onboard networking. Haha, B-roll. I just got his headphones on, he can't hear me. So this case is really very Frankenstein. It's been used a lot of times for a lot of different builds and I don't have half of the screws. So it's just like random screws that are just jammed into places. But I always end up back with this case because it's extremely versatile. It fits long graphics cards or reasonably long graphics cards. I hope all the graphics cards fit. Oh man, this would be a good time to find that out as opposed to later on down the line. So we'll pull up the WinForce card. I don't know that I would have necessarily chosen a WinForce card for this particular rig if given a choice. But I mean, I'm not going to discard the WinForce card and then go buy another one separately. Oh wow, yeah, that isn't even close. So we're going to have to pull out the drive cages, I guess, in order to have that card fit. What I normally probably would have rather done... Well, there's intakes on the side. But I would have rather gone with a blower style cooler that exhausts everything out of the case. But you know, you make do with what you have, I guess. You know, if we have to use that GTX 780, then we can. But usually I recommend WinForce cards for more of an open case design where there's a lot more space. I don't need the front firewire cable still. So I had disconnected that during a previous build. And for that matter, I don't need the front audio either because the five and a quarter inch bay here... This is what often irks me about these things is they're like, Yeah, we want you to have all the I.O. in the front of your case. Like, why would I need... What case doesn't have front audio? And what motherboard has, you know, two hookups for it? So why are you giving me this? I don't need this. I want a card reader, USB 3, eSATA is fine. But stuff where it's like 100% going to replicate something that your case already had just kind of irks me. So anyway, we don't need the front audio there. So we're just going to use the hook up the front USB 2 and the front sort of power reset, all that good stuff. So the next stage, now that we've stripped everything out of the case, is probably to install the I.O. shield. So just get all four sides just like that. All the standoffs are already in this case, so I don't really have to worry about moving them around or anything like that. Micro ATX is quite a bit more, well, more standard than ATX in terms of where the standoffs go. Some ATX boards, particularly a few years ago, had, you know, standoffs missing or standoffs added compared to other ones. So you had to be a little bit careful to make sure that you don't short out your board by accidentally having a standoff installed somewhere where you don't need one. It's actually a lot less important to have all the standoffs installed versus not having any extras installed. Extras are really, really terrible. So once the I.O. shield is in, all we got to do is grab that dear motherboard. So this, you guys are going to see why I needed to have a low profile CPU cooler. There is not going to be a lot of space once we install our power supply, which I have misplaced. There it is. There's not going to be a lot of space once we have our power supply installed under there. So even that stock LGA 2011 cooler, I don't think is going to fit in this config. So now we screw in the motherboard. I don't remember which which type of screws it uses. So the trick that I usually use is start with a small one. So those are the ones that are threaded for optical drives, often motherboard standoffs. And then if those ones don't stay in, then switch to a coarser thread one, which are the ones that are threaded for hard drives, for example. So we'll go with this guy. And you can see that that is indeed holding. So it looks like this motherboard uses the smaller threads or this case uses smaller threads. So I'm trying to figure out how to get the drives in here because I have to take out the drive mounting cage. I'm stuck with one of a few different options. So I can either just like bolt the I mean, the SSD I'm not worried about. That one could just kind of hang out inside the case as long as it's like Velcro to something. But hard drives, I tend to prefer a more stable mount. So I was thinking what I could do is I could grab some silicone isolators that I salvaged from another case and maybe just mounted in the bottom here by drilling some holes through the bottom of the case. Or another option would be to mount it in the five and a quarter inch bay in a similar fashion. In fact, I think that might actually work best because then I could just take the SSD and this one, chuck them in there and hopefully I would actually still even be it. Yeah, I think so. I think I can even still fit my five and a quarter inch card reader thing. I run all these through here. Man, there's going to be a lot of cables in here. It's a good thing we're using a modular power supply. What is that? Oh, apparently I owe Diesel like five hundred dollars because my camera broke his lenses or something. So he's quietly sneaking that onto my desk before he goes. It's like awesome. All right. So there we go. Yeah, it looks like I'm going to be able to fit all that stuff in there without too much trouble. I really don't like how little room there is for airflow around that velociraptor though. So I still might opt to put it down here. This is kind of ridiculous. I've never seen anything like this before, but this multi-function front panel thing actually comes with its own self tapping like plastic screws that go into some special holes that are just plastic and are not threaded at all. Apparently uses a little tiny Phillips head bit. So I'm going to have to grab a different bit. Unbelievable. Sometimes you just encounter like the weirdest stuff that just has no right to exist. And you just kind of go, OK, well, whatever. When I'm building machines for my own personal use or for internal use here at Linus Media Group, it's very rare that you'll catch me putting all the screws in, especially for things like, you know, a front panel card reader. Two screws is fine. You know, you don't have to you don't have to attach every you don't have to weld everything to the case unless it's something where there's like, you know, a safety reason or a reliability reason that it needs to be attached incredibly well. So I'll just put in on the corners, although it could be argued that I should probably put in all four of these because they're like these weird special custom screws that I'll probably never encounter ever again. So if I were to lose them and I would never be able to do a proper installation of this thing with all four screws. So there you go. I'll at least put them in a little bit so that they'll stay there and not come out. I do have some new ideas for how to mount the hard drive. Well, not really new ideas, but I've went I've gone and obtained the hardware. So I grabbed some some screws. So these are hard drive screws that have a non threaded portion in the middle. So I don't even know if you guys can see that at all, but whatever anyway, and some silicone or rubber isolators. So I'm going to put some holes in the bottom of the case and I am going to melt that hard drive down here in the bottom. I'm going to end up with a ridiculous amount of front panel I.O. stuff connected. So HD audio goes into the AAFP over here. That's one of the things I also like about this board. It has a great onboard audio solution. So when he's working on audio stuff, which evidently he does apparently some point in time, you know, the quality of it isn't going to be just so horrible that it's unusable. I mean, a lot of the time the issue with onboard audio solutions is less to do with even that the quality is terrible, which it usually is, but often more to do with that the drivers are terrible. And I would have higher expectations than that from something like an ROG Supreme FX3 audio solution. So there you go. That's one of the reasons to justify a high end board. If you really need to do that for yourself. I mean, really the reason for us going with the high end board for this is more to do with just we want the utmost in terms of reliability. I could kind of considered overclocking it. And so that was that was one of the reasons why we'd gone with an ROG board. I mean, particularly on a higher end socket like LGA 2011, you're going to expect to get better overclocking headroom out of out of a better board with the consumer grade platforms. It's less less of a factor from what I've seen in the last couple of gents. Yeah, I don't know. Not much else to say at the moment. So I'm just plugging in all the front panel stuff. So that was my front panel connectors. They're labeled on the board. I mean, those little things high end boards, those convenient creature and comfort features that you don't really get on the low end stuff. Where normally you'd have to go look in the manual or something like that because of the unique configuration with our five and a quarter inch Bay device and the fact that this board has four or this case has four front panel USB two ports. We're going to end up with a total of six front USB ports, which is great because he really uses a lot of them. So I go ahead and plug those in down here and I've got a phone call. So I'm going to go ahead and take that. Oh, how disappointing. I miscounted the the number of front USB plug in devices that I had versus headers. So I actually two of the ports on the front will be dead so that the card reader can get the USB connection that it needs. That's a shame. And it comes on its own full block here, even though actually only four of the pins are populated. So it could have in theory supported at least one more port. But oh, well, cable management here is going to be a bit of a bit of a trick just because all those cards have to be installed somehow. I usually cut these off these days. This is the old AC 97 on board audio pins or wires or whatever you want to call them. So if you're not going to use them, which you're not unless you're going to install like on like a Pentium three computer or something, then just you can just cut them off because otherwise they can be in the way of things. Just make sure you don't cut them off in such a way that they're going to short out on each other or anything like that. So this gives us a lot less room for that brilliant hard drive mounting strategy that I'd come up with, which could make things a little bit challenging. Maybe what we can do is we can take all these wires and we can actually manage them up here off of off of sort of ground level so that we don't get in the way of everything. So if we just kind of tuck everything over here, we should still have space for that long card, which I've decided is going to go in the third PCI Express slot. So that's a full 16x slot. So full bandwidth. Yeah. And there we go. So we should have room for that. And the Quadro should fit just fine where there's a little bit less room. So that one will go right there like that. Yep. Should be just dandy. OK, so here I'm eyeballing approximately where on the bottom I want to drill the holes for the hard drive. I don't know off the top of my head what the spacing is. So what I did is I marked approximately where I want one of them to go with sort of landmarks of junk that goes through and just making sure that things like this that are poking through aren't going to be interfering with anything. So apparently we'll sit about there. Then what I'll do is I'll measure this out and drill holes. So wish me luck with that. I don't recommend drilling holes in a system with components already installed in it, but there are things you can do to prevent it from being as much of a problem. So you can put masking tape over it so that the shavings don't go flying all over the place. Orient it so that they fall away from the components and all that. But really, please don't do that in general. All right. So hopefully these are approximately right. I hope. Yeah, I still have audio. Here we go. Oh, I went through the mouth. No, I'm just kidding. All right. Next hole. OK, number two. And I was only able to put in three because one of them ended up under this foot. So we'll just see how this goes. OK. No idea if these are going to align or not. But the only way to find out for certain is to measure before you do. I mean, just try things. All right. Here we go. Where are the holes? Where do they go? There's one sort of. It's hard to see here. Wait, wait for it. No, no, that's not a hole. That's interesting. Ah, yes, I see the problem now. Right. I moved it further down because I didn't want to interfere with the SATA ports. Other than that, there's nothing hanging off the right hand edge of the board that would interfere with plugging things into the hard drive and that the hard drive would prevent from operating correctly. All right. So there's one of them. So one of them definitely lined up with something. All right. So the idea being that. Huh, that's a shame. That's the biggest drill bit in Slick's kit. So that's not big enough to put these through without the threading, unfortunately, which means that I might have to go back to the back to my own house to get my own kit to do that. OK, well, we'll continue this when we're ready. Oh, that one almost lines up, so that should be good enough for our purposes here. So I did wuss out and remove the motherboard. So, yeah, the mess of all the filings around here is less of an issue. I was able to find another wider bit, so I did end up being able to drill the holes that I need. So my brilliant plan is screws through here. OK. I've only got three still just because that foot was in the way. Then I'm going to put the rubber isolators on the other side. Then I'm going to attempt to screw in the drive. So this is going to be a bit of a balancing act here. I've gone ahead and put the board back in off camera now. So that's done. Oh, wow. Yeah, because all of these have to go on. I hope you guys can see this. Yeah, all of these have to go on and they all have to kind of stay in place at the same time, which isn't going to be easy. It's OK. These are the challenges that make PC building fun, as opposed to, you know, just buying things that all work together in the first place. Yeah, that's for noobs or something. No, actually, this just makes it more stressful, but whatever. All right, so we're going to go ahead and put that drive on there now. Wow, it worked. OK, I don't need to mush the crap out of those isolators. Just got to make sure that it's reasonably firmly mounted. And there we have it. The hard drive is now mounted actually pretty darn securely. I don't have as much clearance over on this side as I had hoped for the connectors, but that's OK. I'll just go find a left angle connector for the SATA port and then we'll figure out power. Can't be that complicated. And there you have it. All right, so I did manage to get just regular straight SATA connectors in there, although it's extremely tight. So we'll add this to the long list of things I wouldn't recommend doing about this build. I got my industrial strength Velcro. So I'm going to go ahead and attach the SSD. I decided rather than using up a five and a quarter inch bay, I mean the whole notion of drives must go where the manufacturer says they should go. To me that really bothers me. Drives should go wherever is most convenient and awesome. So I'm going to go ahead and put some Velcro on the back of this drive. So that'll give me the option to add an optical drive later, should I choose to, by doing this this way. So I'm sticking the Velcro side to here and then I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to put this SSD kind of here-ish. Kind of here-ish? No, I'm going to put it here. There we go. So the SSD will go there. That separates it enough from that velociraptor that I don't have to worry about heat or anything like that because I had thought about just sticking it straight to the top of the velociraptor, but then I changed my mind about that. Don't want the SSD to have its lifespan affected by its neighbor like I do. Can you guys believe I have to sit like right across from Diesel? My desk here at work, right across from him. I mean the music he listens to. He listens to Bieber. So for all those of you who think he's cool. Now I guess that is pretty cool. Oh wait. So all of our front panel connectors are all attached. I've started, I've wired up the drives. Now it's pretty much time to get the expansion cards in here. No, no, no. See now you've got that song stuck in my head. Wow. This case is not, has seen better days. Let's just say that the spacing of like the PCI bracket isn't even right anymore. That's the thing about aluminum cases is they often, they often bend in pretty spectacular ways. So, oh, this is a PCI. Okay. Well, here's a good tip for you guys. PCIe 8x cards can be installed in PCIe 4x slots. You might get slightly less overall bandwidth available to the card. I don't remember on these 10 gigabit cards whether they actually needed all of the available bandwidth. I think each PCIe 2x lane or PCIe 2.0 lane is around 250 megabytes per second. So we should be pretty close to all that it can consume actually. But there you go. Ideally, I would put it in another slot. But in order to get all my cards in here, that's not going to work. So this case has kind of a unique fan arrangement here, which I actually had turned around before. So I had this as exhaust and this is intake. But I'm going to put those back in the default configuration so I can bring nice fresh air down to particularly these ones. There's vents in the side the wind force can take advantage of, but particularly these ones. I want this fan to get nice fresh air and I want this heat sink to get some incidental cooling as well. So last but not least, the wind force GTX 780 for CUDA. I can see diesel drooling over there about the fast output times. You're not drooling, are you? It's okay because I can't see you either. So everything I said was a lie. Everything I said was a lie. Except the part about installing this graphics card. There we go. So one screw, I actually only had three screws in there. So I'm just going to find another random one. There we go. And let's put that in there. All right. So that my friends is one monkey jam packed card configuration. Love it. All right. So I turn the fans around. You can see right here is where the power supply sits on the other side. So this piece is steel and this piece is aluminum since it doesn't really do anything other than hold a couple of fans. There's no actual structural integrity of the case that's being taken care of. I'm pretty sure this isn't how you're supposed to put it in. But yeah, I'm pretty sure a lot of the stuff we've done with this build isn't how you're supposed to put it in. Now this bracket uses those weird countersunk screws that only Silverstone and like some other sort of weird manufacturers seem to use. And I only have like two of them. So I'm going to put this in as best as I can without having to use too many of them. If you don't use the countersunk ones, though, then the case cover doesn't sit right. So you just kind of have to you kind of have to use them. Maybe this one will work. Try this one. That's pretty low profile. So there we go. Now we have our cooling fans in place. I just got to find somewhere to tuck these. This is a this is a working machine, not a show machine. So cable management is a bit of a secondary concern as long as it's out of the way of airflow. I don't get too uptight about it and stuff like this. So there we go. Yeah, we've got nice unrestricted airflow from our intakes to our graphics cards. And it's pretty much time to get the power supply in here. Now, with these smaller form factor systems, I often find it's easier to install the modular cables first and then actually install the power supply. So I'm going to start with I really wish these would stay under that USB cable that is supposed to be kind of anchoring them. I mean, I could cable tie them down, which would be a better way to do this. But trying to get this done so that diesel can get back to work because it is now the next day. Wow, the 780 takes two 8 pins. Do they all do that? I can't even remember. All right, so I'm going to run this through over here. Then over here. Because once we've got the power supply in this case, it's going to be a total nightmare to get my hands in anywhere. So just get it all done now. Make life easy for ourselves. I mean, as easy as it can be when you're just making your own drive mounts as you go and sort of playing by no one's rules, except your own, not even your own. All right, I think there's that. Yeah, so this part, this is one of the things I like about Be Quiet power supplies is they tend to come with sort of a bunch of different options in terms of the modular cables. So it comes with a dual PCIe and a single PCIe on a 550 watt power supply. I think the manufacturer's expectation is that you're using one of those two options, but we're going to go ahead and use both. I mean, they give you the modular connections on the power supply for it. So, you know, they asked for it, I guess. My expectation for a dark power power supply is also that it's going to be able to handle pretty much near its peak output at any given time. So I'm not worried about blowing it up or anything like that. Next up, we've got our, wow, that's a long cable. This is where those short cable kits that guys like Silverstone sell come in handy because this is an awfully long cable. And the only real way to cable management is going to be to chuck it back here or something or potentially actually we could throw it over here with all these other cables near the hard drive. That'll probably work. But if we were relying on any airflow from the front of the case, which this case doesn't have, then this isn't really something that I would want to do too much. So there's that one. And finally, the 24 pin connector is pre attached to the power supply. So we're pretty much ready to put the power supply in and find out if this system works at all. I think it comes with its own special screws. I'll find those and right at exactly the moment where I had found some other thumb screws that also had nice long threads on them. Diesel found the be quiet thumb screws that have even longer threads so that you can really, you know, put them on there and get that power supply installed. I like the noise isolating strip. I wish that it didn't reduce compatibility with other screws. But, you know, sometimes that's the sacrifice you have to make. So there you go. So those are installed, which brings us back to the inside. Wow, this is starting to get heavy with those graphics cards in there. So that brings us to the inside. So we're going to tuck our 24 pin. Actually, no, we're going to plug in the modular cables that we have here first. So try and get you guys a decent view of that. So PCI Express, we have four different PCI Express plug options here. Again, the thing with the whole like options on the be quiet power supplies that I that I quite like. Next, we've got one for drives. All right. Oh, actually, let's do. Oh, cool. It has fan plugs, too. So we could actually while we're using manual fan control in the front of the case. But if we weren't using that, then we can have the power supply control our fans, which is kind of neat, actually. All right. So the CPU connector goes over here. Most modular power supplies these days use the same plugs for the P4 connector or P8 connector, whatever you want to call it, and PCI Express. But this one doesn't. It has a specific spot for it. I wonder if it has to do with the way that the rails are distributed because it is not a single rail power supply. It is a multi rail power supply. So we've got that. We can tuck our 24 pin up here in the five and a quarter inch bay, at least until we wanted to install a five and a quarter inch drive, maybe at some point in the future. And then what I'm going to do, this is something that I often do with builds as I use cables to cable manage. So I'm going to use the 24 pin to hold all that other stuff out of the way of the CPU fan so that there's nothing interfering with it. So if I can just get in there a little bit better. I should have plugged this in just like I did with all the other cables first before I actually installed the power supply fully because the cable is so long. I could have gotten away with that even though it's pre attached. This is one of the reasons why full modular can be nice, even if it's not a necessity because it does allow you to fully wire up your system before you actually have to put the power supply in it. Or if you're RMA in your system or your power supply, for example, it can be a great way to not have to actually rewire anything when the new one arrives back, which is neat as well. I'm having a little bit of difficulty here. Yep, having some difficulty. A little trick, guys, if you plug the four pin in first, then the 20 pin will often sit on top of it and lock it into place depending on how the cable is designed and that is how this one is designed. So that's in there now. And then the last thing we need is it would be just like be quiet to include something like this, but I need like a single Molex. Oh, they got a single SATA. All right. So I was close and a single Molex. Look at that. Love it. I don't need any more than that. So I'm just going to plug in my dual SATA connector for the drives down there. Trying to get you guys a view of this, but it's not working too well. So that's going to go into drives number five. And then my other my Molex connector is going to go into drives number four. And I'll be using that to power my front panel five and a quarter inch bay device, which is going to power my fans and my built-in card reader and evidently all the other things. One thing I didn't show you guys is I did plug in the SATA connector for the eSATA in the front panel. So all the IO options will be had with this particular machine. Very cool. There we go. Not the greatest cable management I've ever done, but lots of clearance around the CPU cooler, which hopefully works. Otherwise, we're going to have to pull the power supply out and swap that out for something a little bit taller, perhaps, and hopefully ample cooling for those graphics cards and hopefully enough power. So there's a lot of things to test once we fire this bad boy up. So it's moment of truth time. We're going to find out if she boots up. I really hope we get into the OS because we don't have time to reformat before packs. So, yeah, if there's any kind of hardware conflicts or anything like that. Oh, we've got an ROG logo. That's a good sign. There's our 10 gigabit NIC. So that's detected. Fan control. Seems to be working. All right. So we've got that going here. New CPU installed. Press F1 to run setup. 32 gigs of RAM. Both of our hard drives are detected. This is all looking pretty solid so far. F1 to run setup. Let's make sure we don't have any sort of completely weird. This is something I really recommend doing right. Oh, that CPU is at 57 degrees already. That is a big problem. At idle, we should be not sitting at 57 degrees. Hmm. That I'm not happy about. I wonder if there's anything we could do fan-wise to be a bit more aggressive. Although often a very high idle temperature actually indicates a bad mount. So we may want to take it right off and then put it back on and see if that alleviates the problem. Well, let's find out if she'll boot either way. I mean, 60 degrees is hot, but it's not it'll brick immediately if we go into an OS hot. So that's a shame. Let's find out if she boots. I guess you guys can come along for the ride if you want. We're pretty much done here. I was just thinking because Diesel and I were having a conversation about the irony of Amy Winehouse making a hit song. This is actually his observation, not mine. I can't take credit for this or blame or whichever. Making a hit song about not going to rehab and then dying of drug related complications. And I was actually thinking so this is my contribution to the discussion that the name irony should actually be different because irony has iron in it which rusts and deteriorates over time. But irony I believe will be just as delicious a thousand years from now as it was a thousand years ago when dinosaurs and their hubris. Okay, I think we're done now. So rendering. Oh, okay. We got away. Well, either way, we're into the OS. So I'm not too worried about it at this point. So that's great. The upgrade worked. We just got a diagnose our CPU. Oh, yeah. I'm going to find out about power consumption as well. So we're sitting at 160 watts idle right now. So we'll be back. So this is a bit of a public service announcement on why PS2 keyboards are still important and PS2 ports are still important because they don't require any drivers. So we've booted up again and we're still not getting our keyboard and mouse drivers loaded. Now PS2 doesn't support hot hot swap on many or hot plugging or whatever you would call it on many motherboards. So we're going to reboot this and then we should be able to use the PS2 keyboard to at least navigate into the OS where the drivers are more likely to be picked up and installed. All right. So I'm pretty sure at this point that it's not a bad amount just because it doesn't really seem to be behaving like one. But there's only one way to know for sure. What I did determine is that there is enough room in here for the stock cooler that we happen to have one of. So we're going to go ahead and install that. But once we pull it off, we'll be able to tell for sure if it was a bad mount or if it's just not quite up to the task of an extreme edition on LGA 2011 here. Now, I think I have some bad news. I think I can get this one out, but I don't think I'm going to be able to get that stock cooler in without removing this brace here. So I really, really hope that that doesn't end up being the case. But you got to work with what you got. Yeah. See, that's a perfectly fine thermal paste application there. So I really don't think that was the issue. It's not too much, not too little, just right. As Papa Bear would say or Goldilocks or whoever it was that it was Goldilocks apparently. OK. Well, whatever, man. So I'm going to, you know, speaking of perfect thermal paste applications, I'm going to commit a sin here. And I'm going to just kind of plunk this on top of the old thermal paste once I can find something to wipe it off with. Do you have any TP? Really? I stole it. I call rubbish on that. OK, that does sound like me. All right. Time to put a beefier cooler in here. So I've at least cleaned off the base. So we're going to go ahead and I guess we'll install it first. I really hope this fits or well, the screwdriver fits. I'm able to get in there and screw it in. Come on, come on, come on, Gil. Oh, I think we got this. Nice. Oh, except that wire that's under the heat sink. That'll be a problem at some point in the future here in like four minutes. OK. Same thing. Cross pattern. This side first. Remember, going in at an angle is OK, as long as you're careful and gentle. As long as you don't cross thread the screw. What did you guys think I was talking about? OK, one, two, three and four. There we go. So we have a slightly better cooler in there now. It's still a stock cooler, still nothing special about it. But at least it should work at stock speeds without sort of running too hot or anything like that. So we're going to fire this bad boy up back up once I've closed it up again and take a baseline reading of the temperatures in the BIOS again to make sure that it's running all right. OK, so our CPU is still running a little bit on the toasty side. But the funny thing is it was showing up as lower in real temp than it is in the BIOS here. So maybe it's some weird ROG feature I've never heard of. Either way, I'm going to just kind of go for gold here and we're going to go use CPU level up, which is ASUS's super simple overclocking utility thing. And we're going to go for 4.25 gigahertz just to see what happens. So wish us luck with that. And as long as as long as she's stable and doesn't exceed the maximum power we can draw from the wall, which is going to be around 600 watts because we're looking at about 90 percent efficiency on this power supply, then we should be OK. Let's see if it even like boots now. Fans ramping up. We set it to turbo mode for the automatic fan speed control. See the OS. All right, so we're finally done. The rig upgrade overclocking was a complete no go. So we're trying to figure out how to liquid cool this thing at some point here. That stock cooler just no, no, no. We might be able to turn clock speed up a little bit, but we're not able to use any of ASUS CPU level up stuff. So now to make sure that it can handle fully loading all the components inside, we're running Prime 95 in place, whatever it is, the one that does a lot of CPU and some memory. So we're sitting at around 320 watts at the wall. Now we're going to run the ARION Bench 64 to load up both of our graphics cards with a CUDA benchmark here to find out what our absolute max power consumption is going to be with this system. So there you have it, guys. I knew it was going to be borderline. This isn't the first time we've run this, so that 504 watts we're seeing right now is not quite the peak. The highest I saw was around 560 watts, which means when you factor in that the power supply is probably only around 83 to 88 percent efficient at this kind of a load, means that we are actually nowhere near the maximum load of the power supply. With that said, you should allow for a power supply to age a little bit and become less efficient and less capable over time. But particularly with very high quality units, it's much less of an issue. So a dark power pro should be just fine for that. So we're calling it good on the power supply side. We've got to figure out better CPU cooling at some point. But other than that, the new workstation is ready to rock. So don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings, reviews and other computer videos. Like this video if you liked it, dislike it if you disliked it. I know this was a bit of a departure from our usual style and leave a comment and let us know what you thought of this build guide sort of.