The Build Process: A Behind-the-Scenes Look

As I began installing the SSD, I found myself feeling quite optimistic about the build process. I had started by placing it at the top of my table, securing it firmly with screws. However, things took a turn for the worse when I realized that I didn't have all the necessary screws in place. In an attempt to rectify the situation, I asked my wife, Mrs. D, to help me out. She agreed to assist me and together we managed to get everything back on track.

As I continued with the build process, things started to fall into place once again. My GPU was installed next, and I was pleased to report that it was going smoothly. However, disaster struck when I attempted to secure a bracket onto my case. In a moment of panic, I realized that I had loosened some screws unnecessarily, which caused me significant stress. Thankfully, Mrs. D came to the rescue once more, helping me to get everything back in order.

The cable management aspect of the build was proving to be a challenge. With the timer ticking away, I found myself struggling to get all the cables organized and secured properly. It was a puzzle that needed to be solved quickly, but it seemed like an insurmountable task at times. After what felt like an eternity, the side panel finally came together, albeit with some minor adjustments required.

With the case now assembled, I turned my attention to connecting all the necessary components. The 8-pin EPS and 24-pin power connectors were easily connected, but there was one major issue: a front panel connector that had come undone during the process. In an attempt to plug it in, I realized that I was actually trying to force it into place, rather than ensuring it was securely attached. Thankfully, Mrs. D noticed this and pointed out my mistake.

As we continued with the build, it became clear that there were a few minor issues that needed attention. The case's side panel wouldn't stay in place due to some slight misalignment, but I had managed to resolve this issue by adjusting everything accordingly. However, when it came time to plug in all the cables, I realized that my front panel connector was still not securely attached.

Despite these setbacks, we persevered and eventually got everything plugged in. It seemed like a minor oversight at first, but upon closer inspection, it became clear that there were indeed some major issues with my build process. Fortunately, Mrs. D's keen eye had caught this error before anyone else did.

In the end, our system came together seamlessly, despite some initial setbacks and missteps along the way. The build process proved to be a true test of endurance, but ultimately it was worth it in the end. And as for me? Well, let's just say I won't be winning any awards for my building skills anytime soon.

The Verdict

After tallying up the votes, it became clear that I had emerged victorious. Paul, who had been a part of our judging panel, voted for me and explained that one of his main reasons was because my LED lighting system wasn't functioning properly due to not being plugged in. Heather's system, on the other hand, featured tempered glass sides, which made it easier to manage cables.

In the end, I managed to squeak out a victory by a narrow margin. However, our panel member, Chris, pointed out that my build process had been marred by some major issues and that maybe I wasn't as skilled at building systems as I thought. Despite this, I was thrilled to come out on top.

The Rematch

With my win still fresh in the air, it's clear that a rematch is inevitable. And judging by the reaction of our panel members, I think we can expect some fireworks when we face off again. After all, there's no way Chris and Paul were going to let me get away with such subpar building skills for long.

In conclusion, my build process may have been imperfect, but it taught me a valuable lesson about the importance of attention to detail and perseverance. And even though I won this round, I know that there will be many more opportunities to showcase my skills in the future. Bring it on!

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enso something interesting happened the other day my own wife challenged me to a cable management 1v1 showdown so here we are the audacity of this woman what prompted that anyway cuz I think I have better cable management than you decide what it is you know I'm glad we have that on now I'm glad we're recording that so we can play it back after I beat you I hope you don't lose cuz it'll be really embarrassing it'll be way more embarrassing for me to lose right just to make things as fair as possible obviously I have a bit more building experience than you but we are using an identical set of hardware pretty much straight across the board I think with the exception of SSD in memory because those don't really matter but yeah pretty much apples to apples hardware so you wanna list off the components really quick sure for this sex we're using rice and CPUs we have an azrog a.m. for B 450 motherboard 16 gigabytes of RAM a r8 spire cooler in our TX 2080 founders Edition will each have an SSD and for the case we'll be using a Corsair spec for yes I intentionally picked that case out because of well it's more or less an entry-level case and so the cable management in it isn't stellar challenge yeah it makes it very challenging there's no power supply shroud there's very minimal space between the back of the motherboard tray and the right side panel and so forth so it should be interesting and finally we're using a non modular power supply also my idea to to make things extra fun for us and then we also have rules because we're not animals so it's gonna be 15 minutes we're gonna 15 minutes to get the job done essentially and all the components are pretty much gonna be pre-installed with the exception of the GPU and the SSD because it's gonna be up to us where we want to mount the SSD there's a couple different mounting locations and there's a drive cage with three trays and there's also two mounting points at the back behind the motherboard tray so that'll be completely up to us and then GPU will want to wait on that because depending on where you plug in your SATA cable it might be easier to do that before a GPU installation also we can use a total of five zip ties they can be any size we have two different sizes large and small you can mix and match the sizes but you can't have more than five total that being said we can use the pre-installed zip ties there are a couple of pre-installed zip ties there in the case those are completely fine if you want to leave them alone you can if you want but it doesn't grant you any additional zip ties if you do there's also twist ties in the case that we cannot use we have to remove the twist ties we can't leave purpose them in any way additionally every single cable that can be used must be used and if if it's not by the end of that 15 minutes then you incur a penalty and we'll get the penalties in a moment additionally if you can't put the right side panel on relatively easily or if it's just not going to happen that's also a penalty against your final score so speaking of scoring let's talk about how this is all gonna get judged we're gonna have three judges for today the first one is the one and only Chris who is also our camera operator for today Chris is a special judge because he's gonna be the only one today who actually gets to see our work in person so his opinions gonna be very important our second judge is our Twitter followers we're gonna do a Twitter poll and they're not gonna know whose bill does whose so it's gonna be a blind vote and then finally we're gonna have a celebrity judge our good friend Paul for Paul's hardware he's actually gonna weigh in and and he's you know he's he's an expert builder himself so very important to have hanging boards why I don't see I'll say he's not gonna know who's build is who's either you know if he did he probably would choose yours clearly hates me each judge cast one vote of course whoever has a majority vote wins the contest however for every penalty you incur you get minus one vote against your total score all right so could essentially put you out of the game and that's pretty much it I think we covered it so are you are you are you ready okay good luck to you good luck to you good sportsmanship I like it you guys need it bad sportsmanship that quickly 180 all right let's go it's on are you ready honey yeah I'm ready all right let's get all of it I'm gonna start the timer count us down Chris oh okay I think I'll install the GPU first that sounds like a great idea well I'm not giving up any of my strategy so you do whatever you want I don't want your crappy strategy anyway what my Togo you having problems over there pal no oh now we didn't discuss this deal all four screws have to go in there sis t just - let's just do - all right - what he is installed either the rush sounds like I hear some struggling over there honey I just didn't realize there's so many screws on this bracket for the GPU oh wow he's got a bit overwhelmed it's just annoying that's all I already have my GPU and SST installed babe how about you I'm not saying anything go away everything's fine you're stressing out over there nope oh my gosh I actually perform better under pressure unlike some people I meet you good damnit definitely got the better of Squire cutters oh my god ouch what's happening seriously okay oh that's rough there's no way babe I don't know if we really gave ourselves enough time to be honest well sounds like a personal problem he's damn zip-tie holes on this case they're so thin it's like threading a frickin needle you can't even use the Lord as if touch oh my god really 3-minute warning so my strategy is not to be perfect it just needs to be better than holy crap that was hard that was so much more challenging I thought how'd you do honey oh I can't touch anything okay so this this is my build it's not up to par with my usual quality of cable managing but I did the best I could in the allot of time that I had and I think I did pretty good all things considered you know I've got to I've got the excess cables I didn't use nicely zip-tied at the bottom of the case I didn't have time to quite make this 8 pin EPS cable as neat as I would have liked to obviously with the case not having a cutout in the top left corner of the motherboard I had no choice but to sort of run it across the mobo there you can see I actually opted to mount the SSD in the lower tray just to be able to hide some of the cables underneath the cage a bit more effectively there's actual kind of weird tie-down points here where there's just two holes they're not really traditional tie-down points and the holes are very small so I couldn't even use the larger thicker zip ties that we have on hand but the smaller ones that actually do fit are not very long so I had a hard time I actually had to go through one or two different zip ties they kept breaking because they weren't quite long enough to to fit all these cables comfortably but I got one of them on there these were pre-installed from the case I left those there this is probably the the hairiest part of the bill down here because that's that's exactly when I ran out of time however I did get one last large zip tie if you can look right there pretty much tying down large bulk of these cables otherwise the side panel would probably have had a really difficult time getting on that was done at the very last second but there it is the winning prize PC I'm sure let's see how you did honey yeah let's take a look come on he just oh oh I got to see this no you you've been talking up a storm so long let me see what you did so I had a few hangups sit the obviously screwed me over royally a few hangups I started out installing the SSD that was fine he went right here at the top top cage yep and then I asked my table moving it's fine it's all fine all right so I have mrs. D installed I had my GPU installed I was actually moving pretty quickly but then when I was putting the the bracket on here on the side I had almost all my screws in and then I realized I didn't realize how loose these were and they weren't even underneath the bracket wait why were you worried about these ones these should have never been uninstalled you said I had to remove this entire thing no I was talking about this thing to play yes I'm coming now I thought that I needed to remove all these in order to take this off just when I was about to like make everything look good the timer went off so basically this was a cable management challenge and I did sir okay management yeah there's no way the side panel spitting on that okay so that would be one penalty and then do you have everything plugged in I believe so your 8 pin EPS is good 24 pin check we do have a front front panel connector is undone there's one that's how they came undone when it fell because I make sure they're all plugged in before we so you have one unplugged cable I didn't say this earlier because I was trying to look good but you actually notice that one of my front panel connectors came undone as well while I was in the process of pulling the other cables through the thicker cables through it kind of just popped out with the other ones and I was very confident that I had all those plugged in as well so I would suspect that your front panel connector came out before the timer was up I knew I was getting a point docked with the side panel not going on so I was really careful to make sure they're all plugged in I think the table collapses right there oh I don't actually think the system was in frame let me double-check and the handsaw oh I think this is one of your front panel connectors it looks plugged in which is the one that's unplugged right now I think one of the power top-left yeah see that looks it looks like you might be good honey yeah I mean I can't really see anything I can't say yes or no okay we got to make a decision here so because there's no conclusive evidence that you fail to plug in the connector before the 15 minutes was up I feel like we should do the whole innocent until proven guilty let's just say that you only have one penalty against you for not being able to put the side panel on I think at this point we should just let Chris administer the other two votes to Paul and to Twitter tally up the votes put it in an envelope and then hand it to us we'll open it and declare a winner so okay let's do it let's do it good good luck all right here we are Chris do you have the envelope with the results inside ah go ahead and reveal the first vote one of the time Kyle Twitter oh I won the Twitter poll one for me you are fired explain yourself yourself because on Heather's it was our LED which is like whatever it's like yeah it's not plugged in but yours was the reset button functional Wow you were really splitting hairs oh there's a second reason the cables that because of you know the psyche panel is not a tempered glass you can't see it so it really doesn't matter if it's messy or not if anything I felt hers was easier to close than yours because Brenda we're so flexible oh they just lay flat anywhere they fit oh so just don't do any cable marriage at all that's it's the best chance you have of getting your side panel on yeah okay well you know we we did make you a judge so that's that's our fault I don't know if the last one is okay let's see it is the tiebreaker this is for all the marbles and and me voted for me thank you Paul Paul's my homie so it looks like I have two votes why he has one and we both have one penalty against us so majority wins anyway looks like I'm the winner yay hurray to me good job good job wifey job - I think the rematch might be in order I think that needs to happen anyway thank you very much for watching everyone toss a like on the video if you enjoyed it get subscribe so you don't miss any more notes or you can just like it still its engagement that's fine to get subscribe so you don't miss any more tech stuff like this coming at you really soon thank you very much for watching have a good one and I'll see you in the next videoso something interesting happened the other day my own wife challenged me to a cable management 1v1 showdown so here we are the audacity of this woman what prompted that anyway cuz I think I have better cable management than you decide what it is you know I'm glad we have that on now I'm glad we're recording that so we can play it back after I beat you I hope you don't lose cuz it'll be really embarrassing it'll be way more embarrassing for me to lose right just to make things as fair as possible obviously I have a bit more building experience than you but we are using an identical set of hardware pretty much straight across the board I think with the exception of SSD in memory because those don't really matter but yeah pretty much apples to apples hardware so you wanna list off the components really quick sure for this sex we're using rice and CPUs we have an azrog a.m. for B 450 motherboard 16 gigabytes of RAM a r8 spire cooler in our TX 2080 founders Edition will each have an SSD and for the case we'll be using a Corsair spec for yes I intentionally picked that case out because of well it's more or less an entry-level case and so the cable management in it isn't stellar challenge yeah it makes it very challenging there's no power supply shroud there's very minimal space between the back of the motherboard tray and the right side panel and so forth so it should be interesting and finally we're using a non modular power supply also my idea to to make things extra fun for us and then we also have rules because we're not animals so it's gonna be 15 minutes we're gonna 15 minutes to get the job done essentially and all the components are pretty much gonna be pre-installed with the exception of the GPU and the SSD because it's gonna be up to us where we want to mount the SSD there's a couple different mounting locations and there's a drive cage with three trays and there's also two mounting points at the back behind the motherboard tray so that'll be completely up to us and then GPU will want to wait on that because depending on where you plug in your SATA cable it might be easier to do that before a GPU installation also we can use a total of five zip ties they can be any size we have two different sizes large and small you can mix and match the sizes but you can't have more than five total that being said we can use the pre-installed zip ties there are a couple of pre-installed zip ties there in the case those are completely fine if you want to leave them alone you can if you want but it doesn't grant you any additional zip ties if you do there's also twist ties in the case that we cannot use we have to remove the twist ties we can't leave purpose them in any way additionally every single cable that can be used must be used and if if it's not by the end of that 15 minutes then you incur a penalty and we'll get the penalties in a moment additionally if you can't put the right side panel on relatively easily or if it's just not going to happen that's also a penalty against your final score so speaking of scoring let's talk about how this is all gonna get judged we're gonna have three judges for today the first one is the one and only Chris who is also our camera operator for today Chris is a special judge because he's gonna be the only one today who actually gets to see our work in person so his opinions gonna be very important our second judge is our Twitter followers we're gonna do a Twitter poll and they're not gonna know whose bill does whose so it's gonna be a blind vote and then finally we're gonna have a celebrity judge our good friend Paul for Paul's hardware he's actually gonna weigh in and and he's you know he's he's an expert builder himself so very important to have hanging boards why I don't see I'll say he's not gonna know who's build is who's either you know if he did he probably would choose yours clearly hates me each judge cast one vote of course whoever has a majority vote wins the contest however for every penalty you incur you get minus one vote against your total score all right so could essentially put you out of the game and that's pretty much it I think we covered it so are you are you are you ready okay good luck to you good luck to you good sportsmanship I like it you guys need it bad sportsmanship that quickly 180 all right let's go it's on are you ready honey yeah I'm ready all right let's get all of it I'm gonna start the timer count us down Chris oh okay I think I'll install the GPU first that sounds like a great idea well I'm not giving up any of my strategy so you do whatever you want I don't want your crappy strategy anyway what my Togo you having problems over there pal no oh now we didn't discuss this deal all four screws have to go in there sis t just - let's just do - all right - what he is installed either the rush sounds like I hear some struggling over there honey I just didn't realize there's so many screws on this bracket for the GPU oh wow he's got a bit overwhelmed it's just annoying that's all I already have my GPU and SST installed babe how about you I'm not saying anything go away everything's fine you're stressing out over there nope oh my gosh I actually perform better under pressure unlike some people I meet you good damnit definitely got the better of Squire cutters oh my god ouch what's happening seriously okay oh that's rough there's no way babe I don't know if we really gave ourselves enough time to be honest well sounds like a personal problem he's damn zip-tie holes on this case they're so thin it's like threading a frickin needle you can't even use the Lord as if touch oh my god really 3-minute warning so my strategy is not to be perfect it just needs to be better than holy crap that was hard that was so much more challenging I thought how'd you do honey oh I can't touch anything okay so this this is my build it's not up to par with my usual quality of cable managing but I did the best I could in the allot of time that I had and I think I did pretty good all things considered you know I've got to I've got the excess cables I didn't use nicely zip-tied at the bottom of the case I didn't have time to quite make this 8 pin EPS cable as neat as I would have liked to obviously with the case not having a cutout in the top left corner of the motherboard I had no choice but to sort of run it across the mobo there you can see I actually opted to mount the SSD in the lower tray just to be able to hide some of the cables underneath the cage a bit more effectively there's actual kind of weird tie-down points here where there's just two holes they're not really traditional tie-down points and the holes are very small so I couldn't even use the larger thicker zip ties that we have on hand but the smaller ones that actually do fit are not very long so I had a hard time I actually had to go through one or two different zip ties they kept breaking because they weren't quite long enough to to fit all these cables comfortably but I got one of them on there these were pre-installed from the case I left those there this is probably the the hairiest part of the bill down here because that's that's exactly when I ran out of time however I did get one last large zip tie if you can look right there pretty much tying down large bulk of these cables otherwise the side panel would probably have had a really difficult time getting on that was done at the very last second but there it is the winning prize PC I'm sure let's see how you did honey yeah let's take a look come on he just oh oh I got to see this no you you've been talking up a storm so long let me see what you did so I had a few hangups sit the obviously screwed me over royally a few hangups I started out installing the SSD that was fine he went right here at the top top cage yep and then I asked my table moving it's fine it's all fine all right so I have mrs. D installed I had my GPU installed I was actually moving pretty quickly but then when I was putting the the bracket on here on the side I had almost all my screws in and then I realized I didn't realize how loose these were and they weren't even underneath the bracket wait why were you worried about these ones these should have never been uninstalled you said I had to remove this entire thing no I was talking about this thing to play yes I'm coming now I thought that I needed to remove all these in order to take this off just when I was about to like make everything look good the timer went off so basically this was a cable management challenge and I did sir okay management yeah there's no way the side panel spitting on that okay so that would be one penalty and then do you have everything plugged in I believe so your 8 pin EPS is good 24 pin check we do have a front front panel connector is undone there's one that's how they came undone when it fell because I make sure they're all plugged in before we so you have one unplugged cable I didn't say this earlier because I was trying to look good but you actually notice that one of my front panel connectors came undone as well while I was in the process of pulling the other cables through the thicker cables through it kind of just popped out with the other ones and I was very confident that I had all those plugged in as well so I would suspect that your front panel connector came out before the timer was up I knew I was getting a point docked with the side panel not going on so I was really careful to make sure they're all plugged in I think the table collapses right there oh I don't actually think the system was in frame let me double-check and the handsaw oh I think this is one of your front panel connectors it looks plugged in which is the one that's unplugged right now I think one of the power top-left yeah see that looks it looks like you might be good honey yeah I mean I can't really see anything I can't say yes or no okay we got to make a decision here so because there's no conclusive evidence that you fail to plug in the connector before the 15 minutes was up I feel like we should do the whole innocent until proven guilty let's just say that you only have one penalty against you for not being able to put the side panel on I think at this point we should just let Chris administer the other two votes to Paul and to Twitter tally up the votes put it in an envelope and then hand it to us we'll open it and declare a winner so okay let's do it let's do it good good luck all right here we are Chris do you have the envelope with the results inside ah go ahead and reveal the first vote one of the time Kyle Twitter oh I won the Twitter poll one for me you are fired explain yourself yourself because on Heather's it was our LED which is like whatever it's like yeah it's not plugged in but yours was the reset button functional Wow you were really splitting hairs oh there's a second reason the cables that because of you know the psyche panel is not a tempered glass you can't see it so it really doesn't matter if it's messy or not if anything I felt hers was easier to close than yours because Brenda we're so flexible oh they just lay flat anywhere they fit oh so just don't do any cable marriage at all that's it's the best chance you have of getting your side panel on yeah okay well you know we we did make you a judge so that's that's our fault I don't know if the last one is okay let's see it is the tiebreaker this is for all the marbles and and me voted for me thank you Paul Paul's my homie so it looks like I have two votes why he has one and we both have one penalty against us so majority wins anyway looks like I'm the winner yay hurray to me good job good job wifey job - I think the rematch might be in order I think that needs to happen anyway thank you very much for watching everyone toss a like on the video if you enjoyed it get subscribe so you don't miss any more notes or you can just like it still its engagement that's fine to get subscribe so you don't miss any more tech stuff like this coming at you really soon thank you very much for watching have a good one and I'll see you in the next video\n"