Building a Gaming PC with Micro Center: A Step-by-Step Guide

The first component we're going to add is the CPU, which I've chosen as the AMD Ryzen 11600K. It's going to fit right in here nice and neat and if you did want to go with a different CPU it will fit but I think this one is going to be perfect for a little system like this. Now that we have our CPU let's take a look at how it fits into the case.

I went with a compact ATX motherboard that can fit all the necessary components and even has some extra room for future upgrades. The first thing you'll notice about this build is the color scheme, which I've chosen to be black and white. It really does clean up the whole system and with those sleeve cables it adds a nice touch of elegance to the case.

Next up we have the memory, which in this case is 16GB of DDR4 RAM. Now, I know what you're thinking, "Why not 32GB or more?" And that's a great question, but for most users 16GB should be plenty. Plus, it keeps things nice and simple. We'll install the RAM into our motherboard and boot up the system to check out the performance.

The first thing I like to do when building a new PC is run some benchmarks to see how it compares to my old system. First up we have Geekbench 5, which is a great tool for measuring CPU performance. With a single core score of 1691 and multi-core score of 7944, this build is definitely holding its own.

Next up we have Cinebench R23, another popular benchmarking tool that measures GPU performance. With a total multi-core score of 11,533, it's clear that our Ryzen 11600K is putting out some serious power. Now let's move on to some GPU benchmarks and see how our RTX 3060 performs.

First up we have 3DMark FireStrike, which is a great benchmark for measuring GPU performance. With a score of 19,996 it's clear that our RTX 3060 is capable of handling even the most demanding games at high resolutions. Next up we have Time Spy, another popular benchmarking tool that measures GPU performance.

Finally, let's check out some real-world performance with some games. First up we have Forza Horizon 4 at 1080p ultra settings. With an average frame rate of 148 FPS, this game is running smoothly and looking great. Next up we have Fortnite at 1080p epic settings, which still managed to deliver an average frame rate of 134 FPS.

But the final test is always going to be Skyrm, especially with its maxed out settings. This is a system that's truly capable of delivering high frame rates on even the most demanding games. With an average frame rate of 131 FPS at 1080p max settings, this build is definitely capable of handling anything you throw at it.

Of course, no gaming PC would be complete without a good game to test it out in. So let's finish off with some Street Fighter V and GTA V at 1080p very high settings. With an average frame rate of 131 FPS and dips below that occasionally due to the complex nature of these games, this build is still holding its own.

And finally, we have Cyberpunk 2077 at 1080p medium settings with ray tracing enabled. This is a tough game to run smoothly, but our RTX 3060 is up to the task. With an average frame rate of 64 FPS, it's clear that this build has some serious capability.

In conclusion, I'm really happy with how this build turned out. The looks are clean and sleek, and performance is more than capable of handling any game you throw at it. I want to give a huge thank you to Micro Center for sending over these parts, which were free with the purchase of a computer case. If you're in the market for a new gaming PC or just want to build one yourself, be sure to check out their website and see what they have available.

Finally, if there's anything else you'd like to see running on this system, please let me know in the comments below. And don't forget to like and subscribe for more content, including upcoming videos that will show off some of the other features of this build.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey what's going on everybody it's eta prime back here again today we got an awesome little gaming pc going together here today and you know in the past i've done a lot of builds on the channel but i'd say the last 10 builds have all been amd but that's all going to change with this one because intel has recently released their 11th gen line and in this one we're going to be using the all new i5 11 600k i've been really wanting to get my hands on this to do a build with and i was finally able to round all the parts up thanks to micro center they were kind enough to send all these parts over for a build so this video is sponsored by microsoft if you're looking to build a custom gaming pc right now in this weird time we're in with pc part availability being very scarce and gpu prices skyrocketing i would definitely suggest checking out micro center as long as you have a store near you there's a good chance you can find the parts you need to put your gaming pc together and if you head over to their online custom pc builder you can choose everything you need here basically what you're going to do is choose your store columbus ohio you'll select your cpu from here we'll go with one of the new intel i5 so we'll do the eleven four hundred so we'll just select that it's going to add everything up and like i showed you you choose the store you want if it's not in stock it'll tell you it's not in stock so they have 25 plus in stock here we'll go with a motherboard let's do the msi z590 get some ram going and one of the main parts we need right now for decent gaming pc is the gpu limited stock but they do have it in stock at the store that i chose the rtx 3060. so you'll basically just go down the line choose your storage your cpu cooling software you can go with some extra peripherals if you want to it's going to add it all up over here on the right hand side and you can reserve it to go and pick it up at your local store but if you're not sure on what parts to use for your custom build you can always head over to the micro center community just join up here ask a couple questions there's a lot of nice people over here that'll help you decide on what to use for your gaming pc so yeah i think it's an awesome little tool that micro center offers and that's exactly what i used to put this one together here and basically what we're going with here is the new i5 11600 k 16 gigabytes of ram this msi z590 motherboard and an rtx 3060. this should net us some really great gaming performance but before we get into testing we need to put this thing together all right so as we're putting this thing together i'll go over the parts used for the motherboard we have the msi z590a pro this is a great little motherboard and i think it should be just fine even overclocking this new 11600k i5 cpu six course 12 threads base clock of 3.9 gigahertz with a boost up to 4.9 okay so now that we have that cpu situated in the motherboard it's time to turn our attention to the ram and for this i went with 16 gigabytes of corsair vengeance rgb pro and as you can see i did go with the white version because i wanted to keep a little bit of a black and white theme with this whole setup i'm going with when it comes to my main storage i opted to pick up a one terabyte inland platinum m.2 nvme ssd read speeds up the 3 400 megabytes write speeds up to 1900 not the fastest in the world but yeah this should definitely get the job done and this msi z590 actually supports up to three m.2 nvmes we have three slots here so if you want to add more storage down the road m.2 storage it'll be very easy now with this whole build i'm also going to be adding a two terabyte mechanical drive and that's really just going to store my games my operating system and most of the stuff that i use every single day will be running from this m.2 now when it comes to cooling down this 11600k i opted for the kraken x53 this is an all-in-one liquid cooler and i'm going to install it after i get my motherboard and everything else inside of the case and speaking of the case i went with the white and black version of the nzxt h510 really nice looking case i've been wanting to build in one for a while i just haven't gotten around to getting my hands on one but uh yeah i do like the design of this thing and i've seen some reviews online seems like a solid choice time to prepare the case so first things first i always just throw my motherboard i o shield in here i make sure it's going in the correct orientation when we lay this motherboard in here everything should line up i've also checked that all of the standoffs in the case are in the correct location for the motherboard i'm using and once i have all of that situated i'm going to go ahead and lay my motherboard down now usually when i'm using an air cooler i have something to grab onto this one's a bit awkward to get in here but it should be pretty easy just don't put any pressure on your ram make sure everything's lined up in the back make sure our standoffs in the case are lined up and we can actually go ahead and grab the hardware that came with the case and mount the motherboard down so i've got the motherboard situated in the case we have our ram we have our cpu now it's time to add our power supply and for this i opted for a 550 watt thermaltake smart power supply this is the bx1 550 non-modular and i really wanted to keep with that white and black theme because this case is going to look really nice once it's done so i opted to pick up some of the sleeved extension cables now it's not going to add any extra performance to this pc but once it's done it should look really nice and something like this we have our main 24-pin plugged in we also have our 8-pin up top for the cpu power and these sleeve kits also come with an extension for your external gpu power and since i'm using an rtx 3060 we only need a single eight pin connector now like i mentioned to cool that 11 600k off i went with the kraken x53 this should be more than enough even if we want to do like a 5.1 gigahertz overclock on this thing and uh as you can see this is a bit more involved than an air cooler would be but if you follow the included instructions or just get online for an online tutorial you'll have no trouble installing something like this and this h510 case is actually perfect for something like this because they're both made by the same manufacturer nzxt on the front of the case we have a removable bracketing system your aio radiator and fans will mount directly to this and then all we need to do is put it in with two thumb screws and once i was finished with it looks something like this i'll have the air being pulled in from the front going over the radiator and i think it turned out really nice but it's time to add the last component before cleaning everything up and that's going to be the video card for this i went with the zotac gaming geforce rtx 3060. it's going to fit right in here nice and neat and if you did want to go with a bigger card it will fit but i think the 3060 is going to be perfect for a little system like this and we'll check out the performance in just a second i'll plug in my 8-pin gpu power and once it was all said and done it looks something like this and i think it came out absolutely amazing i've got everything buttoned up and i really do like this black and white color theme here and with those sleeve cables it definitely does clean the whole system up now there's a few extra things i need to do here like install windows 10 pro but real quick we'll boot it up for the first time as you can see we get that nzxt logo on that crack and cooler i think that looks pretty cool and we also have that rgb ram now looking at it here i probably should have went with just some regular ram but this is going to work out just fine it adds a little bit of color get that plastic film off and once that's done i just need to install windows and get right into some testing and after i got everything set up the first thing i like to do is run some benchmarks first up we have geekbench 5 with a single core of 1691 which is really awesome i love that single core score and when we move over to multi it's a 7944 and keep in mind this is only six cores with 12 threads not bad at all the next thing i ran was cinebench r23 and we came in with a total multi-core score of 11 533 moving over to some gpu benchmarks first up we have 3dmark firestrike with a 19996 and finally time spy with an 8785 looking really good and this rtx 3060 is more than enough for 1080p gaming first up forza horizon 4 1080p ultra settings i mean this thing is maxed out here and i got an average of 148 fps definitely playable looks great here at those ultra settings and it's super smooth next up fortnite 1080p epic settings by the end of this i had an average of 134 fps i was really hoping we could get an average of 144 out of this and at high settings i believe it will do it but reset it epic i always like to throw one of my favorite games in and that's skyrim this is the special edition version 1080p maxed out it's going to run at 60 all day and out of the box both of the skyrim games are locked at 60 you can go into the config file and change it but running this at 60 is fine kind of the same thing with street fighter 5 here we have it at 1080p max settings and it's running perfectly gta 5 1080p very high settings i got an average of 131 fps and you'll see it dip down below that every once in a while but most of the time you're not in a fire fight and it's way above that average and finally here we have cyberpunk 2077 1080p medium settings with ray tracing set to medium we can go up to ultra but it's going to drop on down the way it's set up right now with those medium settings across the board we can get an average of 64 fps out of this and this is just a really hard game to run so overall i think the build came out really nice in the looks department and performance this rtx 3060 paired with that 11600k definitely does a great job at 1080p and if you wanted to do something like world of warcraft or even overwatch at 4k you could definitely push it out of a machine like this i do want to give micro center a big shout out for sending these parts over and if you're interested in putting a build like this together i will leave links in the description and by the way if you're interested in getting a free pair of bluetooth headphones micro center has a coupon deal going on right now you'll get online throw your email in go to your local store show them that coupon and you'll get a free set of wireless headphones but that's going to wrap it up for this video really appreciate you watching i will have one more video coming up on this build i got a couple more things that i want to test here especially emulation but if there's anything else you want to see running on this system just let me know in the comments below and like always thanks for watchinghey what's going on everybody it's eta prime back here again today we got an awesome little gaming pc going together here today and you know in the past i've done a lot of builds on the channel but i'd say the last 10 builds have all been amd but that's all going to change with this one because intel has recently released their 11th gen line and in this one we're going to be using the all new i5 11 600k i've been really wanting to get my hands on this to do a build with and i was finally able to round all the parts up thanks to micro center they were kind enough to send all these parts over for a build so this video is sponsored by microsoft if you're looking to build a custom gaming pc right now in this weird time we're in with pc part availability being very scarce and gpu prices skyrocketing i would definitely suggest checking out micro center as long as you have a store near you there's a good chance you can find the parts you need to put your gaming pc together and if you head over to their online custom pc builder you can choose everything you need here basically what you're going to do is choose your store columbus ohio you'll select your cpu from here we'll go with one of the new intel i5 so we'll do the eleven four hundred so we'll just select that it's going to add everything up and like i showed you you choose the store you want if it's not in stock it'll tell you it's not in stock so they have 25 plus in stock here we'll go with a motherboard let's do the msi z590 get some ram going and one of the main parts we need right now for decent gaming pc is the gpu limited stock but they do have it in stock at the store that i chose the rtx 3060. so you'll basically just go down the line choose your storage your cpu cooling software you can go with some extra peripherals if you want to it's going to add it all up over here on the right hand side and you can reserve it to go and pick it up at your local store but if you're not sure on what parts to use for your custom build you can always head over to the micro center community just join up here ask a couple questions there's a lot of nice people over here that'll help you decide on what to use for your gaming pc so yeah i think it's an awesome little tool that micro center offers and that's exactly what i used to put this one together here and basically what we're going with here is the new i5 11600 k 16 gigabytes of ram this msi z590 motherboard and an rtx 3060. this should net us some really great gaming performance but before we get into testing we need to put this thing together all right so as we're putting this thing together i'll go over the parts used for the motherboard we have the msi z590a pro this is a great little motherboard and i think it should be just fine even overclocking this new 11600k i5 cpu six course 12 threads base clock of 3.9 gigahertz with a boost up to 4.9 okay so now that we have that cpu situated in the motherboard it's time to turn our attention to the ram and for this i went with 16 gigabytes of corsair vengeance rgb pro and as you can see i did go with the white version because i wanted to keep a little bit of a black and white theme with this whole setup i'm going with when it comes to my main storage i opted to pick up a one terabyte inland platinum m.2 nvme ssd read speeds up the 3 400 megabytes write speeds up to 1900 not the fastest in the world but yeah this should definitely get the job done and this msi z590 actually supports up to three m.2 nvmes we have three slots here so if you want to add more storage down the road m.2 storage it'll be very easy now with this whole build i'm also going to be adding a two terabyte mechanical drive and that's really just going to store my games my operating system and most of the stuff that i use every single day will be running from this m.2 now when it comes to cooling down this 11600k i opted for the kraken x53 this is an all-in-one liquid cooler and i'm going to install it after i get my motherboard and everything else inside of the case and speaking of the case i went with the white and black version of the nzxt h510 really nice looking case i've been wanting to build in one for a while i just haven't gotten around to getting my hands on one but uh yeah i do like the design of this thing and i've seen some reviews online seems like a solid choice time to prepare the case so first things first i always just throw my motherboard i o shield in here i make sure it's going in the correct orientation when we lay this motherboard in here everything should line up i've also checked that all of the standoffs in the case are in the correct location for the motherboard i'm using and once i have all of that situated i'm going to go ahead and lay my motherboard down now usually when i'm using an air cooler i have something to grab onto this one's a bit awkward to get in here but it should be pretty easy just don't put any pressure on your ram make sure everything's lined up in the back make sure our standoffs in the case are lined up and we can actually go ahead and grab the hardware that came with the case and mount the motherboard down so i've got the motherboard situated in the case we have our ram we have our cpu now it's time to add our power supply and for this i opted for a 550 watt thermaltake smart power supply this is the bx1 550 non-modular and i really wanted to keep with that white and black theme because this case is going to look really nice once it's done so i opted to pick up some of the sleeved extension cables now it's not going to add any extra performance to this pc but once it's done it should look really nice and something like this we have our main 24-pin plugged in we also have our 8-pin up top for the cpu power and these sleeve kits also come with an extension for your external gpu power and since i'm using an rtx 3060 we only need a single eight pin connector now like i mentioned to cool that 11 600k off i went with the kraken x53 this should be more than enough even if we want to do like a 5.1 gigahertz overclock on this thing and uh as you can see this is a bit more involved than an air cooler would be but if you follow the included instructions or just get online for an online tutorial you'll have no trouble installing something like this and this h510 case is actually perfect for something like this because they're both made by the same manufacturer nzxt on the front of the case we have a removable bracketing system your aio radiator and fans will mount directly to this and then all we need to do is put it in with two thumb screws and once i was finished with it looks something like this i'll have the air being pulled in from the front going over the radiator and i think it turned out really nice but it's time to add the last component before cleaning everything up and that's going to be the video card for this i went with the zotac gaming geforce rtx 3060. it's going to fit right in here nice and neat and if you did want to go with a bigger card it will fit but i think the 3060 is going to be perfect for a little system like this and we'll check out the performance in just a second i'll plug in my 8-pin gpu power and once it was all said and done it looks something like this and i think it came out absolutely amazing i've got everything buttoned up and i really do like this black and white color theme here and with those sleeve cables it definitely does clean the whole system up now there's a few extra things i need to do here like install windows 10 pro but real quick we'll boot it up for the first time as you can see we get that nzxt logo on that crack and cooler i think that looks pretty cool and we also have that rgb ram now looking at it here i probably should have went with just some regular ram but this is going to work out just fine it adds a little bit of color get that plastic film off and once that's done i just need to install windows and get right into some testing and after i got everything set up the first thing i like to do is run some benchmarks first up we have geekbench 5 with a single core of 1691 which is really awesome i love that single core score and when we move over to multi it's a 7944 and keep in mind this is only six cores with 12 threads not bad at all the next thing i ran was cinebench r23 and we came in with a total multi-core score of 11 533 moving over to some gpu benchmarks first up we have 3dmark firestrike with a 19996 and finally time spy with an 8785 looking really good and this rtx 3060 is more than enough for 1080p gaming first up forza horizon 4 1080p ultra settings i mean this thing is maxed out here and i got an average of 148 fps definitely playable looks great here at those ultra settings and it's super smooth next up fortnite 1080p epic settings by the end of this i had an average of 134 fps i was really hoping we could get an average of 144 out of this and at high settings i believe it will do it but reset it epic i always like to throw one of my favorite games in and that's skyrim this is the special edition version 1080p maxed out it's going to run at 60 all day and out of the box both of the skyrim games are locked at 60 you can go into the config file and change it but running this at 60 is fine kind of the same thing with street fighter 5 here we have it at 1080p max settings and it's running perfectly gta 5 1080p very high settings i got an average of 131 fps and you'll see it dip down below that every once in a while but most of the time you're not in a fire fight and it's way above that average and finally here we have cyberpunk 2077 1080p medium settings with ray tracing set to medium we can go up to ultra but it's going to drop on down the way it's set up right now with those medium settings across the board we can get an average of 64 fps out of this and this is just a really hard game to run so overall i think the build came out really nice in the looks department and performance this rtx 3060 paired with that 11600k definitely does a great job at 1080p and if you wanted to do something like world of warcraft or even overwatch at 4k you could definitely push it out of a machine like this i do want to give micro center a big shout out for sending these parts over and if you're interested in putting a build like this together i will leave links in the description and by the way if you're interested in getting a free pair of bluetooth headphones micro center has a coupon deal going on right now you'll get online throw your email in go to your local store show them that coupon and you'll get a free set of wireless headphones but that's going to wrap it up for this video really appreciate you watching i will have one more video coming up on this build i got a couple more things that i want to test here especially emulation but if there's anything else you want to see running on this system just let me know in the comments below and like always thanks for watching\n"