The Art of Building a PC: A Cautionary Tale

As I sat amidst the wreckage of our latest PC build, I couldn't help but think that Lyle had done it all wrong. The front panel connectors hung out like entrails, a mess of cables and wires snaking about without any semblance of organization or care. It was as if he had just plugged things in without thinking, hoping they would magically work together in harmony. But it didn't. And now we were left with a system that looked like it belonged in a science fiction movie, not a respectable PC built by a tech-savvy individual.

The case itself was cavernous, with plenty of breathing room for our components to thrive. But Lyle had seen fit to stuff as many parts into the case as possible, without so much as a thought for airflow or thermal management. The result was a system that looked like it was going to overheat at any moment, and probably would if we didn't take drastic action.

So, we decided to start from scratch. We removed everything that Lyle had put in place, and carefully planned our cable management strategy from the outset. This time around, we paid close attention to airflow and thermal management, making sure that our components were properly cooled and that the case was not a recipe for disaster.

Our first decision was where to mount our GPU. In the past, Lyle had seen fit to stick it in the x4 slot, where it was doing little more than choke data out of the system. But this time around, we decided to move it to the x16 slot, where it belonged. And what a difference that made! The average frame rates improved by a staggering 48%, making our system look like a completely different animal.

But Lyle's mistakes didn't stop there. Our SSD was mounted in a cable grommet, rather than being properly secured and connected to the motherboard. And our case fans were spinning wildly, picking up on my mic and driving me a bit crazy. But we took care of that by unplugging one of the fans and installing it in a more sensible location.

Now, after all the changes we had made, it was time to validate our claims with some benchmarks. We ran a series of tests at 1920x1080 on Windows 10 64-bit, using the latest Google drivers from Nvidia. And what we found out was that this new and improved system outperformed the old one in pretty much every area.

The graphics card, for example, saw a tremendous 48% uplift in average frame rates, making it look like we were running two different systems side by side. The old system was still playable, but the difference was night and day. And while Lyle's mistakes had a minimal impact on our frame rates directly, they did have an impact on thermals. We saw a 5-degree drop in temperature on our 1700X, thanks to better airflow and thermal management.

The moral of the story today is quite simple but important: if you're gonna do something, do it right. Don't be like Lyle and just plug things in without thinking. Read the manual, swallow your pride, and always remember that just because something fits, doesn't mean it should go there.

If you've built a PC at home with similar issues, we'd love to hear from you in the comments below. How did you manage to overcome these issues? Was it trial and error, or did you have some experience under your belt? Let us know!

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Thanks for tuning in, and we'll see you all in the next week!

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enthe core p90 TG from Thermaltake sports an open-air design and a prism shaped body surrounded by five millimeter thick tempered glass for a spectacular view from any angle a trio of compartments housed full-size hardware and expansive support for custom water cooling all of which can be shown up vertically horizontally or even on your wall to learn more click the link in the description for more info what's going on guys welcome back to the channel hope you're all doing well I just want to start this video off by saying I am truly sorry for the actions of my identical twin brother Lyle who came in here unbeknownst to me in the Milan studio when I was gone and built this travesty of a system decided to film it and upload the video in its entirety to my YouTube channel I am sorry I had no idea that this happened until after the fact and trust me I had some very strong words with Lyle as soon as I found out but I thought at the very least I could make light of a bad situation by learning from all of the mistakes he's made when assembling this rig so today what we're gonna do is compare the gaining performance of the system that he's built in its current state against an identical one using all the same hardware that I've reconfigured and installed everything properly just to see what kind of performance drop off if any you would incur from building a system like this now before we dive into the benchmarks I want to quickly point out all of the things that Lyle has done incorrectly here there's quite a few of them so for starters we have our case fans completely still the system is powered on mind you and yet we have to 120s the front a 140 at the back and a 200 millimeter up top that are not plugged in so that's a lot of airflow we're missing out on that's not reaching our main components and we'll actually be able to validate soon enough what kind of thermal costs that costs additionally we have a CPU cooler with a fan mounted on the left side of the fin stack moving air towards the front of the case which seems a bit backwards to me if it were me I'd have the fan on the opposite side pushing air through the radiator towards the back of the case so we can get ejected out with the help of this fan assuming it was plugged in look at this only one of our memory sticks is mounted in the proper slot that's a 50% Lyle you know what that is and we also have a very nice MSI GTX 1080 gaming excursion Utley mounted into an X 4 slot so it's only receiving four PCIe lanes which if there's gonna be anything I think that tanks gaming performance with this system it's gonna be that and honestly I don't think there'd be as much concern if this was flooded in the x8 slot because there's typically very little drop-off going from 16 X to 8x but I think 4 X were tipping the scales at that point and we'll see exactly what kind of damage that does we have a power supply that's mounted upside down depending on who you ask with the fan up top here which some people claim is going to compete for airflow with your graphics card especially one that's mounted so closely together I think this might be a non-issue once we mount the GPU up to the 16x slot so maybe this might be one area where Lyle gets off easy but rest assured we'll hold him accountable for everything else like these front panel connectors that are just sort of hanging out of our case like entrails absolutely disgusting he could have at least put them behind the motherboard tray if he wasn't gonna plug him in what a pig and finally we have an SSD that's just hanging out of a cable grommet not sure what the thought process was there Lyle did you miss the 1 2 3 4 SSD trike right in front of you come on dude this is unacceptable and quite frankly I can't look at the system a moment longer so let's just go ahead and redo everything he's done wrong which is everything and give this thing a makeover all right guys this is what a proper system should look like Lyle take notes we got our GPU in the proper x16 slot or CPU coolers facing the right way our case fans are spinning for the love of God although this one is kind of picking up on my mic right now so I'm gonna unplug it hey don't mind me rest assured I tested it with the fan spinning up for our benchmarks but what I want to say here is that not only does this clean up the overall look of our system especially after tidying up the cable management but in theory making these changes should drop our temperatures on our 1700 I rise in 7 1700 in our GT X 1080 while also boosting our gaming performance in terms of frame rates so I think it's time to validate these claims with the benchmarks that I run at 1920 by 1080 on Windows 10 64 bit using the latest Google drivers from Nvidia ladies and gentlemen without further ado here are the benchmarks while the benchmarks have spoken and what they've said is that this new and improved system outperforms the old one in pretty much every area starting with the graphics card I mean simply swapping it from the x4 slot where it was just being choked for data into the x16 slot we saw a tremendous 48 percent uplift in average frame rates and that was combining all the data from our five different tests that's insane that's really really insane almost to the point where it felt like I was gaining on two different systems because this new one was so much more visibly smooth in every sense that being said I got to give the old crappy system some credit it was still very playable but the frame rate difference is just so vast that it really is kind of night and day additionally all the other changes that we made in the system have less of an impact on frame rates directly and more to do with thermals I would say particularly for our risin 7 1,700 here we actually dropped 5 degrees going from 42 to 37 which isn't a whole lot granted this is a 65 watt TDP chip in the first place so it's not going to get very hot from the get-go and then for degrees we've dropped off of our graphics card going from 72 to 68 now I was actually expecting a much larger thermal Delta here and I think one of the reasons apart from again 65 watt TDP chip that we're seeing this is because the case that we're dealing with is so cavernous there's a lot of breathing room inside of the trooper as is and also the fact that we get that nice unimpeded front mesh grille means that we actually have room for passive airflow here which definitely helps out our components evidently so I think what this is all chucking up - is that the moral of the story today is quite simple but important and that is if you're gonna do something do it right don't be like Lyle and don't just plug and chug things in arbitrarily read the manual don't be afraid of the manual try to swallow your pride you know when it comes to to building your PC and stuff like that and always remember that just because something fits doesn't mean it should go there that's what she said cutting things off right there ladies and gentlemen thank you so much for tuning in let me know in the comments if your system at home looks anything like this one or if there's certain things that you've mounted you know in an unorthodox or unconventional way for whatever reason and and how that's been working out for you I'd love to hear all about it down below apart from that guys toss a like on the video if you enjoyed it you can also get subscribed to the channel so you don't miss any more of our tech stuff coming at you really soon you can also follow us on a floatplane for three bucks a month if you want to catch our videos a week early without ads I'll put a link for that in the video description apart from that guys thank you so much for tuning in have a good one and I'll see you all in the next weekthe core p90 TG from Thermaltake sports an open-air design and a prism shaped body surrounded by five millimeter thick tempered glass for a spectacular view from any angle a trio of compartments housed full-size hardware and expansive support for custom water cooling all of which can be shown up vertically horizontally or even on your wall to learn more click the link in the description for more info what's going on guys welcome back to the channel hope you're all doing well I just want to start this video off by saying I am truly sorry for the actions of my identical twin brother Lyle who came in here unbeknownst to me in the Milan studio when I was gone and built this travesty of a system decided to film it and upload the video in its entirety to my YouTube channel I am sorry I had no idea that this happened until after the fact and trust me I had some very strong words with Lyle as soon as I found out but I thought at the very least I could make light of a bad situation by learning from all of the mistakes he's made when assembling this rig so today what we're gonna do is compare the gaining performance of the system that he's built in its current state against an identical one using all the same hardware that I've reconfigured and installed everything properly just to see what kind of performance drop off if any you would incur from building a system like this now before we dive into the benchmarks I want to quickly point out all of the things that Lyle has done incorrectly here there's quite a few of them so for starters we have our case fans completely still the system is powered on mind you and yet we have to 120s the front a 140 at the back and a 200 millimeter up top that are not plugged in so that's a lot of airflow we're missing out on that's not reaching our main components and we'll actually be able to validate soon enough what kind of thermal costs that costs additionally we have a CPU cooler with a fan mounted on the left side of the fin stack moving air towards the front of the case which seems a bit backwards to me if it were me I'd have the fan on the opposite side pushing air through the radiator towards the back of the case so we can get ejected out with the help of this fan assuming it was plugged in look at this only one of our memory sticks is mounted in the proper slot that's a 50% Lyle you know what that is and we also have a very nice MSI GTX 1080 gaming excursion Utley mounted into an X 4 slot so it's only receiving four PCIe lanes which if there's gonna be anything I think that tanks gaming performance with this system it's gonna be that and honestly I don't think there'd be as much concern if this was flooded in the x8 slot because there's typically very little drop-off going from 16 X to 8x but I think 4 X were tipping the scales at that point and we'll see exactly what kind of damage that does we have a power supply that's mounted upside down depending on who you ask with the fan up top here which some people claim is going to compete for airflow with your graphics card especially one that's mounted so closely together I think this might be a non-issue once we mount the GPU up to the 16x slot so maybe this might be one area where Lyle gets off easy but rest assured we'll hold him accountable for everything else like these front panel connectors that are just sort of hanging out of our case like entrails absolutely disgusting he could have at least put them behind the motherboard tray if he wasn't gonna plug him in what a pig and finally we have an SSD that's just hanging out of a cable grommet not sure what the thought process was there Lyle did you miss the 1 2 3 4 SSD trike right in front of you come on dude this is unacceptable and quite frankly I can't look at the system a moment longer so let's just go ahead and redo everything he's done wrong which is everything and give this thing a makeover all right guys this is what a proper system should look like Lyle take notes we got our GPU in the proper x16 slot or CPU coolers facing the right way our case fans are spinning for the love of God although this one is kind of picking up on my mic right now so I'm gonna unplug it hey don't mind me rest assured I tested it with the fan spinning up for our benchmarks but what I want to say here is that not only does this clean up the overall look of our system especially after tidying up the cable management but in theory making these changes should drop our temperatures on our 1700 I rise in 7 1700 in our GT X 1080 while also boosting our gaming performance in terms of frame rates so I think it's time to validate these claims with the benchmarks that I run at 1920 by 1080 on Windows 10 64 bit using the latest Google drivers from Nvidia ladies and gentlemen without further ado here are the benchmarks while the benchmarks have spoken and what they've said is that this new and improved system outperforms the old one in pretty much every area starting with the graphics card I mean simply swapping it from the x4 slot where it was just being choked for data into the x16 slot we saw a tremendous 48 percent uplift in average frame rates and that was combining all the data from our five different tests that's insane that's really really insane almost to the point where it felt like I was gaining on two different systems because this new one was so much more visibly smooth in every sense that being said I got to give the old crappy system some credit it was still very playable but the frame rate difference is just so vast that it really is kind of night and day additionally all the other changes that we made in the system have less of an impact on frame rates directly and more to do with thermals I would say particularly for our risin 7 1,700 here we actually dropped 5 degrees going from 42 to 37 which isn't a whole lot granted this is a 65 watt TDP chip in the first place so it's not going to get very hot from the get-go and then for degrees we've dropped off of our graphics card going from 72 to 68 now I was actually expecting a much larger thermal Delta here and I think one of the reasons apart from again 65 watt TDP chip that we're seeing this is because the case that we're dealing with is so cavernous there's a lot of breathing room inside of the trooper as is and also the fact that we get that nice unimpeded front mesh grille means that we actually have room for passive airflow here which definitely helps out our components evidently so I think what this is all chucking up - is that the moral of the story today is quite simple but important and that is if you're gonna do something do it right don't be like Lyle and don't just plug and chug things in arbitrarily read the manual don't be afraid of the manual try to swallow your pride you know when it comes to to building your PC and stuff like that and always remember that just because something fits doesn't mean it should go there that's what she said cutting things off right there ladies and gentlemen thank you so much for tuning in let me know in the comments if your system at home looks anything like this one or if there's certain things that you've mounted you know in an unorthodox or unconventional way for whatever reason and and how that's been working out for you I'd love to hear all about it down below apart from that guys toss a like on the video if you enjoyed it you can also get subscribed to the channel so you don't miss any more of our tech stuff coming at you really soon you can also follow us on a floatplane for three bucks a month if you want to catch our videos a week early without ads I'll put a link for that in the video description apart from that guys thank you so much for tuning in have a good one and I'll see you all in the next week\n"