The Gigabyte Control Center: A Comprehensive Guide to Building a Gaming Computer

Every motherboard manufacturer has its own software setup that helps users pull downloads and updates from their system. Typically, they have a Masterpiece of software that facilitates this process. However, it's often recommended to grab drivers directly from the manufacturer of your motherboard to ensure they are up-to-date and as accurate as possible.

In this tutorial, we will demonstrate how to download and install drivers for our Gigabyte motherboard and NVIDIA graphics card. We start by searching for the most up-to-date driver for our specific GPU, which in our case is a GeForce 4070 Super. By searching online, we find that Windows 11 has an updated driver available, which we can download.

Once we have downloaded all the necessary drivers, we need to copy them over to our flash drive and move them to our system. This process ensures that our computer recognizes and uses the latest version of each driver. Additionally, it's essential to note that downloading motherboard drivers and graphics drivers are crucial steps in getting our gaming computer up and running smoothly.

In some cases, users may also need to download other software related to their specific components, such as case fans or LED lighting systems. The key is to find the correct software setup for your system and follow the tutorial provided by the manufacturer. While some RGB software can be finicky, it's essential to ensure that our system is configured correctly to take full advantage of our gaming experience.

With all the necessary drivers copied over to our internal drive, we can now restart our computer and begin the process of getting online. This may involve downloading gigabyte control center, which serves as an overall piece of software designed to keep everything up-to-date. By following this tutorial, users can ensure that their system is running smoothly and efficiently.

Before completing our tutorial, it's essential to double-check a few key settings on our computer. Specifically, we should verify the resolution and frame rate on our monitor to ensure that they are set correctly. This may involve accessing the advanced display settings within our system's display settings. By taking these final steps, users can be confident that their gaming computer is optimized for peak performance.

In conclusion, building a gaming computer requires attention to detail and a willingness to invest time in getting everything up-to-date and configured correctly. By following this tutorial and downloading the necessary drivers, we have successfully built ourselves a high-performance gaming computer that will provide an exceptional experience. We would like to thank Mic Center for sponsoring this tutorial and supporting our efforts in creating educational content for PC enthusiasts.

For those interested in building their own gaming computer or upgrading their existing system, it's essential to explore the resources provided by reputable manufacturers such as Gigabyte and NVIDIA. By doing so, users can ensure that they have access to the latest software and hardware configurations designed specifically for their needs. Remember to subscribe to our channel and check out the links in our description for more information on PC components and tutorials.

Finally, we would like to take a moment to apologize to our wonderful edit team for asking them to edit through 17 hours of footage during this tutorial's production. We appreciate their hard work and dedication to ensuring that our content is polished and informative.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enWelcome to our 2024 gaming PC tutorial in this video I'm going to walk you through everything you need to know to build yourself a gaming PC so whether this is your first build or you just want to refresh on the 2024 latest and greatest on Tech this is the video for you so I'm going to show you how to pick your components how to put the entire PC together and all the other stuff you need to do to go from a pile of parts in your cart to a completed gaming PC and of course it is all thanks to our sponsors here at Microcenter so let's get started first first things first before you build a PC you need all of the right building blocks now it can be really tempting to just pick any old Parts based on the budget or aesthetic but you have to make sure that all components are compatible or they may not fit together or even turn on properly now there are several online compatibility Checkers including of course the Micro Center PC Builder which really are incredibly useful when finding components since they can automatically let you know if there is a compatibility issue with your Hardware the CPU AKA processor is often referred to as the brain of the computer now as far as your choices between AMD and Intel thankfully here in 2024 there is not a bad option and both on the ryzen side as well as on the Intel Core side you have a ton of selections so specifically looking at ryzen on the top of the Shelf here you can see the high-end ryzen 9 processors you can also come down to the ryzen 7 ryzen 5 and sometimes even ryzen 3 so for today I going to be using the AMD ryzen 77700 X this is an 8 core processor that is not going to give us a lot of gaming performance but importantly also productivity performance now the choice between AMD and Intel and ryzen 9 versus ryzen 7 or whatever is largely down to price as always when I'm at micr Center I like to take advantage of their bundle deals so this is normally a $320 processor but when you bundle it with a motherboard and RAM you can get the entire setup for $400 saving you a ton of money often times I let this dictate some of the parts that I choose because you can save an absolute Fortune by getting a nice little bundle and you know that it's all going to work together the last big thing to pay attention to is the socket and generation this will determine what kind of motherboard you compare the CPU with this also determines what kind of upgrade options you have in the future next we're going to choose our motherboard so this is an important component to pair with your CPU because while many components in a PC build are fairly Universal you know you could take a graphics card and install it on almost any PC an SSD will go into almost any PC but the CPU and motherboard need to be paired fairly close together so if I grab this which is a gigabyte b650 gaming X ax V2 you're going to see that is an AMD ryzen socket am5 board now remember brand and socket are important here you cannot take an AMD processor and put it into an Intel motherboard or vice versa so make sure to pick out a motherboard with the socket that matches your CPU AMD sockets right now are either the older but incredibly well supported am4 and the newest socket being am5 Intel on the other hand call their sockets LGA numbers go here with the latest socket being LG GA 1700 size also matters here if you're looking to build in a small form factor case typically you'll need a smaller motherboard that will fit so motherboard sizes typically range from a full standard ATX going to a smaller Micro ATX and an even smaller miniitx generally standard HX motherboards will only fit in ATX size cases but smaller motherboards can fit into larger cases if you've got a small Peg it'll go in a big hole but if you got a big Peg it only fits in the big hole that really makes sense yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah that's my analogy it makes sense personally I don't usually recommend making a small form factor PC as a first time build just because it could be really difficult to maneuver in you can get a little claustrophobic and plus you do have to worry a lot more about air flow in a smaller chassis and troubleshooting could be a bit of a nightmare when cables and stuff is just really really tiny in there but don't let me dissuade you if you're up with a challenge buy all means go for it I'll just say a lot of first time Builders have a much easier time building in a larger chassis for first time build you probably want to optt for a standard ATX or a Micro ATX for the most amount of options possible next up we're choosing our memory or Ram now this is a very important component in your system so for this video I'm going to be going with the gskill flare X5 so this is specifically 32 GB running at 6,000 megat transfers per second memory commonly known as RAM is kind of what it sounds like it determines how much data your PC can hold in short-term memory this is very important for multitasking and active programs such as web browsers video editing graphic design and even gaming one thing to keep in mind is that ddr5 is the latest generation of ram but ddr4 is still widely available ddr5 is faster but currently more expensive than the older ddr4 generation so the decision here is always going to be what kind of memory does your motherboard support So if you're using an Intel processor you could actually have either a ddr4 or a ddr5 motherboard really kind of depends typically the cheaper motherboards use dd4 the higher motherboards use ddr5 there's not a massive difference in performance between the two but you'll definitely want to make sure that you pick the correct RAM for your board now because we're going with AMD ryzen 7000 our decision's already been made for us we have to use ddr5 and the good thing is this is actually part of the bundle that I'm picking up here at Micro Center soting this the motherboard and the CPU all together which means that not only I saving money but importantly I also know they are fully compatible when it comes to choosing the specific kit of ram you want to look for there's two things that I would say first and foremost get enough capacity so you could technically get away with 8 GB of RAM if you're doing a super budget PC but really get at least 16 gbt and ideally 32 it is going to give you a lot of flexibility in the future for multitasking gaming all that kind of stuff and it's not that much more expensive on top of that make sure to get a dual Channel kit so sometimes if you wanted to you could get a single stick of memory that will fully function you're not going to break anything but you're going to be leaving significant performance on the table your your CPU and your motherboard are both designed with dual Channel memory and mind and honestly the vast majority of the kits here mic Center are going to be in dual Channel configuration so just keep that in mind get at least two sticks of ram at a minimum of 16 GB for a gaming PC in 2024 I think that's a very safe thing 32 gigs if you can swing it February is build your own month at Microcenter which is the perfect opportunity to build upgrade and importantly save with a bunch of great deals a Microcenter have now of course they have great deals year round but this is the perfect time to upgrade your existing system or use this tutorial and build an all new one on top of that there is a brand new Microcenter opening in Charlotte in early 2024 not only will they have a huge selection of PC components but once the store opens you can receive a free 128 gig flash drive by signing up at the link in the description now it's time to get to the good part the GPU is probably the single most important component for a PC when it comes to gaming like how I CPU processes data the GPU processes data but more specifically Graphics data you can think of the CPU is your sort of Jack of all trades but a GPU is highly specialized in processing tasks such as AI related work game or video data usually everything else being equal the more powerful a GPU is the more FPS and resolution you can push in games so there are three options which is going to be AMD Intel and Nvidia now much like with CPUs you can't really go too wrong all these items are very heavily priced according to their performance level which really makes sure your decision a little bit easier the more of your budget that you can put into the graphics card will directly correlate to additional gaming performance now you want to be a little bit reasonable you don't to be like SpongeBob with one huge beefy arm or one little noodle arm you want to make sure that you're getting a decent power supply and CPU motherboard and all the stuff to support it but really when it comes to gaming performance the graphics card is what is going to dictate your resolution your frame rate all of that kind of stuff so for this video I am going to be taking advantage of the fairly new RTX 47 super this currently is running about $600 obviously prices will vary by the time you watch this video but it's a pretty high-end card okay so this is going to deliver plenty of performance for some 4K gaming some higher frame rate like 1440p gaming and whatnot 12 gigs of RAM it is a good card generally speaking you can go really in depth with graphics cards but the two most important specs to look for are processing power and memory now there's no General recommendation for processing power of a GPU I mean that's going to come down to the games you want to play what resolution and refresh rate your monitor can handle and of course the big elephant in the room what kind of budget you have to work with GPU memory is a little different from Ram so it's called vram here and that too is a very specialized thing for graphics another oversimplification but generally speaking more vram and more bandwidth is better it's a little easier to make a recommendation here when it comes to actual how much RAM you need for your card so I would say you want at least 8 GB of vram to play today's demanding games but honestly if you've got the budget for it 10 or 12 GB of vram can definitely make a difference and give you a little bit more Comfort level in the future next up we're going to be choosing the case now the case is definitely the most personal aspect of your PC build this is where the Aesthetics come in but also there's a lot of functionality so I'm going to be going with this Leon Lee lancool 216 this is an incredibly popular case it's a very safe bet it's very representative of the sort of average PC build because you've got a lot of flexibility on the inside it's very easy to work in you've got yourself three fans including two RGB fans in the front so you don't have to do a lot of extra work to actually make this thing look cool it comes in different colors I'm going to go with the white one cuz I personally think it pops we also have plenty of space for our ATX motherboard and our graphics card some things to consider when you're choosing your case outside of the Aesthetics is that you do want to make sure you have a reasonable amount of space especially if you want to go for a little bit more of a higher end system so take for example your graphics card support so your graphics card is going to live right in here but you can see that there's all this extra space on the side that's because especially these days higher in graphics cards can actually be quite tall so you actually need a little bit of this extra space to make sure that they will clear and you have room to plug in like your power cables and stuff so going to something like this 216 is going to be a nice safe bet that should last for years and years in the future plenty of space and install like radiators on top again you've got the fans you've got the basement where you can hide your power supply and some cables and stuff like I mentioned with motherboards there are different sizes of cases the standard size ATX cases are the traditional PC Tower size but there are smaller Micro ATX and many ITX cases if you do want to go for a smaller footprint just remember it may make building in them a little bit tricky and you do need to be mindful of air flow on the other end of the extreme you have e8x size cases which are massive chungi chungus chalinos that are specifically designed to house and show off your big bulky components like graphics cards or big than my head or intricate Hardline water cooling for first- time Builders I recommend just a standard ATX case as it will probably provide enough air flow and enough space to comfortably build in and it's a little bit of an easier process but again choose the case that you want best it's going to not only set up the aesthetic it's going to decide if it goes on your desk below your desk and it's the part that looks cool when it comes to cooling your CPU there are tons of options so on the high end you can do something like this which is a Hardline Loop now this as cool as it is is way outside the scope of a PC tutorial so traditionally you're going to choose one of two options air or liquid cooling so if you want to do air cooling there are options such as this which is an ak400 it's a fairly straightforward air cooler honestly if this is your first time building a PC this is usually the right move unless you have a very very highend CPU we'll talk a little bit about this later but the main thing I'm going to show you is how to install an all-in-one liquid cooler as you can see there are tons and tons of options so the the main things to consider would be the size and what kind of CPU you're cooling so for us with a ryzen 77700 x it's actually a fairly efficient chip we do not need a crazy cooler but for the purposes of this tutorial I'm going to go with a very high-end lean Lee specifically 360 mm radiator so the way the sizes work is that this is a 360 mm radiator which is essentially 310 mm fans so if I find a 240 for example this is two 120 mil fans or by the same token I could do two 140 mm fans which would equal 280 the way you choose this is very much down to your case so all cases will list what kind of radiator and fan support that they have so for our case we have up to a 360 mm Radiator on the top but some cases you could also mount it on the front or even sometimes on the bottom but traditionally your radiator your AIO will be installed either in the front or on the top so we're going to be using this one this is a very high-end AO it's more than we need but I'm going to show you for the purposes of this tutorial it also has a neat little screen on it too so I'll show you how to install this and while air cooling is the safer bet for most firsttime Builders if you want that sort of flashy RGB fans the liquid cooler the whole thing and you want to get the maximum performance this is a great move luckily a lot of low and mid-range gpus you buy will come with a stock cooler in the Box for most people this is completely fine it's not flashy and you won't want to push limits with overclocking but it is a perfectly reasonable opt option that you can always upgrade down the line now when it comes to high-end processors they typically don't ship with stock coolers at all as manufacturers expect you to get a better cooler anyway and the demands of those chips are a lot more than a little stock cooler can handle a high performance air cooler will do just as good of a job if not better than all but the beefiest AO liquid cooling solutions but there are other pros and cons to each liquid cooling draws the heat away from the CPU via heat sink and then the liquid carries that heat all the way through a rator to be dissipated now this method is typically quieter than air Cooling and the higher-end coolers have neat little screens that could show you like some specs or a gift Loop like they're very flashy but they typically require multiple fan slots in your case which can be difficult to install based on the configuration a lot more work to install to begin with not to mention that there's a small but still there's a risk of liquid leaking from that cooler and damaging other components air cooling is the tried andrue cooling method it's just a fan blowing air through a heat sink that is drawing that heat away from the CPU it's simple which means it's less likely to break but high performance air coolers do have some cons such as they typically take up a lot of space if your PC case doesn't have a lot of clearance or you have a smaller motherboard sometimes that can actually be very restrictive as far as how easily you can access the PC and on top of that if you're going to be moving your PC around a lot it's not necessarily a great idea to have a heavy air cooler just because the good ons while they're very good at cooling are very heavy they can put a lot of strain on the board and the mounting points while it definitely depends on the cooler that you choose air coolers can get a little bit on the loud side especially when the PC is working on a heavy load like gaming but look ultimately the choice is up to you I personally tend to lean more towards solid air coolers such as KN to options but I'd say most Gamers especially on the high end tend to take advantage of liquid cooling next up we're choosing our power supply this is a critical component of every PC build is quite literally the Beating Heart supplying power to every component in the system you want something high quality and you want to make sure that you have plenty of capacity it is a component that takes AC power from the wall and converts it into stable DC power that the PC can actually use it then distributes power through cables all like veins throughout the PC Now power supplies measure output via Watts it's fairly straightforward I mean you just need to add up the power requirements of your PC components and then choose a power supply that exceeds that number usually your CPU and especially your GPU will have minimum recommended wattages which is great place to start again micr Center has an online pc Builder that will help you calculate how much power your power supply needs but just as a baseline a lower to mid-tier PC may need something like 500 or 600 watts an upper tier system may need something closer to 750 watts and a high-end system will likely need 850 Watts plus definitely do the math on your own system you don't want your computer to draw more power than the power supply can provide or else it will just crash or shut down immediately or you could even do long-term damage to your system for the for this build I'm going to go with this the MSI mag aa50 G PCI 5 there's a few reasons why I like this power supply first of all 850 wats is going to be plenty for this system but I don't mind that typically for a system because power supplies usually have quite long warranties and can last for several iterations of your system so having a little bit of that extra margin is nice to have something else to consider is some of the specs on this so because we are using an RTX 470 super a 40 series GPU we actually going to want to take advantage of the PCI 5 specs you'll see here it says ATX 3.0 compatible PCI 5.0 ready what that means is that it has with the actual cables in the Box a specific cable which is designed to be used for RTX 40 series cards this is nice because for our GPU if we don't have this built into the power supply we actually have to use an adapter which technically will work but I don't really recommend it so if you have the luxury of buying a brand new power supply for your system getting something with ATX 3.0 is very nice to have that futureproof built in other things to consider here is that this is a fully modular power supply which means that we can easily plug in only the actual cables we need so our cable runs can be a little bit cleaner and this is also an 80 plus gold rated power supply 80 plus ratings while sometimes you can kind of use them as a little bit of a bar for Quality typically they're much more meant for the actual efficiency of your power supply so you can do 80 plus white silver gold Platinum like they go up quite a bit for me gold is usually the right sweet spot between between price efficiency and typically quality so this will be what will power our gaming PC now when it comes to storage for your system you have a couple of options so old school PCS traditionally use hard drives we are going to use a hard drive for the system but for Windows for gaming for all of your normal use I would highly highly recommend an SSD if Rand is short-term memory storage like ssds and hard drives are more like long-term memory they hold all of your data like your computer programs photos videos Games Etc ready to be accessed whenever you need them there are two main types of ssds to choose from SATA which are older school and use these same connectors as a hard drive and can easily be swapped into like say an older system for example but if you're building a modern system I recommend an M2 nvme SSD they use the same type of flash memory as regular ssds do but they get rid of that old SATA connection that limited their speeds top-of-the-line inum ssds are about 60 times faster than hard drives that's right 60 60 times faster like Rand you want to pay attention to speed and capacity here one reason to go with an MVM SSD is that they are pretty much universally fast enough for basically any task you could throw at them I mean even a slow MVM Drive will be faster than any other hard driver regular SSD out there as for capacity I recommend at least 500 GB if you pair it with something like a hard drive but honestly one or even 2 terby mvme drives are relatively cheap these days and will give you plenty of Headroom to store all of your games so for this system we're going to go high-end with the Samsung 990 Pro you can also install a hard drive now technically you could use a hard drive instead of an SSD but I would highly recommend against it but what a hard drive does have over an SSD is a lot of capacity for not a lot of money so take for example this which is a wd blue 4 TB drive for only 50 bucks you're also going to almost certainly want a copy of Windows 11 for your gaming PC now technically you could do Windows 10 although at this point Windows 11 is pretty much the no-brainer there's Windows 11 home as well as Pro honestly you can just get Windows 11 home but this I'll show you how to install it later but it is very important to have a copy of Windows otherwise your PC will have a great view of the bio screen or you can install Linux but that's a little bit outside the scope for a PC tutorial all right my friends it is time to build ourselves a gaming computer so if this is your first time building I'm going to walk you through step by step all the components how we put them together some combination issues the whole thing but sit back relax this is going to be easy and fun and we're not going to have any problems at all positivity it's an important element of PC Building so right here I've got all the components that we need for the build laid out here so what you'll actually need to build your computer outside of the the parts to do it with is going to be a decent sized workspace so a desk a table make sure you have at least a little bit of space because trust me once you start opening all these boxes it gets cluttered very quickly and need to a couple tools by a couple I mean a knife to open boxes and A Philip screwdriver that's literally it it is very simple all the other bits and Bobs cables screws all that kind of stuff should be included in the various component boxes that we're going to be using now beyond that it's really pretty straightforward let's clear up some space grab our case box and we will begin unboxing and building our gaming computer I always like to start with a case for a PC build not only so that you can sort of wrap your head around the physical dimensions maybe take a look and kind of get a sense for how you're actually going to build it but also I like to install the power supply too to get a couple of the components out of the way before we move on to some of the uh more complicated bits so with this particular case we actually have a box of accessories which you will want to hold on to but other than that I'm actually going to flip this upside down and pull the box over the actual case kind of like how if you're unboxing like a TV or something you want to sort of pull the Box up and over otherwise it's a pan there we go so I actually ially like to keep the case box handy this is a great spot to put all of your random trash from the actual build so packaging materials and that kind of stuff and sometimes you need to go back through there and realize you forgot to screw or something so I just like to use that as like sort of my temporary storage all right with our plastic removed we got our first good look at the case that we will be spending the next several hours building in so before we do anything let's go ahead and take off the side panels and wrap our heads around what the actual physical case looks like so with this one in particular it's actually really nice we have some thumb screws on the back so it's very easy to access sometimes like actually right now you will need to use a screwdriver to get these screws started mostly because they tend to come a little like overtightened from the factory so if any of these screws are annoying just give them a little loosen with your screwdriver so every case is going to be a little different and honestly every PC build is going to be a little different so I'm going to speak sort of generally but I will kind of give you the the Topline stuff to pay attention to as you build something so for this case I'm going to remove all the core panels so this is the top panel we will have to remove this later to install the aiio anyway so I'm just put this off to the side when it comes to taking the back panel off this actually has no screws so you just pop it right off toss it off to the side here and then we've got our glass side panel so I believe it just need that one screw right and there we go we can take off our glass side panel and then because this case has a basement we also have one additional screw on the bottom and we're going to want to remove that um so again all cases are going to be a little different um this because it has the mesh bottom makes a little bit easier for us to run some cabling install our power supply that kind of thing I'm going to put my screw off to the side just a little note you're going to have a lot of screws through this process make sure to have a little handy spot I usually just dedicate a small corner for it but you can use like a little magnetic Mount or a little bowl or whatever just don't lose them there's only actually like a handful of types of screws so some of them are a little interchangeable but just try to keep them organized so that when you're looking to put something back together you won't be like uhoh it got put in the trash cuz I've never done that before Behold a magnetic mat so I can put my screws right there and I don't lose it with the basement cover taken off we now have pretty much full access to the case so before we actually start building anything let me just give you a quick little run through about what we're looking at so this part right here in the middle is where our motherboard will Mount so we'll explain that in a little bit but generally speaking just so you have the lay of the land the motherboard goes here our graphics card is going to go roughly right here here we're going to have our all-in-one liquid cooler mounted on the top of the chassis now this actually technically we could mount it up front too but because it already has a couple of fans pre-installed it'll be a pretty easy bet just to put it on the top the power supply is going to go down here our hard drive is going to go right here and that's largely it um so some things to consider we've got ourselves some little grommets so we can run cables through here so it'll help to kind of do a little bit of management we also do have if I flip it over this side a lot more cable management that is already built into the back now you're going to hear the words Cable Management a lot throughout this video all that means is there's two ways of building a PC you could throw the components in there turn it on it works and then smash the side panels on and hope for the best you should take a little time especially when we're done with the system but even while we're actually building to try to run cables neatly not only is going to make your life a lot easier when you try to put the side panel on and you have a pile of cables that thick but also as you can see with a case like this there's a nice little bit bit of space back here so there's plenty of room and there's actually sort of not like guides but these sort of like velcro sort of uh cable runs that are already built in so as we install components I'm going to try my best to run cables in a clean natural way don't worry about getting it perfect once we've actually made sure the system is fully functional we will go back through there and double check things but as you run stuff take 30 extra seconds and run it through a cable panel or a cable sleeve or a cable guide versus just letting it dangle everywhere it will definitely make your life a lot easier when it comes time to clean it up that's largely it the only other thing I'll show you and we'll deal with this a minute we have our hard drive sort of trays down here but we do not need to use these just yet so you just leave those in place so let us Begin by installing our first component into our strip down case which is going to be the power supply now I like to start with the power supply there's a few ways that you could approach this but I like to install the power supply first to make sure that I can start running some cables and getting them out of the way now I will say there's one thing you could do which would be a different order of operation for this tutorial I would generally recommend for you to open up all of your components and do a test before you put everything in your actual case you do not have to do that I'm not going to do that today but even though it's rare it does happen that maybe there's some incompatibility issue with your parts maybe a part just came damaged or broken out of the box and it's not fun when you spend several hours was building the PC hit that big power button and nothing happens and you have to tear it all apart to troubleshoot right that is a thing you may have to deal with so it is usually a good idea to actually take all of your components set them out on like a basic table like this so motherboard graphics card y y y plug it all into a power supply out of the case and ensure that it actually fires up and it works right all you need to do is just make sure that everything functions and you can tear it all apart and put it in the case but for now I'm going to be building everything inside the case and assuming that all of our components are full fully functional and fully compatible what can go wrong okay so inside our power supply box there's going to be a few things it's fairly straightforward so there's a little thing saying hey plug your cable all the way in we'll go over this in a little bit then we have the power supply itself now there are like I was saying earlier Micro Center a couple of different sizes of power supply this is a normal HX Supply so it's a very standard Square little box and this one as you can see is fully modular so none of the actual connectors that go to our motherboard and our system are installed right now because they're all in this little pouch now these pouches are meant to be kept so a lot of the stuff that we're working through here these boxes you can just Chuck it right like you don't really need them but this pouch full of power supply cables is very helpful because we're only going to plug in the things that we need for this system but say in the future we wanted to add more hard drives or uh beef your graphics card or whatever the case is these cables are what you will need to expand the power supply and keep in mind that power supply cables are not Universal you want to use cables that are designed for your power supply they may look very similar but often times they are not compatible and you may cause damage so keep this little bag full of cables handy if you're using a lower-end power supply that's not modular well these will all just be dangling after the power supply and you just pluck them out of the way but if you've got a modular or semi- modular Supply makes it a lot easier to sort of clean up the aesthetic so you don't have a mess of cables all hanging around in the middle so we can check this box I will say the only thing we want to make sure we find in addition to our cables are some screws so there should be four little screws in a baggie so in this one it is going to be I think in here um but if you unbox your power supply and don't find four little screws stop and look closer cuz we going to need those screws in about 47 seconds so I have my standard IEC power cable so this just goes from the back of the power supply into your outlet so make sure to hold on to this and in this bag we have all of the other cables that we will need so I will go ahead and walk you through them right now um like I said earlier we're actually not going to use all of these for this belt and I'll be honest almost no one needs all of these connected at the same time um but they give you extras so that just in case you're building a system with 10 hard drives or some crazy stuff or whatever you should have all the cables you need but let me actually walk you through what is what here because there's a lot and Adit this is a little intimidating I think when it's a firsttime builder especially you look at all these cables and you're like yikes but it's totally totally fine like the good thing about literally all these power cables is that you really can't do it wrong as long as you fully seat it it will be fine you're not going to be able to accidentally like put it upside down without using an insane amount of force you're not going to be able to plug it into the wrong thing like everything is key everything is going to be unique so it's not anywhere near as scary as it seems so let me walk you through it really quick the first cable we're going to start out with is our 20 plus 4 pen so this is the main power to the motherboard so you see it's going to be 20 plus 4 the four is always attached it's really like a 24 pen and then on the other side this is the end that we're going to plug into the power supply so I'm going to actually do that right now this is a cable that you will need 100% of the time so it's modular just because reasons but um yeah you're always always going to need this cable so for this it's very straightforward we're going to plug in the left and the right side of our cables and make sure that we get the little click it's one two perfect so again 100% of gaming PCs are going to need this cable so we always going to plug that in next up we're going to grab one that's a little bit more unusual especially if you not built a PC in the last couple of years so this is known as the 12vt 600 wat PCI 5.0 ATX 3.0 there's a lot of names for this cable but essentially what this is is a new high power cable specifically for graphics cards as a recording this video is almost exclusively used on Nvidia graphics cards now you may have heard of this cable because that has a little bit of a problematic start to life um some people have had issues with these things melting or not working well because it's a 600 W cable that is very very thin now because we have a power supply that is designed to be used with this because you can use like an adapter to get this out of a couple of these guys the main thing is and it's really straightforward make sure you are fully seeding this cable not only into your power supply but also into your graphics card part Reon I to put this little pamplet in here saying hey plug it all the way in so it don't melt um which sounds scarier than it is should be totally fine so this cable like almost everything we're doing here is only going to go in one way so you see this little clip is going to go into this hole and You' got these little pins that go onto the bottom so we're just going to line it up make sure it's seated give it a nice little bit of force get a weak little click but it is in there we'll give it a little tug just to make sure and there you go you've got yourself the power supply to graphics card connector now I am using this and only this for our graphics card because I am using an ARX 40 series card now if I was using an Intel GPU an AMD GPU an ultra Nvidia GPU I would not be using this cable instead i' would be using this PCI power so this is known as a 6 plus2 connector and uh this is a tried andrue method that graphics cards have used for many many years um it's not quite as clean because so what this single cable will do is like 600 watts to do this with PCI cables you need to use several of these as you can see they have these like little like pigtail things because graphics cards have different levels of power needed so some graphics cards may only need a single six pen or you may need to connect the six plus two making it an eight pen or you may need two of these or sometimes three it depends on the card is going to completely vary but it will tell you what kind of actual power you need on your graphics card box if your graphics card needs these it's super simple so just the same way we did it before this is the end that would go into your power supply so again it's the 6 plus two but the other end is going to be specific so you can see right here it says CPU and pcie so these four or sorry these two and these two are all the same just like all the rest of the connectors as far as installing us the power supply it is dead simple so we're going to install one of these just to show you what it would be like so we're going to click it in place and if we were not using this Nvidia 40 series GPU I would be using these 8 pen connectors as opposed to the fancy new one but because we are using a RTX 470 super I'm actually going to unplug that and put this off to the side specifically and our power for future use oh huh found the screws they're hiding in the bag with the pouch remember those screws I told you to look for found them next up is our CPU power cable so while that big 20 plus 4 pen connector is what supplies power to the motherboard this connector is specifically for your CPU this is an 8 pen CPU power connector so depending on your motherboard you may need any number of these so for a lower-end system sometimes you actually only need the four P you you actually would split this connector into half you can also click it together and it is an eight pin which is the most standard some highering motherboards actually have support for two of these you actually don't typically need to install two of them they're more for so for like extreme overclocking but uh general rule of thumb if you have the power from your power supply so if you have two of these in the box and your motherboard wants two of them plug them in but typically an 8 Pin is all you need to power everything but the most power hungry CPUs on the planet and this is going to install the exact same way as the PCI so you'll see that the other end that goes in the power supply is the same so it's the eight pen so you line it up with the CPU and pcie these are all the same so it doesn't matter so we line it up click it and this is ready to go into our motherboard connector specifically the CPU slot so for our build that's actually almost everything we need as far as power goes so there are a couple of other connectors that I will show you really quick here so if I grab this one right here this is known as SATA so SATA is a little bit an older School standard it's meant more so for like lower powered accessories so originally it was meant for hard drives Optical drives older School ssds often times these days you're actually going to use this more so for auxiliary things so for example you may need it for your fans you may need it for the pump you may need it for your all-in-one liquid cooler like there's a bunch of different things that you could use this for um so traditionally you're going to need to at least install one of these I think for this system this has what one two three it has three individual leads on it that should be be plenty for the system so this is probably the most unique looking actual connector so you'll see it's very long and skinny and has a little Notch that Notch is very helpful because it means that you're only going to install this one way so I'm going to just put one of these into our power supply for now I explain how to connect it once we actually need it uh but almost every build is going to want at least one of these SATA connectors installed on our power supply another cable that you may see although is thankfully becoming a little bit less common is Molex so you'll see this janky looking connector is old school like this is probably the oldest school Power standard that's still around I mean this has been around since freaking forever um this is similar to SATA in that it is meant for lower power accessories so this used to be used for like floppy disc drives thankfully most systems you actually won't need this uh some usually it's like fan headers and stuff will still use Molex um it's kind of annoying because it's got this like sort of like I don't know how you would call it a little like clip like clampy guy so you can see you kind of like sort of pinch it to install it it look I don't like these things they're really fiddly because sometimes you think You' got all the way installed it's not you have to really kind of tug it out if your system doesn't need one of these feel free to not plug this Cable in at all but if you think you may want to do it you don't want to double check all your components it's not a terrible idea to plug this in as you can see right here on the actual power supply these are all for SATA or molik so it doesn't matter so we could install this plug it in and just sort of Tuck this cable off to the side if we want to use it later but for these purposes and because I don't think I need Molex for anything in this system I'm going to disconnect this and put on a little cable pouch and if we find that we need it later all we got to do is pop open this little basement and plug one of these into the power supply we'll be good to go but I think we can safely not use this today other than that that's pretty much it so we have a few extra versions of the cables so again I've got more PCI Leads Here know I was about to put up this second CPU power connector but I just checked my mother board it actually does support8 plus 4 pens you don't have to do this I've run plenty of systems that have that auxiliary port and I don't pull anywhere near enough power for it so it doesn't it's like not necessary um but we have the cable it's just a little extra run and technically if we ever lose our mind and overclock this thing to a gajillion gigahertz it may need this cable so it's on the board I'm going to go ahead and install it now is time to install the power supply in our case so power supplies are very straightforward now sometimes they have like interesting designs you can see this one has uh the MSI logo and the mag logo on this side so it's meant so it will look good on either way but the important thing to keep in mind is that while all of your internal connectors are on one side this is obviously the back of the power supply where you have your onoff switch your I and your little fan button but you will also find a fan it is important to give access to Fresh Air for this fan so when it comes to installing it in the case the vast vast majority of cases these days we'll install the power supply on the bottom whether you have a basement or not it almost always goes on the bottom if I was installing this on the top of the case then typically You' want to have the fan up so the fan can pull in air from the top but because I'm installing on the bottom of the case I'm going to go fan down so you can see here that I actually have a little fan filter specifically for the power supply so this actually pops out from the bottom this is fairly standard on most cases it's just a little dust filter but it gives you a very good sense for where the air flow is going to be coming from your power supply so what we're going to do is we're going to take our power supply actually I think with this system it doesn't matter we can go left or right we're going to line it up with that fan facing down so it's going to be able to pull in air from here so we're going to slide this into place it actually has these nice little rubber feet which help us to sort of Center things up and don't worry about your cables right now they're all kind of dangling out the back it's totally fine this part is very simple we just need to install the four screws to hold our power supply into place so I'm going to go ahead and grab a screw um so the only thing you may have to do is power supplies they always sit roughly right but often times they're like slightly off so maybe be leaning one way or another so just visually make sure that you can see all of the screw holes so with this I'm actually a little bit low so I make sure that sit completely flat which it looks like it is so you may just need to do a little bit of wiggling to make sure so just pick any of the sides doesn't matter where you start so just going do it right here and then we're going to get this installed so when it comes to installing actually really all components so there's a couple things to keep in mind first and foremost don't tighten it down until you've got it into place you know it's just like almost anything in life you want to make sure that you got all your screws into place before you do the final tighten on top of that you should do it in a cross pattern so I started with this bottom left screw to make sure that I'm applying even pressure I'm now going to go to the top right screw to install that now it's not super important when it comes to a power supply because there's not like any crazy tension or anything you have to worry about but some other components specifically it comes to something like a CPU Cooler this is actually very important but honestly again this is just good General Life advice cross patterns whether it's your wheel whether it's your power supply whether it's your CPU whether it's your door handle that has four screws for some reason whatever the case is it's always good to go on opposite Corners so you're evenly applying pressure to whatever it is that you're installing once you got the first two screws in you can kind of let go of the power supply and then these should go in a little bit easier again we're just going to do it kind of light to make sure that we've got everything lined up correctly and for this final screw we actually can assume that everything looks fine which it is we've got access to everything we actually can now start tightening things now that we know that it is all lined up once you've got these screws tightened up you have successfully installed yourself a power supply in your gaming PC that's step one of just a couple more there a few we'll be here for a couple more hours all right so for now we're clear to take our case and just set it off to the side because we are going to begin building up our motherboard so we're going to be looking for a few components here so we're going to have not only of course the motherboard which is important but we're also going to grab our CPU we're going to grab our memory and assuming you're using an M2 SSD we're also going to be grabbing this if you're using a hard drive which hopefully not or a St SSD we'll do that later but for this we need all four of these things because they're all going to be installed onto our motherboard so before we open all these up let me give you a quick little tour around the board itself so motherboards uh there's a few things to know about this again a motherboard is where all of your components are going to connect so this is an important component there's a few things to keep in mind as we're actually doing this so again I'm going to flip it over to the back there is some information here there's also should be a manual on the inside but it'll give you a little bit of basic stuff it'll tell you about the compatibility yada y yada none of this is important but I will tell you what while you build this up keep the Box handy I actually like building my motherboard up on the box because it is fairly safe against stuff like static electricity now okay so Ken is going to now demonstrate what your not supposed to do which is to rub your socks on carpet and try to zap things but I'll be honest most of these things are relatively durable to the point where you would have to try real real hard to cause it the yeah there you go thank you for the illustration yeah so there you go didn't kill it you see that what happened but what I do like to do is pull the motherboard out and once I get my accessories out I'm going to put this on the box and use that as my little build area so motherboard take a look at in a second below that we have a few things that we will want to pull out so so because this motherboard has Wi-Fi it's going to have our Wi-Fi antennas we toss that off to the side we have a slightly smaller instruction manual compared to what you used to get back in the day so it's going to give me a little bit of info here you may want to pull up the pdf online if you don't have the full manual this is going to give us some very basic stuff but there are a few things in this manual which are nice to have such as your pen outs for your front panel connectors and a little bit more of a thorough overview of all the compon on the board so like a lot of components when it comes to building a PC every motherboard is going to be a little different so I'm going to walk you through this specific gigabyte b650 board there's some similarities between all boards there's some similarities between AMD boards but always safe bet is to actually find that manual that comes with your motherboard and take a look through and it'll just kind of explain to you where each item is now beyond the Wi-Fi module on the board there are a few accessories here so we have a couple of screws uh actually have a bunch of screws so these will be to install ssds so we're just going to put these off to the side we also have a couple and by a couple mean two stated cables now we're going to be using this for our hard drive but again we would use these sated cables for a traditional hard drive a SATA SSD an optical drive if you're using one of those um SATA cables are nice and they typically not always but typically come with your motherboard the board itself this is an ATX motherboard so the most standard size for I would say the majority of first- time builders especially so what you'll see is a whole lot of stuff inside this plastic bag so I'm going to set this down here um now I'm not going to try to scare you like oh it's super dangerous cuz it's not right like try not to get your greasy hands all over it maybe wash your hands before you do the build but like components are pretty durable these days not saying you couldn't break something if you try or if you drop it or whatever but again if you've never built a PC before this is going to probably look a little intimidating but it's really not that bad so a few ground rules first and foremost before you do anything with this PC take a look around when this goes into the case it's a lot harder to find some of these little connectors it'll really pay off if you take this opportunity to learn where all the different bits and Bobs are on the system so when this is in your case you're trying to run a cable and it's dark and you can't see and blah blah blah it is so much better when you know oh I know that's on the bottom right and you can find it so let me walk you through it really quick here first of all we're going to see our CPU socket so regardless of whether this is AMD or Intel it's pretty much always in the top middle so this is where surprise surprise your CPU goes we'll explain that in just a second to the right here we have our Ram slots so you'll see that this board has four um sometimes you'll only have two slots if it's a smaller or cheaper motherboard but four is pretty standard for this kind of thing um below our CPU we're going to see our first of several into SSD slots so I'll do is actually I'll go ahead and open this up um usually you're going to have like a little heat sink so it's going to look different on every board so if we remove the heat sink what you'll see is a little slot to install our M2 SSD we'll get to that in a minute but just keep in mind that uh often times it's a little hidden so this one actually says M2 SSD on it but you might not know unless you're looking closely we can also install ssds down here so if I take this cover off I can show you so underneath this cover you'll see that this board has two more empty slots for total of three uh this is a point where it might be helpful to consult your manual because sometimes these are actually kind of hidden so I've seen these that go on the back of a motherboard especially for like smaller ITX boards and again you wouldn't necessarily think that this is even something you could remove much less that you have hidden slots underneath so again for this board we have a total of three slots again you can check your manual general rule of thumb is that top slot is going to be the one you want to populate first it's typically the fastest it's the one that's closest it's the one that's going to have the best traces but theoretically any of these are going to function so right below our top M2 slot we have this which is our PCI Express slot this is where you will install your graphics card now you can see we actually have a total of three so we have one on top and then two more a little bit lower down again every motherboard is going to be a little different smaller motherboards just have fewer slots because they're typically about this size on top but they just sort of lose some of that sort of height so if you only have one slot that's actually kind of fine because the vast majority of systems are only going to install a single graphics card you can use these for graphics cards as well but you shouldn't because this is a full speed 16x slot these are typically 8X or 4X or an older generation usually what you'll use for these additional slots are things like video capture cards or Raid controllers or things that are possible to do on your system but a little less common so for our system we're not going to be using these at all but like I said with the SSD which should go on the top slot your graphics card definitely should go in the top one you can also see that this one is a little bit more robust so unlike these that are plastic this is made of metal so it's going to be a little bit more durable especially when you get like a really big heavy graphics card in there it's going to you a little bit of extra support so this is where our graphics card is going to install now this top left area is full of heat sinks so there's not a whole lot you need to worry about here except for these little connectors right here so you'll see that I have a eight pen as well as a four pen this is our CPU power that I was talking about earlier so for a system like this plug in the eight pen for sure that what is going to provide power to the actual CPU the four pin is auxiliary you don't need it I'm going to do it just for the sake of being complete but unless you're doing some crazy overclocking or something typically you don't need that but if you've got the connectors on your board and the power from your power supply there's no reason not to do it so again you may have only a four pin here you may have an eight you have an eight plus four you may have an 8 plus 8 if you have a super high-end board um as long as you have one eight pin in there that's usually enough but you can fully fill it out if you would like to the right hand side we're going to have a bunch of smaller connectors so you're going to see that we have three different headers so these are that's very sticky these are fan headers so you'll see they're actually labeled so we have CPU fan CPU optional and system fan one so four pin connectors I'll go over it when we're actually installing them but this is how fans are connected so for us we will plug in our CPU fan the optional is if you have something like an allinone which is going to provide continuous power to the pump they all use the same connector now there are two different types of fans there's four pen and three pen but they can all go into four pen so you'll see there's this little Notch right here so if you do the three pen it'll just go around the notch if you have a four pin it just expands over that side so much like pretty much everything in a PC fan headers are only going to go in one way so if you try to put it in there and it doesn't look right there's a couple of notches to guide you into place um there's a bunch of other stuff that's not super relevant so you're going to see some things like LEDs and RGB controllers I will tell you that while RGB is great and makes your system look awesome it is outside the scope of this tutorial for one reason it's real Annoying so look look RGB as an ecosystem is a mess there are tons of Standards tons of Brands tons of varieties of things that work together they could be daisy chain it's a honestly a mess if you would like to install RGB fans RGB strips whatever the case is in your system I would implore you to look up tutorials for that specific thing because none of them are the same some use chroma some use RGB some use Mystic light it's just it's a whole thing honestly I don't typically install a lot of RGB entirely because it's pain if you want to make your system look awesome by all means go for it you can plug it directly into the board there are also like little add-on things that you can do depending on like if you're going to use like a little third party controller or whatever but like it's just it's annoying and I don't like to deal with it cuz I just want my PC to work and I don't need it to be in full rainbow parade all the time also I think the fans in the system are going to do that by default without me doing anything so directly on the right of your board you should see the 20 plus 4 pen connector so this is that cable that is going to come from the power supply that's the big chunky guy this provides power to the entire motherboard very important no matter what other stuff you have on your system you're always going to populate this 20 plus 4 very important it'll click all the way in I'll show you in a little bit but it is very straightforward um coming down a little bit farther you're going to see some other random things so we have another fan header here um it is actually a good idea while you're looking at the board outside the case to just take quick stock of where fan headers are so typically you'll have them in a few different areas so usually there'll be some up toward the top usually one or two on the right side one or two on the bottom it depends where they are higher end boards typically have more headers but just kind of have a general idea of where these are because once you have this in the actual case you're going to want to run fans to whatever Port that is closest so you don't have like ugly cables like running across just something to pay attention to now down here on the right now this is could be anywhere they tend to be on the right side but this is a USBC connector so if you have an older motherboard or a case that doesn't support USBC don't worry about this but this case does have a USBC port and that is something we're going to plug in right here it looks like well ironically it looks a little bit like a usba port um so I'll show you how to install in a minute but again just while we're going to the board take a mental note of where these various things are now along the right side you're going to see we have four SATA data connectors now if you're not using a hard drive an optical drive or a SATA SSD you do not actually need to use these this is a little bit of an older connector uh you used to have a ton of these on motherboards now a lot of boards only have two or four if you're going to install a bunch of like hard drives and stuff you'll want to take advantage of these we are going to plug one hard drive in here but again it is going to be an additional bit of data for your storage is going to be right here on the right side of the board but sometimes it could be on the bottom off the side whatever but it's right here also along the right side we have our USB 3.0 header now uh this is not my favorite connector U I'll show you when we actually install it it's fine it Powers the front USB ports on our case almost all boards and cases are going to have this it's a really annoying connector purely because you can install it fine but when you ever need to take it out of the system I've broken a lot of these over the years it's just real fiddly the plastic tends to crack and snap because it's just in there so firmly ideally plug that one in toward the end once you know everything works real real good cuz uh it's just annoying but yeah bottom right we have our front panel connectors I will give a special thank you to gigabyte for color coding these a lot of motherboards over the years have had no easy way to see what's up so these are a bunch of individual connectors again I'll show you when we actually install it later but just to to know where they are these are individual connectors for lots of random bits and Bobs on your case these are things like your power button the reset button your hard drive LED just lots of little bits and Bobs that you are going to want to use if you look closely this one is nicely labeled so you see our power LED hard drive reset yada yada yada it's very nice to have this right here um if you don't have a nice little Legend to show you what everything is you can always look at your motherboard manual and it will give you the pen outs again I'll explain this later just pointing out where it is right now we also have another fan header here and a couple of USB 2.0 so if you have a case it has USB 2.0 ports instead of or in addition to USB 3 ports you plug these in here these days though they're actually a little bit more common for use in sort of internal things so for example sometimes like a all-in-one pump will actually have a USB 2.0 header that you'll plug into uh it just depends but this board has two of them you may not need them based on the build sometimes you use one sometimes you use both and then there's a couple of other things that are not super important we have like our audio which I will explain in a minute but honestly that's the most important things on this board the only other thing I'm going to mention now before we actually start building here is over here on the backside this is our IO Shield so this is basically all of the ports that are going to be poking out the back of the case so you look at the back of the case you see this little slot here this is where the io Shield goes so all of these ports are accessible to you on the outside of the system and uh again every board is going to be a little different um the nice thing about this board and most relatively high-end boards is that this is actually already one piece if you're getting a little bit more of an affordable board this little metal piece will actually come separately usually in the actual box itself so you'll need to click that into the actual case I'll tell you it's really nice when it's already installed here on your motherboard because you just need to slide it right in um but you can see here we've got a bunch of ports so we have our Wi-Fi USB PS2 ethernet you name it it's all on here it's really easy that my friends I'm forgetting something is pretty much everything we have on the board you can see on this one there's really nothing on the back so it's going to be mounted directly onto the actual case the only other thing I'll mention while I'm here is just the differ between AMD and Intel sockets for the CPU since we're using an AMD ryzen 7000 system it's very straightforward um so we're going to push this little arm back just going to unlock it and I'm just going to pick this up gently so you'll see that there are a ton of little pins on the actual motherboard now I'm going to give you a word of warning for anything when it comes to building your computer it would be this don't touch these pens there's a lot of them they're really small and if you're using your screwdriver in this area you're moving your finger around you start bending these you're going to be in for a real bad time very quickly now it's fine if you're careful but most things in the system you can make a little mistake you can drop something whatever it's fine right you bend some of these pens you can technically get them back I've done it in the past uh but it really really sucks so I would just give you a for warning be careful with these pens now this is an am5 socket which looks very different because you can see it actually has that sort of little slash in the middle so you can see there's pens on the top and pens on the bottom now if you're using an older AMD system so something with an am4 socket for example there's actually no pens here the pins are on the CPU itself so instead it's sort of flipped right so I'll show you my CPU really quick so on the back side of the CPU there's just a bunch of pads that connect to these pens but on older AMD systems it's reversed so you would have pens on the CPU pads on the actual motherboard same concept there are little pens there don't touch them don't mess them up or you're going to be in a world of hurt so that's just a little heads up um Intel motherboards are very similar it looks a little different than this but the pens are on the board itself so just please be careful I'll show you how to install the CPU in a second but just if you mess these pens up you're going to not you can try to fix them but it's really hard you may need to actually swap out your board so that's a word of warning my friends be careful with pens they're sharp and importantly a huge pain to put back in place it is time to to install our CPU now again I'm using a ryzen 7000 series processor installing pretty much every CPU is the exact same so there's slight variations as far as when you actually go to install them like how they're like melted and stuff but it's a very very similar process so I'm going to take this out of the box now because this is a ryzen 7 a little bit more of a higher end chip that's all I've got in the box so if I had a lower-end chip it would typically come with the stock cooler and like I mentioned earlier those stock coolers are to totally fine but when you get the higher end chip it comes in a smaller box and only the CPU it's like when you buy a phone and it doesn't come with power cable anymore even though youve paid $1,000 for it you know who you are so we're going to open up this little plastic clamshell now when it comes to uh CPU this is a little bit sensitive it's not too bad um you do need to be a bit careful if this is an older AMD chip so again like a ryzen 5000 and am4 Chip be careful because that has pens on the bottom this does not so if I flip it over here you'll see that on the bottom of the chip they're all of our little pads so this is what makes contact with all the pins on the motherboard you don't want to touch these but it's not super super critical like you're not going to I mean it's fine just don't get it dirty and it's all right um now you'll see that with ryen 7000 it has this sort of interesting design where it almost looks like a crown um most chips will look vaguely similar so if this was an Intel CPU it would actually be a little bit taller and if you're with a like an older am4 it would be a little bit flatter a little bit more boring but again pretty much every CPU is going to look quite similar and installing them is also basically the same sort of thing so I've already done it here but you can see that when you get the motherboard you will want to push down the arm so it's either on this side or this side depending on which socket you've got you want to pull it back and then gently we're going to lift up the little lid so I've already taken off this little plastic protector you can actually leave it on because it's designed to pop Loose as you close it down but I just pull this off so we get a little bit of a clearer shot now when it comes to installing the CPU on am5 it is very very simple so not only are there a couple of notches you'll see there's a notch on top and bottom which corresponds to a notch on top and bottom of the CPU but it's especially easy because if you flip it over you'll see that there is that little line right so we have the top and the bottom of the chip that line denotes top and bottom on both the actual socket and the CPU so this is super simple if you're using Intel or an older AMD you're going to want to go by the little notches so there'll be notches on the left or the right or the top the bottom and you'll also see that with this and most CPUs there's going to be a little gold triangle that gold triangle will also denote the little triangle on the socket so there's a number of ways to double check but just make sure that it lines up correctly when we drop this in we're going to gently place it if you go to put your CPU in and it fights you at all stop that's not good it's supposed to gently rest into place okay so scary it's probably the only part of the system that is actually a real danger but it's totally fine so to install the CPU very simple hold it by the corners trying to touch that bottom just good general rule of thumb we're going to line it up with our actual socket making sure that it is lined up correctly with those notches and we're going to gently let go of it tada that's it you see how it just rests very very seamlessly here again if you going to put that in there and it doesn't feel right don't Wiggle It Don't Force It gently pick it up visually inspect that The Notches are lined up and everything is fine as you can see it just rests completely fine once you know that it is in here you can put your finger out you just give a little wiggle just to make sure totally fine then we're going to take the top of it put it underneath this little retention so you'll see that we actually have to make sure it's all the way forced down there and then we take this arm and give it some good Force it's going to be a little hard to put down but don't worry about it it's just a moderate amount of force and congratulations you have a CPU installed in your motherboard that's it it's that simple it seems scary there's a lot of things that could go wrong but as long as you put the CPU on is lined up correctly you put that arm down that's it that is really the most nerve-wracking part of any PC build at this point it gets much much less scary next up let's install our Ram so for this system I'm going to be installing dual Channel memory which is going to come in two dens so uh to install RAM it is very simple if you've ever worked on a PC in the past oar was probably installing RAM so you're hopefully familiar but if not so so simple so I'm going to pull it out of the little clamshell here um Ram is not super fragile you don't have to worry about it too much so almost all Ram these days has like a little like metal heat sink which is perfectly safe to hold now it's just a good general rule of thumb you see like little gold contacts on pretty much anything don't touch them it's okay you just don't want to get them dirty you want to get them like gross or nasty or anything so typically it's always safe to grab these things by the sides or by I like the little metal shrouds but you'll see that I have two sticks of ddr5 here now I actually have right here a stick of ddr4 so if you're building a system you're going to be using one of these types of memory they look almost the exact same but importantly they're not compatible with each other so if you're building an Intel system often times Intel systems will actually have an option so the CPUs would support ddr4 or ddr5 and it's down to which motherboard you get but a motherboard will only select one of these two so this board actually says right here and it's RIS 7,000 so you know it's ddr5 same thing is if you buy an Intel board it will tell you ddr4 ddr5 the main reason I say that is because while they look similar they're not the same if I try to take ddr4 and put in a ddr5 board it will not fit and vice versa with ddr5 the main reason for that put them side by side you see there's a little Notch it's about halfway through or so that Notch is in a different spot for ddr4 versus ddr5 that is the only physical thing stop stopping you from trying to make a real bad mistake so if you've made it somehow to this point and you're not sure double check that your ddr4 ddr5 RAM is correct for your ddr4 or ddr5 motherboard sounds like it's very complicated it really isn't if you're building with ryzen 7000 you're definitely using ddr5 if you're building with ryzen 5000 or earlier you're definitely using ddr4 if you're building with Intel it could be either or reference what kind of motherboard you have that will tell you what kind of ram you need to use but because we're using ryzen 7000 it's very straightforward now regardless of what kind of ram you're using installing this is dead simple A2 and B2 it says first that is very common so what we're going to do is we're going to pull back these little retention arms so you'll see you just pull it back on one side on the other side we're going to do it on slot two and four um some motherboards actually only allow you to open one of the sides if that's the case it's fine but you always at least open one of them and then with our in hand what we're going to do is we're going to line it up so uh there's no easy way of telling which way it is I I'll be honest just look at the Notch and just sort of do a little test fit and see so you'll see that does fit you'll see that does fit there we go I still put the ram in wrong almost every time so you know how I mentioned that you got that little Notch what's almost halfway but not quite and Visually it's hard to tell so what I do every time is I just come a little lower I line up in the slot making sure that you have actually opened the correct arm so it's easier to accidentally like kind of cross it so make sure that you've actually got it slot two slot two right so it's going to line up line up here look at where that Notch is and you'll see that it matches up correctly I can now click this into place if however I roll the dice wrong and put it in backwards what you would see is that that Notch does not line up and this will not go into place right so if you feel it obviously and it just physically doesn't look at it actually matches just flip the stick around it's totally fine it's just because it's almost half and not halfway through it's really hard for me to visually tell which side it is so I always just actually look down do a very light little test fit to make sure it does line up which I can see it is and at that point take a thumb on either corner and give it a relatively decent amount of pressure until you hear it click so ready set one and boom there we go we got one stick of RAM installed that simple so because I have the two sticks of ram I'm going to go to my fourth slot do the exact same thing making sure that I have lined it up correctly so again there's a little guide there so it should line up relatively well one two and we're going to push and push there we go we have ourselves 32 GB of RAM installed now if you had four sticks of ram if you're Mr Moneybags over here you would just continue to populate all the slots but if you're doing dual Channel memory with just two Dems which is the majority of systems you're going to put those two in there we go that's it super super straightforward like honestly even if if you've never built a PC before you could just install RAM in your existing system like it is very simple just don't push it really hard if it doesn't go in because you probably have it upside down and again I do that a lot so just this is a little outside the scope of the tutorial but just a little tip so I'm using a kit of gskill flare X5 so these are two identical sticks of ram technically any set of ddr5 would work but I don't recommend it so if I were to say expand this Ram to 64 GB and buy two more I want to buy the exact same kit of ram mostly because this Ram is all going to be running at the same speed same timing same everything that is a pretty much guaranteed way of expanding your memory if I was to say grab a set of Corsair Ram that's a little slow or whatever the system will work but it will default to whatever the lowest speed is and sometimes it'll default to like base base speeds you also can sometimes have compatibility issues most modern systems it will work but if you're going to expand your memory try to buy the exact same kit that you have so it might not be a bad idea so this is just a little pamphlet that came in the plastic sleeve it might not be a bad idea to just keep this handy so say 6 months or a year or two years from now if you want to buy some more RAM you can confirm that you're getting the exact same thing so again it's not just necessarily the manufacturer but it's the speed it's the timing it's everything if you're doing troubleshooting Ram is the spot that I always like to start with so especially if you've got got mismatched Ram in there that can sometimes cause compatibility issues so if you get this thing all put together you hit the power button nothing happens check your RAM make sure it's seated make sure you have all matching sticks and if it really doesn't work what I'll actually do sometimes is I will remove one of the sticks of RAM and try to post it that way you shouldn't actually run your computer like this because you're losing performance but if you're just doing a little bit of troubleshooting trying with a single stick of ram can sometimes actually fix the issue every once in a while sticker Ram may be dead or not seated right or whatever the case is so just a little tip for troubleshooting and future expansion but for now we're going to install both of our sticks we're going to move on to our SSD so we are of course using a Samsung 990 Pro but this is an mvme SSD and they're all going to install the exact same way so um the 990 Pro is a very high-end SSD this thing will do what like 7,000 megabytes per second like it is absurdly fast like I'll be real with you almost every MVM SSD you could install is going to be just silly fast right um the thing I do tend to like is going with Samsung ssds for reliability now you have to be a little careful when it comes to picking a brand for reliability because everyone's different every SSD every manufacturer every line right Samsung make a number of different ssds for example um so the safe beted is always to read some reviews and see but I just personally speaking have had a lot of good luck with Samsung ssds in the past so again your mileage may vary every company has quality control issues sometimes yada y y but I tend to like Samsung because not only are they fairly fast and usually on The Cutting Edge they make all their own stuff but importantly I have never had a Samsung SSD fail on me actually I don't think I've ever had a problem with it so you know obviously plenty of options out there but it's good to have a high quality SSD so that you don't you know lose data cuz that's not fun when it comes to installing our SSD it is very simple so we're going to go to our top PCI slot which again is the one that had this little cover on it so if you can't find it you may need to take one of these covers off and what we're going to do is if you look at the SSD you'll see it has a bunch of little gold pens with a little Notch right so the notch denotes where the power and the data are split so with this is only going to go in one way there is technically another type of M2 SSD which is based on SATA and that will have an additional Notch up here those are less common and honestly kind of out of date at this point so the vast majority of you should buy an mbme SSD as opposed to a SATA M2 SSD which word soup but um if you have the second Notch you'll just need to make sure that your motherboard has a slot that supports SATA ssds but like I said 95% of you buying an SSD should get just a regular mvme M2 SSD at which point you should have no compatibility issues so what we're going to do is we're going to take it we're going to line it up with this little slot here so when we line it up we're going to do it at just a little bit of an angle so just give a little wiggle you'll feel it start to go in and you you can let go it will stay like that and the next step is to go to those little screws that came with the motherboard and you'll see that there's a little baggie here that has one baby screw in it um they give them to you separately um not sure why but these SSD screws that you're going to need are going to come with the motherboard now some motherboards actually don't need the screw this one does but sometimes you'll actually have a little plastic piece that goes on this and all you'll do is you'll just push this down and rotate the plastic piece down cuz all it's doing is just physically holding in place so depending on the manufacturer of your motherboard you may use one of these little screws that comes with your motherboard or you might just have a little plastic piece that just swivels around and holds it both are totally fine takes 5 Seconds to put one screw in but it is so simple like honestly compared to we'll show you how to do a hard drive in a little bit um but compared to installing a hard drive it's not exactly a tough thing to do but man M2 ssds are so easy I mean it is just it's so good before we screw it in I'm just going to make sure that the SSD is fully seated so I'm going to put a little bit of pressure toward the socket it's nice and firm in there so I'm going to take my finger and push it down grab my screwdriver take the screw like this and then I'm going to screw it into place and just like that we have an SSD installed I told you it is really really simple so before we're done we're just going to just give a little push test just to make sure it's not loosened anyway um another troubleshooting thing if you have problems later on sometimes you may be able to actually get the computer to post and go into the BIOS but your SSD won't show up almost always your problem is that you didn't fully seated typically if the screw goes in you know nice and cleanly you do have that fully seated but just as a heads up if you have any problems with your SSD showing up later now would be a great time to come back in make sure your screw is all the way tight and make sure that it is fully seated in there CU if it's out even just a little bit it sometimes might not show up but that's it it's not very complicated the last thing we need to do here is install this little cover now strictly speaking you don't actually have to use these so the reason why it's this sort of big metal cover it's actually a heat sink for your SSD now I highly recommend this you should definitely use this cuz it comes with the board you'll see On The Backs side so this is like the front so this is the back so if you peel off the little piece of plastic you'll actually see that it is a little thermal pad so if you touch it little sticky this is actually meant to transfer heat from the SSD onto your heat sink and let it be dissipated in your case um again I would definitely recommend to do this your system will run without a heat sink usually um but just just don't do that just just put the heat sink on it is going to help your SSD perform far better it's going to be much more of a long happy life and it's already on your motherboard almost certainly so it's kind of a bit of a no-brainer all these heat sinks can be slightly different based on your motherboard but with this one it's really straight forward so this little Notch which is going to go into where the socket is and then there's a screw on the other side uh the only thing I'll say as far as installing these because this is a sticky thermal pad try to do this cleanly the first time you don't be wiggling around or whatever cuz it'll actually like tug your SSD so just make sure that you get it nice and cleanly so we going try to do this some one try so we going to take our heat sink we're going to line it up with the top of the socket here so it just slides in like so I'm going to actually get a little lower so I can get a nice view of it so it should make nice smooth and even contact with our SSD and it's going to be hard for you to see but there's this little screw hole right here so I'm going to make sure that that is making in contact with our actual screw and with that I'm going to gently put it into place you go and screw this pretty much all the way down once I'm done I like to take my finger and just sort of run it along a time or two just to make sure that it is made some good contact and that's it your SSD is installed it has a full nice heat sink on it to make sure it's nice and cool if you ever need to take your SSD out swap it out that's fine just keep in mind that because that thermal pad's a little sticky you don't want to do that too much you don't want to touch that too much cuz will start to lose some of the effect but that's it my friends we got ourselves a CPU installed we got ourselves RAM installed we've got ourselves an SSD installed you can take a little bit of a break now maybe do a little stretch did you drink some water you probably need to drink some water cuz we're about to go into the next phase which is to install our motherboard into the case we're going to start installing our graphics card our cooler all the kind of fun stuff but here is a great point if you take a little break and Patch yourself on the back cuz you've actually made a a lot of progress good job now my friends it is time to retrieve our case and set it down on the desk so she going to put it down flat on its bottom or its back I guess because we're going to install our motherboard so I will admit a big reason why I'm using a white case right now is because it is a lot easier to see now that is because I'm doing a tutorial obviously you pick whatever case you want I would just give you a little heads up if you have chosen a black case it's a little hard to see sometimes I would recommend if you do not have a well-lit area pull out your phone and your flashlight sometimes like again with this white case and the studio light it's really easy to see but there's definitely times when I'm building in a black case especially once you start getting a bunch of components in it can be hard to sort of see like some of the areas where you like run cables or standoffs or whatever so just a little like sort of heads up as you're sort of either planning your build or actually getting started make sure you have a well lit area and if you've that a white case it's a lot easier to see so just a little tip there but let's install our motherboard before you install your motherboard you want to make sure your IO Shield is in place so again this motherboard has an IO Shield already attached to the board so I don't have to do this but a lot of other boards don't so I'll show you a clip of our previous PC tutorial where you have to install the io Shield essentially it's just a little piece of metal that clicks into place in this sort of back part of the chassis now you want to make sure that is fully seated you also want to make sure that the it is in the correct orientation you just want to make sure that the io Shield matches up with the layout of the ports on the back of your motherboard trust me I say you want to make sure that IO Shield is in correctly CU if you don't and you put your motherboard in and you screw it all down and then you look at the back and realize none of your ports are sticking out you're going to be real grumpy not that I've ever done that or anything um but uh if your Bor already has the io shield in congratulations that step's already done so assuming you have your IO Shield installed it is time to put the motherboard in so motherboards are fairly straightforward now this is the point where I will tell you to check the size of your motherboard and the size of your case so this is again an ATX chassis and an ATX board which means that thankfully I already have my standoffs installed so you can see that I have nine of them 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 nine that is a standard ATX configuration now if I was using a smaller motherboard I would only be using maybe four six eight it depends on the boards especially Micro ATX sometimes has slightly different positioning so if you're using a differ sized motherboard check the manual for your case sometimes the case will actually have like M or ATX or ITX engraved typically though you want to take a look at your actual manual to see um the idiot proof way of doing it is to just test fit your motherboard so you can see with this ATX board I should just be able to drop it right into place and I will be able to see that everything lines up so I'm just going to line it up something like this and I can already visually see 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 nine screw holes so I know that this will line up but if you're again using a Micro ATX motherboard and an ATX chassis you may need to install or move some standoffs which brings me to this box of Hardware so every case is a little different so this is a lean Le case which has a large amount of accessories in it but you're always going at this point want to find the box of stuff that came in your case usually it's a little small than this sometimes it's like in like your little hard drive caddy um there's a bunch of stuff in here including a manual which you may want to check if you have any questions especially again when it comes to the positioning of where you want standoffs but what I'm looking for is this little guy right here so this is a little box of Hardware so if I can do this without dumping it all over the place you'll see that I have a bunch of different types of screws and mounts and all that kind of thing this is very helpful in fact not just very helpful it's a necessity cuz these are where you're going to find screws to mount most of the components in your system including your motherboard so because I am using an ATX case and an ATX motherboard my standoffs are already here if I'm using a different size or some cases don't have this I need to actually manually install these standoffs myself so if I look through here normally what you'll find so you'll see that this is a little bag that has a bunch of screws and standoffs um now sometimes these standoffs are actually bronze so actually made out of brass the whole point of a standoff is to separate your motherboard from actually grounding itself on the case and you just need a place to screw it in also just a little heads up as you open these little baggies be real careful they explode all over the place I have lost like you want to lose one of these in your carpet I don't think so so this is what a standoff looks like so you can see it has a little thread on the top and if I flip it over you'll see it has a thread on the bottom so this is what goes into the case and then this is where your screw will go into the actual standoff through the motherboard a lot of this stuff is very small so I'll will admit it's a little hard to get on camera so I'll try to show you as much as possible but again my standoffs are already installed in this case if you do need to install standoffs so I'll just show you like say I'll put one right here um what I like to do is I like to start it fingertight so you can get it kind of in there you want to make sure as you install stand ups that you get them in there pretty firmly because what can happen is is that say I install this one just fingertight and I call it a day fingertight is actually enough to install your motherboard what can happen is is that say you need to replace your motherboard you need to pull it out at some point if this is not all the way seated into the case when you go to unscrew the screw out of your actual motherboard instead of coming out it'll just spin the standoff and it'll get stuck and at that point you have to get like a pair of pliers in there it's it's a huge pain so I would highly recommend to make sure this is nice and tight there's a couple ways to make sure that you install these correctly so most of the time not always most of the time you'll have this little tool I don't know if it actually has an official name but I just call it the standoff tool and basically this is on the top it's going to be a little uh Phillips bit and on the bottom is going to be a little hex I'll show you how to do this just for Simplicity sake so I'm going to take my bit and put it over the standoff and then I'm going to screw it in pretty tightly so don't go crazy on it or anything that's magnetic so it comes back up but that is the way to properly install a standoff and same thing if the standoffs that are already in your case don't match up for whatever reason you can use this tool to remove a standoff as well with this tool it is very straightforward to install and remove standoffs based on what you need for your board I will say that these are usually but not always included with your case Hardware if you don't have one of these you actually can use a little pair of pliers to crank them down and sort of put pull them back out uh I don't like doing that if I can avoid it because you can't always get it all the way in there it's a little bit more annoying and that's the only time you ever really do need pliers but just a little heads up if maybe you're working on your PC later and you lose this little guy or something you can use a pair of pliers to do it but just if you're installing standoffs make sure you've got them in there nice and firm cuz trust me you'll get them in there halfway you'll install your motherboard two years will go by you'll try to take your board out and you realize that you're screwing your standoff or just spinning and you're going to really regret your decisions so just make sure you get those things all the way in there but for this video we actually don't need to do that all the standoffs are in there and it is time to install the board itself the only other thing I'll say as I start to line the board up here is that you may want to install your all-in-one liquid cooler before you do your motherboard I will mention that there are two different schools of thought as far as the order of operations at this point so I'm going to show you how to install the motherboard and then the CPU Cooler now if you're using something like an air cooler this is definitely what you want to do right and I'll show you that in just a second but because this system we're using a all-in-one liquid cooler so we're going to have a radiator and some fans that are mounted up top sometimes you actually want to do this in the opposite order and install your radiator and your fans first and then your motherboard I unfortunately don't have a like foolproof recommendation it does kind of come down to your actual case it comes down to how big of a cooler you're using and it comes down to the motherboard the main reason why you may want to install the cooler first is to be able to actually easily run your cables so you can see here that there's a few things we're going to need to plug in on the top of the board so you can imagine that there's going to be a radiator right here and then fans as well so it's going to actually kind of come out to here thankfully this case has lots of space so it shouldn't be a huge con concern but certainly some cases that are a little bit more compact it's really hard to say like pull your like sort of CPU power connectors up here and plug them in you got this huge Radiator in the way so I would just give you a little sort of heads up that you may want to do this slightly out of order compared to what I'm doing but if you're using an allong cooler that say has it mounted on this side it's not a problem so it's like a a 120 or 240 if you're mounting in the front it's not a problem and if you are using an air cooler it's also not a problem so I'm going to be just installing this the normal sort of way um before inall the board though let me just quickly show you the difference between an air and a water cooler so again I'm using an AIO so I'm going to be installing um everything up on top if I was installing an air cooler it would be mounted something like this and this might just be a good sort of way of showing you one of the reasons why you may or may actually want an air cooler so this is a be quite cooler it is on the larger side certainly at the biggest but the thing with these is I like the Simplicity but they are quite heavy and when you mount them you can see because obviously the board is going to be like sort of vertically this is a lot of weight they can to be kind of pull pulling on your system which is a great reason why you should make sure to use all of the standoffs all nine of them on our ATX board and make sure you screw everything in nice and tightly uh I've seen some horror stories of a cooler it's a little heavy maybe it's being shipped or moved or whatever and it can rip stuff right out now let us install our motherboard so I'm going to go through here I have a bunch of the screws which I will show you so the thing is and you know what I don't understand why we've been building PCS for what however many decades at this point you don't at a quick glance know what screws go to what which is weird because a bunch of these screws are very similar to size that you would think that like I don't know some of them make them different colors or something now if you really want to know you can go to your uh manual that comes with your case and somewhere in here is going to tell you what screws go to what so right here it'll tell you all of the different screws that come with your system as you can see a lot of these screws look very very similar so you can see that this one right here here shows screw for motherboard and 2.5 in SSD got a little like almost washer looking guy around the corner so that's the kind of screw we're looking for sometimes you can grab a screw that feels almost exact same thing and it doesn't thread right if you grab that it doesn't thread just grab the other screw but it's just I don't know I I feel like we should have slightly more distinct screws cuz they're so so similar um but for our purposes we're going to look for eight and nine of these little guys I'm going to use my little magnetic mat so I don't lose them and then it as simple as in installing the board but some cases will have instead of nine standoffs they'll have eight plus a little peg in the center that's actually really helpful because when you go to install your board so you can see right here um you have may have to zoom in a little bit but you can see that while it's pretty much in place it's slightly a skew across the board so what I'm going to have to actually do is I'm going to have to adjust it and sort of try to center it up myself but if you have a case that has one of those little centering pens that'll actually kind of help to well Center it by itself but it's not a big deal just expect that when you put the board in it's not going to look quite right you're going to have to sort of finesse it just a little bit to make sure it all lines up now before we put in any screws something to keep in mind now this is not really a big problem for this system because it has that IO Shield built in but if you do have a system that you're going to install the io shield and then sort of Slide the motherboard into so again like usually a little bit of an older or lower-end system take a look around the back so you see here that I can see all of my ports they're nice and clear nice and clean perfect I know that I'm good to go if if I am using a IO shield and sliding the motherboard in take a look at that rear IO can you see all of your ports are there any little metal pegs or penss anywhere boy oh boy it's not fun to install your Board finish your whole system get it all ready to go and then you go to plug your ethernet in and there's a little metal pen in the way because you didn't notice it highly highly recommend before you put in any screws for your motherboard visually look at every single one of your ports and make sure that it is unobstructed just look really close make sure boy I can't tell you how many times I've had to spend an hour tearing apart my PC just to move one tiny little pin cuz I wasn't paying attention um thankfully though because this system has the io Shield integrated that's basically never a problem because it's quite literally already attached so just a little warning for first-time Builders to don't be doing big dumb things like I have done in the past to install the motherboard we're going to use the same sort of cross pattern as we did for our power supply so pick a quarter doesn't really matter which one and we're going to start a screw now again because the motherboard we're just getting it started it's going to be a little bit crooked that's totally fine just sort of give it a little bit of pressure and sort of slide it into roughly the position so I can see right here I need to give it a little bit of uh shove to the left side so it's almost there there we go uh motherboards don't ever fit quite right right out of the box so like with this I can see I can actually need to adjust it a little bit more there we go all right so this board wants to fight me a little bit so I'm going to start with this top right corner which is the one that doesn't want to fit quite right that's fine we'll just give it a little bit of encouragement and we're going to just tighten that down um when you're doing this do not tighten it super tight just get it started make sure that it's not going to like sort of hop off and then what we're going to do is we're going to go to the opposite corner again you always want to install things corner corner corner corner to make sure that you are evenly applying pressure especially with a motherboard if I tighten that all the way down I'm going to have to still adjust like this back corner to make sure it fits and then tighten it otherwise you're going to crank that thing all the way down and half your screw holes will not line up so just do this slowly do it like a little bit at a time and then you can make sure that your motherboard is fully seated cuz you know PC builds have been around for decades and certain things have improved over the years but certain things feel like they just they figured it out in 1984 and they never decided to second guess anything and installing motherboards really has not evolved a lot yeah L up with the holes you wiggle it till it fits you screw it into place check guys something me sounds pretty s but got fiddly anyway all right so I again visually see that the top right is fine so I'm going to go to my bottom left and again just going to do that like half tight just make sure it's not going anywhere I don't get it too tight and then we're going to do the top left corner which I'm give it a little bit of a wiggle but that also looks like it's fine and again only doing it about half tight just to make sure that it's not going to wiggle I still may actually have to give it a little bit of a of a push to make sure everything lines up but so far I think we're about there and then once we've done the four corners then you can do all the ones in the middle just make sure you do all of your screws and standoffs I mean you don't technically need to but I would highly recommend it especially because uh these days graphics cards can be very heavy it puts a lot of pressure on these things and again if you're ever like moving or shipping your system or whatever uh you want to make sure that you are fully seated so again with an ATX motherboard you're looking for nine total screws um for Micro ATX it's usually anywhere between seven and eight I think off the top of my head mini itex is typically four scre so just make sure that you're going around installing everything all right cool so before you tighten everything down quick idiot check again look at your IO Shield make sure all your ports are looking fine no brainer on this one make sure that the board is like obviously not like pinching any cables so you can see I have this little fan header up here so you want make sure that that's not being like sort of pinched or anything but as long as everything visually looks fine and we know that nothing needs to move at this point take a screwdriver and tighten down all of our screws and our motherboard will be fully installed in our case next up before we install our CPU Cooler regardless if you're using a liquid cooler or an air cooler I recommend installing your CPU power so it is always up here on the top left of the board now with this case we actually have a pretty good amount of clearance but a lot of cases don't have quite so much and once you put like radiators or even just a big air cooler in the way it can sometimes be very hard to reach back here so I always recommend doing this first as you run cable so you'll see right now that even though we have a modular Supply there's still a lot of stuff here as you run cables just try to think about how you position them there's no real right or wrong way but you can see that okay so if I'm going to install my CPU power connector so do is I'll pull these cables out of the way and kind of tuck them on the bottom now the main reason to do this is just so that you don't have a bunch of extra sort of thickness so a little bit later on when we actually do our cable management put the side panel on what you want to do is you want to make sure that the cables are sort of Diversified if you have all your cables sort of in a thick like run in the middle these side panel may not go back on so for this run for example because I know that these are going to go off to the side I'm going to specifically pull them out of the way run them through these little cable channels here which should give us enough length and then I'm going to run them up here now I say that these might actually not be long enough but I'll actually yeah I think it'll work so this case specifically has his little cable channels often times you won't have that so you'll see that there are all these little like sort of holes here so there's like a little Gap here Gap here Gap here these are so you can use twist ties so when you're running your cables especially a little bit later once you're actually done you can tie them down but for now and just generally speaking when you're plugging things in try to think a little bit about the cable run because it's a lot cleaner and a lot smoother if you do this now versus building the whole system and then you have to tear half of it out to figure out where everything goes so for this assuming that that is long enough which I think it should be we going to poke it through this top left spot here I think it's going to be just long enough now I might have to pull a little bit of slack if we turn the case back around it's easy to do this while the case is mostly empty cuz when you have to like rotate the case back and forth it's full of components I mean unless you're J2 cents over here it's kind of heavy so you can see that right now I've run my two CPU connectors through this top corner so you'll see they're just going to come right down to here so what I will do is just make sure that I've got all the slack I can but it is going to be enough and what you'll do is you will just plug them in one after the other so this one is already together so you see that because I have the eight plus4 here's the eight and here's the 4 plus4 they can just snap together but because I only need half of these I have to separate these before I plug them in so to install these it's quite simple so I'm going to start with my eight pen which is going to go on this side so there's a little clip on the bottom which like most things in a computer means it's only going to go in one way a little hard for me to see and it's probably impossible for you to see but if I just rotate that around there we go that is a nice little click and honestly those cables actually look pretty nice now I'm going to do the same thing for the auxiliary power I'm going to Che just a little bit so because my secondary CPU I only need four of the eight pens I'm actually going to split them so you'll see they kind of split by themselves so if I just pull them apart a little bit I get a little bit sorry it's hard to see but you'll see I got a little bit of extra space I'm going to take the extra four that I don't need and tuck them back in and I'm only going to feed the four that I actually need again all this is just for Aesthetics but it's going to make your life a little easier and importantly your cable runs to look a little bit neater sometimes especially when you're working like sort of confined spaces you kind of have to go off a feel more than anything thing um this is where you may want to use something like a flashlight but there we go that's it now we have our CPU power cables connected the rest of our power cables can come later once we have more components in the system but I definitely recommend doing this earlier because it's a lot easier when you don't have any obstructions in your way now it is time to install our CPU Cooler we are taking advantage of a 360 mimer all-in-one radiator pump fan the whole deal right everything you need to cool your CPUs in this box now a couple of things to go over before we do this first of all this is quite a high-end setup now if you really really are going in depth on PC Building you want to do a full like custom Loop or something by all means but I think most people watching this tutorial are probably not going to be doing a custom Hardline liquid cooling Loop for their first system so this is a much more straightforward plug-and-play kind of method however it's quite a lot for this system now it will fit it's a 360 mm radiator which means we have three 120 mil fans which will be mounted here here and here it'll all go together nicely it will fit in this case but I'll be honest it's quite overkill for our ryzen 77700 X I mean it'll be nice and cool but um if I was not doing this for tutorial purposes I would probably pick maybe a 240 mm radiator at the most for this system but I'm me to show you what it looks like when we do the entire 360 mm setup so this is going to be about as big of a AI IO that you would ever install technically they make slightly biger ones but they're quite rare like this is a it's a big boy and importantly it does have the screen on the front now while I'll be showing you how to install this ail you of course could be using an air cooler now these come in a bunch of different sizes and varieties in fact that goes for all CPU coolers almost no CPU Cooler is the same as another one when it comes to the install so if you're using this exactly in Lee I'll show you how to do it you can see if it's a CPU Cooler it would go on something like that and you can see that if that was in there we would have very little space up here but for these purposes we're going to be going with this aiio all right I think that's enough Preamble let's crack this open and begin the install it is um not super difficult but also one of my least favorite parts of building a PC um it's fine aios there's nothing against them right like they certainly have their advantages as we've already discussed um the main downside is just the fact that they're there's a lot of components because there's three individual fans there's the radiator then there's the pump and you want to make sure that that's all there there's also a lot of cables involved like this is 100% duable if this is your first system I don't want to scare you off at all but um an air cooler is certainly a lot easier to install I will tell you that now before I actually go into this it's really not a problem but I will mention it anyway you'll see right here it says Intel LGA 1700 and AMD am5 supported now generally speaking CPU coolers are pretty Universal now they may not be powerful enough or sort of efficient enough to sort of get rid of a bunch of heat if you have like a little dinky air cooler and you put it on like a really powerful processor but usually they will physically Mount and that especially goes for the stock coolers which if you're using a stock cooler typically they just clip right on or attach they're super easy to install now it comes to third party coolers it is worth a quick check to make sure that it is going to be compatible with your socket so because this is an am5 motherboard this is an am5 socket if we're using Intel would be LGA 1700 there are a lot of older sockets that are also included I only mention this because a year or two ago actually maybe two three years ago at this point Intel changed their socket for the first time in a very long time it was a physically different size and a lot of CPU coolers did not have compatibility with it for 6 months 12 months as they were sort of changing because you need like a little different plate so it's not really a problem today am5 is super easy and again pretty much anything you should buy in 2024 will support 1700 but it's probably worth a quick little check just to make sure but you shouldn't have any problems unless you're using maybe like an old cooler from like an older build or something in which case you may need some kind of like adapter bracket which most companies sell but it's not quite Universal just a little heads up on that all right we got ourselves the all important instruction manual which is really thin wow that's okay well they you know what they they're very confident because that's not a lot of stuff wow these usually several pages so that's all the instructions we need hold on to these I will show you how to do this but let me be very clear every CPU Cooler installs differently which is not helpful when I make a tutorial on how to install a CPU Cooler so I'm going to show you the broad strokes and if you want to go with this one you obviously can by all means go for it but just keep in mind get a Corsair if you get a lean Lee you get a MSI they're all going to be a little different probably the same but a little different all right what you will find with every aiio are your fans and your radiator which are already installed oh my God are they already installed yo that's awesome so this is actually the newer version of The L Le coolas these used to be called the Galah hats I think they've just rebranded to the ga2s um or at least I think so this is the first time I've used it oh my God that's so good this okay so uh remember that whole thing about how every CPU Cooler is different yeah uh they already installed the fans for me normally you get your two your three fans or whatever and they're in the box and you have to connect them and it's got USBC on the pump too this Le Lee I'm glad I went with I was like not sure what I was going to use for this tutorial this is great okay well I'll quickly show you what you would theoretically do if you were using a non lanly cooler so if I take off all this plastic you'll see here that this part right here is the radiator it's actually very similar to like a radiator in your car or something so this is where the liquid's going to flow through and the fans are going to push air through that radiator essentially to dissipate the heat right so the way this works is actually pretty neat so this is our pump so you can see that if I flip it over this will be the screen that you'll see see when it's actually installed and on the back there's this sort of uh oh they've got the thr paste on there too godam Le and Lee what you y'all are out here man y'all are out here okay well this could to be a really simple install I'm used to doing like half the stuff myself okay the way this works is pretty straightforward so your CPU generates a whole bunch of heat so that is moved through this thermal past which usually you have to do yourself but is already play pre-applied here which is very helpful and then that is on a copper heat sink so all that heat comes to the Copper and then gets dissipated by the liquid that runs through the pump so the pump is constantly circulating so basically what it does it runs the liquid through here across in through all these sort of veins of the actual um Radiator in through the radiator and then the air blows that heat away again if we were using a air cooler it is even more straightforward the heat comes through here runs through the heat pipes gets blown out super simple actually not wildly different between the two the difference is this does not need any kind of like actual pump or anything it just needs the actual fan to run whereas with this you need to make sure that this has power so there's a lot of extra assembly steps when it comes to attaching the fans attaching the pump attaching the RGB all this kind of stuff we also have a bunch of accessories which we will almost certainly need although fewer than we normally would so I'm going to show you what you would normally do which is to screw your fans into place so because these are already on here it makes it really simple but typically what you'll do is you will take your fans and you will put them on the bottom of your radio mediator so let me just kind of mock it up and show you what it's going to look like once we're done if you were so unfortunate as to be using a cooler that does not have the fans applied it's pretty straightforward so you're going to have a whole bunch of these longer screws and so basically what this does is once you actually lay it down on your cooler now you can technically do it either in a push or a pull configuration if you're using RGB fans you're pretty much always going to be doing it in a push configuration so you're basically going to be pushing the air from here out so technically you could do it the other direction maybe if you were to say put your cooler in like the front or something almost everyone's going to put it on the top these days that's really what they're kind of designed for and because the RGB looks so sick you're going to want to have that sort of front and center so that's what I would recommend if you wanted to do another configuration you could just put the fans on the other side of the radiator but it depends on where you're mounting it but again the vast majority of people are going to put the radiator on the top of your system you're going to want the fans sort of pulling air from the inside and exhausting it out the top now when it comes to installing f fans and this is actually the same thing if you're putting on an AIO you're putting on air cooler or you're installing case fans is first you need to understand the front versus the back of the fan so almost always you will see like the main logo on the front so you can see that this is the logo and you see the sort of the front of the fan blades if I flip it over you will see that there's the structure of the fan so it's these little sort of like spindly guys as well as all your like barcodes and that kind of stuff that means that this is the back of the fan so essentially the air is going to come in the front and come out the back now I I will be honest with with you there's usually not like a super clear way of knowing short of just looking at it like it doesn't usually say like air comes out here or something but you can see that these blades are clearly intaking it and exhausting it out the back so that's the best way to tell you I wish I had like a more foolproof way of doing that but you need to think about this because air flow is important now building a PC it is filled with lots of very hot components the main ones to think about are your CPU and your graphics card now your motherboard and some other things will put off some heat you want General airfill in the case but generally CPU your graphics card by far the line share of the heat output in the system and the whole point of all these fans in your system is to exhaust that heat out right so most cases will have this sort of figured out for you already so again taking this L Le for example if you look at it up front we have two fans these fans are pulling cool air from outside the case and bringing it inside now with our ail on the top is going to be pulling that hot air up and this rear fan is doing the exact same thing so it is pushing that hot air out the back of the system this is definitely the standard way of doing it now you can get a little creative you know people can do all push all pull I don't really recommend that normally especially if this is your first time uh building your system but you can certainly tweak and tune it but what usually makes sense is your front fans pulling cool air and your rear and or top fans exhausting hot air out that's just the simplest way to think about it all of that being said when it comes to installing our AO It's relatively straightforward you take the four screws and you tighten them down while I'm here I'm going to remove all of this plastic film that they have placed in many many spots on this fan that's a lot of plastic again this was a really expensive cooler it was totally Overkill uh this thing is fancy as hell so at this point in the tutorial we have installed or had our fans already pre-installed onto our Ai and the next step is to install it on our actual CPU this is where you're going to pull out your manual because if you're doing AMD or Intel is going to be a different sort of setup so now that we have consulted our handy dandy instruction manual we're going to put our case on its back um now you'll probably notice I have all these cables kind of dangling they're fine maybe try not to pinch them too much but don't worry about it that much but you definitely want to have your case laying flat for this next step so for our am5 system we're going to leave the back plate on the CPU which is why we want to put the case flat down so that that plate doesn't come flying off but we're going to remove these four screws that hold hold down the little brackets that come if you're using the stock cooler for example so it should be pretty straightforward so so that's the top bracket removed which should just come off so you'll see that we have these two little mounting points here so this is what we're going to use for the actual cooler so that's on the back plate but once we take off these little brackets that back plate can fall so I'll show you what that looks like in a second but for now go ahead and remove the bottom screws as well um and obligatory mention that while I am following the instructions and you should as well uh this will be very different especially if you're using an entel C CPU that is going to be a completely different sort of setup uh the actual like cooler and all that kind of stuff like this all works the same but as far as actually installing it on your motherboard it is going to be different and every brand likes to do a little different some use the back plates some don't some use the mounting points it's it's just different and the thing is if you actually look at one of these manuals sorry a little bit of a tangent um often times what they'll do this one's not so bad but this one will tell you like oh here's how to install it on like Ancient Ancient systems too so like I said this one's a little bit more straightforward it's not huge it shows like 1700 uh LJ 1115 uh 115 so 1150 1151 etc etc um shows am4 am5 but yeah it's just there's a lot of stuff to do so now with our brackets removed it is time to actually get ready to install our CPU Cooler before we install it we're going to have to take a look at our list of hardware and find the right screws because you could install this on an Intel or AMD CPU there are a whole lot more bits of Hardware than you actually need so now is a great time to reference what sizes of what we're looking for so because we're using am5 this is actually a pretty straightforward process we just need to find these four little screws and we are theoretically about ready to begin now before I actually install these I'm going to come back over to our cooler now as far as where you put the radiator there's no like best spot for it right now just kind of tuck it off to the side because we're going to need to make sure we actually have it mounted so again referring to our instruction manual it actually tells us the optimal way to mount the hoses for the best water flow or liquid flow so we going just kind of generally put this in place put it in a little bit of an angle now I'm not actually mounting it yet all I'm doing is just kind of putting it roughly where it's going to be uh when you're installing things in a computer it's usually good idea to IDI check yourself on a regular basis so I'm going to put it roughly where it's going to be again doesn't have to be perfect and then we're going to start rotating this around so this specifically says I should put my tubes on the bottom for the best performance which actually makes it fairly straightforward so you can imagine what will happen is it will be mounted something like this and then uh that looks pretty accurate now that we have idiot checked ourselves to make sure that the cooler should fit and it clearly fits in the top of the chassis it is time to actually install it for this system I'm going to use their pre-applied thermal paste which I'm sure is very high quality but on the very likely opportunity that you do not have this already ready to go I will show you how to install thermal paste on your system so want to carefully put this off to the side and I will show you what it looks like to put that on your CPU there is a large amount of debate on the best way to install your thermal paste so the old school method was just like a little like grain of rice on the middle I did that for many years but newer CPUs tend to be a little bit larger especially in this case of Intel chips and you also can have a little bit more of like a hot spot kind of thing so what I'm going to do is I'm going to do my four corners plus the center I don't have a fancier name so with your tube of theral paste which will almost always come with your CPU Cooler it's not the world's best stuff but honestly it's totally fine what we're going to do is we're going to put a little bit on the top left and I'm taking a little bit right you don't go crazy with the stuff top right bottom right bottom left and then maybe a little bit more in the middle you should use a little bit more than a little bit less um so this tube should do multiple uh applications so you don't want to make this thing go goopy all over the place like some people will just absolutely unloaded if Mr Easter has taught me anything the little extra past never hurt anybody but it is a pain to clean up when you want to replace your CPU Cooler or something and I will actually mention that so obviously this is like our first time installation now if this was say my second or third time you want to replace that thermal paste every time so 6 months from now I want to take my cooler off to swap the CPU or whatever you want to completely clean off both the actual uh block or whether it's the CPU Cooler for liquid or air whatever the case is you want to clean off all the ethernal paste off of this guy and off of your CPU before you install a new one um but for these purposes I'm actually going to wipe off what I just did because again we've got the theral paste on here and there's no reason to not use it so I'm going to go ahead just actually remove that thermal paste because the theral paste it's already on there should be totally fine um there are different ways of doing this I am a fan of the paper towel method the only downside is it tends to leave a little bit of like paper towel stuff so um make sure to get it thorough you also may want to use a little bit of rubbing alcohol I'm actually not going to do that though because I just applied this thermal paste it should just come up pretty easy one two three and move my tap paper towel a little bit four and five and I got almost all of it out and now we use just a little bit of alcohol to remove it so again if this is your first time building a PC you don't have to worry about this until you do it a little bit later but just a little little bit of alcohol should do the trick again just if you're using a paper towel or something like that just make sure you're not rubbing it too much and you know it's going to make a mess everywhere but just a little bit of circular motion and that is a clean CPU so now let us install our CPU Cooler so the first step is to remove those brackets that are already there for this L Le we actually want to hold on to those screws because we're going to reuse them and then we're going to take the brackets that it comes with which have a little CPU on it so it says CPU and the arrow just to show you which direction they're going to go on so we're going to take this and put it on the top and I put another one on the bottom and then what I'm going to do is I'm going to reuse those four screws that came off of the brackets that originally came with it we're going to install those and like always we're going to do these about 2/3 tight or so make sure it's fully seated and then we will crank it all the way down this is a thing you want to put a little bit of pressure on to make sure that it is firmly attached I will say this is uh out of all the coolers you could use one of the easiest I have ever seen um it's very clean and easy to understand instructions uh you've got yourself a lot of things that are already done for you which makes sense cuz this is quite an expensive cooler but you got the fancy UNIF fans like this thing is going to look sick when we actually get it up and running never tighten anything down all the way the first try come back go back and forth time or two and that is on there pretty firmly okay now it is time to put a radiator roughly back in place so it's not going to get in our way that's the only downside when it comes to a 360 mil radiator it looks really good like it's going to fill out all of the fan slots on the top but it's big and it is it fits but it's like not super easy to work with okay so when it comes to actually installing this it's very simple but because I have thermal paste on here here normally you would have thermal paste on your CPU like I showed you but because we have thermal paste here once you apply it you don't want to move it if you wiggle around a little bit that's fine you have to seat it and unseated a time or two the theral paste is not going to stick as well so you're going to cleanly try to install this in one shot so you'll see here that with this bracket we have four little pegs so one two three four and that is going to correspond with these holes so what we'll do is we'll line it up again because the instructions told us so we want to leave our tubes on the bottom going to line up with our CPU we're going to firm normally press it down into place now with one hand on it we're going to find our little screws and we're going to do these fingertight so I'm going to line up on the top left apologize if you can't see this too well but I'm committed now so I can't stop so I'm just going to get that finger tight don't worry about getting it uh like all the way on or anything but just kind of get it started should be good grab one more of those and like always we're going to use a cross pattern so I'm going to reach over to the bottom left and I will tell you if there is one area on this whole PC that you should listen to me when it comes to using a cross pattern it is a CPU Cooler so what's happening once you've got finger tight on two You Can Let Go what's happening is is that as you tighten down each of the corners it is sort of pushing that thermal paste and your cooler down onto the CPU this is really important you want to make sure that that is making as good of a bit of contact as possible not is going to help to spread that thermal paste out but importantly it will make a very significant difference to the level of performance that you get like if you say tighten one side down the other side it be like completely like squished on one side and you may be only touching like half of your CPU or something so do one then the other then the other the other but do it in that cross pattern and honestly go around a few times right so again I like to start out by just doing it like fingertight and that's fine to get everything sort of in place so we're going to do the top left here you know what we're actually running into an issue already which is perfect I can show you so I'm going to use one hand to steady the CPU Cooler so as you start to tighten it down whatever side is not screwed in will start to pull up so don't go like super super hard like again I'm just doing it half fingertight just enough so this doesn't actually pop up and get out of my way and then what I'll do is once I've got that I'm push this down just a little bit I'm going to go around with the screwdriver and tighten it but I'm going to do it in a pretty slow kind of manner I'm going to do a few turns on one side a few turns on the next to make sure this is actually one of the only steps of an AIO that's easier than an air cooler because if you have an air cooler the problem is that they tend to be really sharp so you can see like on this one over here it has all these like fins that one's actually a nicer cooler because it's like rounded boy the amount of times I have cut myself trying to like reach around like a CPU Cooler and the fs are sharp as hell for no reason not fun but with an AO that's much simpler there we go all right I had to cheat a little bit with the screwdriver um so now I'm going to do make sure that's in there well so once You' got all four of these screws started take your screwdriver and go all the way around so again corner corner corner corner and do it slowly two or three turns to the screwdriver and then move to the next one so I'm going to start with this one so go one two three then come up here one two three and then come up over here 1 two 3 4 five six that one's a little looser one two three four there we go and again you go around and around until the screws stop so sometimes I'll have like a little spring on the bottom but just get it until it's actually tight now once you've gotten to this point as long as you're patient you should be fine also a probably should mentioned this earlier but just a a little heads up sometimes CPU cool specifically AOS if they don't have thermal paste pre-applied they'll have a little piece of plastic on them take that piece of plastic off it has happened many many times to many many seasoned PC Builders insert YouTuber of your choice here including myself uh this one didn't have it so this one actually had this like hard piece of plastic on the bottom but just make sure that when you're doing this there's no like plastic or anything in between CU it'll technically work at really terrible speeds because guess what you know it's not a good thermal conductor plastic you'll actually want to go at this for a little while um because these screws have quite a long way because they are really trying to make sure that is very very firm and very sort of evenly attached so you're going to end up screwing these for a while don't worry about it as long as it's actually bit onto the screw you'll be just fine there we go all righty so with that we have all four of our screws in place you can give that little wiggle and it is going to be super solid or at least it should feels Wiggly you've already screwed it all the way in time out maybe take it off and make sure you actually m it correctly I hate tutorials that say that I'm sorry so what we're going to do is we're going to take our radiator which I've already kind of put in place if you got a larger radiator it's a little bit harder to get but also it only goes in one way so it's a little bit more straightforward so we're going to do is we're going to adjust it and we want to make sure we see all of our screw holes so there are three 120 mm fans on this so you should see four * three so we should see a total of 12 so what we'll do is we're going to line up a radiator so you'll see that it goes on these top series of holes and make sure to adjust it so that all the holes are visible and same thing on the bottom so you can see that with this case technically I could put it like on one of these bottom uh rails but that's only if we had a larger fan so because these all line up on that top slot should be very straightforward now before we actually install it you want to make sure that you grab all the hardware so with this one we're going to have a bunch of little washers and little screws so what we'll do is we'll put the little screw through the washer I think this is number what do they call it these are fs and G's little screws little washers the only thing I'll say uh is that when it comes to installing this it does help if you have a magnetic screwdriver because what we're going to do I'm going to let the bit hold the screw and use my other hand to sort of guide the radiator in place um for this all I'm going to do is I'm going to put it in one corner just going to get it started and then I will use my other hand to sort of straighten it out it doesn't have to be perfect right out the gate you just want to make sure that there's a screw that's in there to keep it from just straight falling down and just install it doesn't to be super tight just so it's not going to fall out I'm still holding it I'm going to do that one more time so so now I'm going to thread one more washer through the screw again put it on the tip of my screwdriver and then I'm going to line this up so we're going to move it up here like that again uh this is a great time for us to slide it back and forth as needed because once we put the second screw in it's going to be starting to get locked into its final position so again I'm not going to do it super tight or anything just make sure it's in place and now is a great time to take a moment and count your screw holes so have 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 there we go everything is visible at this point now it's just time to rinse and repeat install all the screws with washers don't forget the washers otherwise it might fall out um and that's pretty much it and at this point once you've got those first two in you can actually start tightening things down it should be in its final position so I'll see you once I've screwed 10 more times so when it comes to wiring up a CPU Cooler it ranges from from simple to difficult so if you're using a simple air cooler it is usually a single connector or maybe two if you have two fans so simple when it comes to an AO I would refer you to this very helpful wiring diagram that is going to tell you what needs to go to where so I'm not going to show you the details of this because again it's going to vary based on every single CPU Cooler out there but I will show you are some of the common things you will see and how to deal with them if you're using an AIO you're always going to have one of these pwm connectors so it may be either three pen or four pen doesn't really matter and what you'll see is that you have the little pens here as well as two notches on the top which denotes that it's only going to go in one way this if you're using an AO should be installed into the CPU optional now you could plug it into like a system fan header or whatever but if you do that you need to go into the motherboard and specifically tell it that it is a pump because essentially this connector can be used for fans in which case the fans can ramp up and wrapped down but when it comes to a pump that is going to constantly be circulating the liquid through your system it typically be set to a set standard speed but regardless if you have a CPU optional Little connector which is going to be right up here on the top right and this one is actually even a different colors so you can tell it is simple as just plugging it in beyond that you're going to see that we have a whole bunch of cables dangling here which I've started to put together now this is our fan controller so from this side you'll see that we have both the power and the RGB from our UNIF fans now we have a couple of other things that are attached to it so this one's pretty straightforward this is SATA power so you remember when we we plugged in those SATA leads from our power supply earlier because stuff like this often needs it well here we go this is what we're going to need now on top of that there's also a USB header and in fact actually with this system we have two so this is a 9pen USB so this is the one that's on the bottom of the system so this is USB 2.0 and I'm glad that we have two of them on this board because we need two of them for the system so again this is going to have one little pen knocked out so it's only going to go in one way and this comes not only from the actual controller but because we have a fancy AO the screen there's also a USBC cable with a secondary USB 2.0 now this one's important because this is what's going to tell your fans to go BR or yikes um this one is just purely for Aesthetics it's going to allow you to play gifts and whatever you want to do on that little display the last thing I'll show you here is our RGB okay so there are two main types of rgbs so there is 5V and 12vt uh the simple way of thinking about is like this if it's got three pens that says 5vt plug it into something that says 5vt it has four pens and 12vt plug it into something on your motherboard that says 12vt do not get these mixed up because if you plug a 5 volt to 12vt well that's too many volts and it doesn't work anymore so again RGB is way outside the scope of this tutorial is very dependent on what manufacturer you use etc etc etc but most important thing is if you have RGB in your system make sure that you connecting it to either a 5vt or a 12vt and don't get them mixed up it will clearly tell Val and again this is three pens so we know it's 5vt but just be careful this will technically one of the only components actually you could shove this into a 12vt it would fit and it would cause bad things in fact actually with this board if you get real close up here so with this motherboard you'll see that we have a 12vt LED connector with four pin here and a three pin for 5vt here so you can imagine how it' be very easy to get those mixed up so just be careful out there friends RGB is a dangerous world full of pitfalls and compatibility issues and really really terrible software next up we're going to be installing a hard drive and/or 2.5in SSD if you were not doing this feel free to skip this part of the tutorial so I'm going to be installing this WD blue hard drive which again is not what you should use to install Windows on this is much more so for just extra storage for stuff you don't need like super quick access to I will also at the same time show you briefly how to install a SATA SSD so remember when we installed that M2 SSD underneath here yeah like you should just do that um but if you're working with an older system maybe you have an older SSD you want to install whatever the case is I will briefly show you how to do this it's very similar to the hard drive it's just a different sort of form factor so before we do any of this we're going to come around to the back of our case and we're going to pull out our 3.5 in Drive caddy so most cases will have them down here so you see that I can pull this out is where we're going to install the hard drive technically if I was installing an SSD I could also install it onto one of these guys which just I can take the thumb screw off and and it will work the same kind of way if you're just installing an SSD I would actually recommend to do it in one of these because it's designed to sort of be nice and flat and flush and you kind of hide it in the back if you are not using a hard drive you actually can easily just take this entire tray out and that's going to give you some more room for cable management and whatnot um thankfully it's toolless but I'm actually going to be using that so I'm going to put that right back into place we're going to be installing a hard drive into this 3.5 in so um if you were installing your SATA SSD onto this gun you'll see there are four holes here and there are four holes on the bottom of the SSD as you can imagine you line it up and you screw it in with some of the screws that come with your case but we are not going to be doing that we're going to be installing a hard drive so let's unbox this hard drive um this is really simple in fact actually with this case like most things that LE and Lee have done with this sort of setup um it's very very straightforward so we're going to open up the hard drive now this actually does come with the screws to mount it in usually your case will also come with these same screws but it doesn't really matter so what we'll do is we're going to take it out of the protective packaging um now a little word of warning so you know how earlier I mentioned that it's recommended to put your system together outside the case and do a little task before putting it in well if I was going to just give you like a number a percentage of components that have problems out of the box a hard drive going to be pretty high up on the list so unlike basically every other component in your system which has few to no moving pieces this is a magnetic spinning platter of death and it you you drop it or it got dropped or tossed around at some point and it's life it may not function so if when you post your system and everything lights up and it's all great and your hard drive doesn't show up obviously double check this fully connected but sometimes these things do just show up the OA and I would say these tend to have problems much more than say an SSD for example so just a little word of warning um not that you should be discouraged you could always just look turn it typically but um just a little heads up that hard drives are fragile and are made of magnetic bits and so we have our hard drive so this is very straightforward there's really not a whole lot to it um so just be a little bit mindful that there is a circuit board on the bottom it's not really going to be too fragile this little ripping cable is but you know just hold it by the side it should be fine so on the bottom of the hard drive you're going to find two connectors so one you should be very familiar with it is our SATA power connectors this is what we used to connect our fan headers uh is also something that comes directly off of the power supply so that SATA power is what we used for our controller for our fans uh but typically it is used for hard drives beside that you'll also see your SATA data connector so this is also notched although it is much less Long than the SATA power now your Sata cable should have come with your motherboard so if you left all the stuff in that box you might want to go and grab it now so I'm going to pull it open now typically you'll see two cables here and they're slightly different based on how you want to do it so unwind this so on one side you'll see that these are the same so you'll see that it is a little clip on one side and there's a notch so it only goes in one way on the other side you'll see that one of these is a flat data cable and one of these is a 90° which one you use is going to be entirely down to your system so when I think about it we could probably use either with this because we're going to plug it in roughly here um I'm going to use this flat one um just cuz I think it'll be a little bit easier if a cable run yeah plug something like that um but again it doesn't really matter usually you have to just just in case you have a really tight sort of bit of Tolerance on your system or something but that is all we actually really need to get this thing up and running to install your hard drive into this tray typically you'll need to use four screws and sometimes you'll have like little rubber grommets but with this one it's super simple because it already is toolless so all you need to do is just bend it open a little bit and line up your hard drive so when you do this make sure to put the um little barcode side facing forward because you want to have access to these ports on the back but the way to do it is very simple so we're going to open it up we're going to try to slide it so it lines up somewhat like this and all you got to do you'll see that there's four holes one on each corner of the hard drive just pull it open just a little bit so you got that clearance three four boom that's it we're ready to install now once you've done that make sure that you have your SATA data and power facing towards you and not toward the front of the case where you can't reach it you just take this and we're going to line it up right here then we're just going to take the hard drive and we're going to click it right into place boom look at that that's a hard drive installed all we got to do now is grab our SATA data cable we're going to plug that in right here making sure that the notch is facing downward and we're also going to grab our lead from the power supply which I probably should have prepped ahead of time instead of leaving it all dangled over here so basically what I'm trying to do right now is I need to install the SATA up here so technically I have enough SATA leads because I have one SATA that goes to the fan header that comes in the case one that comes to this one which is installed here and the other one needs to go into the hard drive but it is just too short to actually reach I can kind of get it but then no I just have to rewire the whole thing damn all right so I guess this is the point where we're going to go into my box of power supply cables install one extra SATA just for one hard drive because it's ever so slightly too far away so if you're like me and need a little extra power in your life what we're going to do is just plug this into our power supply or maybe you just plug this in to begin with cuz you thought ahead and I was trying to be a little too optimistic unplug this into our power supply exactly the same way we did earlier with our state of power connected over here I'm going to run the lead out and run it into our power supply so there you go and now it is connected now you'll see that our cabling is getting a little bit out of control although honestly it's not too bad now it's tempting to start trying to like zip tie and clean things up don't do that yet make sure that everything is installed in the case it's fired up everything shows up first now a little bit of like you know tucking a cable behind a little clip here there trying to sort of massage a run so it's not going to be sticking out that's fine but just don't go too deep because there's a very decent likelihood that you may have to start tearing some stuff out or you forgot something like you 2 Ines short of reaching your hard drive not that I forgot I just didn't I just was hoping I would be lucky with that the only other thing we have to do is plug in our hard drive to our motherboard so what we'll do is we'll flip the case around oh it's getting heavy now all right so what I'm going to do is I'm going to Route this cable over to this side so this is a great opportunity to show you how to try to run things somewhat cleanly so you see we have these little grommets so even though we're not really worrying about Cable Management yet always run cables to the closest sort of access point so again I can run it right here and you'll see it's going to pop out right beside our SATA leads so what we can do is if we flip this cable around we actually kind of plug that in so that it's sort of hidden obviously it's not completely hidden but that's like a nice flat clean run this doesn't matter hugely for anything besides Aesthetics but especially if you're building in a white case your cables are going to be very very easy to see all the black cables right it's going to be very very contrasty so it's a good idea just to try to run things somewhat cleanly when you have the opportunity to cuz it will make it look a whole lot nicer once you get all the side panels on but with that we have ourselves a hard drive or an SSD if you're using that installed in the system now the last thing I'll say on this if for some reason you were installing an optical drive so a DVD or Blu-ray Drive it uses the exact same two connectors as your hard drivve so you'll have one state of power one state of data typically It Go in the front of the case I'll say I can't remember the last time I saw a brand new case that still had a 5 and a/4 inch drive for optical drives so I mean if you're keeping the physical media dream Alive by all means have fun but um yeah that should be it and now it's time to run some more cables so our system is looking really good right now the next step is going to be getting a lot of our cabling actually installed not cable management but actually plugging stuff in now you could install the GPU right now but I recommend holding out against that mostly for the same reason as why we did this CPU power first the GPU is big and kind of gets in the way so it's much easier to do this without the GPU installed so let's go from top to bottom shall we first up we have our 20 plus 4 pen power connector now I like to start with this largely because it's a very thick cable so uh we're not worrying about Cable Management right now but what we are going to worry about is being able to get our side panel on so because this is so thick what you do want to avoid is a situation where you have to like run two of these thick cables on top of each other you just wouldn't have the room unless you really squash your side panel on so what I like to do is I like to run this 20 plus4 pen early and then when you run the rest of your cables you can kind of try to go around it as opposed to just crossing straight across it so once you run this through it is going to have a clip on the bottom side which is going to only go in one way so usually going to have to do a little rotating action on this but it's not too bad and then we're going to line it up and then just going to give it a nice firm bit of pressure on both sides in the middle until it clicks and that's almost in there there we go and that's it now I will try and push that cable up a little bit so it looks kind of decent it's a little dangly right now the thing is we actually have already done a bunch of the other stuff right so we already have our CPU power plugged in if you did not do that definitely do it now we already have our SATA connected so the next thing is to tuck some of our extra cables in and we're going to start installing some of our front panels accessories that kind of thing so these are essentially all of the bits and Bobs that come from your case so starting out with we have our big chunky USB 3.0 connector so like I mentioned in the motherboard segment this is for your front panel connectors on your case and boy oh boy is it an easy connector to break so when you plug it in make sure you've got it run the correct way you don't want to wiggle around or whatever cuz sucks to remove this is our USBC connector for the USBC on the front of the case uh not all cases have USBC most of them do at this point but that's what we're going to use here then we also have our front panel connectors now something that has gotten so much better compared to older School builds is how easy it is to do the front panel connectors so these are a bunch of individual little connectors that are for things like your power button the LEDs your reset button that kind of stuff now most systems used to have this as a bunch of individual little connectors so I'll show this from like a previous video this is what it used to look like but with this le le case it all comes on a block which makes it super simple and on top of that our gigabyte motherboard has them all color coded so instead of having to dig through the manual and everything you just look at the color code but with this it's even simpler cuz I just plug it in and it works there ically last but not least here we also have our audio connector now this looks very similar to a USB 2.0 it is also 9 pen however it is going to have a different pen knocked out so the USB 2.0 has a pen knocked out on the top left this one has the second from the left so again you can't accidentally do it but very clearly says audio on here and this is going to be running into our motherboard on the bottom left so right here is where that gets plugged in now it's good to take a look at this before you start plug things in not only to make sure that you're running cables in a sort of neat way where you're not like Crossing them and making a giant mess but also just because it's nice to know what you're looking for as you start diving into your motherboard which is again why I like to show you what's going on in the motherboard section so that when I say hey look for USB 3.0 header you remember where that was right you remember where a USB 3.0 header is you looked for it and you made a mental note of it before we moved on to this part of the tutorial right good I'm glad you were paying attention all right let's start running stuff so what I'm going to do is I'm going start with that audio connector so again I'm kind of breaking my own device by running some of the cable management here but it's going to make our lives easier so I'm just going to try to tuck this underneath we got our front panel audio coming out so it's going to always go to the far corner so I'm going to poke this through on the back side and then I'll rotate the case around and you'll see that it is sticking out so with our audio connector pulled through again there's a pen knocked out so it's going to only go in one way which in this case the labeling is going to go upside down I'll line it up with this connector on the bottom left which is for audio insert it and there we go so that is going to get our headphone combo audio jack on the front to work okay so next up we're going to install our USB C header which is going to go onto the motherboard and it should just click right into place there and we'll just tuck the excess off to the side one thing actually I almost did it and I'm going to stop myself and explain it to you really quick so as I push these cables in and especially as you start to do like cable management on the back what you'll see is while you can get a cable run nice and neat you see if I start pulling this you see how it starts kind of tugging that connector in don't do that it's really easy to do try to make sure that when you actually plug these things in that they're coming out at not too harsh of a Bend not only because you don't want to break something off but also sometimes you might actually like slightly tug the connector out when you're doing Cable Management you do all your troubleshooting you fire it up and then like a week later you realize your front USBC doesn't work so just a little reminder to myself and to you when you plug these things in get rid of the slack but don't pull it too much cuz otherwise you'll see that bends way too far starts to pull it out of the thing so something like that should look nice and neat next let's do our front panel connectors shall we if you're using a case and or motherboard that does not have everything nice neat and labeled refer to your motherboard manual it will tell you where to plug each thing in um so again I'll show you some footage of previous years when I've done this essentially every one of those little connectors are going to have a little arrow on it that is going to denote the positive so you'll see that like oh for your power connector it'll say positive on one side negative on the other you would look for the arrow you would put it in that orientation now when it comes to doing these front panel connectors it seems a little intimidating cuz a bunch of little fiddly wires kind of hard to see here's the thing you're not going to do any damage if you mess it up it's totally fine worst thing that'll happen is that your power button won't work and nothing will happen when you hit the bio button or your LEDs w't work or whatever so if you have any problems when you do these uh front panel connectors if you don't have them on this nice neat little sort of breakout box don't worry about it a little bit of trial and error you will be just fine it's easy to panic when you press the power button and nothing happens when you realize you actually plugged your power button into your reset switch or something but if you're using this le le case and some most recent cases or at least a lot of them do have this it's very simple because this plugs directly in and again this motherboard also works great because it's all nice and neatly colorcoded but for this what I'm going to do is make sure that it is lined up so we're going to see that it goes 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 so it goes in with the label facing forward but again refer to your manual if you have any questions about it plug that in like that tuck the excess out into the back and there we go theoretically with that power button things will work now all right last of the connectors for the motherboard is going to be that USB 3.0 boo USB 3.0 is good but boo USB 3.0 connector I sound like a freaking nerd so for USB 3 um this one's a little bit annoying to actually run because it's like sort of a double thick cable cuz it's got two little ends on it so we're just we're going to poke it through right here and again I'm going to try to get it roughly where I want it the good thing about this connector is that even though it's got these two little cables on the end it actually folds really nice and flat so as long as you can get a good bend on the back side of your actual uh case which I'm going to try to do like this um you actually should be able to get it in nice and smoothly so you'll see that on this there's a notch so there's a notch only on one side that is going to go with that corresponding notch on the board so again it only goes in one way please make sure that you've got this lined up as best as possible make sure that you don't need to unplug this for cable management or whatever try to tuck it in a nice neat spot because again don't take this connector out if you can avoid it it will come out if you need to take it out try to do it very gently cuz this little sleeve especially on actually be fair this one's built a little bit better that one looks a little bit stronger but like that little thing can break off and it is such a pain so just when you plug this Cable in try to make sure that you've got it nice and neat and where you want it so I'm going to line it up whoops don't do that I almost grabbed the pen all right so line it up and give it a nice little bit of pressure it clicks into place and that is all you got to do my friends we now have our piece see pretty much good to go and in fact if you were for some reason building a computer without a graphics card we actually could get started from this point now you should definitely install a graphics card if you were building a PC um but technically this would be a fully functional system now it is time for the fun part let's install ourselves a graphics card so before we do this we do just need to prep the case just a little bit so the graphics card like I mentioned earlier is going to go into this top PCI slot so so the way to do it would be to take off some of these covers now before you do that I actually recommend to open up your graphics card so most all graphics cards used to be dual slot so the easy way to do it would be to look at your slot and go oh I'm going to remove this one and this one right below it but these days graphics cards have gotten enormous especially if you haven't built a PC in a while they've gotten long they've gotten tall they've gotten wide like they've just gotten huge so what I'd like to do you can look up the spec but honestly I just like to actually take the graphics card out of the box line it up and just VIs see like oh it's clearly a triple slot card and blah blah blah it just sort of helps to visualize before you start taking off these little uh panel covers these PCI covers and then realize that you grabbed the wrong one cuz the graphics card was bigger than you thought now this actually should be a fairly reasonable size GPU especially when you get some of like the overclocked cars that have like these massive Beast speed coolers I mean they're great they have a lot of performance but they just take up so much space uh which is also why cases like this have a little bit of extra width involved so you can see right here a lot of cases used to kind of cut off right about here but you have all this extra space not only for cooling but just to fit some really big cards like you should be able to fit any graphics card ever essentially in this case right here and that's becoming more and more common um but if you are maybe like reusing an older case from a previous build this would be a great time to double check that your graphics card actually fits it should fit but some of these things get huge man they really do packing steps and unpacking steps really you need tell me how to do this wow and that's it wow look at that that's some you know what this reminds me of this reminds me of when you buy like uh an Apple product like like an iPhone or something when you when they ship it to you they do it in this like little like plastic sort of like containery thing all right want get rid of all this the only other thing in the box and we're not going to be using it but I will highlight it nonetheless is a little adapter for your graphics card so if you remember earlier when I was talking about when we were choosing us our power supply and I mentioned if you're using a newer RTX 40 series card that it uses a different kind of power connector so if you look on top here this is our 12 pen power connector so if you've not built a PC recently this is probably going to be a new looking connector now again that is a single cable that will deliver up to 600 WTS plenty for this graphics card and then some however if you are using an older power supply that does not have that connector every one of these graphics cards should come with one of these so on one end it's a a 12 pen 600 W adapter on the other end is a pair of 8 pen PCI connectors this will work it is included in the box for a reason they have been a little bit unreliable if you are using this you can feel free fully connect every part of it make sure that the eight pens are clicked in there make sure this goes fully fully seated into the graphics card because this is very very thin gauge wiring which is pumping a ton of voltage through it they do have a tendency to fail so I would just say I would normally recommend if you using a RTX 40 series card to go with a newer power supply that has that 12 pen built on this will work it will come with every 40 series card as far as I know unless they change that in the future um it's fine and again if you're using an older Nvidia card at 30 series or earlier you're using an AMD card if you're using an Intel card uh this is not relevant you're just going to have like an eight pen or a couple of eight pens on there but just as a heads up this will be in the box and it's fine but not really recommended so there is a lot of plastic on this card look at that wow that's they they really want to keep you protected take off all the film which I will say you should 100% do um because this film even though it won't keep it from working is super ugly and if you leave the film on for a little while it can melt on I've seen people who never took this off and it freaking gets all like yellowed and gross just take off the film all right last things we need to do is there's going to be a little uh protector over our PCI slot so you want to take that off the back that is what was actually going to connect to the motherboard and then on the back side of the card there's a bunch of little uh Port connectors for our display ports and our HDMI wow that's really iny and there's also of course more plastic on the back all right that should be everything we need to get our graph scar up and running so before we install it let me walk you around it really quickly so obviously we have a couple of fans U all graphics cards are different some have two fans some have three fans not super relevant what I will point out is the actual backside of the card so this is the actual part that sticks out the C back of the Chassy so you'll see that you have your display port you have your HDMI now you'll see that this actually sticks up over the PCI slot right so older graphics cards used to cut off at this point a lot of newer ones have kind of expanded out here which as I kind of show you here uh that's where the some of this extra space comes in handy that doesn't stick out enough that it will be a problem for most cases but just something to keep in mind especially if you're building like in a small form Factor system um make sure that the dimensions of your card are compatible with the case because it can be a very tight fit even if it technically works and you have like no clearance it can be sometimes kind of hard to like kind of wedge it in there cuz basically what we need to do is line up here and go straight back now thankfully this is almost a true dual slot card so what I mean by that is that you'll see that we have the two slots it goes over just a little bit so you see here it's a little bit extra on the side it's pretty close to a dual slot um I'll tell you honestly this is actually a fairly decent size GPU so again this is a 4070 super um you can definitely find graphics cards that are way way chunkier on the cooler I think this is actually a pretty nice blend now the last thing I'll show you here and it's only going to be on some cards is there's a little switch here so there is a p and a q it means mind your p's and q's n performance and quiet I'm going to leave it on performance mode um this is not super important honestly and sometimes you can even change that in the actual driver settings sometimes no no sorry not driver settings the like the Asus software or whatever um this basically just change the actual performance profile of the GPU um I never play with it I just always put in performance and what do you want what are you going to buy a 4070 super and then say hey I want quiet mode it's most ridiculous thing I've ever heard um all right let's install this thing so to install what we'll do is before we actually do it we'll line it up so we again want to make sure that we know what actual covers we need to remove so we'll line up with this uh slot and you'll see that we need to remove cover number two cover number three very standard if you have a bigger card sometimes you actually have to remove three covers but for this we're going to just install it in the top two slots I will say some cases have a vertical Graphics Mount so what that would be is you would actually install the graphics card like right here up front and they would have like a little Riser that plugs into your motherboard it's a little bit specialty it certainly is a thing and you actually can buy like a lot of cases will actually have like an adapter plate that you could do that yourself it certainly looks cool I'll totally admit it looks cool to have your graphics card like that um but this is by far the most standard kind of configuration so we'll do is we're going to remove slot number two and keep these slot covers handy when you take them off uh cuz if you ever need to replace it or whatever it's just nice to have and also keep the screws we're going to reuse those in just one second so see that's one cover um I'll also mention it's really not that common but if you're building in a older or very cheap system sometimes they actually don't unscrew sometimes you actually have to like physically Bend these little uh slot covers out which feels really gross um just as a heads up in case you again have like a very very budget oriented case pretty much anything above like that $50 price point these days is going to be unscrewed but just in case yours is a one of those Bender things you just take it and you bend it back and forth until it snaps out doesn't feel good but that's the way they're designed so got to save some money somehow okay my friends we've got ourselves our covers out the installation of the graphics card is incredibly simple so we have our PCI connector right here is going to go into the motherboard again you want to go into the top PCI slot so technically it would fit and work on the bottom ones but you're going to be severely limited in bandwidth also why would you do that there's no reason okay so we're going to line it up so make sure that is lined up here and all you got to do is making sure that it's all securely set up we're going to firmly push it into place and you'll hear it click ready and boom there we go now if this was a heavier graphics card I would have had taken my hand off so fast but I'll tell you some of the really heavy graphics cards are they're they're they're really really heavy and they'll actually kind of sag again this is a plastic uh primarily plastic shroud GPU it's not super heavy so that actually sits in there fine some if you're rocking like a really big heavy like 4090 or something often times you'll actually want to use like a little Riser so sometimes they actually come where they just kind of give a little support on the back side of the GPU or sometimes they'll actually take up one of your slot covers and give a little bit of extra lift um it sounds a little bit silly but when you get a really heavy graphics card in place it can slowly sag now that it looks sort of bad but it actually can pull itself out of the slot especially if you're ever like shipping or moving your PC it's not really a PC tutorial thing this is just a ownership of a gaming PC kind of tip be careful with the graphics card if you ever move or ship your computer now we're going to screw it into place that should be fine for this but if you're ever actually doing like some real moving of your PC more than just like gently like picking it up and bringing it to like your car or something I actually pretty much always take the graphics card out again they've gotten really heavy and while they're fine stationary if you're moving this thing around it can either snap off or fall or bend or whatever just if you're doing anything more than just a gentle move of your PC from place to place I usually take the graphics card out it's also really simple because it's a couple of screws and one or two power cables but just a little Pro tip so we're going to take those same screws that we took out of the covers and we're going to load up our graphics card and give it a little bit of extra support so now the graphics card installed you should see why we did so much before this point because you know if I'm trying to install our USBC or USB 3.0 or a lot of these things it's much more difficult to do with the graphics card in the ways it's definitely nice to get as much of this done as possible and then install your graphics card we're almost there my friends we're very very close last thing we need to do for the graphics card is run our power so yet again I'll be very clear just in case you skip to the video and weren't paying attention we have ourselves our 12 pen power connector which is very thankfully yellow so you don't accidentally forget to plug it in I don't know we're going to plug this in it is the exact same way if you were using another kind of GPU you would be plugging in your six your 6 plus2 your 8 however many power connectors it actually needs you plug it in the same way you connect it like say the CPU or something there's a little notch on so goes in one way but we're going to install this like so now before I actually do it I will say there's a couple ways we could run this cable none of them are that clean so I think I'm just going to run along the side I could run it from the top or the bottom the thing is if you get on the bottom it actually kind of gets close to the fans and I don't like that and it looks kind of ugly we could kind of do on the top but honestly there's not like a really good way of doing it I'm just going to do it on the side and um we'll just kind of get rid of the slack as much as possible it's not the most pretty thing in the world and you do want to be careful when you plug that in to make sure it's fully fully seated a little less important when it is the actual power supply versus the adapter this is the adapter I'm like making sure it's in there super tight that is definitely in there but uh you don't want to like tug or especially you have like a case that has like a very sort of small tolerance like if anything's like pushing against that like the side panel not good thankfully we have plenty of space so it's fine so a little Bend is okay but nothing that's too aggressive make sure it just feels feel like it's uh got a little bit of leeway that my friends is actually a completed PC y I know right where did the time go so there's a few things we're going to want to do before we're actually done so stay tuned we're not done yet but before we go through and tidy things up and button up the case and everything we're going to do a quick little power test now theoretically you may have done this power test earlier with all of your components all over the case or all over the the table or whatever that's fine regardless you need to do it again with everything installed here you want to make sure everything works everything shows up so time to grab your keyboard your mouse your monitor power cable and get everything plugged in so we can do one final boot test so with everything plugged in let me just run you through a couple of steps before you hit that big red or white or blue power button so there's a few smaller things we should do uh first and foremost you see this little switch on the back of your power supply see the zero and the one flip it to one I can tell you the amount of times I built a PC and forgot to do that and it doesn't do anything cuz your power supply is off um while you're back here you also may want to press the little zero fan button that's on most moderate to highend power supplies that is just going to allow the power supply fan to only turn on when it needs to versus always be spinning on top of that you see how I've got my display port cable plugged into my graphics card so technically I could plug it into my motherboard and that would work the problem though is that I would be using the very wimpy integrated graphics on our CPU now that's fine for troubleshooting or if maybe building the PC you're getting your graphics card next week or whatever um but if you have a graphics card you should always always plug it in to your graphics card right don't use this if you have this that make sense get a graphics card plug your monitor into that one okay good the amount of people who have like a badass graphics card you plug in the HDMI whatever to your motherboard and go man this gaming sucks cuz you're not using the graphics card um also while I'm back here because my motherboard does have Wi-Fi I'm going to pre-install our modules or our little antennas um you don't have to do this for the BIOS I just like to do it while I'm back here so I don't forget cuz technically much like a lot of things on a computer you can actually make it work in a somewhat Jank way if you don't have the antennas you actually will get some Wi-Fi reception but obviously the antennas help that tremendously all right so we're going to one and two cool I think that's pretty much everything we need to do on the back of the system now now the only other thing I will mention is that uh obviously we are doing this test with the computer you know fully assembled and whatnot now because this is our first test boot of the system we're of course just going to be pressing the power button and hoping that it works if however you have built your system outside the case for a test you actually can use a screwdriver to turn it on that sounds sketchy but it's fine all you need to do is go on your front panel connectors and there are the two pens for power you take a screwdriver or any piece of metal really and you bridge those two pens and ENT will turn on the system so just a little heads up it's really helpful for troubleshooting as well knowing that you can just easily jump the board um it's not sketchy don't worry don't maybe stick your screwdriver on all the pin and all the metal bits you probably find something that's not good but when it comes to those front panel connectors you just have to tap it but that's it that's everything we need to do we've got our monitor plugged in our HDMI display port connected mouse and keyboard ready to go everything's turned on fired up all we got to do now is press the power button and hope that we have made a good decision with our lives Okay so we've got uh I forgot to plug in the fans from the case so I'll do that after we're done here but importantly we have all three of our UNIF fans running for the CPU Cooler your graphics card fans actually don't always turn on so if it's a more modern GPU often times they don't spin up until the GPU gets a little hot uh we got our screen on our le le cooler that's activated and if I come around here hey you got a new CPU installed congratulations that is a very good sign we're going to hit Y we're going to let the motherboard do its thing and assuming that everything shows up here in the Bios we have successfully built ourselves a PC so I will need to plug in our fan header which I forgot to do in fact here don't do this but I'm just going to plug it in cuz I left it connected right here so now you can see that we got all of our fans running in the system now at this point the fan is cranking at 100% there's some things that we're going to need to tweak none of that matters right now there's plenty of time to do do that all we need to do is in our bios hit okay here and we want to make sure that everything shows up so we go through the list we see the motherboard ryzen 7 7700x perfect we see our SATA hard drive we see our PCI card which is the PCI x16 perfect and we see our Samsung 990 Pro so that means our SSD our hard drive and our graphics card are all showing up fine on top of that we see our Ram so we see one G scale 16 and two GLE 16s that is everything we need to look for for right now there's a bunch more stuff we need to actually do with the BIOS installing Windows I'm going to walk you through that entire process but this is a perfect opportunity to take a big old deep breath and say congratulations me I built a PC I mean not me like I'm congratulating you for building a PC yeah we did it wo you're the best that ever was to catch them is my real test to train them is my cut so a lot of what we're doing today is software so we're going to be updating the BIOS installing Windows drivers that kind of stuff but before we do that we're going to do just a little bit of cable management and I'm going to do the one thing that I did not do yesterday which is plug in our fan header and our actual RGB Hub so if I rotate the system around it's mounted here this is not on all cases I would say a lot of cases these days will have some kind of Fan Hub so the problem with these is that you got to do a little bit of searching so for these I've got to fish my C out from this Cable Management here so technically they're run down but I actually want to plug them into the top of the board um so what you'll see here is that this case has these nice little cable channels which is lovely except for when you need to pull something out and you have to undo the twist ties now I'm not going to go super in depth on this part because it's is going to be highly dependent on the case and the uh kill management and whatnot that you've got but what I will do is I will show you pulling my fan headers out so right now they actually works so you saw earlier they actually fired up when I gave them power the problem is that by default they're just going to be running at 100% speed which is not ideal I'm going to pull these cables out which come out from here so that's fine so we're going to just pull the excess out of here and then what I'll do is I'm going to tuck the cables that we don't need anymore Behind these little clips now you can go incredibly in depth on cable management for me as long as things are sort of Tidy and I can easily get at stuff and Trace runs I don't care too much the main thing you have to do is just make sure that your cables will be able to close behind the side panel so I can immediately tell that while a lot of the stuff is actually not too far off like my 20 plus 4 pin my CPU my GPU actual cable some of these are going to be a little bit thick so what I'll do is in a minute I'll come back through and actually run them all but the before I do any of that let me plug in our last cables which is going to be for our RGB and for our fan controller um so you'll you saw that when I plugged it into Power the ual Hub all my fans on the case started spinning that's totally fine but they're spinning at 100% because they have no communication with the system they just have power they're cranking so by plugging these into the motherboard not only can we control the RGB on these fans but importantly we can also have the motherboard automatically spin them up and down based on the load of the system no reason to have fans cranking 100% almost ever so rotate this around here I'm going to plug these in uh these are the exact same connectors that we already showed so it is our 3 pen 5vt uh RGB header as well as our pen pwm for the fans so I'm going to plug that into our system fan slot up on the top left or top right rather and same thing for RGB and plug this in right here it's the same stuff as we were doing before just one additional set of cables and then like always I'm going to pull that excess out run it along the top and then what I'll do is I'm just going to tuck it into this little plastic cable holder now you see there's a lot of cables behind this one but that's fine honestly like these are really easy to work with so when it comes to doing Cable Management I'm not going to give you a super in-depth tutorial again kind of try to clean things up as much as you can it helps a lot if you ran cable smartly the first time so a few things that I will do is tuck the obvious stuff like this thing can just kind of tuck back here a little bit more these are actually kind of fine as is now you can go super in depth on this if you'd like I like using these little Clips because they really kind of help hold things in place the other thing you should do is if you have something like Velcro so you can see I have velcro ties all over the place these essentially work as cable channels for this one I realized oh I should run that inside the velcro and help kind of tuck it in a little bit so in fact I sort of push both of these in and right off the bat I bet you if I put that side panel on it would just go we've all done the whole struggle to shove the side panel on there's no shame in that but um yeah that will clearly work I'm going to clean these cables up a little bit throw the side panel on and then it is time to start updating our bios and just like that we've got ourselves a side panel on now I will just take a second and show you just putting the rest of the case together before we install our bios the rest of this is very straightforward so we're going to take our little cover for our basement and line this up like this and there we go so this will help to hide our power supply and all of our extra cables that we definitely very carefully cable managed and it's super tidy but um you know it's it's like your basement in your real house you want to hide it from view so that people don't judge you for hoarding or I don't know whatever you put in your basement I'm not judging and then we're going to put our top panel on here which again this should just slide right on most cases will break down to this level not all cases will let you take off the cover for the basement but most will and I'm just going to line it up here make sure it's fully seated and uh the good thing about this case is it's all thumb screws so you actually don't need to pull out the screwdriver if you don't want to like I can thumb screw all this together it also makes really easy if you need to open up the case and double check something or whatever before you put everything everything back together sometimes it's worth just giving it a quick power cycle just to make sure that everything is still working once you do a cable management every once in a while if you're like pulling a cable it might pull something loose or whatever so you know it's probably a good idea but honestly as soon as you put the side panels on you really shouldn't have to take them off until you're ready to upgrade or do something else I'll be honest uh I don't always pay a ton of attention to the color scheme in my build I try but a lot of times I get like blind ited or very excited about some deal at Micro Center and I'll like forget that it's a brown graphics card for my red case or whatever but like this one looks pretty good and what you'll find was when you're picking components um usually white and black are like sort of the standard colors because we also have to consider that we have RGB to work with so you have some element of customization even after you've built it that certainly helps when you have something looks clean right out of the box all right so going to line this up it's going to pop in place and then again there's one thumb screw in the back and that is a physically assembled computer good job my friends before we proceed I definitely recommend to update your bios so to do this you're going to need a USB flash drive and uh typically a Windows computer although you can sometimes do it on a Mac you just have to make sure that this is formatted correctly typically it's fat 32 but I'll show you that in just a second so the point of updating your bios so the BIOS is essentially the software that runs your motherboard so this runs before windows it's important for a lot of reasons not only does it have like security implications sometimes performance stability it's a pretty important thing now you can update this later and it's not a bad idea to update your bios every once in a while but when you first got your PC built it is always a good idea to either update it or make sure that you are running the most up-to-date bios so I already checked earlier in it and I know that there's a newer bios online cuz this is only F1 which is like the first launch model now to find out what you'll do is you'll just Google the name of your motherboard this is a gigabyte b650 gaming X ax V2 an easy name to remember so I'm going to hop on to the gigabyte website same thing if you're using Asus or MSI or anything like that you're going to want to look for support and so for bios we can see that F1 which is what we're running came out in December of 2023 but there is a F3 bios that came out in January so you can see there's a couple of little updates doesn't matter we want to download that when it comes to installing biosis it's sometimes a little different based on the vendor um but typically you'll want to extract it and copy it over to a flash drive you can use any size flash drive really um what I'm going to do is just for safety I'm going to reformat this one I'm going to format this drive as NTFS let me just label it bios and hit start yes I do want to format and then once ah is formatted it will pop up for me and then what we'll do is we'll close this out and then all I need to do is copy the entire contents of this it really needs that F35 but I'm going to copy the entire contents over to my BIOS USB so we give it a second and that's it so we take this USB out we plug it into our system um you can plug it into any USB I like to plug it into one of the ones on the actual motherboard just because it feels a little bit safer in fact actually I will definitely do that because on this board it has a specific Port that looks for the BIOS this is more meant for like troubleshooting and stuff but whatever I'm just G to plug it into my BIOS USB as I hit my power button I'm going to spam the delete key on my keyboard which will get us into BIOS so spam spam spam you just want to spam it until you actually get into the BIOS um this is a little bit more relevant when you already have windows installed because traditionally when you hit the power button on your computer give it a second it will launch into windows but you saw that gigabyte screen that showed up there we want to make sure that we clicked it by that point but it's fine so what we're going to do is before we adjust any of our settings we want to make sure that our bios is up to date so what we need to do is go to Q flash every vendor does it a little different so some call it like easy flash some call it Q flash look around your settings or Google it really quick to find exactly what it's called is essentially the BIOS update tool so here Q flash it's right here all right I would like to update my bias yes I would love to on the left here it tells me what bias I'm currently running which is F1 from December of 2023 but in this case I already had checked beforehand and I know that I need F3 which is a more recent version from January so going to click on that hit the arrow button it's going to ask me if I want to do it I say yes now as I do this it's going to take a few minutes right so it's going to verify now while we update the BIOS don't touch your computer it's going to do some stuff it's fine let it do its thing because we are updating the BIOS and while a lot of boards will be fine if there's something goes wrong it'll fall back it'll you know check everything um you don't really want to rely on that and if something does go wrong during this process it could cause some damage to your system um typically it just requires you to reflash the bio yourself but it's a whole thing so while we're updating bios hands off everything related to the computer don't let your dog near the power cable to kick it down or whatever the case is so see it's restarted is now verifying the file is correct and it should after 5 10 minutes or so have a brand new bios installed on our system so there it goes we're going from F1 it's confirmed everything it is now updating from F1 to F3 so again hands off keep a few feet away from your system don't breathe too hard that's fine just don't touch it don't mess it up and then once we've updated the BIOS that's when we actually can go in and start tweaking some settings but typically when you update the BIOS it nukes all the settings that you put in the bios so you know if you start to like change your RAM speed and you know dialing overclocks or any of those things typically not always but typically when you update the BIOS all that gets re wiped anyway so I just like to do this at the very beginning and then we can go in and tweak a couple of settings and whatnot all right and no I didn't hit the button fast up okay so here's a little tip uh we should make sure we're going to hit the reset button real quick we should make sure to spam that delete key most of the time it lands a bios sometimes it doesn't spam the delete key please there we go all right cool so now we can see that everything worked because in our bios information it now says we are on F3 so we are on the most up-to-date version of the BIOS now there's a few things we want to do so again a good time to just double check everything still showing up correctly so ryzen 7 we've got ourselves temperature which is 28° which is very much within spec if you were having issues like so say you didn't put your thermal paste on maybe you left the little plastic thing on your fans are spinning what you would see is even in BIOS this CPU temperature start to climb very quickly um so you should see it be generally below like 40° C would be a good sort of general rule of thumb especially with a nice AIO like this 28° C is barely above room temperature it's very very cool all right so so now let's go ahead and start setting up a couple of things so this motherboard actually has resizable bar support right here and is already enabled this is if it's an option you should always do that most modern graphics cards with resizable bar it essentially allows them to bypass a little bit of the overhead and sort of just give you a little bit of extra performance I can't think of any reason why you would not want to turn that on if it is an option if your graphics card supports it so thankfully this board already has it now we also have our ddr5 Auto booster so if I click on that and it hit enable and I also hit on the XMP Expo profile what is going to do is automatically not overclock our Ram but set the ram to the speed that it is designed to run at so XMP is the Intel version Expo is the AMD version they're functionally the same in fact some AMD systems will work with XMP and whatnot doesn't really matter essentially this Ram while default is running at 4,800 megat transfers I think this Ram runs at 6,000 yeah this runs at 6,000 so basically that Ram can run faster which is going to give you more bandwidth not only going to help speed up your CPU it's just a oneclick thing to give you a whole lot more performance now there's other stuff we can do in here I am not going to be doing that for the purposes of this tutorial now if you want you can go into like there fan curves you can actually adjust all the different fans in here so if we want we can go out of easy mode and into advanced mode this is outside the scope of this video but if you're going to be doing things like overclocking or especially if you want to do like troubleshooting so sometimes you need like filled with some random bits and Bobs again I'm not going to show this for this video I'm just going to hit save and exit I'm going to save and I'm going to save the configuration so we're going to do that we're going to let it reboot I am going to spam the delete key to get into the BIOS one more time I just want to make sure that the XMP profile or the Expo profile in this case took and that everything is booted correctly um a good time to mention that if you run into problems at this step typically memory if you're clocking it too high or you have like a really fancy kit and the CPU can't hold up or whatever you could have some stability issues that's why I like to hop into the BIOS once it wants to boot and ensure that we have actually hit the correct speed which nine times out of 10 it'll run fine right out of the gate but we want to just go back over to easy mode so you can see here now that our memory frequency went from 4,800 to 6,000 which is exactly what should be working with our Gull modules cool all right so we're actually done with the computer for a moment is now time to install Windows when it comes to installing Windows there are a few options you have first and foremost you need to make your decision between Windows 10 and 11 I would recommend 11 mostly because Windows 10 is actually getting a little bit like I think they've only got like another year or something of support like Windows 11 I know some people aren't like a huge fan of it but like at this point it's kind of tough to justify using Windows 10 when it might not be supported for that much longer now how you get Windows 11 there's a bunch of different ways so if you already have a code for some reason you could actually just download a Windows tool which is available from Microsoft and essentially that will allow you to load up a copy of Windows on a flash drive and you can use the your own actual code for it um I of course have purchased a full copy of Windows 11 for Microcenter which I will be using and the one that I've got here comes with a flash drive so all I do is plug this flash drive in and uh put the code that comes in the back of the box and that will be good to go so do with that information as you wish so here is our key so if I flip around to the back you would see I'll cover it up you see here's our key which has our freaking 25 digigit or whatever code on it we're going to keep this handy we're going to need that a little bit and then we have our handy Windows Flash drive you can actually make your own Windows Flash drive um it will be definitely a more upto-date version than whatever was shipping on this drive as far as I'm concerned if it comes in the Box we'll plug it in it'll just take a little bit of extra time to update it's it's outside the scope to like like freaking make your own flash drive you don't need to do that if you do need to make a flash drive it is very simple there's a tool I think it's the Windows media creation tool you download it directly from Microsoft you plug your USB in it downloads Windows it puts on the drive it's super easy but for now what we're going to do is we're going to actually I proba should done that beforehand I'm going to restart the system so we're going to go save and exit and one more time we're going to spam that delete key and with our USB install we want to make sure that we're booting from this so get used to that spamming the delete key to get in the Bios cuz we're going to be doing it a whole bunch today cool all right so what we need to do is we need to make sure that we're booting from our USB so right here you can see that I've got you Windows 10 here so I can just hit F10 and exit um you also could manually just select like USB or whatever but theoretically we don't have to spam delete this time it is going to restart the system and start booting off of this USB now if that works we will start to see Windows Z bits pop up in one moment there we go loading files so it is going to start loading up a copy of Windows 11 so you'll see soon as you see a little pin wheel you know Windows is activating and that is really fast there we go Windows setup um I'm going to walk you this really quickly there's not a whole lot you need to worry about so um we'll just get past the language screen there's only one thing I really want to highlight which is to install it on the correct Drive especially if you have multiple hard drives or ssds inside oh look activating my Windows key I'm going to do that later but uh I've got one and I can install it whenever want uh you should do that though uh if you've got your key because windows will work without the key for a little bit but it gets grumpy you can't like change like your wallpaper much by the stuff again we're going to do that soon all right so install the operating system so you'll see that we have a ton of options here we're going to want to install the option that we've purchased which in this case is Windows 11 home so we're going to select home we're going to agree to the terms and conditions now we're going to hit custom install okay now you'll see that we have two drives showing up so we have drive zero which shows us 3.7 uh terabytes and we have drive 1 which shows us 2 terabytes so you need to know what drives are in your system because windows won't tell you what's what and we could technically install it on the bigger drive but that is our very slow hard drive don't do that install it on your SSD now if you only have one drive in your system it's pretty straightforward it's going to only one's going to show up but would highly recommend to take that drive one we going to hit new apply and we're set okay we're going to give it a second and now it's ready to go don't worry about your hard drive we're going to deal with that once we get into Windows but make sure to install it on your SSD if for some reason you're installing like a 1 TB hard drive and a 1 tab SSD I guess you could just unplug the hard drive to make sure you know which one's which because again there's no real way of telling what drive you can just see how actually like big the capacity is but think almost anyone has two drives are going to be different sizes and you'll know which one's which but anyway make sure to install this on the actual SSD so going to hit next making sure that it is automatically selected the primary partition and at this point sit back give it a little while I will tell you that if you haven't built a PC in a while Windows used to take forever to install but with like modern like CPUs especially like ssds this might only take like 10 minutes or so so I'll be right back as soon as it's done with the install and there we go we are ready to get going that took like 5 minutes um now you'll notice that when you go to the Windows setup your screen is going to look a little weird a little blurry we don't have drivers installed it's it's not going to be running at the correct resolution don't worry about it we'll deal with that later so uh most of this is really straightforward just going to kind of Click through make sure your keyboard's right yada yada yada there's only one thing I really want to point out which is that we're going to need to be connected to a network now if you're using Windows 10 this is a prompt that you can ignore if you're using Windows 11 home edition like we are you do need an internet connection so you can plug in via Ethernet which is what I'm going to do you also if you've got a Wi-Fi module built into your motherboard you can do that on I am going to find my ethernet cable down here and going to plug this in um one of the reasons people don't like Windows 11 I'm honest with you so I'm going to plug my ethernet in give it a minute it should automatically pop up and then it will start to download some initial updates and at this point as soon as you actually get online everything is going to be really straightforward just click through log in with your Microsoft account yada y yada there's nothing it's all that spicy or the ethernet cannot work so here's the other thing makes it real fun sometimes it don't want to work um and it don't want to work if you were unfortunate enough to be in the position I am in which my computer doesn't want to get online you can bypass this setup so we going hit shift and F10 on our keyboard we're going to type in o o b backspace bypass nro enter so this is going to put us in limited setup mode it will work theoretically it just doesn't like to do this but in a case like this where it doesn't want to work with our drivers uh what you going to do that say backspace back slash don't hit backspace that just deletes whatever you just typed I'm a front slash guy so I don't I don't think about backslashes a lot all right we going try that one more time yep yep skip I don't have internet connect continue with limited setup imagine if that was just a button you could press from the beginning all right so now we're going to go through the setup so again at this point is basically the same regardless of whether you were lucky enough to have the internet Grace your presence or not so log in um for this case because we don't have Internet we're not going to log into our Microsoft account we'll do that in a little bit create a name yada y yada and I will see you on the other side my friends with windows installed the first thing I want to do is hit the Windows key and type in task manager so all we're doing here we'll get rid of this gigabyte thing is just make sure that everything is showing up correctly it should we see AMD ryzen 7 7700x sweet we see 31 or 32 gigs of RAM sweet we see our hard drive and our SSD both of those are fine and that's pretty much it so we can actually take out our Windows Flash drive now keep this handy if you ever need to reinstall Windows but you can easily remake one of these it's not super important and now it is time to grab our drivers now if your computer is online and everything is functioning you can just download these directly because we're not online yet I'm going to come over to my laptop here with my flash drive installed and I'm going to download a few things so in this same support page that we downloaded the BIOS you're going to see a bunch of drivers you want to download almost all of these you'll see for example for audio there's two versions there's an older one and a newer one so I'm going to download the newer version we're going to grab chipset so again we'll grab the newer versions which are Apu and chipset so we're download both of these you want to grab your land driver very important so we're going to grab the most recent version which looks like it is from December of 2023 and we're going to grab it for Windows 11 um you can sort in the actual setup here if you which driver OS you have but it's pretty simple uh we don't actually need the raid driver we'll show that later and the wireless Bluetooth all this kind of stuff so I'm going to download all of the things so we got all these set up now there is also utility which is going to be the gigabyte control center um I'm actually going to do this later every motherboard manufacturer is going to have different sort of setups so typically they'll have some kind of like Masterpiece of software which will help help you pull downloads and updates uh from that point and it will say that Windows once you actually get this online Windows update will do its best to grab some drivers but typically I like to grab the drivers directly from the manufacturer of my motherboard to make sure they are as up to dat and everything as possible so I've got all of my Gigabyte drivers downloaded but before I move on just because I know my system is not online I don't have to deal with it also going to look up NVIDIA drivers now you would do this exact same thing if this was AMD or Intel you just want to download Lo the drivers for your specific GPU so for us we know that we have a GeForce card I have a 40 series and it is a 4070 super that's super good Windows 11 and we hit search and it should give us the most upto-date driver so we're going to download that as well and then once we got everything downloaded we're going to copy all of it over to our flash drive and move it over to the system downloading your motherboard drivers and your graphics drivers are the most important thing now at this point you will probably want to download some other stuff so for example because we have a Leon Lee case and cooler we would want to download the lean Lee uh lconnect software which will allow us to not only adjust of course all of our RGB and stuff but specifically adjust the actual screen here I'm not going to show you how to do that I'll be honest with you every bit of RGB software is Different download whatever setup is correct for your system go through the little tutorial be aware that sometimes that RGB stuff could be really finicky but it's gotten better um but for the purposes of this tutorial I'm just going to show you how to get this thing online with the correct Graphics drivers and then we're going to run Windows update and we should hopefully be done all right so everything is copied over to my driver USB I'm going to plug this in so uh I'm just going to plug it into the back USBS um it's a really small note but typically the fastest USB ports on your computer are the ones on the motherboard these are fine but sometimes they're like only USB 3.0 speeds it doesn't really matter but if you got like an SSD or something faster I just always like plugging into the motherboard feels a little bit more reliable all right so with that plugged in we're going to go into file manager we see our drivers we're going to copy all of this stuff over into our I just put in documents or downloads so I copy everything over to our actual SSD or our computer itself once everything is copied over we want to run it off the internal drive cuz it's can be a lot faster ideally as you install these drivers things start to work thankfully after some driver downloads and a quick restart we are now online so at this point we're almost done so I do have this little popup asking me to download gigabyte control center I will do that because that is that sort of overall piece of software that's going to help me to make sure that everything is up to date and the last step is going to be to download updates and believeing I say windows is going to have a whole lot of updates so let it run you may need to restart a couple of times and check it again and it will show up we're not quite done yet one really quick little thing let me quickly hop into our display uh I say this just because it's easy to miss double check your resolution specifically the frame rate on your monitor before we finish so you'll see here this is a 1440p monitor which is correct but we also want to pull up the advanced display so this is going to be in your actual system display settings so if you click on this it immediately does give us 240 HZ good if you have a high refresh rate monitor sometimes they'll defa theault to 60 and you might not realize that you're not getting the full experience out of your monitor now we have successfully built ourselves a gaming computer yay congratulations thank you very much to mic Center for sponsoring this tutorial as always if you're ever interested in buying any PC components Microcenter is your number one stop for all things gaming computer related excuse me my friends I'm going to go and apologize to our wonderful edit team for asking them to edit through 17 hours of footage but hopefully you found this tutorial helpful if you did make sure to subscribe to the channel ring L that dingling button and check out all all the components that we purchased for this video at the links in the description I'll see you next yearWelcome to our 2024 gaming PC tutorial in this video I'm going to walk you through everything you need to know to build yourself a gaming PC so whether this is your first build or you just want to refresh on the 2024 latest and greatest on Tech this is the video for you so I'm going to show you how to pick your components how to put the entire PC together and all the other stuff you need to do to go from a pile of parts in your cart to a completed gaming PC and of course it is all thanks to our sponsors here at Microcenter so let's get started first first things first before you build a PC you need all of the right building blocks now it can be really tempting to just pick any old Parts based on the budget or aesthetic but you have to make sure that all components are compatible or they may not fit together or even turn on properly now there are several online compatibility Checkers including of course the Micro Center PC Builder which really are incredibly useful when finding components since they can automatically let you know if there is a compatibility issue with your Hardware the CPU AKA processor is often referred to as the brain of the computer now as far as your choices between AMD and Intel thankfully here in 2024 there is not a bad option and both on the ryzen side as well as on the Intel Core side you have a ton of selections so specifically looking at ryzen on the top of the Shelf here you can see the high-end ryzen 9 processors you can also come down to the ryzen 7 ryzen 5 and sometimes even ryzen 3 so for today I going to be using the AMD ryzen 77700 X this is an 8 core processor that is not going to give us a lot of gaming performance but importantly also productivity performance now the choice between AMD and Intel and ryzen 9 versus ryzen 7 or whatever is largely down to price as always when I'm at micr Center I like to take advantage of their bundle deals so this is normally a $320 processor but when you bundle it with a motherboard and RAM you can get the entire setup for $400 saving you a ton of money often times I let this dictate some of the parts that I choose because you can save an absolute Fortune by getting a nice little bundle and you know that it's all going to work together the last big thing to pay attention to is the socket and generation this will determine what kind of motherboard you compare the CPU with this also determines what kind of upgrade options you have in the future next we're going to choose our motherboard so this is an important component to pair with your CPU because while many components in a PC build are fairly Universal you know you could take a graphics card and install it on almost any PC an SSD will go into almost any PC but the CPU and motherboard need to be paired fairly close together so if I grab this which is a gigabyte b650 gaming X ax V2 you're going to see that is an AMD ryzen socket am5 board now remember brand and socket are important here you cannot take an AMD processor and put it into an Intel motherboard or vice versa so make sure to pick out a motherboard with the socket that matches your CPU AMD sockets right now are either the older but incredibly well supported am4 and the newest socket being am5 Intel on the other hand call their sockets LGA numbers go here with the latest socket being LG GA 1700 size also matters here if you're looking to build in a small form factor case typically you'll need a smaller motherboard that will fit so motherboard sizes typically range from a full standard ATX going to a smaller Micro ATX and an even smaller miniitx generally standard HX motherboards will only fit in ATX size cases but smaller motherboards can fit into larger cases if you've got a small Peg it'll go in a big hole but if you got a big Peg it only fits in the big hole that really makes sense yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah that's my analogy it makes sense personally I don't usually recommend making a small form factor PC as a first time build just because it could be really difficult to maneuver in you can get a little claustrophobic and plus you do have to worry a lot more about air flow in a smaller chassis and troubleshooting could be a bit of a nightmare when cables and stuff is just really really tiny in there but don't let me dissuade you if you're up with a challenge buy all means go for it I'll just say a lot of first time Builders have a much easier time building in a larger chassis for first time build you probably want to optt for a standard ATX or a Micro ATX for the most amount of options possible next up we're choosing our memory or Ram now this is a very important component in your system so for this video I'm going to be going with the gskill flare X5 so this is specifically 32 GB running at 6,000 megat transfers per second memory commonly known as RAM is kind of what it sounds like it determines how much data your PC can hold in short-term memory this is very important for multitasking and active programs such as web browsers video editing graphic design and even gaming one thing to keep in mind is that ddr5 is the latest generation of ram but ddr4 is still widely available ddr5 is faster but currently more expensive than the older ddr4 generation so the decision here is always going to be what kind of memory does your motherboard support So if you're using an Intel processor you could actually have either a ddr4 or a ddr5 motherboard really kind of depends typically the cheaper motherboards use dd4 the higher motherboards use ddr5 there's not a massive difference in performance between the two but you'll definitely want to make sure that you pick the correct RAM for your board now because we're going with AMD ryzen 7000 our decision's already been made for us we have to use ddr5 and the good thing is this is actually part of the bundle that I'm picking up here at Micro Center soting this the motherboard and the CPU all together which means that not only I saving money but importantly I also know they are fully compatible when it comes to choosing the specific kit of ram you want to look for there's two things that I would say first and foremost get enough capacity so you could technically get away with 8 GB of RAM if you're doing a super budget PC but really get at least 16 gbt and ideally 32 it is going to give you a lot of flexibility in the future for multitasking gaming all that kind of stuff and it's not that much more expensive on top of that make sure to get a dual Channel kit so sometimes if you wanted to you could get a single stick of memory that will fully function you're not going to break anything but you're going to be leaving significant performance on the table your your CPU and your motherboard are both designed with dual Channel memory and mind and honestly the vast majority of the kits here mic Center are going to be in dual Channel configuration so just keep that in mind get at least two sticks of ram at a minimum of 16 GB for a gaming PC in 2024 I think that's a very safe thing 32 gigs if you can swing it February is build your own month at Microcenter which is the perfect opportunity to build upgrade and importantly save with a bunch of great deals a Microcenter have now of course they have great deals year round but this is the perfect time to upgrade your existing system or use this tutorial and build an all new one on top of that there is a brand new Microcenter opening in Charlotte in early 2024 not only will they have a huge selection of PC components but once the store opens you can receive a free 128 gig flash drive by signing up at the link in the description now it's time to get to the good part the GPU is probably the single most important component for a PC when it comes to gaming like how I CPU processes data the GPU processes data but more specifically Graphics data you can think of the CPU is your sort of Jack of all trades but a GPU is highly specialized in processing tasks such as AI related work game or video data usually everything else being equal the more powerful a GPU is the more FPS and resolution you can push in games so there are three options which is going to be AMD Intel and Nvidia now much like with CPUs you can't really go too wrong all these items are very heavily priced according to their performance level which really makes sure your decision a little bit easier the more of your budget that you can put into the graphics card will directly correlate to additional gaming performance now you want to be a little bit reasonable you don't to be like SpongeBob with one huge beefy arm or one little noodle arm you want to make sure that you're getting a decent power supply and CPU motherboard and all the stuff to support it but really when it comes to gaming performance the graphics card is what is going to dictate your resolution your frame rate all of that kind of stuff so for this video I am going to be taking advantage of the fairly new RTX 47 super this currently is running about $600 obviously prices will vary by the time you watch this video but it's a pretty high-end card okay so this is going to deliver plenty of performance for some 4K gaming some higher frame rate like 1440p gaming and whatnot 12 gigs of RAM it is a good card generally speaking you can go really in depth with graphics cards but the two most important specs to look for are processing power and memory now there's no General recommendation for processing power of a GPU I mean that's going to come down to the games you want to play what resolution and refresh rate your monitor can handle and of course the big elephant in the room what kind of budget you have to work with GPU memory is a little different from Ram so it's called vram here and that too is a very specialized thing for graphics another oversimplification but generally speaking more vram and more bandwidth is better it's a little easier to make a recommendation here when it comes to actual how much RAM you need for your card so I would say you want at least 8 GB of vram to play today's demanding games but honestly if you've got the budget for it 10 or 12 GB of vram can definitely make a difference and give you a little bit more Comfort level in the future next up we're going to be choosing the case now the case is definitely the most personal aspect of your PC build this is where the Aesthetics come in but also there's a lot of functionality so I'm going to be going with this Leon Lee lancool 216 this is an incredibly popular case it's a very safe bet it's very representative of the sort of average PC build because you've got a lot of flexibility on the inside it's very easy to work in you've got yourself three fans including two RGB fans in the front so you don't have to do a lot of extra work to actually make this thing look cool it comes in different colors I'm going to go with the white one cuz I personally think it pops we also have plenty of space for our ATX motherboard and our graphics card some things to consider when you're choosing your case outside of the Aesthetics is that you do want to make sure you have a reasonable amount of space especially if you want to go for a little bit more of a higher end system so take for example your graphics card support so your graphics card is going to live right in here but you can see that there's all this extra space on the side that's because especially these days higher in graphics cards can actually be quite tall so you actually need a little bit of this extra space to make sure that they will clear and you have room to plug in like your power cables and stuff so going to something like this 216 is going to be a nice safe bet that should last for years and years in the future plenty of space and install like radiators on top again you've got the fans you've got the basement where you can hide your power supply and some cables and stuff like I mentioned with motherboards there are different sizes of cases the standard size ATX cases are the traditional PC Tower size but there are smaller Micro ATX and many ITX cases if you do want to go for a smaller footprint just remember it may make building in them a little bit tricky and you do need to be mindful of air flow on the other end of the extreme you have e8x size cases which are massive chungi chungus chalinos that are specifically designed to house and show off your big bulky components like graphics cards or big than my head or intricate Hardline water cooling for first- time Builders I recommend just a standard ATX case as it will probably provide enough air flow and enough space to comfortably build in and it's a little bit of an easier process but again choose the case that you want best it's going to not only set up the aesthetic it's going to decide if it goes on your desk below your desk and it's the part that looks cool when it comes to cooling your CPU there are tons of options so on the high end you can do something like this which is a Hardline Loop now this as cool as it is is way outside the scope of a PC tutorial so traditionally you're going to choose one of two options air or liquid cooling so if you want to do air cooling there are options such as this which is an ak400 it's a fairly straightforward air cooler honestly if this is your first time building a PC this is usually the right move unless you have a very very highend CPU we'll talk a little bit about this later but the main thing I'm going to show you is how to install an all-in-one liquid cooler as you can see there are tons and tons of options so the the main things to consider would be the size and what kind of CPU you're cooling so for us with a ryzen 77700 x it's actually a fairly efficient chip we do not need a crazy cooler but for the purposes of this tutorial I'm going to go with a very high-end lean Lee specifically 360 mm radiator so the way the sizes work is that this is a 360 mm radiator which is essentially 310 mm fans so if I find a 240 for example this is two 120 mil fans or by the same token I could do two 140 mm fans which would equal 280 the way you choose this is very much down to your case so all cases will list what kind of radiator and fan support that they have so for our case we have up to a 360 mm Radiator on the top but some cases you could also mount it on the front or even sometimes on the bottom but traditionally your radiator your AIO will be installed either in the front or on the top so we're going to be using this one this is a very high-end AO it's more than we need but I'm going to show you for the purposes of this tutorial it also has a neat little screen on it too so I'll show you how to install this and while air cooling is the safer bet for most firsttime Builders if you want that sort of flashy RGB fans the liquid cooler the whole thing and you want to get the maximum performance this is a great move luckily a lot of low and mid-range gpus you buy will come with a stock cooler in the Box for most people this is completely fine it's not flashy and you won't want to push limits with overclocking but it is a perfectly reasonable opt option that you can always upgrade down the line now when it comes to high-end processors they typically don't ship with stock coolers at all as manufacturers expect you to get a better cooler anyway and the demands of those chips are a lot more than a little stock cooler can handle a high performance air cooler will do just as good of a job if not better than all but the beefiest AO liquid cooling solutions but there are other pros and cons to each liquid cooling draws the heat away from the CPU via heat sink and then the liquid carries that heat all the way through a rator to be dissipated now this method is typically quieter than air Cooling and the higher-end coolers have neat little screens that could show you like some specs or a gift Loop like they're very flashy but they typically require multiple fan slots in your case which can be difficult to install based on the configuration a lot more work to install to begin with not to mention that there's a small but still there's a risk of liquid leaking from that cooler and damaging other components air cooling is the tried andrue cooling method it's just a fan blowing air through a heat sink that is drawing that heat away from the CPU it's simple which means it's less likely to break but high performance air coolers do have some cons such as they typically take up a lot of space if your PC case doesn't have a lot of clearance or you have a smaller motherboard sometimes that can actually be very restrictive as far as how easily you can access the PC and on top of that if you're going to be moving your PC around a lot it's not necessarily a great idea to have a heavy air cooler just because the good ons while they're very good at cooling are very heavy they can put a lot of strain on the board and the mounting points while it definitely depends on the cooler that you choose air coolers can get a little bit on the loud side especially when the PC is working on a heavy load like gaming but look ultimately the choice is up to you I personally tend to lean more towards solid air coolers such as KN to options but I'd say most Gamers especially on the high end tend to take advantage of liquid cooling next up we're choosing our power supply this is a critical component of every PC build is quite literally the Beating Heart supplying power to every component in the system you want something high quality and you want to make sure that you have plenty of capacity it is a component that takes AC power from the wall and converts it into stable DC power that the PC can actually use it then distributes power through cables all like veins throughout the PC Now power supplies measure output via Watts it's fairly straightforward I mean you just need to add up the power requirements of your PC components and then choose a power supply that exceeds that number usually your CPU and especially your GPU will have minimum recommended wattages which is great place to start again micr Center has an online pc Builder that will help you calculate how much power your power supply needs but just as a baseline a lower to mid-tier PC may need something like 500 or 600 watts an upper tier system may need something closer to 750 watts and a high-end system will likely need 850 Watts plus definitely do the math on your own system you don't want your computer to draw more power than the power supply can provide or else it will just crash or shut down immediately or you could even do long-term damage to your system for the for this build I'm going to go with this the MSI mag aa50 G PCI 5 there's a few reasons why I like this power supply first of all 850 wats is going to be plenty for this system but I don't mind that typically for a system because power supplies usually have quite long warranties and can last for several iterations of your system so having a little bit of that extra margin is nice to have something else to consider is some of the specs on this so because we are using an RTX 470 super a 40 series GPU we actually going to want to take advantage of the PCI 5 specs you'll see here it says ATX 3.0 compatible PCI 5.0 ready what that means is that it has with the actual cables in the Box a specific cable which is designed to be used for RTX 40 series cards this is nice because for our GPU if we don't have this built into the power supply we actually have to use an adapter which technically will work but I don't really recommend it so if you have the luxury of buying a brand new power supply for your system getting something with ATX 3.0 is very nice to have that futureproof built in other things to consider here is that this is a fully modular power supply which means that we can easily plug in only the actual cables we need so our cable runs can be a little bit cleaner and this is also an 80 plus gold rated power supply 80 plus ratings while sometimes you can kind of use them as a little bit of a bar for Quality typically they're much more meant for the actual efficiency of your power supply so you can do 80 plus white silver gold Platinum like they go up quite a bit for me gold is usually the right sweet spot between between price efficiency and typically quality so this will be what will power our gaming PC now when it comes to storage for your system you have a couple of options so old school PCS traditionally use hard drives we are going to use a hard drive for the system but for Windows for gaming for all of your normal use I would highly highly recommend an SSD if Rand is short-term memory storage like ssds and hard drives are more like long-term memory they hold all of your data like your computer programs photos videos Games Etc ready to be accessed whenever you need them there are two main types of ssds to choose from SATA which are older school and use these same connectors as a hard drive and can easily be swapped into like say an older system for example but if you're building a modern system I recommend an M2 nvme SSD they use the same type of flash memory as regular ssds do but they get rid of that old SATA connection that limited their speeds top-of-the-line inum ssds are about 60 times faster than hard drives that's right 60 60 times faster like Rand you want to pay attention to speed and capacity here one reason to go with an MVM SSD is that they are pretty much universally fast enough for basically any task you could throw at them I mean even a slow MVM Drive will be faster than any other hard driver regular SSD out there as for capacity I recommend at least 500 GB if you pair it with something like a hard drive but honestly one or even 2 terby mvme drives are relatively cheap these days and will give you plenty of Headroom to store all of your games so for this system we're going to go high-end with the Samsung 990 Pro you can also install a hard drive now technically you could use a hard drive instead of an SSD but I would highly recommend against it but what a hard drive does have over an SSD is a lot of capacity for not a lot of money so take for example this which is a wd blue 4 TB drive for only 50 bucks you're also going to almost certainly want a copy of Windows 11 for your gaming PC now technically you could do Windows 10 although at this point Windows 11 is pretty much the no-brainer there's Windows 11 home as well as Pro honestly you can just get Windows 11 home but this I'll show you how to install it later but it is very important to have a copy of Windows otherwise your PC will have a great view of the bio screen or you can install Linux but that's a little bit outside the scope for a PC tutorial all right my friends it is time to build ourselves a gaming computer so if this is your first time building I'm going to walk you through step by step all the components how we put them together some combination issues the whole thing but sit back relax this is going to be easy and fun and we're not going to have any problems at all positivity it's an important element of PC Building so right here I've got all the components that we need for the build laid out here so what you'll actually need to build your computer outside of the the parts to do it with is going to be a decent sized workspace so a desk a table make sure you have at least a little bit of space because trust me once you start opening all these boxes it gets cluttered very quickly and need to a couple tools by a couple I mean a knife to open boxes and A Philip screwdriver that's literally it it is very simple all the other bits and Bobs cables screws all that kind of stuff should be included in the various component boxes that we're going to be using now beyond that it's really pretty straightforward let's clear up some space grab our case box and we will begin unboxing and building our gaming computer I always like to start with a case for a PC build not only so that you can sort of wrap your head around the physical dimensions maybe take a look and kind of get a sense for how you're actually going to build it but also I like to install the power supply too to get a couple of the components out of the way before we move on to some of the uh more complicated bits so with this particular case we actually have a box of accessories which you will want to hold on to but other than that I'm actually going to flip this upside down and pull the box over the actual case kind of like how if you're unboxing like a TV or something you want to sort of pull the Box up and over otherwise it's a pan there we go so I actually ially like to keep the case box handy this is a great spot to put all of your random trash from the actual build so packaging materials and that kind of stuff and sometimes you need to go back through there and realize you forgot to screw or something so I just like to use that as like sort of my temporary storage all right with our plastic removed we got our first good look at the case that we will be spending the next several hours building in so before we do anything let's go ahead and take off the side panels and wrap our heads around what the actual physical case looks like so with this one in particular it's actually really nice we have some thumb screws on the back so it's very easy to access sometimes like actually right now you will need to use a screwdriver to get these screws started mostly because they tend to come a little like overtightened from the factory so if any of these screws are annoying just give them a little loosen with your screwdriver so every case is going to be a little different and honestly every PC build is going to be a little different so I'm going to speak sort of generally but I will kind of give you the the Topline stuff to pay attention to as you build something so for this case I'm going to remove all the core panels so this is the top panel we will have to remove this later to install the aiio anyway so I'm just put this off to the side when it comes to taking the back panel off this actually has no screws so you just pop it right off toss it off to the side here and then we've got our glass side panel so I believe it just need that one screw right and there we go we can take off our glass side panel and then because this case has a basement we also have one additional screw on the bottom and we're going to want to remove that um so again all cases are going to be a little different um this because it has the mesh bottom makes a little bit easier for us to run some cabling install our power supply that kind of thing I'm going to put my screw off to the side just a little note you're going to have a lot of screws through this process make sure to have a little handy spot I usually just dedicate a small corner for it but you can use like a little magnetic Mount or a little bowl or whatever just don't lose them there's only actually like a handful of types of screws so some of them are a little interchangeable but just try to keep them organized so that when you're looking to put something back together you won't be like uhoh it got put in the trash cuz I've never done that before Behold a magnetic mat so I can put my screws right there and I don't lose it with the basement cover taken off we now have pretty much full access to the case so before we actually start building anything let me just give you a quick little run through about what we're looking at so this part right here in the middle is where our motherboard will Mount so we'll explain that in a little bit but generally speaking just so you have the lay of the land the motherboard goes here our graphics card is going to go roughly right here here we're going to have our all-in-one liquid cooler mounted on the top of the chassis now this actually technically we could mount it up front too but because it already has a couple of fans pre-installed it'll be a pretty easy bet just to put it on the top the power supply is going to go down here our hard drive is going to go right here and that's largely it um so some things to consider we've got ourselves some little grommets so we can run cables through here so it'll help to kind of do a little bit of management we also do have if I flip it over this side a lot more cable management that is already built into the back now you're going to hear the words Cable Management a lot throughout this video all that means is there's two ways of building a PC you could throw the components in there turn it on it works and then smash the side panels on and hope for the best you should take a little time especially when we're done with the system but even while we're actually building to try to run cables neatly not only is going to make your life a lot easier when you try to put the side panel on and you have a pile of cables that thick but also as you can see with a case like this there's a nice little bit bit of space back here so there's plenty of room and there's actually sort of not like guides but these sort of like velcro sort of uh cable runs that are already built in so as we install components I'm going to try my best to run cables in a clean natural way don't worry about getting it perfect once we've actually made sure the system is fully functional we will go back through there and double check things but as you run stuff take 30 extra seconds and run it through a cable panel or a cable sleeve or a cable guide versus just letting it dangle everywhere it will definitely make your life a lot easier when it comes time to clean it up that's largely it the only other thing I'll show you and we'll deal with this a minute we have our hard drive sort of trays down here but we do not need to use these just yet so you just leave those in place so let us Begin by installing our first component into our strip down case which is going to be the power supply now I like to start with the power supply there's a few ways that you could approach this but I like to install the power supply first to make sure that I can start running some cables and getting them out of the way now I will say there's one thing you could do which would be a different order of operation for this tutorial I would generally recommend for you to open up all of your components and do a test before you put everything in your actual case you do not have to do that I'm not going to do that today but even though it's rare it does happen that maybe there's some incompatibility issue with your parts maybe a part just came damaged or broken out of the box and it's not fun when you spend several hours was building the PC hit that big power button and nothing happens and you have to tear it all apart to troubleshoot right that is a thing you may have to deal with so it is usually a good idea to actually take all of your components set them out on like a basic table like this so motherboard graphics card y y y plug it all into a power supply out of the case and ensure that it actually fires up and it works right all you need to do is just make sure that everything functions and you can tear it all apart and put it in the case but for now I'm going to be building everything inside the case and assuming that all of our components are full fully functional and fully compatible what can go wrong okay so inside our power supply box there's going to be a few things it's fairly straightforward so there's a little thing saying hey plug your cable all the way in we'll go over this in a little bit then we have the power supply itself now there are like I was saying earlier Micro Center a couple of different sizes of power supply this is a normal HX Supply so it's a very standard Square little box and this one as you can see is fully modular so none of the actual connectors that go to our motherboard and our system are installed right now because they're all in this little pouch now these pouches are meant to be kept so a lot of the stuff that we're working through here these boxes you can just Chuck it right like you don't really need them but this pouch full of power supply cables is very helpful because we're only going to plug in the things that we need for this system but say in the future we wanted to add more hard drives or uh beef your graphics card or whatever the case is these cables are what you will need to expand the power supply and keep in mind that power supply cables are not Universal you want to use cables that are designed for your power supply they may look very similar but often times they are not compatible and you may cause damage so keep this little bag full of cables handy if you're using a lower-end power supply that's not modular well these will all just be dangling after the power supply and you just pluck them out of the way but if you've got a modular or semi- modular Supply makes it a lot easier to sort of clean up the aesthetic so you don't have a mess of cables all hanging around in the middle so we can check this box I will say the only thing we want to make sure we find in addition to our cables are some screws so there should be four little screws in a baggie so in this one it is going to be I think in here um but if you unbox your power supply and don't find four little screws stop and look closer cuz we going to need those screws in about 47 seconds so I have my standard IEC power cable so this just goes from the back of the power supply into your outlet so make sure to hold on to this and in this bag we have all of the other cables that we will need so I will go ahead and walk you through them right now um like I said earlier we're actually not going to use all of these for this belt and I'll be honest almost no one needs all of these connected at the same time um but they give you extras so that just in case you're building a system with 10 hard drives or some crazy stuff or whatever you should have all the cables you need but let me actually walk you through what is what here because there's a lot and Adit this is a little intimidating I think when it's a firsttime builder especially you look at all these cables and you're like yikes but it's totally totally fine like the good thing about literally all these power cables is that you really can't do it wrong as long as you fully seat it it will be fine you're not going to be able to accidentally like put it upside down without using an insane amount of force you're not going to be able to plug it into the wrong thing like everything is key everything is going to be unique so it's not anywhere near as scary as it seems so let me walk you through it really quick the first cable we're going to start out with is our 20 plus 4 pen so this is the main power to the motherboard so you see it's going to be 20 plus 4 the four is always attached it's really like a 24 pen and then on the other side this is the end that we're going to plug into the power supply so I'm going to actually do that right now this is a cable that you will need 100% of the time so it's modular just because reasons but um yeah you're always always going to need this cable so for this it's very straightforward we're going to plug in the left and the right side of our cables and make sure that we get the little click it's one two perfect so again 100% of gaming PCs are going to need this cable so we always going to plug that in next up we're going to grab one that's a little bit more unusual especially if you not built a PC in the last couple of years so this is known as the 12vt 600 wat PCI 5.0 ATX 3.0 there's a lot of names for this cable but essentially what this is is a new high power cable specifically for graphics cards as a recording this video is almost exclusively used on Nvidia graphics cards now you may have heard of this cable because that has a little bit of a problematic start to life um some people have had issues with these things melting or not working well because it's a 600 W cable that is very very thin now because we have a power supply that is designed to be used with this because you can use like an adapter to get this out of a couple of these guys the main thing is and it's really straightforward make sure you are fully seeding this cable not only into your power supply but also into your graphics card part Reon I to put this little pamplet in here saying hey plug it all the way in so it don't melt um which sounds scarier than it is should be totally fine so this cable like almost everything we're doing here is only going to go in one way so you see this little clip is going to go into this hole and You' got these little pins that go onto the bottom so we're just going to line it up make sure it's seated give it a nice little bit of force get a weak little click but it is in there we'll give it a little tug just to make sure and there you go you've got yourself the power supply to graphics card connector now I am using this and only this for our graphics card because I am using an ARX 40 series card now if I was using an Intel GPU an AMD GPU an ultra Nvidia GPU I would not be using this cable instead i' would be using this PCI power so this is known as a 6 plus2 connector and uh this is a tried andrue method that graphics cards have used for many many years um it's not quite as clean because so what this single cable will do is like 600 watts to do this with PCI cables you need to use several of these as you can see they have these like little like pigtail things because graphics cards have different levels of power needed so some graphics cards may only need a single six pen or you may need to connect the six plus two making it an eight pen or you may need two of these or sometimes three it depends on the card is going to completely vary but it will tell you what kind of actual power you need on your graphics card box if your graphics card needs these it's super simple so just the same way we did it before this is the end that would go into your power supply so again it's the 6 plus two but the other end is going to be specific so you can see right here it says CPU and pcie so these four or sorry these two and these two are all the same just like all the rest of the connectors as far as installing us the power supply it is dead simple so we're going to install one of these just to show you what it would be like so we're going to click it in place and if we were not using this Nvidia 40 series GPU I would be using these 8 pen connectors as opposed to the fancy new one but because we are using a RTX 470 super I'm actually going to unplug that and put this off to the side specifically and our power for future use oh huh found the screws they're hiding in the bag with the pouch remember those screws I told you to look for found them next up is our CPU power cable so while that big 20 plus 4 pen connector is what supplies power to the motherboard this connector is specifically for your CPU this is an 8 pen CPU power connector so depending on your motherboard you may need any number of these so for a lower-end system sometimes you actually only need the four P you you actually would split this connector into half you can also click it together and it is an eight pin which is the most standard some highering motherboards actually have support for two of these you actually don't typically need to install two of them they're more for so for like extreme overclocking but uh general rule of thumb if you have the power from your power supply so if you have two of these in the box and your motherboard wants two of them plug them in but typically an 8 Pin is all you need to power everything but the most power hungry CPUs on the planet and this is going to install the exact same way as the PCI so you'll see that the other end that goes in the power supply is the same so it's the eight pen so you line it up with the CPU and pcie these are all the same so it doesn't matter so we line it up click it and this is ready to go into our motherboard connector specifically the CPU slot so for our build that's actually almost everything we need as far as power goes so there are a couple of other connectors that I will show you really quick here so if I grab this one right here this is known as SATA so SATA is a little bit an older School standard it's meant more so for like lower powered accessories so originally it was meant for hard drives Optical drives older School ssds often times these days you're actually going to use this more so for auxiliary things so for example you may need it for your fans you may need it for the pump you may need it for your all-in-one liquid cooler like there's a bunch of different things that you could use this for um so traditionally you're going to need to at least install one of these I think for this system this has what one two three it has three individual leads on it that should be be plenty for the system so this is probably the most unique looking actual connector so you'll see it's very long and skinny and has a little Notch that Notch is very helpful because it means that you're only going to install this one way so I'm going to just put one of these into our power supply for now I explain how to connect it once we actually need it uh but almost every build is going to want at least one of these SATA connectors installed on our power supply another cable that you may see although is thankfully becoming a little bit less common is Molex so you'll see this janky looking connector is old school like this is probably the oldest school Power standard that's still around I mean this has been around since freaking forever um this is similar to SATA in that it is meant for lower power accessories so this used to be used for like floppy disc drives thankfully most systems you actually won't need this uh some usually it's like fan headers and stuff will still use Molex um it's kind of annoying because it's got this like sort of like I don't know how you would call it a little like clip like clampy guy so you can see you kind of like sort of pinch it to install it it look I don't like these things they're really fiddly because sometimes you think You' got all the way installed it's not you have to really kind of tug it out if your system doesn't need one of these feel free to not plug this Cable in at all but if you think you may want to do it you don't want to double check all your components it's not a terrible idea to plug this in as you can see right here on the actual power supply these are all for SATA or molik so it doesn't matter so we could install this plug it in and just sort of Tuck this cable off to the side if we want to use it later but for these purposes and because I don't think I need Molex for anything in this system I'm going to disconnect this and put on a little cable pouch and if we find that we need it later all we got to do is pop open this little basement and plug one of these into the power supply we'll be good to go but I think we can safely not use this today other than that that's pretty much it so we have a few extra versions of the cables so again I've got more PCI Leads Here know I was about to put up this second CPU power connector but I just checked my mother board it actually does support8 plus 4 pens you don't have to do this I've run plenty of systems that have that auxiliary port and I don't pull anywhere near enough power for it so it doesn't it's like not necessary um but we have the cable it's just a little extra run and technically if we ever lose our mind and overclock this thing to a gajillion gigahertz it may need this cable so it's on the board I'm going to go ahead and install it now is time to install the power supply in our case so power supplies are very straightforward now sometimes they have like interesting designs you can see this one has uh the MSI logo and the mag logo on this side so it's meant so it will look good on either way but the important thing to keep in mind is that while all of your internal connectors are on one side this is obviously the back of the power supply where you have your onoff switch your I and your little fan button but you will also find a fan it is important to give access to Fresh Air for this fan so when it comes to installing it in the case the vast vast majority of cases these days we'll install the power supply on the bottom whether you have a basement or not it almost always goes on the bottom if I was installing this on the top of the case then typically You' want to have the fan up so the fan can pull in air from the top but because I'm installing on the bottom of the case I'm going to go fan down so you can see here that I actually have a little fan filter specifically for the power supply so this actually pops out from the bottom this is fairly standard on most cases it's just a little dust filter but it gives you a very good sense for where the air flow is going to be coming from your power supply so what we're going to do is we're going to take our power supply actually I think with this system it doesn't matter we can go left or right we're going to line it up with that fan facing down so it's going to be able to pull in air from here so we're going to slide this into place it actually has these nice little rubber feet which help us to sort of Center things up and don't worry about your cables right now they're all kind of dangling out the back it's totally fine this part is very simple we just need to install the four screws to hold our power supply into place so I'm going to go ahead and grab a screw um so the only thing you may have to do is power supplies they always sit roughly right but often times they're like slightly off so maybe be leaning one way or another so just visually make sure that you can see all of the screw holes so with this I'm actually a little bit low so I make sure that sit completely flat which it looks like it is so you may just need to do a little bit of wiggling to make sure so just pick any of the sides doesn't matter where you start so just going do it right here and then we're going to get this installed so when it comes to installing actually really all components so there's a couple things to keep in mind first and foremost don't tighten it down until you've got it into place you know it's just like almost anything in life you want to make sure that you got all your screws into place before you do the final tighten on top of that you should do it in a cross pattern so I started with this bottom left screw to make sure that I'm applying even pressure I'm now going to go to the top right screw to install that now it's not super important when it comes to a power supply because there's not like any crazy tension or anything you have to worry about but some other components specifically it comes to something like a CPU Cooler this is actually very important but honestly again this is just good General Life advice cross patterns whether it's your wheel whether it's your power supply whether it's your CPU whether it's your door handle that has four screws for some reason whatever the case is it's always good to go on opposite Corners so you're evenly applying pressure to whatever it is that you're installing once you got the first two screws in you can kind of let go of the power supply and then these should go in a little bit easier again we're just going to do it kind of light to make sure that we've got everything lined up correctly and for this final screw we actually can assume that everything looks fine which it is we've got access to everything we actually can now start tightening things now that we know that it is all lined up once you've got these screws tightened up you have successfully installed yourself a power supply in your gaming PC that's step one of just a couple more there a few we'll be here for a couple more hours all right so for now we're clear to take our case and just set it off to the side because we are going to begin building up our motherboard so we're going to be looking for a few components here so we're going to have not only of course the motherboard which is important but we're also going to grab our CPU we're going to grab our memory and assuming you're using an M2 SSD we're also going to be grabbing this if you're using a hard drive which hopefully not or a St SSD we'll do that later but for this we need all four of these things because they're all going to be installed onto our motherboard so before we open all these up let me give you a quick little tour around the board itself so motherboards uh there's a few things to know about this again a motherboard is where all of your components are going to connect so this is an important component there's a few things to keep in mind as we're actually doing this so again I'm going to flip it over to the back there is some information here there's also should be a manual on the inside but it'll give you a little bit of basic stuff it'll tell you about the compatibility yada y yada none of this is important but I will tell you what while you build this up keep the Box handy I actually like building my motherboard up on the box because it is fairly safe against stuff like static electricity now okay so Ken is going to now demonstrate what your not supposed to do which is to rub your socks on carpet and try to zap things but I'll be honest most of these things are relatively durable to the point where you would have to try real real hard to cause it the yeah there you go thank you for the illustration yeah so there you go didn't kill it you see that what happened but what I do like to do is pull the motherboard out and once I get my accessories out I'm going to put this on the box and use that as my little build area so motherboard take a look at in a second below that we have a few things that we will want to pull out so so because this motherboard has Wi-Fi it's going to have our Wi-Fi antennas we toss that off to the side we have a slightly smaller instruction manual compared to what you used to get back in the day so it's going to give me a little bit of info here you may want to pull up the pdf online if you don't have the full manual this is going to give us some very basic stuff but there are a few things in this manual which are nice to have such as your pen outs for your front panel connectors and a little bit more of a thorough overview of all the compon on the board so like a lot of components when it comes to building a PC every motherboard is going to be a little different so I'm going to walk you through this specific gigabyte b650 board there's some similarities between all boards there's some similarities between AMD boards but always safe bet is to actually find that manual that comes with your motherboard and take a look through and it'll just kind of explain to you where each item is now beyond the Wi-Fi module on the board there are a few accessories here so we have a couple of screws uh actually have a bunch of screws so these will be to install ssds so we're just going to put these off to the side we also have a couple and by a couple mean two stated cables now we're going to be using this for our hard drive but again we would use these sated cables for a traditional hard drive a SATA SSD an optical drive if you're using one of those um SATA cables are nice and they typically not always but typically come with your motherboard the board itself this is an ATX motherboard so the most standard size for I would say the majority of first- time builders especially so what you'll see is a whole lot of stuff inside this plastic bag so I'm going to set this down here um now I'm not going to try to scare you like oh it's super dangerous cuz it's not right like try not to get your greasy hands all over it maybe wash your hands before you do the build but like components are pretty durable these days not saying you couldn't break something if you try or if you drop it or whatever but again if you've never built a PC before this is going to probably look a little intimidating but it's really not that bad so a few ground rules first and foremost before you do anything with this PC take a look around when this goes into the case it's a lot harder to find some of these little connectors it'll really pay off if you take this opportunity to learn where all the different bits and Bobs are on the system so when this is in your case you're trying to run a cable and it's dark and you can't see and blah blah blah it is so much better when you know oh I know that's on the bottom right and you can find it so let me walk you through it really quick here first of all we're going to see our CPU socket so regardless of whether this is AMD or Intel it's pretty much always in the top middle so this is where surprise surprise your CPU goes we'll explain that in just a second to the right here we have our Ram slots so you'll see that this board has four um sometimes you'll only have two slots if it's a smaller or cheaper motherboard but four is pretty standard for this kind of thing um below our CPU we're going to see our first of several into SSD slots so I'll do is actually I'll go ahead and open this up um usually you're going to have like a little heat sink so it's going to look different on every board so if we remove the heat sink what you'll see is a little slot to install our M2 SSD we'll get to that in a minute but just keep in mind that uh often times it's a little hidden so this one actually says M2 SSD on it but you might not know unless you're looking closely we can also install ssds down here so if I take this cover off I can show you so underneath this cover you'll see that this board has two more empty slots for total of three uh this is a point where it might be helpful to consult your manual because sometimes these are actually kind of hidden so I've seen these that go on the back of a motherboard especially for like smaller ITX boards and again you wouldn't necessarily think that this is even something you could remove much less that you have hidden slots underneath so again for this board we have a total of three slots again you can check your manual general rule of thumb is that top slot is going to be the one you want to populate first it's typically the fastest it's the one that's closest it's the one that's going to have the best traces but theoretically any of these are going to function so right below our top M2 slot we have this which is our PCI Express slot this is where you will install your graphics card now you can see we actually have a total of three so we have one on top and then two more a little bit lower down again every motherboard is going to be a little different smaller motherboards just have fewer slots because they're typically about this size on top but they just sort of lose some of that sort of height so if you only have one slot that's actually kind of fine because the vast majority of systems are only going to install a single graphics card you can use these for graphics cards as well but you shouldn't because this is a full speed 16x slot these are typically 8X or 4X or an older generation usually what you'll use for these additional slots are things like video capture cards or Raid controllers or things that are possible to do on your system but a little less common so for our system we're not going to be using these at all but like I said with the SSD which should go on the top slot your graphics card definitely should go in the top one you can also see that this one is a little bit more robust so unlike these that are plastic this is made of metal so it's going to be a little bit more durable especially when you get like a really big heavy graphics card in there it's going to you a little bit of extra support so this is where our graphics card is going to install now this top left area is full of heat sinks so there's not a whole lot you need to worry about here except for these little connectors right here so you'll see that I have a eight pen as well as a four pen this is our CPU power that I was talking about earlier so for a system like this plug in the eight pen for sure that what is going to provide power to the actual CPU the four pin is auxiliary you don't need it I'm going to do it just for the sake of being complete but unless you're doing some crazy overclocking or something typically you don't need that but if you've got the connectors on your board and the power from your power supply there's no reason not to do it so again you may have only a four pin here you may have an eight you have an eight plus four you may have an 8 plus 8 if you have a super high-end board um as long as you have one eight pin in there that's usually enough but you can fully fill it out if you would like to the right hand side we're going to have a bunch of smaller connectors so you're going to see that we have three different headers so these are that's very sticky these are fan headers so you'll see they're actually labeled so we have CPU fan CPU optional and system fan one so four pin connectors I'll go over it when we're actually installing them but this is how fans are connected so for us we will plug in our CPU fan the optional is if you have something like an allinone which is going to provide continuous power to the pump they all use the same connector now there are two different types of fans there's four pen and three pen but they can all go into four pen so you'll see there's this little Notch right here so if you do the three pen it'll just go around the notch if you have a four pin it just expands over that side so much like pretty much everything in a PC fan headers are only going to go in one way so if you try to put it in there and it doesn't look right there's a couple of notches to guide you into place um there's a bunch of other stuff that's not super relevant so you're going to see some things like LEDs and RGB controllers I will tell you that while RGB is great and makes your system look awesome it is outside the scope of this tutorial for one reason it's real Annoying so look look RGB as an ecosystem is a mess there are tons of Standards tons of Brands tons of varieties of things that work together they could be daisy chain it's a honestly a mess if you would like to install RGB fans RGB strips whatever the case is in your system I would implore you to look up tutorials for that specific thing because none of them are the same some use chroma some use RGB some use Mystic light it's just it's a whole thing honestly I don't typically install a lot of RGB entirely because it's pain if you want to make your system look awesome by all means go for it you can plug it directly into the board there are also like little add-on things that you can do depending on like if you're going to use like a little third party controller or whatever but like it's just it's annoying and I don't like to deal with it cuz I just want my PC to work and I don't need it to be in full rainbow parade all the time also I think the fans in the system are going to do that by default without me doing anything so directly on the right of your board you should see the 20 plus 4 pen connector so this is that cable that is going to come from the power supply that's the big chunky guy this provides power to the entire motherboard very important no matter what other stuff you have on your system you're always going to populate this 20 plus 4 very important it'll click all the way in I'll show you in a little bit but it is very straightforward um coming down a little bit farther you're going to see some other random things so we have another fan header here um it is actually a good idea while you're looking at the board outside the case to just take quick stock of where fan headers are so typically you'll have them in a few different areas so usually there'll be some up toward the top usually one or two on the right side one or two on the bottom it depends where they are higher end boards typically have more headers but just kind of have a general idea of where these are because once you have this in the actual case you're going to want to run fans to whatever Port that is closest so you don't have like ugly cables like running across just something to pay attention to now down here on the right now this is could be anywhere they tend to be on the right side but this is a USBC connector so if you have an older motherboard or a case that doesn't support USBC don't worry about this but this case does have a USBC port and that is something we're going to plug in right here it looks like well ironically it looks a little bit like a usba port um so I'll show you how to install in a minute but again just while we're going to the board take a mental note of where these various things are now along the right side you're going to see we have four SATA data connectors now if you're not using a hard drive an optical drive or a SATA SSD you do not actually need to use these this is a little bit of an older connector uh you used to have a ton of these on motherboards now a lot of boards only have two or four if you're going to install a bunch of like hard drives and stuff you'll want to take advantage of these we are going to plug one hard drive in here but again it is going to be an additional bit of data for your storage is going to be right here on the right side of the board but sometimes it could be on the bottom off the side whatever but it's right here also along the right side we have our USB 3.0 header now uh this is not my favorite connector U I'll show you when we actually install it it's fine it Powers the front USB ports on our case almost all boards and cases are going to have this it's a really annoying connector purely because you can install it fine but when you ever need to take it out of the system I've broken a lot of these over the years it's just real fiddly the plastic tends to crack and snap because it's just in there so firmly ideally plug that one in toward the end once you know everything works real real good cuz uh it's just annoying but yeah bottom right we have our front panel connectors I will give a special thank you to gigabyte for color coding these a lot of motherboards over the years have had no easy way to see what's up so these are a bunch of individual connectors again I'll show you when we actually install it later but just to to know where they are these are individual connectors for lots of random bits and Bobs on your case these are things like your power button the reset button your hard drive LED just lots of little bits and Bobs that you are going to want to use if you look closely this one is nicely labeled so you see our power LED hard drive reset yada yada yada it's very nice to have this right here um if you don't have a nice little Legend to show you what everything is you can always look at your motherboard manual and it will give you the pen outs again I'll explain this later just pointing out where it is right now we also have another fan header here and a couple of USB 2.0 so if you have a case it has USB 2.0 ports instead of or in addition to USB 3 ports you plug these in here these days though they're actually a little bit more common for use in sort of internal things so for example sometimes like a all-in-one pump will actually have a USB 2.0 header that you'll plug into uh it just depends but this board has two of them you may not need them based on the build sometimes you use one sometimes you use both and then there's a couple of other things that are not super important we have like our audio which I will explain in a minute but honestly that's the most important things on this board the only other thing I'm going to mention now before we actually start building here is over here on the backside this is our IO Shield so this is basically all of the ports that are going to be poking out the back of the case so you look at the back of the case you see this little slot here this is where the io Shield goes so all of these ports are accessible to you on the outside of the system and uh again every board is going to be a little different um the nice thing about this board and most relatively high-end boards is that this is actually already one piece if you're getting a little bit more of an affordable board this little metal piece will actually come separately usually in the actual box itself so you'll need to click that into the actual case I'll tell you it's really nice when it's already installed here on your motherboard because you just need to slide it right in um but you can see here we've got a bunch of ports so we have our Wi-Fi USB PS2 ethernet you name it it's all on here it's really easy that my friends I'm forgetting something is pretty much everything we have on the board you can see on this one there's really nothing on the back so it's going to be mounted directly onto the actual case the only other thing I'll mention while I'm here is just the differ between AMD and Intel sockets for the CPU since we're using an AMD ryzen 7000 system it's very straightforward um so we're going to push this little arm back just going to unlock it and I'm just going to pick this up gently so you'll see that there are a ton of little pins on the actual motherboard now I'm going to give you a word of warning for anything when it comes to building your computer it would be this don't touch these pens there's a lot of them they're really small and if you're using your screwdriver in this area you're moving your finger around you start bending these you're going to be in for a real bad time very quickly now it's fine if you're careful but most things in the system you can make a little mistake you can drop something whatever it's fine right you bend some of these pens you can technically get them back I've done it in the past uh but it really really sucks so I would just give you a for warning be careful with these pens now this is an am5 socket which looks very different because you can see it actually has that sort of little slash in the middle so you can see there's pens on the top and pens on the bottom now if you're using an older AMD system so something with an am4 socket for example there's actually no pens here the pins are on the CPU itself so instead it's sort of flipped right so I'll show you my CPU really quick so on the back side of the CPU there's just a bunch of pads that connect to these pens but on older AMD systems it's reversed so you would have pens on the CPU pads on the actual motherboard same concept there are little pens there don't touch them don't mess them up or you're going to be in a world of hurt so that's just a little heads up um Intel motherboards are very similar it looks a little different than this but the pens are on the board itself so just please be careful I'll show you how to install the CPU in a second but just if you mess these pens up you're going to not you can try to fix them but it's really hard you may need to actually swap out your board so that's a word of warning my friends be careful with pens they're sharp and importantly a huge pain to put back in place it is time to to install our CPU now again I'm using a ryzen 7000 series processor installing pretty much every CPU is the exact same so there's slight variations as far as when you actually go to install them like how they're like melted and stuff but it's a very very similar process so I'm going to take this out of the box now because this is a ryzen 7 a little bit more of a higher end chip that's all I've got in the box so if I had a lower-end chip it would typically come with the stock cooler and like I mentioned earlier those stock coolers are to totally fine but when you get the higher end chip it comes in a smaller box and only the CPU it's like when you buy a phone and it doesn't come with power cable anymore even though youve paid $1,000 for it you know who you are so we're going to open up this little plastic clamshell now when it comes to uh CPU this is a little bit sensitive it's not too bad um you do need to be a bit careful if this is an older AMD chip so again like a ryzen 5000 and am4 Chip be careful because that has pens on the bottom this does not so if I flip it over here you'll see that on the bottom of the chip they're all of our little pads so this is what makes contact with all the pins on the motherboard you don't want to touch these but it's not super super critical like you're not going to I mean it's fine just don't get it dirty and it's all right um now you'll see that with ryen 7000 it has this sort of interesting design where it almost looks like a crown um most chips will look vaguely similar so if this was an Intel CPU it would actually be a little bit taller and if you're with a like an older am4 it would be a little bit flatter a little bit more boring but again pretty much every CPU is going to look quite similar and installing them is also basically the same sort of thing so I've already done it here but you can see that when you get the motherboard you will want to push down the arm so it's either on this side or this side depending on which socket you've got you want to pull it back and then gently we're going to lift up the little lid so I've already taken off this little plastic protector you can actually leave it on because it's designed to pop Loose as you close it down but I just pull this off so we get a little bit of a clearer shot now when it comes to installing the CPU on am5 it is very very simple so not only are there a couple of notches you'll see there's a notch on top and bottom which corresponds to a notch on top and bottom of the CPU but it's especially easy because if you flip it over you'll see that there is that little line right so we have the top and the bottom of the chip that line denotes top and bottom on both the actual socket and the CPU so this is super simple if you're using Intel or an older AMD you're going to want to go by the little notches so there'll be notches on the left or the right or the top the bottom and you'll also see that with this and most CPUs there's going to be a little gold triangle that gold triangle will also denote the little triangle on the socket so there's a number of ways to double check but just make sure that it lines up correctly when we drop this in we're going to gently place it if you go to put your CPU in and it fights you at all stop that's not good it's supposed to gently rest into place okay so scary it's probably the only part of the system that is actually a real danger but it's totally fine so to install the CPU very simple hold it by the corners trying to touch that bottom just good general rule of thumb we're going to line it up with our actual socket making sure that it is lined up correctly with those notches and we're going to gently let go of it tada that's it you see how it just rests very very seamlessly here again if you going to put that in there and it doesn't feel right don't Wiggle It Don't Force It gently pick it up visually inspect that The Notches are lined up and everything is fine as you can see it just rests completely fine once you know that it is in here you can put your finger out you just give a little wiggle just to make sure totally fine then we're going to take the top of it put it underneath this little retention so you'll see that we actually have to make sure it's all the way forced down there and then we take this arm and give it some good Force it's going to be a little hard to put down but don't worry about it it's just a moderate amount of force and congratulations you have a CPU installed in your motherboard that's it it's that simple it seems scary there's a lot of things that could go wrong but as long as you put the CPU on is lined up correctly you put that arm down that's it that is really the most nerve-wracking part of any PC build at this point it gets much much less scary next up let's install our Ram so for this system I'm going to be installing dual Channel memory which is going to come in two dens so uh to install RAM it is very simple if you've ever worked on a PC in the past oar was probably installing RAM so you're hopefully familiar but if not so so simple so I'm going to pull it out of the little clamshell here um Ram is not super fragile you don't have to worry about it too much so almost all Ram these days has like a little like metal heat sink which is perfectly safe to hold now it's just a good general rule of thumb you see like little gold contacts on pretty much anything don't touch them it's okay you just don't want to get them dirty you want to get them like gross or nasty or anything so typically it's always safe to grab these things by the sides or by I like the little metal shrouds but you'll see that I have two sticks of ddr5 here now I actually have right here a stick of ddr4 so if you're building a system you're going to be using one of these types of memory they look almost the exact same but importantly they're not compatible with each other so if you're building an Intel system often times Intel systems will actually have an option so the CPUs would support ddr4 or ddr5 and it's down to which motherboard you get but a motherboard will only select one of these two so this board actually says right here and it's RIS 7,000 so you know it's ddr5 same thing is if you buy an Intel board it will tell you ddr4 ddr5 the main reason I say that is because while they look similar they're not the same if I try to take ddr4 and put in a ddr5 board it will not fit and vice versa with ddr5 the main reason for that put them side by side you see there's a little Notch it's about halfway through or so that Notch is in a different spot for ddr4 versus ddr5 that is the only physical thing stop stopping you from trying to make a real bad mistake so if you've made it somehow to this point and you're not sure double check that your ddr4 ddr5 RAM is correct for your ddr4 or ddr5 motherboard sounds like it's very complicated it really isn't if you're building with ryzen 7000 you're definitely using ddr5 if you're building with ryzen 5000 or earlier you're definitely using ddr4 if you're building with Intel it could be either or reference what kind of motherboard you have that will tell you what kind of ram you need to use but because we're using ryzen 7000 it's very straightforward now regardless of what kind of ram you're using installing this is dead simple A2 and B2 it says first that is very common so what we're going to do is we're going to pull back these little retention arms so you'll see you just pull it back on one side on the other side we're going to do it on slot two and four um some motherboards actually only allow you to open one of the sides if that's the case it's fine but you always at least open one of them and then with our in hand what we're going to do is we're going to line it up so uh there's no easy way of telling which way it is I I'll be honest just look at the Notch and just sort of do a little test fit and see so you'll see that does fit you'll see that does fit there we go I still put the ram in wrong almost every time so you know how I mentioned that you got that little Notch what's almost halfway but not quite and Visually it's hard to tell so what I do every time is I just come a little lower I line up in the slot making sure that you have actually opened the correct arm so it's easier to accidentally like kind of cross it so make sure that you've actually got it slot two slot two right so it's going to line up line up here look at where that Notch is and you'll see that it matches up correctly I can now click this into place if however I roll the dice wrong and put it in backwards what you would see is that that Notch does not line up and this will not go into place right so if you feel it obviously and it just physically doesn't look at it actually matches just flip the stick around it's totally fine it's just because it's almost half and not halfway through it's really hard for me to visually tell which side it is so I always just actually look down do a very light little test fit to make sure it does line up which I can see it is and at that point take a thumb on either corner and give it a relatively decent amount of pressure until you hear it click so ready set one and boom there we go we got one stick of RAM installed that simple so because I have the two sticks of ram I'm going to go to my fourth slot do the exact same thing making sure that I have lined it up correctly so again there's a little guide there so it should line up relatively well one two and we're going to push and push there we go we have ourselves 32 GB of RAM installed now if you had four sticks of ram if you're Mr Moneybags over here you would just continue to populate all the slots but if you're doing dual Channel memory with just two Dems which is the majority of systems you're going to put those two in there we go that's it super super straightforward like honestly even if if you've never built a PC before you could just install RAM in your existing system like it is very simple just don't push it really hard if it doesn't go in because you probably have it upside down and again I do that a lot so just this is a little outside the scope of the tutorial but just a little tip so I'm using a kit of gskill flare X5 so these are two identical sticks of ram technically any set of ddr5 would work but I don't recommend it so if I were to say expand this Ram to 64 GB and buy two more I want to buy the exact same kit of ram mostly because this Ram is all going to be running at the same speed same timing same everything that is a pretty much guaranteed way of expanding your memory if I was to say grab a set of Corsair Ram that's a little slow or whatever the system will work but it will default to whatever the lowest speed is and sometimes it'll default to like base base speeds you also can sometimes have compatibility issues most modern systems it will work but if you're going to expand your memory try to buy the exact same kit that you have so it might not be a bad idea so this is just a little pamphlet that came in the plastic sleeve it might not be a bad idea to just keep this handy so say 6 months or a year or two years from now if you want to buy some more RAM you can confirm that you're getting the exact same thing so again it's not just necessarily the manufacturer but it's the speed it's the timing it's everything if you're doing troubleshooting Ram is the spot that I always like to start with so especially if you've got got mismatched Ram in there that can sometimes cause compatibility issues so if you get this thing all put together you hit the power button nothing happens check your RAM make sure it's seated make sure you have all matching sticks and if it really doesn't work what I'll actually do sometimes is I will remove one of the sticks of RAM and try to post it that way you shouldn't actually run your computer like this because you're losing performance but if you're just doing a little bit of troubleshooting trying with a single stick of ram can sometimes actually fix the issue every once in a while sticker Ram may be dead or not seated right or whatever the case is so just a little tip for troubleshooting and future expansion but for now we're going to install both of our sticks we're going to move on to our SSD so we are of course using a Samsung 990 Pro but this is an mvme SSD and they're all going to install the exact same way so um the 990 Pro is a very high-end SSD this thing will do what like 7,000 megabytes per second like it is absurdly fast like I'll be real with you almost every MVM SSD you could install is going to be just silly fast right um the thing I do tend to like is going with Samsung ssds for reliability now you have to be a little careful when it comes to picking a brand for reliability because everyone's different every SSD every manufacturer every line right Samsung make a number of different ssds for example um so the safe beted is always to read some reviews and see but I just personally speaking have had a lot of good luck with Samsung ssds in the past so again your mileage may vary every company has quality control issues sometimes yada y y but I tend to like Samsung because not only are they fairly fast and usually on The Cutting Edge they make all their own stuff but importantly I have never had a Samsung SSD fail on me actually I don't think I've ever had a problem with it so you know obviously plenty of options out there but it's good to have a high quality SSD so that you don't you know lose data cuz that's not fun when it comes to installing our SSD it is very simple so we're going to go to our top PCI slot which again is the one that had this little cover on it so if you can't find it you may need to take one of these covers off and what we're going to do is if you look at the SSD you'll see it has a bunch of little gold pens with a little Notch right so the notch denotes where the power and the data are split so with this is only going to go in one way there is technically another type of M2 SSD which is based on SATA and that will have an additional Notch up here those are less common and honestly kind of out of date at this point so the vast majority of you should buy an mbme SSD as opposed to a SATA M2 SSD which word soup but um if you have the second Notch you'll just need to make sure that your motherboard has a slot that supports SATA ssds but like I said 95% of you buying an SSD should get just a regular mvme M2 SSD at which point you should have no compatibility issues so what we're going to do is we're going to take it we're going to line it up with this little slot here so when we line it up we're going to do it at just a little bit of an angle so just give a little wiggle you'll feel it start to go in and you you can let go it will stay like that and the next step is to go to those little screws that came with the motherboard and you'll see that there's a little baggie here that has one baby screw in it um they give them to you separately um not sure why but these SSD screws that you're going to need are going to come with the motherboard now some motherboards actually don't need the screw this one does but sometimes you'll actually have a little plastic piece that goes on this and all you'll do is you'll just push this down and rotate the plastic piece down cuz all it's doing is just physically holding in place so depending on the manufacturer of your motherboard you may use one of these little screws that comes with your motherboard or you might just have a little plastic piece that just swivels around and holds it both are totally fine takes 5 Seconds to put one screw in but it is so simple like honestly compared to we'll show you how to do a hard drive in a little bit um but compared to installing a hard drive it's not exactly a tough thing to do but man M2 ssds are so easy I mean it is just it's so good before we screw it in I'm just going to make sure that the SSD is fully seated so I'm going to put a little bit of pressure toward the socket it's nice and firm in there so I'm going to take my finger and push it down grab my screwdriver take the screw like this and then I'm going to screw it into place and just like that we have an SSD installed I told you it is really really simple so before we're done we're just going to just give a little push test just to make sure it's not loosened anyway um another troubleshooting thing if you have problems later on sometimes you may be able to actually get the computer to post and go into the BIOS but your SSD won't show up almost always your problem is that you didn't fully seated typically if the screw goes in you know nice and cleanly you do have that fully seated but just as a heads up if you have any problems with your SSD showing up later now would be a great time to come back in make sure your screw is all the way tight and make sure that it is fully seated in there CU if it's out even just a little bit it sometimes might not show up but that's it it's not very complicated the last thing we need to do here is install this little cover now strictly speaking you don't actually have to use these so the reason why it's this sort of big metal cover it's actually a heat sink for your SSD now I highly recommend this you should definitely use this cuz it comes with the board you'll see On The Backs side so this is like the front so this is the back so if you peel off the little piece of plastic you'll actually see that it is a little thermal pad so if you touch it little sticky this is actually meant to transfer heat from the SSD onto your heat sink and let it be dissipated in your case um again I would definitely recommend to do this your system will run without a heat sink usually um but just just don't do that just just put the heat sink on it is going to help your SSD perform far better it's going to be much more of a long happy life and it's already on your motherboard almost certainly so it's kind of a bit of a no-brainer all these heat sinks can be slightly different based on your motherboard but with this one it's really straight forward so this little Notch which is going to go into where the socket is and then there's a screw on the other side uh the only thing I'll say as far as installing these because this is a sticky thermal pad try to do this cleanly the first time you don't be wiggling around or whatever cuz it'll actually like tug your SSD so just make sure that you get it nice and cleanly so we going try to do this some one try so we going to take our heat sink we're going to line it up with the top of the socket here so it just slides in like so I'm going to actually get a little lower so I can get a nice view of it so it should make nice smooth and even contact with our SSD and it's going to be hard for you to see but there's this little screw hole right here so I'm going to make sure that that is making in contact with our actual screw and with that I'm going to gently put it into place you go and screw this pretty much all the way down once I'm done I like to take my finger and just sort of run it along a time or two just to make sure that it is made some good contact and that's it your SSD is installed it has a full nice heat sink on it to make sure it's nice and cool if you ever need to take your SSD out swap it out that's fine just keep in mind that because that thermal pad's a little sticky you don't want to do that too much you don't want to touch that too much cuz will start to lose some of the effect but that's it my friends we got ourselves a CPU installed we got ourselves RAM installed we've got ourselves an SSD installed you can take a little bit of a break now maybe do a little stretch did you drink some water you probably need to drink some water cuz we're about to go into the next phase which is to install our motherboard into the case we're going to start installing our graphics card our cooler all the kind of fun stuff but here is a great point if you take a little break and Patch yourself on the back cuz you've actually made a a lot of progress good job now my friends it is time to retrieve our case and set it down on the desk so she going to put it down flat on its bottom or its back I guess because we're going to install our motherboard so I will admit a big reason why I'm using a white case right now is because it is a lot easier to see now that is because I'm doing a tutorial obviously you pick whatever case you want I would just give you a little heads up if you have chosen a black case it's a little hard to see sometimes I would recommend if you do not have a well-lit area pull out your phone and your flashlight sometimes like again with this white case and the studio light it's really easy to see but there's definitely times when I'm building in a black case especially once you start getting a bunch of components in it can be hard to sort of see like some of the areas where you like run cables or standoffs or whatever so just a little like sort of heads up as you're sort of either planning your build or actually getting started make sure you have a well lit area and if you've that a white case it's a lot easier to see so just a little tip there but let's install our motherboard before you install your motherboard you want to make sure your IO Shield is in place so again this motherboard has an IO Shield already attached to the board so I don't have to do this but a lot of other boards don't so I'll show you a clip of our previous PC tutorial where you have to install the io Shield essentially it's just a little piece of metal that clicks into place in this sort of back part of the chassis now you want to make sure that is fully seated you also want to make sure that the it is in the correct orientation you just want to make sure that the io Shield matches up with the layout of the ports on the back of your motherboard trust me I say you want to make sure that IO Shield is in correctly CU if you don't and you put your motherboard in and you screw it all down and then you look at the back and realize none of your ports are sticking out you're going to be real grumpy not that I've ever done that or anything um but uh if your Bor already has the io shield in congratulations that step's already done so assuming you have your IO Shield installed it is time to put the motherboard in so motherboards are fairly straightforward now this is the point where I will tell you to check the size of your motherboard and the size of your case so this is again an ATX chassis and an ATX board which means that thankfully I already have my standoffs installed so you can see that I have nine of them 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 nine that is a standard ATX configuration now if I was using a smaller motherboard I would only be using maybe four six eight it depends on the boards especially Micro ATX sometimes has slightly different positioning so if you're using a differ sized motherboard check the manual for your case sometimes the case will actually have like M or ATX or ITX engraved typically though you want to take a look at your actual manual to see um the idiot proof way of doing it is to just test fit your motherboard so you can see with this ATX board I should just be able to drop it right into place and I will be able to see that everything lines up so I'm just going to line it up something like this and I can already visually see 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 nine screw holes so I know that this will line up but if you're again using a Micro ATX motherboard and an ATX chassis you may need to install or move some standoffs which brings me to this box of Hardware so every case is a little different so this is a lean Le case which has a large amount of accessories in it but you're always going at this point want to find the box of stuff that came in your case usually it's a little small than this sometimes it's like in like your little hard drive caddy um there's a bunch of stuff in here including a manual which you may want to check if you have any questions especially again when it comes to the positioning of where you want standoffs but what I'm looking for is this little guy right here so this is a little box of Hardware so if I can do this without dumping it all over the place you'll see that I have a bunch of different types of screws and mounts and all that kind of thing this is very helpful in fact not just very helpful it's a necessity cuz these are where you're going to find screws to mount most of the components in your system including your motherboard so because I am using an ATX case and an ATX motherboard my standoffs are already here if I'm using a different size or some cases don't have this I need to actually manually install these standoffs myself so if I look through here normally what you'll find so you'll see that this is a little bag that has a bunch of screws and standoffs um now sometimes these standoffs are actually bronze so actually made out of brass the whole point of a standoff is to separate your motherboard from actually grounding itself on the case and you just need a place to screw it in also just a little heads up as you open these little baggies be real careful they explode all over the place I have lost like you want to lose one of these in your carpet I don't think so so this is what a standoff looks like so you can see it has a little thread on the top and if I flip it over you'll see it has a thread on the bottom so this is what goes into the case and then this is where your screw will go into the actual standoff through the motherboard a lot of this stuff is very small so I'll will admit it's a little hard to get on camera so I'll try to show you as much as possible but again my standoffs are already installed in this case if you do need to install standoffs so I'll just show you like say I'll put one right here um what I like to do is I like to start it fingertight so you can get it kind of in there you want to make sure as you install stand ups that you get them in there pretty firmly because what can happen is is that say I install this one just fingertight and I call it a day fingertight is actually enough to install your motherboard what can happen is is that say you need to replace your motherboard you need to pull it out at some point if this is not all the way seated into the case when you go to unscrew the screw out of your actual motherboard instead of coming out it'll just spin the standoff and it'll get stuck and at that point you have to get like a pair of pliers in there it's it's a huge pain so I would highly recommend to make sure this is nice and tight there's a couple ways to make sure that you install these correctly so most of the time not always most of the time you'll have this little tool I don't know if it actually has an official name but I just call it the standoff tool and basically this is on the top it's going to be a little uh Phillips bit and on the bottom is going to be a little hex I'll show you how to do this just for Simplicity sake so I'm going to take my bit and put it over the standoff and then I'm going to screw it in pretty tightly so don't go crazy on it or anything that's magnetic so it comes back up but that is the way to properly install a standoff and same thing if the standoffs that are already in your case don't match up for whatever reason you can use this tool to remove a standoff as well with this tool it is very straightforward to install and remove standoffs based on what you need for your board I will say that these are usually but not always included with your case Hardware if you don't have one of these you actually can use a little pair of pliers to crank them down and sort of put pull them back out uh I don't like doing that if I can avoid it because you can't always get it all the way in there it's a little bit more annoying and that's the only time you ever really do need pliers but just a little heads up if maybe you're working on your PC later and you lose this little guy or something you can use a pair of pliers to do it but just if you're installing standoffs make sure you've got them in there nice and firm cuz trust me you'll get them in there halfway you'll install your motherboard two years will go by you'll try to take your board out and you realize that you're screwing your standoff or just spinning and you're going to really regret your decisions so just make sure you get those things all the way in there but for this video we actually don't need to do that all the standoffs are in there and it is time to install the board itself the only other thing I'll say as I start to line the board up here is that you may want to install your all-in-one liquid cooler before you do your motherboard I will mention that there are two different schools of thought as far as the order of operations at this point so I'm going to show you how to install the motherboard and then the CPU Cooler now if you're using something like an air cooler this is definitely what you want to do right and I'll show you that in just a second but because this system we're using a all-in-one liquid cooler so we're going to have a radiator and some fans that are mounted up top sometimes you actually want to do this in the opposite order and install your radiator and your fans first and then your motherboard I unfortunately don't have a like foolproof recommendation it does kind of come down to your actual case it comes down to how big of a cooler you're using and it comes down to the motherboard the main reason why you may want to install the cooler first is to be able to actually easily run your cables so you can see here that there's a few things we're going to need to plug in on the top of the board so you can imagine that there's going to be a radiator right here and then fans as well so it's going to actually kind of come out to here thankfully this case has lots of space so it shouldn't be a huge con concern but certainly some cases that are a little bit more compact it's really hard to say like pull your like sort of CPU power connectors up here and plug them in you got this huge Radiator in the way so I would just give you a little sort of heads up that you may want to do this slightly out of order compared to what I'm doing but if you're using an allong cooler that say has it mounted on this side it's not a problem so it's like a a 120 or 240 if you're mounting in the front it's not a problem and if you are using an air cooler it's also not a problem so I'm going to be just installing this the normal sort of way um before inall the board though let me just quickly show you the difference between an air and a water cooler so again I'm using an AIO so I'm going to be installing um everything up on top if I was installing an air cooler it would be mounted something like this and this might just be a good sort of way of showing you one of the reasons why you may or may actually want an air cooler so this is a be quite cooler it is on the larger side certainly at the biggest but the thing with these is I like the Simplicity but they are quite heavy and when you mount them you can see because obviously the board is going to be like sort of vertically this is a lot of weight they can to be kind of pull pulling on your system which is a great reason why you should make sure to use all of the standoffs all nine of them on our ATX board and make sure you screw everything in nice and tightly uh I've seen some horror stories of a cooler it's a little heavy maybe it's being shipped or moved or whatever and it can rip stuff right out now let us install our motherboard so I'm going to go through here I have a bunch of the screws which I will show you so the thing is and you know what I don't understand why we've been building PCS for what however many decades at this point you don't at a quick glance know what screws go to what which is weird because a bunch of these screws are very similar to size that you would think that like I don't know some of them make them different colors or something now if you really want to know you can go to your uh manual that comes with your case and somewhere in here is going to tell you what screws go to what so right here it'll tell you all of the different screws that come with your system as you can see a lot of these screws look very very similar so you can see that this one right here here shows screw for motherboard and 2.5 in SSD got a little like almost washer looking guy around the corner so that's the kind of screw we're looking for sometimes you can grab a screw that feels almost exact same thing and it doesn't thread right if you grab that it doesn't thread just grab the other screw but it's just I don't know I I feel like we should have slightly more distinct screws cuz they're so so similar um but for our purposes we're going to look for eight and nine of these little guys I'm going to use my little magnetic mat so I don't lose them and then it as simple as in installing the board but some cases will have instead of nine standoffs they'll have eight plus a little peg in the center that's actually really helpful because when you go to install your board so you can see right here um you have may have to zoom in a little bit but you can see that while it's pretty much in place it's slightly a skew across the board so what I'm going to have to actually do is I'm going to have to adjust it and sort of try to center it up myself but if you have a case that has one of those little centering pens that'll actually kind of help to well Center it by itself but it's not a big deal just expect that when you put the board in it's not going to look quite right you're going to have to sort of finesse it just a little bit to make sure it all lines up now before we put in any screws something to keep in mind now this is not really a big problem for this system because it has that IO Shield built in but if you do have a system that you're going to install the io shield and then sort of Slide the motherboard into so again like usually a little bit of an older or lower-end system take a look around the back so you see here that I can see all of my ports they're nice and clear nice and clean perfect I know that I'm good to go if if I am using a IO shield and sliding the motherboard in take a look at that rear IO can you see all of your ports are there any little metal pegs or penss anywhere boy oh boy it's not fun to install your Board finish your whole system get it all ready to go and then you go to plug your ethernet in and there's a little metal pen in the way because you didn't notice it highly highly recommend before you put in any screws for your motherboard visually look at every single one of your ports and make sure that it is unobstructed just look really close make sure boy I can't tell you how many times I've had to spend an hour tearing apart my PC just to move one tiny little pin cuz I wasn't paying attention um thankfully though because this system has the io Shield integrated that's basically never a problem because it's quite literally already attached so just a little warning for first-time Builders to don't be doing big dumb things like I have done in the past to install the motherboard we're going to use the same sort of cross pattern as we did for our power supply so pick a quarter doesn't really matter which one and we're going to start a screw now again because the motherboard we're just getting it started it's going to be a little bit crooked that's totally fine just sort of give it a little bit of pressure and sort of slide it into roughly the position so I can see right here I need to give it a little bit of uh shove to the left side so it's almost there there we go uh motherboards don't ever fit quite right right out of the box so like with this I can see I can actually need to adjust it a little bit more there we go all right so this board wants to fight me a little bit so I'm going to start with this top right corner which is the one that doesn't want to fit quite right that's fine we'll just give it a little bit of encouragement and we're going to just tighten that down um when you're doing this do not tighten it super tight just get it started make sure that it's not going to like sort of hop off and then what we're going to do is we're going to go to the opposite corner again you always want to install things corner corner corner corner to make sure that you are evenly applying pressure especially with a motherboard if I tighten that all the way down I'm going to have to still adjust like this back corner to make sure it fits and then tighten it otherwise you're going to crank that thing all the way down and half your screw holes will not line up so just do this slowly do it like a little bit at a time and then you can make sure that your motherboard is fully seated cuz you know PC builds have been around for decades and certain things have improved over the years but certain things feel like they just they figured it out in 1984 and they never decided to second guess anything and installing motherboards really has not evolved a lot yeah L up with the holes you wiggle it till it fits you screw it into place check guys something me sounds pretty s but got fiddly anyway all right so I again visually see that the top right is fine so I'm going to go to my bottom left and again just going to do that like half tight just make sure it's not going anywhere I don't get it too tight and then we're going to do the top left corner which I'm give it a little bit of a wiggle but that also looks like it's fine and again only doing it about half tight just to make sure that it's not going to wiggle I still may actually have to give it a little bit of a of a push to make sure everything lines up but so far I think we're about there and then once we've done the four corners then you can do all the ones in the middle just make sure you do all of your screws and standoffs I mean you don't technically need to but I would highly recommend it especially because uh these days graphics cards can be very heavy it puts a lot of pressure on these things and again if you're ever like moving or shipping your system or whatever uh you want to make sure that you are fully seated so again with an ATX motherboard you're looking for nine total screws um for Micro ATX it's usually anywhere between seven and eight I think off the top of my head mini itex is typically four scre so just make sure that you're going around installing everything all right cool so before you tighten everything down quick idiot check again look at your IO Shield make sure all your ports are looking fine no brainer on this one make sure that the board is like obviously not like pinching any cables so you can see I have this little fan header up here so you want make sure that that's not being like sort of pinched or anything but as long as everything visually looks fine and we know that nothing needs to move at this point take a screwdriver and tighten down all of our screws and our motherboard will be fully installed in our case next up before we install our CPU Cooler regardless if you're using a liquid cooler or an air cooler I recommend installing your CPU power so it is always up here on the top left of the board now with this case we actually have a pretty good amount of clearance but a lot of cases don't have quite so much and once you put like radiators or even just a big air cooler in the way it can sometimes be very hard to reach back here so I always recommend doing this first as you run cable so you'll see right now that even though we have a modular Supply there's still a lot of stuff here as you run cables just try to think about how you position them there's no real right or wrong way but you can see that okay so if I'm going to install my CPU power connector so do is I'll pull these cables out of the way and kind of tuck them on the bottom now the main reason to do this is just so that you don't have a bunch of extra sort of thickness so a little bit later on when we actually do our cable management put the side panel on what you want to do is you want to make sure that the cables are sort of Diversified if you have all your cables sort of in a thick like run in the middle these side panel may not go back on so for this run for example because I know that these are going to go off to the side I'm going to specifically pull them out of the way run them through these little cable channels here which should give us enough length and then I'm going to run them up here now I say that these might actually not be long enough but I'll actually yeah I think it'll work so this case specifically has his little cable channels often times you won't have that so you'll see that there are all these little like sort of holes here so there's like a little Gap here Gap here Gap here these are so you can use twist ties so when you're running your cables especially a little bit later once you're actually done you can tie them down but for now and just generally speaking when you're plugging things in try to think a little bit about the cable run because it's a lot cleaner and a lot smoother if you do this now versus building the whole system and then you have to tear half of it out to figure out where everything goes so for this assuming that that is long enough which I think it should be we going to poke it through this top left spot here I think it's going to be just long enough now I might have to pull a little bit of slack if we turn the case back around it's easy to do this while the case is mostly empty cuz when you have to like rotate the case back and forth it's full of components I mean unless you're J2 cents over here it's kind of heavy so you can see that right now I've run my two CPU connectors through this top corner so you'll see they're just going to come right down to here so what I will do is just make sure that I've got all the slack I can but it is going to be enough and what you'll do is you will just plug them in one after the other so this one is already together so you see that because I have the eight plus4 here's the eight and here's the 4 plus4 they can just snap together but because I only need half of these I have to separate these before I plug them in so to install these it's quite simple so I'm going to start with my eight pen which is going to go on this side so there's a little clip on the bottom which like most things in a computer means it's only going to go in one way a little hard for me to see and it's probably impossible for you to see but if I just rotate that around there we go that is a nice little click and honestly those cables actually look pretty nice now I'm going to do the same thing for the auxiliary power I'm going to Che just a little bit so because my secondary CPU I only need four of the eight pens I'm actually going to split them so you'll see they kind of split by themselves so if I just pull them apart a little bit I get a little bit sorry it's hard to see but you'll see I got a little bit of extra space I'm going to take the extra four that I don't need and tuck them back in and I'm only going to feed the four that I actually need again all this is just for Aesthetics but it's going to make your life a little easier and importantly your cable runs to look a little bit neater sometimes especially when you're working like sort of confined spaces you kind of have to go off a feel more than anything thing um this is where you may want to use something like a flashlight but there we go that's it now we have our CPU power cables connected the rest of our power cables can come later once we have more components in the system but I definitely recommend doing this earlier because it's a lot easier when you don't have any obstructions in your way now it is time to install our CPU Cooler we are taking advantage of a 360 mimer all-in-one radiator pump fan the whole deal right everything you need to cool your CPUs in this box now a couple of things to go over before we do this first of all this is quite a high-end setup now if you really really are going in depth on PC Building you want to do a full like custom Loop or something by all means but I think most people watching this tutorial are probably not going to be doing a custom Hardline liquid cooling Loop for their first system so this is a much more straightforward plug-and-play kind of method however it's quite a lot for this system now it will fit it's a 360 mm radiator which means we have three 120 mil fans which will be mounted here here and here it'll all go together nicely it will fit in this case but I'll be honest it's quite overkill for our ryzen 77700 X I mean it'll be nice and cool but um if I was not doing this for tutorial purposes I would probably pick maybe a 240 mm radiator at the most for this system but I'm me to show you what it looks like when we do the entire 360 mm setup so this is going to be about as big of a AI IO that you would ever install technically they make slightly biger ones but they're quite rare like this is a it's a big boy and importantly it does have the screen on the front now while I'll be showing you how to install this ail you of course could be using an air cooler now these come in a bunch of different sizes and varieties in fact that goes for all CPU coolers almost no CPU Cooler is the same as another one when it comes to the install so if you're using this exactly in Lee I'll show you how to do it you can see if it's a CPU Cooler it would go on something like that and you can see that if that was in there we would have very little space up here but for these purposes we're going to be going with this aiio all right I think that's enough Preamble let's crack this open and begin the install it is um not super difficult but also one of my least favorite parts of building a PC um it's fine aios there's nothing against them right like they certainly have their advantages as we've already discussed um the main downside is just the fact that they're there's a lot of components because there's three individual fans there's the radiator then there's the pump and you want to make sure that that's all there there's also a lot of cables involved like this is 100% duable if this is your first system I don't want to scare you off at all but um an air cooler is certainly a lot easier to install I will tell you that now before I actually go into this it's really not a problem but I will mention it anyway you'll see right here it says Intel LGA 1700 and AMD am5 supported now generally speaking CPU coolers are pretty Universal now they may not be powerful enough or sort of efficient enough to sort of get rid of a bunch of heat if you have like a little dinky air cooler and you put it on like a really powerful processor but usually they will physically Mount and that especially goes for the stock coolers which if you're using a stock cooler typically they just clip right on or attach they're super easy to install now it comes to third party coolers it is worth a quick check to make sure that it is going to be compatible with your socket so because this is an am5 motherboard this is an am5 socket if we're using Intel would be LGA 1700 there are a lot of older sockets that are also included I only mention this because a year or two ago actually maybe two three years ago at this point Intel changed their socket for the first time in a very long time it was a physically different size and a lot of CPU coolers did not have compatibility with it for 6 months 12 months as they were sort of changing because you need like a little different plate so it's not really a problem today am5 is super easy and again pretty much anything you should buy in 2024 will support 1700 but it's probably worth a quick little check just to make sure but you shouldn't have any problems unless you're using maybe like an old cooler from like an older build or something in which case you may need some kind of like adapter bracket which most companies sell but it's not quite Universal just a little heads up on that all right we got ourselves the all important instruction manual which is really thin wow that's okay well they you know what they they're very confident because that's not a lot of stuff wow these usually several pages so that's all the instructions we need hold on to these I will show you how to do this but let me be very clear every CPU Cooler installs differently which is not helpful when I make a tutorial on how to install a CPU Cooler so I'm going to show you the broad strokes and if you want to go with this one you obviously can by all means go for it but just keep in mind get a Corsair if you get a lean Lee you get a MSI they're all going to be a little different probably the same but a little different all right what you will find with every aiio are your fans and your radiator which are already installed oh my God are they already installed yo that's awesome so this is actually the newer version of The L Le coolas these used to be called the Galah hats I think they've just rebranded to the ga2s um or at least I think so this is the first time I've used it oh my God that's so good this okay so uh remember that whole thing about how every CPU Cooler is different yeah uh they already installed the fans for me normally you get your two your three fans or whatever and they're in the box and you have to connect them and it's got USBC on the pump too this Le Lee I'm glad I went with I was like not sure what I was going to use for this tutorial this is great okay well I'll quickly show you what you would theoretically do if you were using a non lanly cooler so if I take off all this plastic you'll see here that this part right here is the radiator it's actually very similar to like a radiator in your car or something so this is where the liquid's going to flow through and the fans are going to push air through that radiator essentially to dissipate the heat right so the way this works is actually pretty neat so this is our pump so you can see that if I flip it over this will be the screen that you'll see see when it's actually installed and on the back there's this sort of uh oh they've got the thr paste on there too godam Le and Lee what you y'all are out here man y'all are out here okay well this could to be a really simple install I'm used to doing like half the stuff myself okay the way this works is pretty straightforward so your CPU generates a whole bunch of heat so that is moved through this thermal past which usually you have to do yourself but is already play pre-applied here which is very helpful and then that is on a copper heat sink so all that heat comes to the Copper and then gets dissipated by the liquid that runs through the pump so the pump is constantly circulating so basically what it does it runs the liquid through here across in through all these sort of veins of the actual um Radiator in through the radiator and then the air blows that heat away again if we were using a air cooler it is even more straightforward the heat comes through here runs through the heat pipes gets blown out super simple actually not wildly different between the two the difference is this does not need any kind of like actual pump or anything it just needs the actual fan to run whereas with this you need to make sure that this has power so there's a lot of extra assembly steps when it comes to attaching the fans attaching the pump attaching the RGB all this kind of stuff we also have a bunch of accessories which we will almost certainly need although fewer than we normally would so I'm going to show you what you would normally do which is to screw your fans into place so because these are already on here it makes it really simple but typically what you'll do is you will take your fans and you will put them on the bottom of your radio mediator so let me just kind of mock it up and show you what it's going to look like once we're done if you were so unfortunate as to be using a cooler that does not have the fans applied it's pretty straightforward so you're going to have a whole bunch of these longer screws and so basically what this does is once you actually lay it down on your cooler now you can technically do it either in a push or a pull configuration if you're using RGB fans you're pretty much always going to be doing it in a push configuration so you're basically going to be pushing the air from here out so technically you could do it the other direction maybe if you were to say put your cooler in like the front or something almost everyone's going to put it on the top these days that's really what they're kind of designed for and because the RGB looks so sick you're going to want to have that sort of front and center so that's what I would recommend if you wanted to do another configuration you could just put the fans on the other side of the radiator but it depends on where you're mounting it but again the vast majority of people are going to put the radiator on the top of your system you're going to want the fans sort of pulling air from the inside and exhausting it out the top now when it comes to installing f fans and this is actually the same thing if you're putting on an AIO you're putting on air cooler or you're installing case fans is first you need to understand the front versus the back of the fan so almost always you will see like the main logo on the front so you can see that this is the logo and you see the sort of the front of the fan blades if I flip it over you will see that there's the structure of the fan so it's these little sort of like spindly guys as well as all your like barcodes and that kind of stuff that means that this is the back of the fan so essentially the air is going to come in the front and come out the back now I I will be honest with with you there's usually not like a super clear way of knowing short of just looking at it like it doesn't usually say like air comes out here or something but you can see that these blades are clearly intaking it and exhausting it out the back so that's the best way to tell you I wish I had like a more foolproof way of doing that but you need to think about this because air flow is important now building a PC it is filled with lots of very hot components the main ones to think about are your CPU and your graphics card now your motherboard and some other things will put off some heat you want General airfill in the case but generally CPU your graphics card by far the line share of the heat output in the system and the whole point of all these fans in your system is to exhaust that heat out right so most cases will have this sort of figured out for you already so again taking this L Le for example if you look at it up front we have two fans these fans are pulling cool air from outside the case and bringing it inside now with our ail on the top is going to be pulling that hot air up and this rear fan is doing the exact same thing so it is pushing that hot air out the back of the system this is definitely the standard way of doing it now you can get a little creative you know people can do all push all pull I don't really recommend that normally especially if this is your first time uh building your system but you can certainly tweak and tune it but what usually makes sense is your front fans pulling cool air and your rear and or top fans exhausting hot air out that's just the simplest way to think about it all of that being said when it comes to installing our AO It's relatively straightforward you take the four screws and you tighten them down while I'm here I'm going to remove all of this plastic film that they have placed in many many spots on this fan that's a lot of plastic again this was a really expensive cooler it was totally Overkill uh this thing is fancy as hell so at this point in the tutorial we have installed or had our fans already pre-installed onto our Ai and the next step is to install it on our actual CPU this is where you're going to pull out your manual because if you're doing AMD or Intel is going to be a different sort of setup so now that we have consulted our handy dandy instruction manual we're going to put our case on its back um now you'll probably notice I have all these cables kind of dangling they're fine maybe try not to pinch them too much but don't worry about it that much but you definitely want to have your case laying flat for this next step so for our am5 system we're going to leave the back plate on the CPU which is why we want to put the case flat down so that that plate doesn't come flying off but we're going to remove these four screws that hold hold down the little brackets that come if you're using the stock cooler for example so it should be pretty straightforward so so that's the top bracket removed which should just come off so you'll see that we have these two little mounting points here so this is what we're going to use for the actual cooler so that's on the back plate but once we take off these little brackets that back plate can fall so I'll show you what that looks like in a second but for now go ahead and remove the bottom screws as well um and obligatory mention that while I am following the instructions and you should as well uh this will be very different especially if you're using an entel C CPU that is going to be a completely different sort of setup uh the actual like cooler and all that kind of stuff like this all works the same but as far as actually installing it on your motherboard it is going to be different and every brand likes to do a little different some use the back plates some don't some use the mounting points it's it's just different and the thing is if you actually look at one of these manuals sorry a little bit of a tangent um often times what they'll do this one's not so bad but this one will tell you like oh here's how to install it on like Ancient Ancient systems too so like I said this one's a little bit more straightforward it's not huge it shows like 1700 uh LJ 1115 uh 115 so 1150 1151 etc etc um shows am4 am5 but yeah it's just there's a lot of stuff to do so now with our brackets removed it is time to actually get ready to install our CPU Cooler before we install it we're going to have to take a look at our list of hardware and find the right screws because you could install this on an Intel or AMD CPU there are a whole lot more bits of Hardware than you actually need so now is a great time to reference what sizes of what we're looking for so because we're using am5 this is actually a pretty straightforward process we just need to find these four little screws and we are theoretically about ready to begin now before I actually install these I'm going to come back over to our cooler now as far as where you put the radiator there's no like best spot for it right now just kind of tuck it off to the side because we're going to need to make sure we actually have it mounted so again referring to our instruction manual it actually tells us the optimal way to mount the hoses for the best water flow or liquid flow so we going just kind of generally put this in place put it in a little bit of an angle now I'm not actually mounting it yet all I'm doing is just kind of putting it roughly where it's going to be uh when you're installing things in a computer it's usually good idea to IDI check yourself on a regular basis so I'm going to put it roughly where it's going to be again doesn't have to be perfect and then we're going to start rotating this around so this specifically says I should put my tubes on the bottom for the best performance which actually makes it fairly straightforward so you can imagine what will happen is it will be mounted something like this and then uh that looks pretty accurate now that we have idiot checked ourselves to make sure that the cooler should fit and it clearly fits in the top of the chassis it is time to actually install it for this system I'm going to use their pre-applied thermal paste which I'm sure is very high quality but on the very likely opportunity that you do not have this already ready to go I will show you how to install thermal paste on your system so want to carefully put this off to the side and I will show you what it looks like to put that on your CPU there is a large amount of debate on the best way to install your thermal paste so the old school method was just like a little like grain of rice on the middle I did that for many years but newer CPUs tend to be a little bit larger especially in this case of Intel chips and you also can have a little bit more of like a hot spot kind of thing so what I'm going to do is I'm going to do my four corners plus the center I don't have a fancier name so with your tube of theral paste which will almost always come with your CPU Cooler it's not the world's best stuff but honestly it's totally fine what we're going to do is we're going to put a little bit on the top left and I'm taking a little bit right you don't go crazy with the stuff top right bottom right bottom left and then maybe a little bit more in the middle you should use a little bit more than a little bit less um so this tube should do multiple uh applications so you don't want to make this thing go goopy all over the place like some people will just absolutely unloaded if Mr Easter has taught me anything the little extra past never hurt anybody but it is a pain to clean up when you want to replace your CPU Cooler or something and I will actually mention that so obviously this is like our first time installation now if this was say my second or third time you want to replace that thermal paste every time so 6 months from now I want to take my cooler off to swap the CPU or whatever you want to completely clean off both the actual uh block or whether it's the CPU Cooler for liquid or air whatever the case is you want to clean off all the ethernal paste off of this guy and off of your CPU before you install a new one um but for these purposes I'm actually going to wipe off what I just did because again we've got the theral paste on here and there's no reason to not use it so I'm going to go ahead just actually remove that thermal paste because the theral paste it's already on there should be totally fine um there are different ways of doing this I am a fan of the paper towel method the only downside is it tends to leave a little bit of like paper towel stuff so um make sure to get it thorough you also may want to use a little bit of rubbing alcohol I'm actually not going to do that though because I just applied this thermal paste it should just come up pretty easy one two three and move my tap paper towel a little bit four and five and I got almost all of it out and now we use just a little bit of alcohol to remove it so again if this is your first time building a PC you don't have to worry about this until you do it a little bit later but just a little little bit of alcohol should do the trick again just if you're using a paper towel or something like that just make sure you're not rubbing it too much and you know it's going to make a mess everywhere but just a little bit of circular motion and that is a clean CPU so now let us install our CPU Cooler so the first step is to remove those brackets that are already there for this L Le we actually want to hold on to those screws because we're going to reuse them and then we're going to take the brackets that it comes with which have a little CPU on it so it says CPU and the arrow just to show you which direction they're going to go on so we're going to take this and put it on the top and I put another one on the bottom and then what I'm going to do is I'm going to reuse those four screws that came off of the brackets that originally came with it we're going to install those and like always we're going to do these about 2/3 tight or so make sure it's fully seated and then we will crank it all the way down this is a thing you want to put a little bit of pressure on to make sure that it is firmly attached I will say this is uh out of all the coolers you could use one of the easiest I have ever seen um it's very clean and easy to understand instructions uh you've got yourself a lot of things that are already done for you which makes sense cuz this is quite an expensive cooler but you got the fancy UNIF fans like this thing is going to look sick when we actually get it up and running never tighten anything down all the way the first try come back go back and forth time or two and that is on there pretty firmly okay now it is time to put a radiator roughly back in place so it's not going to get in our way that's the only downside when it comes to a 360 mil radiator it looks really good like it's going to fill out all of the fan slots on the top but it's big and it is it fits but it's like not super easy to work with okay so when it comes to actually installing this it's very simple but because I have thermal paste on here here normally you would have thermal paste on your CPU like I showed you but because we have thermal paste here once you apply it you don't want to move it if you wiggle around a little bit that's fine you have to seat it and unseated a time or two the theral paste is not going to stick as well so you're going to cleanly try to install this in one shot so you'll see here that with this bracket we have four little pegs so one two three four and that is going to correspond with these holes so what we'll do is we'll line it up again because the instructions told us so we want to leave our tubes on the bottom going to line up with our CPU we're going to firm normally press it down into place now with one hand on it we're going to find our little screws and we're going to do these fingertight so I'm going to line up on the top left apologize if you can't see this too well but I'm committed now so I can't stop so I'm just going to get that finger tight don't worry about getting it uh like all the way on or anything but just kind of get it started should be good grab one more of those and like always we're going to use a cross pattern so I'm going to reach over to the bottom left and I will tell you if there is one area on this whole PC that you should listen to me when it comes to using a cross pattern it is a CPU Cooler so what's happening once you've got finger tight on two You Can Let Go what's happening is is that as you tighten down each of the corners it is sort of pushing that thermal paste and your cooler down onto the CPU this is really important you want to make sure that that is making as good of a bit of contact as possible not is going to help to spread that thermal paste out but importantly it will make a very significant difference to the level of performance that you get like if you say tighten one side down the other side it be like completely like squished on one side and you may be only touching like half of your CPU or something so do one then the other then the other the other but do it in that cross pattern and honestly go around a few times right so again I like to start out by just doing it like fingertight and that's fine to get everything sort of in place so we're going to do the top left here you know what we're actually running into an issue already which is perfect I can show you so I'm going to use one hand to steady the CPU Cooler so as you start to tighten it down whatever side is not screwed in will start to pull up so don't go like super super hard like again I'm just doing it half fingertight just enough so this doesn't actually pop up and get out of my way and then what I'll do is once I've got that I'm push this down just a little bit I'm going to go around with the screwdriver and tighten it but I'm going to do it in a pretty slow kind of manner I'm going to do a few turns on one side a few turns on the next to make sure this is actually one of the only steps of an AIO that's easier than an air cooler because if you have an air cooler the problem is that they tend to be really sharp so you can see like on this one over here it has all these like fins that one's actually a nicer cooler because it's like rounded boy the amount of times I have cut myself trying to like reach around like a CPU Cooler and the fs are sharp as hell for no reason not fun but with an AO that's much simpler there we go all right I had to cheat a little bit with the screwdriver um so now I'm going to do make sure that's in there well so once You' got all four of these screws started take your screwdriver and go all the way around so again corner corner corner corner and do it slowly two or three turns to the screwdriver and then move to the next one so I'm going to start with this one so go one two three then come up here one two three and then come up over here 1 two 3 4 five six that one's a little looser one two three four there we go and again you go around and around until the screws stop so sometimes I'll have like a little spring on the bottom but just get it until it's actually tight now once you've gotten to this point as long as you're patient you should be fine also a probably should mentioned this earlier but just a a little heads up sometimes CPU cool specifically AOS if they don't have thermal paste pre-applied they'll have a little piece of plastic on them take that piece of plastic off it has happened many many times to many many seasoned PC Builders insert YouTuber of your choice here including myself uh this one didn't have it so this one actually had this like hard piece of plastic on the bottom but just make sure that when you're doing this there's no like plastic or anything in between CU it'll technically work at really terrible speeds because guess what you know it's not a good thermal conductor plastic you'll actually want to go at this for a little while um because these screws have quite a long way because they are really trying to make sure that is very very firm and very sort of evenly attached so you're going to end up screwing these for a while don't worry about it as long as it's actually bit onto the screw you'll be just fine there we go all righty so with that we have all four of our screws in place you can give that little wiggle and it is going to be super solid or at least it should feels Wiggly you've already screwed it all the way in time out maybe take it off and make sure you actually m it correctly I hate tutorials that say that I'm sorry so what we're going to do is we're going to take our radiator which I've already kind of put in place if you got a larger radiator it's a little bit harder to get but also it only goes in one way so it's a little bit more straightforward so we're going to do is we're going to adjust it and we want to make sure we see all of our screw holes so there are three 120 mm fans on this so you should see four * three so we should see a total of 12 so what we'll do is we're going to line up a radiator so you'll see that it goes on these top series of holes and make sure to adjust it so that all the holes are visible and same thing on the bottom so you can see that with this case technically I could put it like on one of these bottom uh rails but that's only if we had a larger fan so because these all line up on that top slot should be very straightforward now before we actually install it you want to make sure that you grab all the hardware so with this one we're going to have a bunch of little washers and little screws so what we'll do is we'll put the little screw through the washer I think this is number what do they call it these are fs and G's little screws little washers the only thing I'll say uh is that when it comes to installing this it does help if you have a magnetic screwdriver because what we're going to do I'm going to let the bit hold the screw and use my other hand to sort of guide the radiator in place um for this all I'm going to do is I'm going to put it in one corner just going to get it started and then I will use my other hand to sort of straighten it out it doesn't have to be perfect right out the gate you just want to make sure that there's a screw that's in there to keep it from just straight falling down and just install it doesn't to be super tight just so it's not going to fall out I'm still holding it I'm going to do that one more time so so now I'm going to thread one more washer through the screw again put it on the tip of my screwdriver and then I'm going to line this up so we're going to move it up here like that again uh this is a great time for us to slide it back and forth as needed because once we put the second screw in it's going to be starting to get locked into its final position so again I'm not going to do it super tight or anything just make sure it's in place and now is a great time to take a moment and count your screw holes so have 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 there we go everything is visible at this point now it's just time to rinse and repeat install all the screws with washers don't forget the washers otherwise it might fall out um and that's pretty much it and at this point once you've got those first two in you can actually start tightening things down it should be in its final position so I'll see you once I've screwed 10 more times so when it comes to wiring up a CPU Cooler it ranges from from simple to difficult so if you're using a simple air cooler it is usually a single connector or maybe two if you have two fans so simple when it comes to an AO I would refer you to this very helpful wiring diagram that is going to tell you what needs to go to where so I'm not going to show you the details of this because again it's going to vary based on every single CPU Cooler out there but I will show you are some of the common things you will see and how to deal with them if you're using an AIO you're always going to have one of these pwm connectors so it may be either three pen or four pen doesn't really matter and what you'll see is that you have the little pens here as well as two notches on the top which denotes that it's only going to go in one way this if you're using an AO should be installed into the CPU optional now you could plug it into like a system fan header or whatever but if you do that you need to go into the motherboard and specifically tell it that it is a pump because essentially this connector can be used for fans in which case the fans can ramp up and wrapped down but when it comes to a pump that is going to constantly be circulating the liquid through your system it typically be set to a set standard speed but regardless if you have a CPU optional Little connector which is going to be right up here on the top right and this one is actually even a different colors so you can tell it is simple as just plugging it in beyond that you're going to see that we have a whole bunch of cables dangling here which I've started to put together now this is our fan controller so from this side you'll see that we have both the power and the RGB from our UNIF fans now we have a couple of other things that are attached to it so this one's pretty straightforward this is SATA power so you remember when we we plugged in those SATA leads from our power supply earlier because stuff like this often needs it well here we go this is what we're going to need now on top of that there's also a USB header and in fact actually with this system we have two so this is a 9pen USB so this is the one that's on the bottom of the system so this is USB 2.0 and I'm glad that we have two of them on this board because we need two of them for the system so again this is going to have one little pen knocked out so it's only going to go in one way and this comes not only from the actual controller but because we have a fancy AO the screen there's also a USBC cable with a secondary USB 2.0 now this one's important because this is what's going to tell your fans to go BR or yikes um this one is just purely for Aesthetics it's going to allow you to play gifts and whatever you want to do on that little display the last thing I'll show you here is our RGB okay so there are two main types of rgbs so there is 5V and 12vt uh the simple way of thinking about is like this if it's got three pens that says 5vt plug it into something that says 5vt it has four pens and 12vt plug it into something on your motherboard that says 12vt do not get these mixed up because if you plug a 5 volt to 12vt well that's too many volts and it doesn't work anymore so again RGB is way outside the scope of this tutorial is very dependent on what manufacturer you use etc etc etc but most important thing is if you have RGB in your system make sure that you connecting it to either a 5vt or a 12vt and don't get them mixed up it will clearly tell Val and again this is three pens so we know it's 5vt but just be careful this will technically one of the only components actually you could shove this into a 12vt it would fit and it would cause bad things in fact actually with this board if you get real close up here so with this motherboard you'll see that we have a 12vt LED connector with four pin here and a three pin for 5vt here so you can imagine how it' be very easy to get those mixed up so just be careful out there friends RGB is a dangerous world full of pitfalls and compatibility issues and really really terrible software next up we're going to be installing a hard drive and/or 2.5in SSD if you were not doing this feel free to skip this part of the tutorial so I'm going to be installing this WD blue hard drive which again is not what you should use to install Windows on this is much more so for just extra storage for stuff you don't need like super quick access to I will also at the same time show you briefly how to install a SATA SSD so remember when we installed that M2 SSD underneath here yeah like you should just do that um but if you're working with an older system maybe you have an older SSD you want to install whatever the case is I will briefly show you how to do this it's very similar to the hard drive it's just a different sort of form factor so before we do any of this we're going to come around to the back of our case and we're going to pull out our 3.5 in Drive caddy so most cases will have them down here so you see that I can pull this out is where we're going to install the hard drive technically if I was installing an SSD I could also install it onto one of these guys which just I can take the thumb screw off and and it will work the same kind of way if you're just installing an SSD I would actually recommend to do it in one of these because it's designed to sort of be nice and flat and flush and you kind of hide it in the back if you are not using a hard drive you actually can easily just take this entire tray out and that's going to give you some more room for cable management and whatnot um thankfully it's toolless but I'm actually going to be using that so I'm going to put that right back into place we're going to be installing a hard drive into this 3.5 in so um if you were installing your SATA SSD onto this gun you'll see there are four holes here and there are four holes on the bottom of the SSD as you can imagine you line it up and you screw it in with some of the screws that come with your case but we are not going to be doing that we're going to be installing a hard drive so let's unbox this hard drive um this is really simple in fact actually with this case like most things that LE and Lee have done with this sort of setup um it's very very straightforward so we're going to open up the hard drive now this actually does come with the screws to mount it in usually your case will also come with these same screws but it doesn't really matter so what we'll do is we're going to take it out of the protective packaging um now a little word of warning so you know how earlier I mentioned that it's recommended to put your system together outside the case and do a little task before putting it in well if I was going to just give you like a number a percentage of components that have problems out of the box a hard drive going to be pretty high up on the list so unlike basically every other component in your system which has few to no moving pieces this is a magnetic spinning platter of death and it you you drop it or it got dropped or tossed around at some point and it's life it may not function so if when you post your system and everything lights up and it's all great and your hard drive doesn't show up obviously double check this fully connected but sometimes these things do just show up the OA and I would say these tend to have problems much more than say an SSD for example so just a little word of warning um not that you should be discouraged you could always just look turn it typically but um just a little heads up that hard drives are fragile and are made of magnetic bits and so we have our hard drive so this is very straightforward there's really not a whole lot to it um so just be a little bit mindful that there is a circuit board on the bottom it's not really going to be too fragile this little ripping cable is but you know just hold it by the side it should be fine so on the bottom of the hard drive you're going to find two connectors so one you should be very familiar with it is our SATA power connectors this is what we used to connect our fan headers uh is also something that comes directly off of the power supply so that SATA power is what we used for our controller for our fans uh but typically it is used for hard drives beside that you'll also see your SATA data connector so this is also notched although it is much less Long than the SATA power now your Sata cable should have come with your motherboard so if you left all the stuff in that box you might want to go and grab it now so I'm going to pull it open now typically you'll see two cables here and they're slightly different based on how you want to do it so unwind this so on one side you'll see that these are the same so you'll see that it is a little clip on one side and there's a notch so it only goes in one way on the other side you'll see that one of these is a flat data cable and one of these is a 90° which one you use is going to be entirely down to your system so when I think about it we could probably use either with this because we're going to plug it in roughly here um I'm going to use this flat one um just cuz I think it'll be a little bit easier if a cable run yeah plug something like that um but again it doesn't really matter usually you have to just just in case you have a really tight sort of bit of Tolerance on your system or something but that is all we actually really need to get this thing up and running to install your hard drive into this tray typically you'll need to use four screws and sometimes you'll have like little rubber grommets but with this one it's super simple because it already is toolless so all you need to do is just bend it open a little bit and line up your hard drive so when you do this make sure to put the um little barcode side facing forward because you want to have access to these ports on the back but the way to do it is very simple so we're going to open it up we're going to try to slide it so it lines up somewhat like this and all you got to do you'll see that there's four holes one on each corner of the hard drive just pull it open just a little bit so you got that clearance three four boom that's it we're ready to install now once you've done that make sure that you have your SATA data and power facing towards you and not toward the front of the case where you can't reach it you just take this and we're going to line it up right here then we're just going to take the hard drive and we're going to click it right into place boom look at that that's a hard drive installed all we got to do now is grab our SATA data cable we're going to plug that in right here making sure that the notch is facing downward and we're also going to grab our lead from the power supply which I probably should have prepped ahead of time instead of leaving it all dangled over here so basically what I'm trying to do right now is I need to install the SATA up here so technically I have enough SATA leads because I have one SATA that goes to the fan header that comes in the case one that comes to this one which is installed here and the other one needs to go into the hard drive but it is just too short to actually reach I can kind of get it but then no I just have to rewire the whole thing damn all right so I guess this is the point where we're going to go into my box of power supply cables install one extra SATA just for one hard drive because it's ever so slightly too far away so if you're like me and need a little extra power in your life what we're going to do is just plug this into our power supply or maybe you just plug this in to begin with cuz you thought ahead and I was trying to be a little too optimistic unplug this into our power supply exactly the same way we did earlier with our state of power connected over here I'm going to run the lead out and run it into our power supply so there you go and now it is connected now you'll see that our cabling is getting a little bit out of control although honestly it's not too bad now it's tempting to start trying to like zip tie and clean things up don't do that yet make sure that everything is installed in the case it's fired up everything shows up first now a little bit of like you know tucking a cable behind a little clip here there trying to sort of massage a run so it's not going to be sticking out that's fine but just don't go too deep because there's a very decent likelihood that you may have to start tearing some stuff out or you forgot something like you 2 Ines short of reaching your hard drive not that I forgot I just didn't I just was hoping I would be lucky with that the only other thing we have to do is plug in our hard drive to our motherboard so what we'll do is we'll flip the case around oh it's getting heavy now all right so what I'm going to do is I'm going to Route this cable over to this side so this is a great opportunity to show you how to try to run things somewhat cleanly so you see we have these little grommets so even though we're not really worrying about Cable Management yet always run cables to the closest sort of access point so again I can run it right here and you'll see it's going to pop out right beside our SATA leads so what we can do is if we flip this cable around we actually kind of plug that in so that it's sort of hidden obviously it's not completely hidden but that's like a nice flat clean run this doesn't matter hugely for anything besides Aesthetics but especially if you're building in a white case your cables are going to be very very easy to see all the black cables right it's going to be very very contrasty so it's a good idea just to try to run things somewhat cleanly when you have the opportunity to cuz it will make it look a whole lot nicer once you get all the side panels on but with that we have ourselves a hard drive or an SSD if you're using that installed in the system now the last thing I'll say on this if for some reason you were installing an optical drive so a DVD or Blu-ray Drive it uses the exact same two connectors as your hard drivve so you'll have one state of power one state of data typically It Go in the front of the case I'll say I can't remember the last time I saw a brand new case that still had a 5 and a/4 inch drive for optical drives so I mean if you're keeping the physical media dream Alive by all means have fun but um yeah that should be it and now it's time to run some more cables so our system is looking really good right now the next step is going to be getting a lot of our cabling actually installed not cable management but actually plugging stuff in now you could install the GPU right now but I recommend holding out against that mostly for the same reason as why we did this CPU power first the GPU is big and kind of gets in the way so it's much easier to do this without the GPU installed so let's go from top to bottom shall we first up we have our 20 plus 4 pen power connector now I like to start with this largely because it's a very thick cable so uh we're not worrying about Cable Management right now but what we are going to worry about is being able to get our side panel on so because this is so thick what you do want to avoid is a situation where you have to like run two of these thick cables on top of each other you just wouldn't have the room unless you really squash your side panel on so what I like to do is I like to run this 20 plus4 pen early and then when you run the rest of your cables you can kind of try to go around it as opposed to just crossing straight across it so once you run this through it is going to have a clip on the bottom side which is going to only go in one way so usually going to have to do a little rotating action on this but it's not too bad and then we're going to line it up and then just going to give it a nice firm bit of pressure on both sides in the middle until it clicks and that's almost in there there we go and that's it now I will try and push that cable up a little bit so it looks kind of decent it's a little dangly right now the thing is we actually have already done a bunch of the other stuff right so we already have our CPU power plugged in if you did not do that definitely do it now we already have our SATA connected so the next thing is to tuck some of our extra cables in and we're going to start installing some of our front panels accessories that kind of thing so these are essentially all of the bits and Bobs that come from your case so starting out with we have our big chunky USB 3.0 connector so like I mentioned in the motherboard segment this is for your front panel connectors on your case and boy oh boy is it an easy connector to break so when you plug it in make sure you've got it run the correct way you don't want to wiggle around or whatever cuz sucks to remove this is our USBC connector for the USBC on the front of the case uh not all cases have USBC most of them do at this point but that's what we're going to use here then we also have our front panel connectors now something that has gotten so much better compared to older School builds is how easy it is to do the front panel connectors so these are a bunch of individual little connectors that are for things like your power button the LEDs your reset button that kind of stuff now most systems used to have this as a bunch of individual little connectors so I'll show this from like a previous video this is what it used to look like but with this le le case it all comes on a block which makes it super simple and on top of that our gigabyte motherboard has them all color coded so instead of having to dig through the manual and everything you just look at the color code but with this it's even simpler cuz I just plug it in and it works there ically last but not least here we also have our audio connector now this looks very similar to a USB 2.0 it is also 9 pen however it is going to have a different pen knocked out so the USB 2.0 has a pen knocked out on the top left this one has the second from the left so again you can't accidentally do it but very clearly says audio on here and this is going to be running into our motherboard on the bottom left so right here is where that gets plugged in now it's good to take a look at this before you start plug things in not only to make sure that you're running cables in a sort of neat way where you're not like Crossing them and making a giant mess but also just because it's nice to know what you're looking for as you start diving into your motherboard which is again why I like to show you what's going on in the motherboard section so that when I say hey look for USB 3.0 header you remember where that was right you remember where a USB 3.0 header is you looked for it and you made a mental note of it before we moved on to this part of the tutorial right good I'm glad you were paying attention all right let's start running stuff so what I'm going to do is I'm going start with that audio connector so again I'm kind of breaking my own device by running some of the cable management here but it's going to make our lives easier so I'm just going to try to tuck this underneath we got our front panel audio coming out so it's going to always go to the far corner so I'm going to poke this through on the back side and then I'll rotate the case around and you'll see that it is sticking out so with our audio connector pulled through again there's a pen knocked out so it's going to only go in one way which in this case the labeling is going to go upside down I'll line it up with this connector on the bottom left which is for audio insert it and there we go so that is going to get our headphone combo audio jack on the front to work okay so next up we're going to install our USB C header which is going to go onto the motherboard and it should just click right into place there and we'll just tuck the excess off to the side one thing actually I almost did it and I'm going to stop myself and explain it to you really quick so as I push these cables in and especially as you start to do like cable management on the back what you'll see is while you can get a cable run nice and neat you see if I start pulling this you see how it starts kind of tugging that connector in don't do that it's really easy to do try to make sure that when you actually plug these things in that they're coming out at not too harsh of a Bend not only because you don't want to break something off but also sometimes you might actually like slightly tug the connector out when you're doing Cable Management you do all your troubleshooting you fire it up and then like a week later you realize your front USBC doesn't work so just a little reminder to myself and to you when you plug these things in get rid of the slack but don't pull it too much cuz otherwise you'll see that bends way too far starts to pull it out of the thing so something like that should look nice and neat next let's do our front panel connectors shall we if you're using a case and or motherboard that does not have everything nice neat and labeled refer to your motherboard manual it will tell you where to plug each thing in um so again I'll show you some footage of previous years when I've done this essentially every one of those little connectors are going to have a little arrow on it that is going to denote the positive so you'll see that like oh for your power connector it'll say positive on one side negative on the other you would look for the arrow you would put it in that orientation now when it comes to doing these front panel connectors it seems a little intimidating cuz a bunch of little fiddly wires kind of hard to see here's the thing you're not going to do any damage if you mess it up it's totally fine worst thing that'll happen is that your power button won't work and nothing will happen when you hit the bio button or your LEDs w't work or whatever so if you have any problems when you do these uh front panel connectors if you don't have them on this nice neat little sort of breakout box don't worry about it a little bit of trial and error you will be just fine it's easy to panic when you press the power button and nothing happens when you realize you actually plugged your power button into your reset switch or something but if you're using this le le case and some most recent cases or at least a lot of them do have this it's very simple because this plugs directly in and again this motherboard also works great because it's all nice and neatly colorcoded but for this what I'm going to do is make sure that it is lined up so we're going to see that it goes 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 so it goes in with the label facing forward but again refer to your manual if you have any questions about it plug that in like that tuck the excess out into the back and there we go theoretically with that power button things will work now all right last of the connectors for the motherboard is going to be that USB 3.0 boo USB 3.0 is good but boo USB 3.0 connector I sound like a freaking nerd so for USB 3 um this one's a little bit annoying to actually run because it's like sort of a double thick cable cuz it's got two little ends on it so we're just we're going to poke it through right here and again I'm going to try to get it roughly where I want it the good thing about this connector is that even though it's got these two little cables on the end it actually folds really nice and flat so as long as you can get a good bend on the back side of your actual uh case which I'm going to try to do like this um you actually should be able to get it in nice and smoothly so you'll see that on this there's a notch so there's a notch only on one side that is going to go with that corresponding notch on the board so again it only goes in one way please make sure that you've got this lined up as best as possible make sure that you don't need to unplug this for cable management or whatever try to tuck it in a nice neat spot because again don't take this connector out if you can avoid it it will come out if you need to take it out try to do it very gently cuz this little sleeve especially on actually be fair this one's built a little bit better that one looks a little bit stronger but like that little thing can break off and it is such a pain so just when you plug this Cable in try to make sure that you've got it nice and neat and where you want it so I'm going to line it up whoops don't do that I almost grabbed the pen all right so line it up and give it a nice little bit of pressure it clicks into place and that is all you got to do my friends we now have our piece see pretty much good to go and in fact if you were for some reason building a computer without a graphics card we actually could get started from this point now you should definitely install a graphics card if you were building a PC um but technically this would be a fully functional system now it is time for the fun part let's install ourselves a graphics card so before we do this we do just need to prep the case just a little bit so the graphics card like I mentioned earlier is going to go into this top PCI slot so so the way to do it would be to take off some of these covers now before you do that I actually recommend to open up your graphics card so most all graphics cards used to be dual slot so the easy way to do it would be to look at your slot and go oh I'm going to remove this one and this one right below it but these days graphics cards have gotten enormous especially if you haven't built a PC in a while they've gotten long they've gotten tall they've gotten wide like they've just gotten huge so what I'd like to do you can look up the spec but honestly I just like to actually take the graphics card out of the box line it up and just VIs see like oh it's clearly a triple slot card and blah blah blah it just sort of helps to visualize before you start taking off these little uh panel covers these PCI covers and then realize that you grabbed the wrong one cuz the graphics card was bigger than you thought now this actually should be a fairly reasonable size GPU especially when you get some of like the overclocked cars that have like these massive Beast speed coolers I mean they're great they have a lot of performance but they just take up so much space uh which is also why cases like this have a little bit of extra width involved so you can see right here a lot of cases used to kind of cut off right about here but you have all this extra space not only for cooling but just to fit some really big cards like you should be able to fit any graphics card ever essentially in this case right here and that's becoming more and more common um but if you are maybe like reusing an older case from a previous build this would be a great time to double check that your graphics card actually fits it should fit but some of these things get huge man they really do packing steps and unpacking steps really you need tell me how to do this wow and that's it wow look at that that's some you know what this reminds me of this reminds me of when you buy like uh an Apple product like like an iPhone or something when you when they ship it to you they do it in this like little like plastic sort of like containery thing all right want get rid of all this the only other thing in the box and we're not going to be using it but I will highlight it nonetheless is a little adapter for your graphics card so if you remember earlier when I was talking about when we were choosing us our power supply and I mentioned if you're using a newer RTX 40 series card that it uses a different kind of power connector so if you look on top here this is our 12 pen power connector so if you've not built a PC recently this is probably going to be a new looking connector now again that is a single cable that will deliver up to 600 WTS plenty for this graphics card and then some however if you are using an older power supply that does not have that connector every one of these graphics cards should come with one of these so on one end it's a a 12 pen 600 W adapter on the other end is a pair of 8 pen PCI connectors this will work it is included in the box for a reason they have been a little bit unreliable if you are using this you can feel free fully connect every part of it make sure that the eight pens are clicked in there make sure this goes fully fully seated into the graphics card because this is very very thin gauge wiring which is pumping a ton of voltage through it they do have a tendency to fail so I would just say I would normally recommend if you using a RTX 40 series card to go with a newer power supply that has that 12 pen built on this will work it will come with every 40 series card as far as I know unless they change that in the future um it's fine and again if you're using an older Nvidia card at 30 series or earlier you're using an AMD card if you're using an Intel card uh this is not relevant you're just going to have like an eight pen or a couple of eight pens on there but just as a heads up this will be in the box and it's fine but not really recommended so there is a lot of plastic on this card look at that wow that's they they really want to keep you protected take off all the film which I will say you should 100% do um because this film even though it won't keep it from working is super ugly and if you leave the film on for a little while it can melt on I've seen people who never took this off and it freaking gets all like yellowed and gross just take off the film all right last things we need to do is there's going to be a little uh protector over our PCI slot so you want to take that off the back that is what was actually going to connect to the motherboard and then on the back side of the card there's a bunch of little uh Port connectors for our display ports and our HDMI wow that's really iny and there's also of course more plastic on the back all right that should be everything we need to get our graph scar up and running so before we install it let me walk you around it really quickly so obviously we have a couple of fans U all graphics cards are different some have two fans some have three fans not super relevant what I will point out is the actual backside of the card so this is the actual part that sticks out the C back of the Chassy so you'll see that you have your display port you have your HDMI now you'll see that this actually sticks up over the PCI slot right so older graphics cards used to cut off at this point a lot of newer ones have kind of expanded out here which as I kind of show you here uh that's where the some of this extra space comes in handy that doesn't stick out enough that it will be a problem for most cases but just something to keep in mind especially if you're building like in a small form Factor system um make sure that the dimensions of your card are compatible with the case because it can be a very tight fit even if it technically works and you have like no clearance it can be sometimes kind of hard to like kind of wedge it in there cuz basically what we need to do is line up here and go straight back now thankfully this is almost a true dual slot card so what I mean by that is that you'll see that we have the two slots it goes over just a little bit so you see here it's a little bit extra on the side it's pretty close to a dual slot um I'll tell you honestly this is actually a fairly decent size GPU so again this is a 4070 super um you can definitely find graphics cards that are way way chunkier on the cooler I think this is actually a pretty nice blend now the last thing I'll show you here and it's only going to be on some cards is there's a little switch here so there is a p and a q it means mind your p's and q's n performance and quiet I'm going to leave it on performance mode um this is not super important honestly and sometimes you can even change that in the actual driver settings sometimes no no sorry not driver settings the like the Asus software or whatever um this basically just change the actual performance profile of the GPU um I never play with it I just always put in performance and what do you want what are you going to buy a 4070 super and then say hey I want quiet mode it's most ridiculous thing I've ever heard um all right let's install this thing so to install what we'll do is before we actually do it we'll line it up so we again want to make sure that we know what actual covers we need to remove so we'll line up with this uh slot and you'll see that we need to remove cover number two cover number three very standard if you have a bigger card sometimes you actually have to remove three covers but for this we're going to just install it in the top two slots I will say some cases have a vertical Graphics Mount so what that would be is you would actually install the graphics card like right here up front and they would have like a little Riser that plugs into your motherboard it's a little bit specialty it certainly is a thing and you actually can buy like a lot of cases will actually have like an adapter plate that you could do that yourself it certainly looks cool I'll totally admit it looks cool to have your graphics card like that um but this is by far the most standard kind of configuration so we'll do is we're going to remove slot number two and keep these slot covers handy when you take them off uh cuz if you ever need to replace it or whatever it's just nice to have and also keep the screws we're going to reuse those in just one second so see that's one cover um I'll also mention it's really not that common but if you're building in a older or very cheap system sometimes they actually don't unscrew sometimes you actually have to like physically Bend these little uh slot covers out which feels really gross um just as a heads up in case you again have like a very very budget oriented case pretty much anything above like that $50 price point these days is going to be unscrewed but just in case yours is a one of those Bender things you just take it and you bend it back and forth until it snaps out doesn't feel good but that's the way they're designed so got to save some money somehow okay my friends we've got ourselves our covers out the installation of the graphics card is incredibly simple so we have our PCI connector right here is going to go into the motherboard again you want to go into the top PCI slot so technically it would fit and work on the bottom ones but you're going to be severely limited in bandwidth also why would you do that there's no reason okay so we're going to line it up so make sure that is lined up here and all you got to do is making sure that it's all securely set up we're going to firmly push it into place and you'll hear it click ready and boom there we go now if this was a heavier graphics card I would have had taken my hand off so fast but I'll tell you some of the really heavy graphics cards are they're they're they're really really heavy and they'll actually kind of sag again this is a plastic uh primarily plastic shroud GPU it's not super heavy so that actually sits in there fine some if you're rocking like a really big heavy like 4090 or something often times you'll actually want to use like a little Riser so sometimes they actually come where they just kind of give a little support on the back side of the GPU or sometimes they'll actually take up one of your slot covers and give a little bit of extra lift um it sounds a little bit silly but when you get a really heavy graphics card in place it can slowly sag now that it looks sort of bad but it actually can pull itself out of the slot especially if you're ever like shipping or moving your PC it's not really a PC tutorial thing this is just a ownership of a gaming PC kind of tip be careful with the graphics card if you ever move or ship your computer now we're going to screw it into place that should be fine for this but if you're ever actually doing like some real moving of your PC more than just like gently like picking it up and bringing it to like your car or something I actually pretty much always take the graphics card out again they've gotten really heavy and while they're fine stationary if you're moving this thing around it can either snap off or fall or bend or whatever just if you're doing anything more than just a gentle move of your PC from place to place I usually take the graphics card out it's also really simple because it's a couple of screws and one or two power cables but just a little Pro tip so we're going to take those same screws that we took out of the covers and we're going to load up our graphics card and give it a little bit of extra support so now the graphics card installed you should see why we did so much before this point because you know if I'm trying to install our USBC or USB 3.0 or a lot of these things it's much more difficult to do with the graphics card in the ways it's definitely nice to get as much of this done as possible and then install your graphics card we're almost there my friends we're very very close last thing we need to do for the graphics card is run our power so yet again I'll be very clear just in case you skip to the video and weren't paying attention we have ourselves our 12 pen power connector which is very thankfully yellow so you don't accidentally forget to plug it in I don't know we're going to plug this in it is the exact same way if you were using another kind of GPU you would be plugging in your six your 6 plus2 your 8 however many power connectors it actually needs you plug it in the same way you connect it like say the CPU or something there's a little notch on so goes in one way but we're going to install this like so now before I actually do it I will say there's a couple ways we could run this cable none of them are that clean so I think I'm just going to run along the side I could run it from the top or the bottom the thing is if you get on the bottom it actually kind of gets close to the fans and I don't like that and it looks kind of ugly we could kind of do on the top but honestly there's not like a really good way of doing it I'm just going to do it on the side and um we'll just kind of get rid of the slack as much as possible it's not the most pretty thing in the world and you do want to be careful when you plug that in to make sure it's fully fully seated a little less important when it is the actual power supply versus the adapter this is the adapter I'm like making sure it's in there super tight that is definitely in there but uh you don't want to like tug or especially you have like a case that has like a very sort of small tolerance like if anything's like pushing against that like the side panel not good thankfully we have plenty of space so it's fine so a little Bend is okay but nothing that's too aggressive make sure it just feels feel like it's uh got a little bit of leeway that my friends is actually a completed PC y I know right where did the time go so there's a few things we're going to want to do before we're actually done so stay tuned we're not done yet but before we go through and tidy things up and button up the case and everything we're going to do a quick little power test now theoretically you may have done this power test earlier with all of your components all over the case or all over the the table or whatever that's fine regardless you need to do it again with everything installed here you want to make sure everything works everything shows up so time to grab your keyboard your mouse your monitor power cable and get everything plugged in so we can do one final boot test so with everything plugged in let me just run you through a couple of steps before you hit that big red or white or blue power button so there's a few smaller things we should do uh first and foremost you see this little switch on the back of your power supply see the zero and the one flip it to one I can tell you the amount of times I built a PC and forgot to do that and it doesn't do anything cuz your power supply is off um while you're back here you also may want to press the little zero fan button that's on most moderate to highend power supplies that is just going to allow the power supply fan to only turn on when it needs to versus always be spinning on top of that you see how I've got my display port cable plugged into my graphics card so technically I could plug it into my motherboard and that would work the problem though is that I would be using the very wimpy integrated graphics on our CPU now that's fine for troubleshooting or if maybe building the PC you're getting your graphics card next week or whatever um but if you have a graphics card you should always always plug it in to your graphics card right don't use this if you have this that make sense get a graphics card plug your monitor into that one okay good the amount of people who have like a badass graphics card you plug in the HDMI whatever to your motherboard and go man this gaming sucks cuz you're not using the graphics card um also while I'm back here because my motherboard does have Wi-Fi I'm going to pre-install our modules or our little antennas um you don't have to do this for the BIOS I just like to do it while I'm back here so I don't forget cuz technically much like a lot of things on a computer you can actually make it work in a somewhat Jank way if you don't have the antennas you actually will get some Wi-Fi reception but obviously the antennas help that tremendously all right so we're going to one and two cool I think that's pretty much everything we need to do on the back of the system now now the only other thing I will mention is that uh obviously we are doing this test with the computer you know fully assembled and whatnot now because this is our first test boot of the system we're of course just going to be pressing the power button and hoping that it works if however you have built your system outside the case for a test you actually can use a screwdriver to turn it on that sounds sketchy but it's fine all you need to do is go on your front panel connectors and there are the two pens for power you take a screwdriver or any piece of metal really and you bridge those two pens and ENT will turn on the system so just a little heads up it's really helpful for troubleshooting as well knowing that you can just easily jump the board um it's not sketchy don't worry don't maybe stick your screwdriver on all the pin and all the metal bits you probably find something that's not good but when it comes to those front panel connectors you just have to tap it but that's it that's everything we need to do we've got our monitor plugged in our HDMI display port connected mouse and keyboard ready to go everything's turned on fired up all we got to do now is press the power button and hope that we have made a good decision with our lives Okay so we've got uh I forgot to plug in the fans from the case so I'll do that after we're done here but importantly we have all three of our UNIF fans running for the CPU Cooler your graphics card fans actually don't always turn on so if it's a more modern GPU often times they don't spin up until the GPU gets a little hot uh we got our screen on our le le cooler that's activated and if I come around here hey you got a new CPU installed congratulations that is a very good sign we're going to hit Y we're going to let the motherboard do its thing and assuming that everything shows up here in the Bios we have successfully built ourselves a PC so I will need to plug in our fan header which I forgot to do in fact here don't do this but I'm just going to plug it in cuz I left it connected right here so now you can see that we got all of our fans running in the system now at this point the fan is cranking at 100% there's some things that we're going to need to tweak none of that matters right now there's plenty of time to do do that all we need to do is in our bios hit okay here and we want to make sure that everything shows up so we go through the list we see the motherboard ryzen 7 7700x perfect we see our SATA hard drive we see our PCI card which is the PCI x16 perfect and we see our Samsung 990 Pro so that means our SSD our hard drive and our graphics card are all showing up fine on top of that we see our Ram so we see one G scale 16 and two GLE 16s that is everything we need to look for for right now there's a bunch more stuff we need to actually do with the BIOS installing Windows I'm going to walk you through that entire process but this is a perfect opportunity to take a big old deep breath and say congratulations me I built a PC I mean not me like I'm congratulating you for building a PC yeah we did it wo you're the best that ever was to catch them is my real test to train them is my cut so a lot of what we're doing today is software so we're going to be updating the BIOS installing Windows drivers that kind of stuff but before we do that we're going to do just a little bit of cable management and I'm going to do the one thing that I did not do yesterday which is plug in our fan header and our actual RGB Hub so if I rotate the system around it's mounted here this is not on all cases I would say a lot of cases these days will have some kind of Fan Hub so the problem with these is that you got to do a little bit of searching so for these I've got to fish my C out from this Cable Management here so technically they're run down but I actually want to plug them into the top of the board um so what you'll see here is that this case has these nice little cable channels which is lovely except for when you need to pull something out and you have to undo the twist ties now I'm not going to go super in depth on this part because it's is going to be highly dependent on the case and the uh kill management and whatnot that you've got but what I will do is I will show you pulling my fan headers out so right now they actually works so you saw earlier they actually fired up when I gave them power the problem is that by default they're just going to be running at 100% speed which is not ideal I'm going to pull these cables out which come out from here so that's fine so we're going to just pull the excess out of here and then what I'll do is I'm going to tuck the cables that we don't need anymore Behind these little clips now you can go incredibly in depth on cable management for me as long as things are sort of Tidy and I can easily get at stuff and Trace runs I don't care too much the main thing you have to do is just make sure that your cables will be able to close behind the side panel so I can immediately tell that while a lot of the stuff is actually not too far off like my 20 plus 4 pin my CPU my GPU actual cable some of these are going to be a little bit thick so what I'll do is in a minute I'll come back through and actually run them all but the before I do any of that let me plug in our last cables which is going to be for our RGB and for our fan controller um so you'll you saw that when I plugged it into Power the ual Hub all my fans on the case started spinning that's totally fine but they're spinning at 100% because they have no communication with the system they just have power they're cranking so by plugging these into the motherboard not only can we control the RGB on these fans but importantly we can also have the motherboard automatically spin them up and down based on the load of the system no reason to have fans cranking 100% almost ever so rotate this around here I'm going to plug these in uh these are the exact same connectors that we already showed so it is our 3 pen 5vt uh RGB header as well as our pen pwm for the fans so I'm going to plug that into our system fan slot up on the top left or top right rather and same thing for RGB and plug this in right here it's the same stuff as we were doing before just one additional set of cables and then like always I'm going to pull that excess out run it along the top and then what I'll do is I'm just going to tuck it into this little plastic cable holder now you see there's a lot of cables behind this one but that's fine honestly like these are really easy to work with so when it comes to doing Cable Management I'm not going to give you a super in-depth tutorial again kind of try to clean things up as much as you can it helps a lot if you ran cable smartly the first time so a few things that I will do is tuck the obvious stuff like this thing can just kind of tuck back here a little bit more these are actually kind of fine as is now you can go super in depth on this if you'd like I like using these little Clips because they really kind of help hold things in place the other thing you should do is if you have something like Velcro so you can see I have velcro ties all over the place these essentially work as cable channels for this one I realized oh I should run that inside the velcro and help kind of tuck it in a little bit so in fact I sort of push both of these in and right off the bat I bet you if I put that side panel on it would just go we've all done the whole struggle to shove the side panel on there's no shame in that but um yeah that will clearly work I'm going to clean these cables up a little bit throw the side panel on and then it is time to start updating our bios and just like that we've got ourselves a side panel on now I will just take a second and show you just putting the rest of the case together before we install our bios the rest of this is very straightforward so we're going to take our little cover for our basement and line this up like this and there we go so this will help to hide our power supply and all of our extra cables that we definitely very carefully cable managed and it's super tidy but um you know it's it's like your basement in your real house you want to hide it from view so that people don't judge you for hoarding or I don't know whatever you put in your basement I'm not judging and then we're going to put our top panel on here which again this should just slide right on most cases will break down to this level not all cases will let you take off the cover for the basement but most will and I'm just going to line it up here make sure it's fully seated and uh the good thing about this case is it's all thumb screws so you actually don't need to pull out the screwdriver if you don't want to like I can thumb screw all this together it also makes really easy if you need to open up the case and double check something or whatever before you put everything everything back together sometimes it's worth just giving it a quick power cycle just to make sure that everything is still working once you do a cable management every once in a while if you're like pulling a cable it might pull something loose or whatever so you know it's probably a good idea but honestly as soon as you put the side panels on you really shouldn't have to take them off until you're ready to upgrade or do something else I'll be honest uh I don't always pay a ton of attention to the color scheme in my build I try but a lot of times I get like blind ited or very excited about some deal at Micro Center and I'll like forget that it's a brown graphics card for my red case or whatever but like this one looks pretty good and what you'll find was when you're picking components um usually white and black are like sort of the standard colors because we also have to consider that we have RGB to work with so you have some element of customization even after you've built it that certainly helps when you have something looks clean right out of the box all right so going to line this up it's going to pop in place and then again there's one thumb screw in the back and that is a physically assembled computer good job my friends before we proceed I definitely recommend to update your bios so to do this you're going to need a USB flash drive and uh typically a Windows computer although you can sometimes do it on a Mac you just have to make sure that this is formatted correctly typically it's fat 32 but I'll show you that in just a second so the point of updating your bios so the BIOS is essentially the software that runs your motherboard so this runs before windows it's important for a lot of reasons not only does it have like security implications sometimes performance stability it's a pretty important thing now you can update this later and it's not a bad idea to update your bios every once in a while but when you first got your PC built it is always a good idea to either update it or make sure that you are running the most up-to-date bios so I already checked earlier in it and I know that there's a newer bios online cuz this is only F1 which is like the first launch model now to find out what you'll do is you'll just Google the name of your motherboard this is a gigabyte b650 gaming X ax V2 an easy name to remember so I'm going to hop on to the gigabyte website same thing if you're using Asus or MSI or anything like that you're going to want to look for support and so for bios we can see that F1 which is what we're running came out in December of 2023 but there is a F3 bios that came out in January so you can see there's a couple of little updates doesn't matter we want to download that when it comes to installing biosis it's sometimes a little different based on the vendor um but typically you'll want to extract it and copy it over to a flash drive you can use any size flash drive really um what I'm going to do is just for safety I'm going to reformat this one I'm going to format this drive as NTFS let me just label it bios and hit start yes I do want to format and then once ah is formatted it will pop up for me and then what we'll do is we'll close this out and then all I need to do is copy the entire contents of this it really needs that F35 but I'm going to copy the entire contents over to my BIOS USB so we give it a second and that's it so we take this USB out we plug it into our system um you can plug it into any USB I like to plug it into one of the ones on the actual motherboard just because it feels a little bit safer in fact actually I will definitely do that because on this board it has a specific Port that looks for the BIOS this is more meant for like troubleshooting and stuff but whatever I'm just G to plug it into my BIOS USB as I hit my power button I'm going to spam the delete key on my keyboard which will get us into BIOS so spam spam spam you just want to spam it until you actually get into the BIOS um this is a little bit more relevant when you already have windows installed because traditionally when you hit the power button on your computer give it a second it will launch into windows but you saw that gigabyte screen that showed up there we want to make sure that we clicked it by that point but it's fine so what we're going to do is before we adjust any of our settings we want to make sure that our bios is up to date so what we need to do is go to Q flash every vendor does it a little different so some call it like easy flash some call it Q flash look around your settings or Google it really quick to find exactly what it's called is essentially the BIOS update tool so here Q flash it's right here all right I would like to update my bias yes I would love to on the left here it tells me what bias I'm currently running which is F1 from December of 2023 but in this case I already had checked beforehand and I know that I need F3 which is a more recent version from January so going to click on that hit the arrow button it's going to ask me if I want to do it I say yes now as I do this it's going to take a few minutes right so it's going to verify now while we update the BIOS don't touch your computer it's going to do some stuff it's fine let it do its thing because we are updating the BIOS and while a lot of boards will be fine if there's something goes wrong it'll fall back it'll you know check everything um you don't really want to rely on that and if something does go wrong during this process it could cause some damage to your system um typically it just requires you to reflash the bio yourself but it's a whole thing so while we're updating bios hands off everything related to the computer don't let your dog near the power cable to kick it down or whatever the case is so see it's restarted is now verifying the file is correct and it should after 5 10 minutes or so have a brand new bios installed on our system so there it goes we're going from F1 it's confirmed everything it is now updating from F1 to F3 so again hands off keep a few feet away from your system don't breathe too hard that's fine just don't touch it don't mess it up and then once we've updated the BIOS that's when we actually can go in and start tweaking some settings but typically when you update the BIOS it nukes all the settings that you put in the bios so you know if you start to like change your RAM speed and you know dialing overclocks or any of those things typically not always but typically when you update the BIOS all that gets re wiped anyway so I just like to do this at the very beginning and then we can go in and tweak a couple of settings and whatnot all right and no I didn't hit the button fast up okay so here's a little tip uh we should make sure we're going to hit the reset button real quick we should make sure to spam that delete key most of the time it lands a bios sometimes it doesn't spam the delete key please there we go all right cool so now we can see that everything worked because in our bios information it now says we are on F3 so we are on the most up-to-date version of the BIOS now there's a few things we want to do so again a good time to just double check everything still showing up correctly so ryzen 7 we've got ourselves temperature which is 28° which is very much within spec if you were having issues like so say you didn't put your thermal paste on maybe you left the little plastic thing on your fans are spinning what you would see is even in BIOS this CPU temperature start to climb very quickly um so you should see it be generally below like 40° C would be a good sort of general rule of thumb especially with a nice AIO like this 28° C is barely above room temperature it's very very cool all right so so now let's go ahead and start setting up a couple of things so this motherboard actually has resizable bar support right here and is already enabled this is if it's an option you should always do that most modern graphics cards with resizable bar it essentially allows them to bypass a little bit of the overhead and sort of just give you a little bit of extra performance I can't think of any reason why you would not want to turn that on if it is an option if your graphics card supports it so thankfully this board already has it now we also have our ddr5 Auto booster so if I click on that and it hit enable and I also hit on the XMP Expo profile what is going to do is automatically not overclock our Ram but set the ram to the speed that it is designed to run at so XMP is the Intel version Expo is the AMD version they're functionally the same in fact some AMD systems will work with XMP and whatnot doesn't really matter essentially this Ram while default is running at 4,800 megat transfers I think this Ram runs at 6,000 yeah this runs at 6,000 so basically that Ram can run faster which is going to give you more bandwidth not only going to help speed up your CPU it's just a oneclick thing to give you a whole lot more performance now there's other stuff we can do in here I am not going to be doing that for the purposes of this tutorial now if you want you can go into like there fan curves you can actually adjust all the different fans in here so if we want we can go out of easy mode and into advanced mode this is outside the scope of this video but if you're going to be doing things like overclocking or especially if you want to do like troubleshooting so sometimes you need like filled with some random bits and Bobs again I'm not going to show this for this video I'm just going to hit save and exit I'm going to save and I'm going to save the configuration so we're going to do that we're going to let it reboot I am going to spam the delete key to get into the BIOS one more time I just want to make sure that the XMP profile or the Expo profile in this case took and that everything is booted correctly um a good time to mention that if you run into problems at this step typically memory if you're clocking it too high or you have like a really fancy kit and the CPU can't hold up or whatever you could have some stability issues that's why I like to hop into the BIOS once it wants to boot and ensure that we have actually hit the correct speed which nine times out of 10 it'll run fine right out of the gate but we want to just go back over to easy mode so you can see here now that our memory frequency went from 4,800 to 6,000 which is exactly what should be working with our Gull modules cool all right so we're actually done with the computer for a moment is now time to install Windows when it comes to installing Windows there are a few options you have first and foremost you need to make your decision between Windows 10 and 11 I would recommend 11 mostly because Windows 10 is actually getting a little bit like I think they've only got like another year or something of support like Windows 11 I know some people aren't like a huge fan of it but like at this point it's kind of tough to justify using Windows 10 when it might not be supported for that much longer now how you get Windows 11 there's a bunch of different ways so if you already have a code for some reason you could actually just download a Windows tool which is available from Microsoft and essentially that will allow you to load up a copy of Windows on a flash drive and you can use the your own actual code for it um I of course have purchased a full copy of Windows 11 for Microcenter which I will be using and the one that I've got here comes with a flash drive so all I do is plug this flash drive in and uh put the code that comes in the back of the box and that will be good to go so do with that information as you wish so here is our key so if I flip around to the back you would see I'll cover it up you see here's our key which has our freaking 25 digigit or whatever code on it we're going to keep this handy we're going to need that a little bit and then we have our handy Windows Flash drive you can actually make your own Windows Flash drive um it will be definitely a more upto-date version than whatever was shipping on this drive as far as I'm concerned if it comes in the Box we'll plug it in it'll just take a little bit of extra time to update it's it's outside the scope to like like freaking make your own flash drive you don't need to do that if you do need to make a flash drive it is very simple there's a tool I think it's the Windows media creation tool you download it directly from Microsoft you plug your USB in it downloads Windows it puts on the drive it's super easy but for now what we're going to do is we're going to actually I proba should done that beforehand I'm going to restart the system so we're going to go save and exit and one more time we're going to spam that delete key and with our USB install we want to make sure that we're booting from this so get used to that spamming the delete key to get in the Bios cuz we're going to be doing it a whole bunch today cool all right so what we need to do is we need to make sure that we're booting from our USB so right here you can see that I've got you Windows 10 here so I can just hit F10 and exit um you also could manually just select like USB or whatever but theoretically we don't have to spam delete this time it is going to restart the system and start booting off of this USB now if that works we will start to see Windows Z bits pop up in one moment there we go loading files so it is going to start loading up a copy of Windows 11 so you'll see soon as you see a little pin wheel you know Windows is activating and that is really fast there we go Windows setup um I'm going to walk you this really quickly there's not a whole lot you need to worry about so um we'll just get past the language screen there's only one thing I really want to highlight which is to install it on the correct Drive especially if you have multiple hard drives or ssds inside oh look activating my Windows key I'm going to do that later but uh I've got one and I can install it whenever want uh you should do that though uh if you've got your key because windows will work without the key for a little bit but it gets grumpy you can't like change like your wallpaper much by the stuff again we're going to do that soon all right so install the operating system so you'll see that we have a ton of options here we're going to want to install the option that we've purchased which in this case is Windows 11 home so we're going to select home we're going to agree to the terms and conditions now we're going to hit custom install okay now you'll see that we have two drives showing up so we have drive zero which shows us 3.7 uh terabytes and we have drive 1 which shows us 2 terabytes so you need to know what drives are in your system because windows won't tell you what's what and we could technically install it on the bigger drive but that is our very slow hard drive don't do that install it on your SSD now if you only have one drive in your system it's pretty straightforward it's going to only one's going to show up but would highly recommend to take that drive one we going to hit new apply and we're set okay we're going to give it a second and now it's ready to go don't worry about your hard drive we're going to deal with that once we get into Windows but make sure to install it on your SSD if for some reason you're installing like a 1 TB hard drive and a 1 tab SSD I guess you could just unplug the hard drive to make sure you know which one's which because again there's no real way of telling what drive you can just see how actually like big the capacity is but think almost anyone has two drives are going to be different sizes and you'll know which one's which but anyway make sure to install this on the actual SSD so going to hit next making sure that it is automatically selected the primary partition and at this point sit back give it a little while I will tell you that if you haven't built a PC in a while Windows used to take forever to install but with like modern like CPUs especially like ssds this might only take like 10 minutes or so so I'll be right back as soon as it's done with the install and there we go we are ready to get going that took like 5 minutes um now you'll notice that when you go to the Windows setup your screen is going to look a little weird a little blurry we don't have drivers installed it's it's not going to be running at the correct resolution don't worry about it we'll deal with that later so uh most of this is really straightforward just going to kind of Click through make sure your keyboard's right yada yada yada there's only one thing I really want to point out which is that we're going to need to be connected to a network now if you're using Windows 10 this is a prompt that you can ignore if you're using Windows 11 home edition like we are you do need an internet connection so you can plug in via Ethernet which is what I'm going to do you also if you've got a Wi-Fi module built into your motherboard you can do that on I am going to find my ethernet cable down here and going to plug this in um one of the reasons people don't like Windows 11 I'm honest with you so I'm going to plug my ethernet in give it a minute it should automatically pop up and then it will start to download some initial updates and at this point as soon as you actually get online everything is going to be really straightforward just click through log in with your Microsoft account yada y yada there's nothing it's all that spicy or the ethernet cannot work so here's the other thing makes it real fun sometimes it don't want to work um and it don't want to work if you were unfortunate enough to be in the position I am in which my computer doesn't want to get online you can bypass this setup so we going hit shift and F10 on our keyboard we're going to type in o o b backspace bypass nro enter so this is going to put us in limited setup mode it will work theoretically it just doesn't like to do this but in a case like this where it doesn't want to work with our drivers uh what you going to do that say backspace back slash don't hit backspace that just deletes whatever you just typed I'm a front slash guy so I don't I don't think about backslashes a lot all right we going try that one more time yep yep skip I don't have internet connect continue with limited setup imagine if that was just a button you could press from the beginning all right so now we're going to go through the setup so again at this point is basically the same regardless of whether you were lucky enough to have the internet Grace your presence or not so log in um for this case because we don't have Internet we're not going to log into our Microsoft account we'll do that in a little bit create a name yada y yada and I will see you on the other side my friends with windows installed the first thing I want to do is hit the Windows key and type in task manager so all we're doing here we'll get rid of this gigabyte thing is just make sure that everything is showing up correctly it should we see AMD ryzen 7 7700x sweet we see 31 or 32 gigs of RAM sweet we see our hard drive and our SSD both of those are fine and that's pretty much it so we can actually take out our Windows Flash drive now keep this handy if you ever need to reinstall Windows but you can easily remake one of these it's not super important and now it is time to grab our drivers now if your computer is online and everything is functioning you can just download these directly because we're not online yet I'm going to come over to my laptop here with my flash drive installed and I'm going to download a few things so in this same support page that we downloaded the BIOS you're going to see a bunch of drivers you want to download almost all of these you'll see for example for audio there's two versions there's an older one and a newer one so I'm going to download the newer version we're going to grab chipset so again we'll grab the newer versions which are Apu and chipset so we're download both of these you want to grab your land driver very important so we're going to grab the most recent version which looks like it is from December of 2023 and we're going to grab it for Windows 11 um you can sort in the actual setup here if you which driver OS you have but it's pretty simple uh we don't actually need the raid driver we'll show that later and the wireless Bluetooth all this kind of stuff so I'm going to download all of the things so we got all these set up now there is also utility which is going to be the gigabyte control center um I'm actually going to do this later every motherboard manufacturer is going to have different sort of setups so typically they'll have some kind of like Masterpiece of software which will help help you pull downloads and updates uh from that point and it will say that Windows once you actually get this online Windows update will do its best to grab some drivers but typically I like to grab the drivers directly from the manufacturer of my motherboard to make sure they are as up to dat and everything as possible so I've got all of my Gigabyte drivers downloaded but before I move on just because I know my system is not online I don't have to deal with it also going to look up NVIDIA drivers now you would do this exact same thing if this was AMD or Intel you just want to download Lo the drivers for your specific GPU so for us we know that we have a GeForce card I have a 40 series and it is a 4070 super that's super good Windows 11 and we hit search and it should give us the most upto-date driver so we're going to download that as well and then once we got everything downloaded we're going to copy all of it over to our flash drive and move it over to the system downloading your motherboard drivers and your graphics drivers are the most important thing now at this point you will probably want to download some other stuff so for example because we have a Leon Lee case and cooler we would want to download the lean Lee uh lconnect software which will allow us to not only adjust of course all of our RGB and stuff but specifically adjust the actual screen here I'm not going to show you how to do that I'll be honest with you every bit of RGB software is Different download whatever setup is correct for your system go through the little tutorial be aware that sometimes that RGB stuff could be really finicky but it's gotten better um but for the purposes of this tutorial I'm just going to show you how to get this thing online with the correct Graphics drivers and then we're going to run Windows update and we should hopefully be done all right so everything is copied over to my driver USB I'm going to plug this in so uh I'm just going to plug it into the back USBS um it's a really small note but typically the fastest USB ports on your computer are the ones on the motherboard these are fine but sometimes they're like only USB 3.0 speeds it doesn't really matter but if you got like an SSD or something faster I just always like plugging into the motherboard feels a little bit more reliable all right so with that plugged in we're going to go into file manager we see our drivers we're going to copy all of this stuff over into our I just put in documents or downloads so I copy everything over to our actual SSD or our computer itself once everything is copied over we want to run it off the internal drive cuz it's can be a lot faster ideally as you install these drivers things start to work thankfully after some driver downloads and a quick restart we are now online so at this point we're almost done so I do have this little popup asking me to download gigabyte control center I will do that because that is that sort of overall piece of software that's going to help me to make sure that everything is up to date and the last step is going to be to download updates and believeing I say windows is going to have a whole lot of updates so let it run you may need to restart a couple of times and check it again and it will show up we're not quite done yet one really quick little thing let me quickly hop into our display uh I say this just because it's easy to miss double check your resolution specifically the frame rate on your monitor before we finish so you'll see here this is a 1440p monitor which is correct but we also want to pull up the advanced display so this is going to be in your actual system display settings so if you click on this it immediately does give us 240 HZ good if you have a high refresh rate monitor sometimes they'll defa theault to 60 and you might not realize that you're not getting the full experience out of your monitor now we have successfully built ourselves a gaming computer yay congratulations thank you very much to mic Center for sponsoring this tutorial as always if you're ever interested in buying any PC components Microcenter is your number one stop for all things gaming computer related excuse me my friends I'm going to go and apologize to our wonderful edit team for asking them to edit through 17 hours of footage but hopefully you found this tutorial helpful if you did make sure to subscribe to the channel ring L that dingling button and check out all all the components that we purchased for this video at the links in the description I'll see you next year\n"