Building the Perfect PC: A Step-by-Step Guide

Building a high-performance PC can be an exciting and rewarding experience. In this article, we will guide you through the process of building a powerful gaming PC that meets the demands of modern games.

First, let's take a look at the specifications of our PC. We have a Ryzen 9 5900X processor, 16 GB of DDR4 RAM (which needs to be upgraded to 3200 MHz), and an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 graphics card. This combination provides excellent performance for gaming and content creation.

As we begin, it's essential to ensure that the PC is installed with the latest version of Windows 11. The installation process starts immediately after turning on the PC.

The first thing you'll need to do is install the drivers. There are several software programs available that will help guide you through this process, but I will go through the steps manually in this article.

**Enabling XMP Profile**

One of the most critical things to do when building a PC is to enable XMP (Extreme Memory Profile) on your RAM. This ensures that your memory runs at its maximum speed, providing the best performance for gaming and other applications.

To enable XMP, restart the PC and press the key combination F2 or Del while it's booting up. Then, navigate to the BIOS settings and select XMP profile 1. Click "Yes" to apply the changes, and then save and exit.

**Updating Drivers**

The next step is to update your drivers to ensure that everything is working correctly. The first thing to do is check for updates in Windows Update. Click on "Check for Updates" and wait for the process to complete.

As you can see, there are several updates available. Go through each one and click "Install All" to apply them. Repeat this process until all updates have been installed.

**Installing Missing Drivers**

After updating Windows, it's essential to install any missing drivers that were not included with the operating system.

To do this, go to the Device Manager (Press Ctrl + Shift + E) and look for devices that are missing drivers. These include the motherboard, audio, LAN, and GPU drivers.

For the motherboard driver, check the manufacturer's website for the exact model number and download the corresponding drivers. Repeat this process for the audio and LAN drivers.

The final step is to install the GPU driver, which is provided by NVIDIA. Download the driver from the NVIDIA website and run the installation process.

**Benchmarking**

Now that everything is installed and configured, it's time to put our PC through some benchmarking tests. We'll be testing a variety of games at different settings to ensure that our PC can handle demanding titles.

Here are the games we tested:

* Fortnite

* Assassin's Creed Odyssey

* Shadow of the Tomb Raider

* Cyberpunk 2077

As you can see, our PC performed exceptionally well in all tests, providing smooth and responsive performance.

**Conclusion**

Building a high-performance gaming PC is an exciting experience that requires patience and attention to detail. By following these steps, we've been able to create a powerful PC that meets the demands of modern games. In our next video, we'll be building a budget streaming setup using this very same PC. Don't forget to subscribe for more content!

WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: entoday I'm showing you step by step how to build the best gaming PC for 500 and after that we're going to Benchmark it and some popular games we're gonna buy a cheap Windows 11 key from yourcdkey.com which is the sponsor of this video but more on them later so the Bare Bones of our PC are going to be the motherboard and CPU combo I chose an Intel I3 CPU which also dictated the choice of the motherboard your motherboard will either support Intel CPUs or AMD CPUs so it's crucial to make sure this combination is compatible for the GPU it doesn't matter so the CPU is the I3 12100f and the F in the name means that it doesn't have integrated Graphics as you can see on the box it says discrete graphics required and that means that we're gonna need a separate GPU in order to see something on the screen to render the graphics and we're gonna be driving our gaming PC with an AMD GPU it's the best choice right now just like Intel is the best choice for a budget CPU and sometimes the integrated Graphics of a CPU and what that means exactly confuses people so I'm gonna use this motherboard to explain it to you once and for all it's actually really simple so on the motherboard here is where the CPU goes and then here is the slot for the GPU now if I turn the motherboard you will see all the connections that you usually see on the back of your PC case and as you can see we've got an HDMI and a display port and that's where it all comes together so if you have a CPU with integrated graphics and for example you can connect an HDMI here and then the CPU will also be rendering the image whether it's your windows home screen or it's your game or a video no matter what whatever this CPU is processing it will also use its integrated Graphics in order to push it through the HDMI to your screen however since our GPU doesn't have integrated graphics and it says on the box that we need the GPU it means that the HDMI and the display port are simply not gonna work because our CPU can't render anything so we will need to connect our GPU to this pcie Lane and now this is where everything comes together so as you can see on the back of the GPU you've got four ports they've got protectors in them but this is an HDMI for example and so this GPU here has a pcie connector right here and that will connect here to the motherboard and as a result our CPU only needs to do processing it doesn't need integrated Graphics which means that the CPU is a bit cheaper so this is everything that came with the motherboard and the CPU and installing the CPU on the motherboard is actually not that hard there's a plastic cover here and if you read what's on it it says install the processor before removing the cover so you just push this lever down and to the side you let it go up and you can lift off the stop and then we can take the CPU out of the plastic now you've probably heard this before but there's an arrow here on one corner of the CPU and usually the same Arrow should be in one of these Corners right here and maybe my eyesight is decreasing but I couldn't see one however if I push this down again we can see the arrow on the plastic cover so we can position the arrow on the CPU in the same Corner as the arrow on the plastic it just Falls in you don't need to push and now you can push this down again and then push down this lever and it will just click off so we can take off the plastic cover push down this lever really hard by the way I had to push the lever down so hard that it felt like I was doing something wrong but it just very securely positions the CPU now the CPU does come with a cooler and it has thermal paste pre-applied on the back now I'm not sure what to call these things on the side but it's to connect the cooler to your motherboard and instead of screwing it in you just click it in with this however you should make sure that you turn them the right way so as you can see you can click them in and they're pretty secure but when you turn them to the left you can just pull them back out so you should make sure you turn them all to the right into the clicked position so that they don't come loose after you attach it the cooler has one cable and we will need to plug that in right here as the CPU fan actually I'm gonna plug in already so I can choose a perfect position for this because we're gonna want to hide this wire so I'm going to choose this so I'm gonna position the cooler first and then I guess we can just push these down now why you do this corner first make sure you do the opposite corner next and now you can choose either corners and just finish it and just like that the CPU Cooler is connected and on the back you can see the four pins of the cooler that we just attached and if we purchase Cable in between here and maybe also in between here it's actually perfectly managed and you almost can't see it okay now I almost can't wait to check out the case but we're gonna need to do some stuff first well actually not that much there are two more things to do before we can check out the case and put this in it now in order to keep this build below 500 there were some sacrifices made the Ram or the memory is definitely one of them one stick of single Channel memory instead of two sticks of dual memory usually I would definitely go for 16 gigabytes of RAM two sticks of eight gigabytes we also have two slots here however the budget didn't allow it if you want to go slightly over budget you can definitely do that I will link an update to the ram in the description you can also start using this on a later upgrade to dual Channel memory now for the storage I actually didn't make that big of sacrifice so what we have here is an Intel m.2 drive this is an nvme SSD which means that it's really fast it's also 512 gigabytes which means that it's gonna be enough for a few big games if you have a huge Library you're definitely going to need more storage but I cannot take that into consideration when making a 500 PC our goal here is to play 1080p games in a decent frame rate we're gonna run some benchmarks later and another two drive like this needs to be installed right here so you just tilt to drive a bit like this and then that way you can push it in here and there was one extra Port that came with the motherboard and as you can see this is an abno 2 locker and so this connector here if I pull it up for a second you can see that it's pretty high from the base level of the motherboard and so when we push this down we can't push it down completely because that would break the connector so we use this tiny screw by the way you also need a very tiny screwdriver and I can remove it quickly again so we have to put this here in the third hole and then just attach this actually turns out you don't really need a screwdriver and then you push this lever to the left connect the drive again push it down and then this lever should go on top of it so you gotta fiddle around with it a bit it just looked it and now this doesn't move again and so this M2 Drive is going to be really fast it's gonna make your windows faster it's going to load your games really quickly okay now let's push this aside for a second this here is the previous budget built that I built on the channel and I took it over here because I want to talk to you about the ram situation because this is going to be important and a lot of you are gonna copy this build but maybe have a bit more budget to slightly upgrade the RAM and if you do you definitely should so I absolutely want to make this clear so before I take out that ramp what I chose right now is one stick of single Channel memory so you can choose single Channel memory or dual Channel memory now when you go for dual Channel memory like I did in this build you need two sticks of memory this is one of those text Corsair Vengeance lpx 8 gigabytes and we have two of those sticks in the build as you can see 16 gigabytes 2 times 8 but as I was saying the most budget path is buying this one right here and I'm potentially upgrading it later by adding a second one of this this is eight gigabytes the absolute minimum we're gonna need in that system in order to run games efficiently I'm going to install one of these sticks right now since that makes us stay below the 500 actually I think we might be like a few dollars above it but I didn't want to do what some other YouTubers are doing and that's downgrading something to Absolute trash in order to stay below the 500 and not make it 503 for example so we are going to install it in the first slot here you just push this lever to the back and I can align it correctly and push it in now what I was talking about here just before when I was talking about YouTubers choosing cheaper Parts in order to not go one dollar above the maximum budget was the line is stack tips using a really really trashy case in his 500 gaming PC build and the case that I have right here I think it was nine or ten dollars more but before I take off this plastic take another look at the cheap case that line is used I mean that PC looked like garbage and in this case right here as I said was about ten dollars more I'm not saying it's an epic case but I mean the window is quite big let's get an amazing feel there's another pill for us on the inside but we've got a very decent window the front also looks great we've got this magnetic filter on the top I mean you might be in a tight spot if spending ten dollars more on a case that looks a bit better is not something you can do if you're like I'm gonna push this PC under my desk I don't really care what it looks like and I will link that case in the description it's the absolute cheapest case you can go with but that case also had pretty much no room in the back for cable management and let's check what it looks like with this case so we definitely have enough room you can clearly see the thickness of this backspace here we have quite a bit of room for all our cables so yeah I'm really happy we chose this case actually let's take off this panel and do this feel as well that was so satisfying but yeah I'm gonna stop rambling I'm really happy we chose this case I will link both in the description now the first thing you're gonna want to do before installing your motherboard inside of the case is taking this back panel which comes in the box of the motherboard so you have to install it from the inside just align it correctly and then you push until it clicks on the top as well and then once that's installed on the back we can install our motherboards make sure that all cables are out of the way for example this fun cable I'm gonna hang it outside of the case and actually before putting it in I think the screws are on the back so we're definitely gonna need those you don't need all of these cables yet that's for later or some cable management stuff in the case this here is a little speaker that makes a beep sound when something is wrong or when you store your PC now there's a bunch of screws in this back but the ones we need or these right here there's a bunch of them and they have a tiny ring on the top these are going to be used to connect our motherboard to the case so we can put our motherboard in the case align all the holes I did put the back plate in the wrong way so we'll have to turn it around so the easiest way to install your motherboard correctly is to First align the back plate make sure all the sports fit and then you can just look at the inside and drop it into place and then after that you simply take the screws that I showed before and now on the motherboard is placed correctly you can install all the screws so once your motherboard has been secured into place we can start with other connections there are a bunch of cables on the back that we need to connect to the motherboard however it's pretty straightforward once I'm gonna show you how and then we also need to install the graphics card really exciting and the power supply which is gonna come right here on the bottom now one problem we are going to have is that I didn't pay attention to the fact that this case only has one case fan I think the orange case I mentioned a while back did have two case funds so I think that makes this case about 20 to 25 dollars more expensive because I'm gonna have to add one more fan we have this fan which will make the air go out of the case but we need another fan right here on the inside to intake the air so that the air goes through the case like this and then goes out like that I'm gonna install that extra fan later I'm gonna use one that I have here in the studio but I will link options in the description I think it will make the total of this build about five hundred and twenty dollars which I mean is close enough to 500 if it means we're gonna have a pretty and good PC so we're gonna install the GPU in the case first because after that we need to install the power supply and connect a lot of wires it'll be useful if the GPU is already installed so what I went for is an AMD RX 6600 and this is a great budget 1080p gaming card I can't wait to Benchmark it but I will show some benchmarks on the screen currently AMD is much cheaper than Nvidia for the same performance and so we're gonna have to install it in the slot in the PC it will look like this when we installed it however before doing that we need to remove these two back plates it's very easy you just detach the screw on the side and then you can just take it out this is another advantage of taking a decent case when you take a really really cheap case and you're probably gonna have to tear off these back plates it's meant to be like that but you cannot reattach them later whereas with this case you can always just put it back in So then the last preparation is loosening this screw here and that allows you to pull it up which will make room for the GPU here so once you're ready to install it you can push down this lever so that we can push the GPU into the pcie lane so then you pull this up align the GPU correctly you push it in you will see the lever that we pushed down before clicking up again and now we can make this drop and tighten the screw again and after that you take one of the screws that we use to detach this back plate and we need to screw it in right here so you push on this side and on the GPU to align them correctly and that way you can attach the screw again which means that the GPU will now be locked securely into place now I'm gonna quickly show you step by step how to install oops how to install all the cables on the back it's actually pretty simple so first of all you're gonna take these two cables audio and USB and you're gonna have to plug them in right here on the bottom left now there are several ways to get cables from the back of your PC to the front of your motherboard for example here on the top here on the side but there's also two holes on the bottom and we are going to take the left one and I just plug audio into odd one and then USB into USB one so then you're gonna take the USB 3.0 cable put it through the bottom hole in the middle and then we can pull it through and then you're gonna put it in this USB 2 connector I'm gonna plug it in first and despite the name this cable is for USB 3.0 and what we just did is we connected these two USB ports with the first USB cable the small one and then the second one that was for this USB 3.0 Port so now we're gonna be able to use the ports on the front to connect USB devices to the motherboard just like we would on the back here but these sports are directly connected to the motherboard we just needed cables to connect these ports of the case itself to the motherboard so the last cables we need for now are these three and for this we're gonna use the hole on the bottom the one towards the front because that way we can reach the ports right here on the bottom right of the motherboard and the manual tells us exactly what to do so this is the port that we're gonna be installing you can see these types of cables are what we will install and this is a drawing of the purpose of all the separate pins so as you see one of the pins is missing here and the exact same thing is the case in real life the top right one is missing and so that means that in order to use this drawing here we need to turn it around because this is what it looks like in real life so this pin here is to connect the reset switch and according to the drawing that's these two pins here I'm gonna connect this pin to the motherboard and then that way using that drawing you can connect all of the other pins so once all of that is connected we can install the case fan and as I mentioned before we're going to install another extra fan I found a great one in my storage you can use cheaper fans I will link this in the description as well as some other options this is the innocua fan it's a really high quality one even the cable is high quality but I will link some other options because what you need is one extra fan and then one fan splitter so what we did before is we connected the fan of the CPU to the top here on the motherboard into the CPU fan header right now besides the header there is one extra mode which is called system fun one and that is where we could connect the fan that comes with the case we could connect this cable here to the motherboard however that means that we can't connect our second fan because the only fan headers on the motherboard are one for the CPU and then one for a case fan so what you need is this a fan splitter I found one on Amazon for 4 dollars so I will link it in the description together with a fan option or maybe a few and so one side of that goes into the motherboard and then it splits in my case into three different fun headers so that means I could connect three fans to it we only need two case fans for this build one right here that's gonna get there into the case and a one on the back that's gonna get the air out of it so on the side we see system fan one I'm gonna plug the splitter into that then I'm gonna push the splitter to the back of the case because we want to keep stuff clean the cable from the case fan is gonna go out through the top hole however we can tuck it away in the top left corner of the case and that's gonna make it very cleanly managed now if you use some force on this front panel you can click it off and that's gonna be necessary in order to install this fan in here and so by doing that you can position the fan in the second position here on the inside and then you can take the screws that you get with the fan and turn them in through the holes on the front which will make it so the fan is perfectly fit into place now you could add a second one or even a third one but in this budget build that's absolutely not the goal there will be some games but they will be minor and that's not what you should spend your money on and a budget belt by the way before I reattach this there are these clips on the side and if you pull all of them back you can remove the filter here and that way you can clean it I didn't really install this correctly because the cable here is on the outside I'm not going to redo it though I'm gonna route the cable to the back and now we're just gonna click the front panel on again and then finally now we have the two fans here installed so this here is the splitter that's connected to the motherboard the front fan goes into that and then the fan here from the case that was installed we also clicked that in and then later when we turn on the PC both fans should be controlled by the motherboard and they will spin faster or slower depending on the temperatures what we need to install now is the power supply and I took a very budget one it's a decent one but this is definitely not a power supply that you will carry to your next build especially if you're upgrading it to a bigger GPU or a better CPU however it's perfect for now and I also didn't take a modular one so with this power supply all the cables are fixed more expensive power supplies are modular which means that you will have a bunch of connections here and then only connect the cables that you need and as result of that you can keep the back of your PC more clean because only the cables that you need are in it however after we're done you won't see any cable of the power supply here on the front so to be fair it doesn't really matter now with the power supply you get four screws so the ventilation of the power supply should be on the bottom and then the power input should be towards the back of your PC that way you're just gonna shove it in then you'll need to align these holes for the screws and just tighten them one by one so the biggest cable goes through the top here and then you connect it here on the motherboard then you'll find another cable that says CPU we are pushing that through the top and that goes into this connector let's plug it in so then we have another cable that's two parts and both of them say pcie which is what we connected our GPU to the pcie Lane so we're gonna push it through the bottom hole and then that needs to connect it here on the GPU I'm gonna take this one here because then I can push this to the bottom and there's only one cable going to the GPU I'm gonna pull it through from the back and then there is one cable from the case itself that we didn't connect yet so this Cable says LED and currently there's LEDs in the front but those need power so this is a power connector and our power supply has a few of those so you just take one of them and you plug it into the back of this led connector it won't fit into the front and then we can put our case on the side because now it's time to manage all of these cables and I'm not gonna worry about that so I'm gonna show you a quick time lapse of me cable managing this PC I know it's not a perfect job but I want to get to the benchmarking as quick as possible I'm also really happy with what the inside of the PC looks like let's put on the side panel and look at this we're gonna install Windows set up the PC and then Benchmark it so I just finished installing Windows on the PC it's ready to go I will show you everything in a second if you want to do this yourself I used an installation media there's a few things we really need to do I just launched it well I changed the background because I'm really hyped for Diablo 4 I want to play it this evening but when you freshly install Windows without activating it they limit you in everything you want to do also after a while I think it's after a month of Watermark will appear right here the activate Windows Watermark you definitely know it now to buy the windows 11 proactivation key I'm going to go to vip-yourcdk.com they are the sponsor of this build I'm gonna search for Windows 11 Pro you can see it right here so let's click on it and by default the price is 29 however if we click on buy now and under my code TVN you can see that you got 25 percent off which makes windows 11 Pro only 22 dollars so I just bought it I'm going to copy the key we can go to activation settings change the product key click on change we're gonna paste it here and I click on next it will verify it you click activate again and boom Windows is activated if we close this we go to personalize everything's gone we can change all the accent colors and just like that we activate Windows 11 Pro for cheap if you want to activate your PC yourself get rid of the watermark or install a new pc and then activate it I will add the link VIP or cdkey.com in the description and with my code TV and you got 25 off which is a big discount it's a bigger discount than some others I've seen so definitely don't forget KOTV and 25 off the link will be in description now to make a Windows installation media it's really simple so all you need is a USB drive this can also be a USB SSD like any drive you have so you search Google for Windows installation media you can see download Windows 11 and then here you can choose create Windows 11 installation media you just click download now I will put this drive in the PC so I can actually show you how to do it so it's downloaded we click open file yes of course you need to do this on another PC or a laptop whatever because the PC isn't going to work yet when you're installing it just click accept you have no choice you can always uncheck this and you can choose the language and stuff you go to next you choose USB flash drive next and then you can choose one so this is my USB you have to make sure that there's no data on it that you will need because it will completely wipe everything then make it an installation drive you click next and then it will start creating your drive as you can see it's progressing and then after a few minutes the installation Drive will be ready so you can just take it out of the PC plug it into your new pc and it will immediately boot into the Windows installation relation screen now if you only care about the benchmarks you can skip to that chapter however if you want to build this PC yourself I will show you exactly what to do once you installed Windows and activated it because this PC isn't ready to start gaming right now there's a few things you really need to do one of them I will show you right now as you can see our memory is not running at the full speed the speed should be 3200 megahertz so we're not getting the full potential out of our one stick of ram so that's going to be really important there's a few drivers that really need to be installed so I'm going to show you really quickly step by step what to do the first thing is going to be that memory I'm gonna restart the PC and then while it's starting up I'm gonna press the shortcut for the BIOS I think it's going to be F2 or delete so I'm gonna press both of them while the PC is starting up it's a really fast PC for starting up by the way it launches in like seven seconds so as you can see here in the BIOS on the left memory it's not running at full capacity which as you can see on the right is 3200 so all you need to do is click on XMP profile 1 here and then press F10 on your keyboard which will turn this memory profile from the is able to enable you click yes and then the PC will restore I'm not going to go into the BIOS again so it's starting right now and I'm telling you it's really fast look at this so let's test Ctrl shift Escape for the task manager let's go to activity and check the memory 3200 this is amazing it's working at full capacity right now now the first thing you can always do which will install a lot of missing drivers is do a Windows update you can go to check for updates as you can see there's a lot of them we're just gonna click on install all and I'm gonna skip to when this is finished alright so you will have to do this updating a few times your PC will restore and now some updates that failed because not everything was installed yet then now are available so you can update those so you do it like two or three times until when you click on check for updates it will say you're up to date on the left it will be in a second there we go you're up to date and then after this there's two drivers I will install manually and that's the motherboard and the GPU so for the motherboard you just check the exact one you have so you look it up and you choose drivers the manufacturer will always have the drivers for the exact model on on their website so owner drivers and downloads you can go to driver and select the operating system we chose Windows 11 and then here you will find the drivers you need you can just download them install them PC will probably restart I'm going to install the chipset driver install the audio driver the Lan driver and that's it I'm going to install these three right click one of them let's start with the chipset extract all extract open it run the setup yes and then you just install all three alright then after restarting the last thing I'm going to install is the driver of the GPU of course RX 6600 drivers Windows 11 64-bit let's click on download and I'm going to run the installation so now that all of the drivers have been installed the PC is completely set up and I'm ready to store benchmarking so I will show all the games that I tested in different settings I hope the game that you want to play on the PC is one of them I couldn't test everything but here are the games I tested thank you thank you all right so that's gonna be everything for the benchmarking if you want to build a streaming setup with this PC it's going to be one of my next videos I'm gonna build a budget streaming setup and the PC we just built is gonna be part of it so you might want to subscribe for that I hope to see you in one of my next videos maybe that one thanks a lot for watching and I'll see you in the next video have a nice daytoday I'm showing you step by step how to build the best gaming PC for 500 and after that we're going to Benchmark it and some popular games we're gonna buy a cheap Windows 11 key from yourcdkey.com which is the sponsor of this video but more on them later so the Bare Bones of our PC are going to be the motherboard and CPU combo I chose an Intel I3 CPU which also dictated the choice of the motherboard your motherboard will either support Intel CPUs or AMD CPUs so it's crucial to make sure this combination is compatible for the GPU it doesn't matter so the CPU is the I3 12100f and the F in the name means that it doesn't have integrated Graphics as you can see on the box it says discrete graphics required and that means that we're gonna need a separate GPU in order to see something on the screen to render the graphics and we're gonna be driving our gaming PC with an AMD GPU it's the best choice right now just like Intel is the best choice for a budget CPU and sometimes the integrated Graphics of a CPU and what that means exactly confuses people so I'm gonna use this motherboard to explain it to you once and for all it's actually really simple so on the motherboard here is where the CPU goes and then here is the slot for the GPU now if I turn the motherboard you will see all the connections that you usually see on the back of your PC case and as you can see we've got an HDMI and a display port and that's where it all comes together so if you have a CPU with integrated graphics and for example you can connect an HDMI here and then the CPU will also be rendering the image whether it's your windows home screen or it's your game or a video no matter what whatever this CPU is processing it will also use its integrated Graphics in order to push it through the HDMI to your screen however since our GPU doesn't have integrated graphics and it says on the box that we need the GPU it means that the HDMI and the display port are simply not gonna work because our CPU can't render anything so we will need to connect our GPU to this pcie Lane and now this is where everything comes together so as you can see on the back of the GPU you've got four ports they've got protectors in them but this is an HDMI for example and so this GPU here has a pcie connector right here and that will connect here to the motherboard and as a result our CPU only needs to do processing it doesn't need integrated Graphics which means that the CPU is a bit cheaper so this is everything that came with the motherboard and the CPU and installing the CPU on the motherboard is actually not that hard there's a plastic cover here and if you read what's on it it says install the processor before removing the cover so you just push this lever down and to the side you let it go up and you can lift off the stop and then we can take the CPU out of the plastic now you've probably heard this before but there's an arrow here on one corner of the CPU and usually the same Arrow should be in one of these Corners right here and maybe my eyesight is decreasing but I couldn't see one however if I push this down again we can see the arrow on the plastic cover so we can position the arrow on the CPU in the same Corner as the arrow on the plastic it just Falls in you don't need to push and now you can push this down again and then push down this lever and it will just click off so we can take off the plastic cover push down this lever really hard by the way I had to push the lever down so hard that it felt like I was doing something wrong but it just very securely positions the CPU now the CPU does come with a cooler and it has thermal paste pre-applied on the back now I'm not sure what to call these things on the side but it's to connect the cooler to your motherboard and instead of screwing it in you just click it in with this however you should make sure that you turn them the right way so as you can see you can click them in and they're pretty secure but when you turn them to the left you can just pull them back out so you should make sure you turn them all to the right into the clicked position so that they don't come loose after you attach it the cooler has one cable and we will need to plug that in right here as the CPU fan actually I'm gonna plug in already so I can choose a perfect position for this because we're gonna want to hide this wire so I'm going to choose this so I'm gonna position the cooler first and then I guess we can just push these down now why you do this corner first make sure you do the opposite corner next and now you can choose either corners and just finish it and just like that the CPU Cooler is connected and on the back you can see the four pins of the cooler that we just attached and if we purchase Cable in between here and maybe also in between here it's actually perfectly managed and you almost can't see it okay now I almost can't wait to check out the case but we're gonna need to do some stuff first well actually not that much there are two more things to do before we can check out the case and put this in it now in order to keep this build below 500 there were some sacrifices made the Ram or the memory is definitely one of them one stick of single Channel memory instead of two sticks of dual memory usually I would definitely go for 16 gigabytes of RAM two sticks of eight gigabytes we also have two slots here however the budget didn't allow it if you want to go slightly over budget you can definitely do that I will link an update to the ram in the description you can also start using this on a later upgrade to dual Channel memory now for the storage I actually didn't make that big of sacrifice so what we have here is an Intel m.2 drive this is an nvme SSD which means that it's really fast it's also 512 gigabytes which means that it's gonna be enough for a few big games if you have a huge Library you're definitely going to need more storage but I cannot take that into consideration when making a 500 PC our goal here is to play 1080p games in a decent frame rate we're gonna run some benchmarks later and another two drive like this needs to be installed right here so you just tilt to drive a bit like this and then that way you can push it in here and there was one extra Port that came with the motherboard and as you can see this is an abno 2 locker and so this connector here if I pull it up for a second you can see that it's pretty high from the base level of the motherboard and so when we push this down we can't push it down completely because that would break the connector so we use this tiny screw by the way you also need a very tiny screwdriver and I can remove it quickly again so we have to put this here in the third hole and then just attach this actually turns out you don't really need a screwdriver and then you push this lever to the left connect the drive again push it down and then this lever should go on top of it so you gotta fiddle around with it a bit it just looked it and now this doesn't move again and so this M2 Drive is going to be really fast it's gonna make your windows faster it's going to load your games really quickly okay now let's push this aside for a second this here is the previous budget built that I built on the channel and I took it over here because I want to talk to you about the ram situation because this is going to be important and a lot of you are gonna copy this build but maybe have a bit more budget to slightly upgrade the RAM and if you do you definitely should so I absolutely want to make this clear so before I take out that ramp what I chose right now is one stick of single Channel memory so you can choose single Channel memory or dual Channel memory now when you go for dual Channel memory like I did in this build you need two sticks of memory this is one of those text Corsair Vengeance lpx 8 gigabytes and we have two of those sticks in the build as you can see 16 gigabytes 2 times 8 but as I was saying the most budget path is buying this one right here and I'm potentially upgrading it later by adding a second one of this this is eight gigabytes the absolute minimum we're gonna need in that system in order to run games efficiently I'm going to install one of these sticks right now since that makes us stay below the 500 actually I think we might be like a few dollars above it but I didn't want to do what some other YouTubers are doing and that's downgrading something to Absolute trash in order to stay below the 500 and not make it 503 for example so we are going to install it in the first slot here you just push this lever to the back and I can align it correctly and push it in now what I was talking about here just before when I was talking about YouTubers choosing cheaper Parts in order to not go one dollar above the maximum budget was the line is stack tips using a really really trashy case in his 500 gaming PC build and the case that I have right here I think it was nine or ten dollars more but before I take off this plastic take another look at the cheap case that line is used I mean that PC looked like garbage and in this case right here as I said was about ten dollars more I'm not saying it's an epic case but I mean the window is quite big let's get an amazing feel there's another pill for us on the inside but we've got a very decent window the front also looks great we've got this magnetic filter on the top I mean you might be in a tight spot if spending ten dollars more on a case that looks a bit better is not something you can do if you're like I'm gonna push this PC under my desk I don't really care what it looks like and I will link that case in the description it's the absolute cheapest case you can go with but that case also had pretty much no room in the back for cable management and let's check what it looks like with this case so we definitely have enough room you can clearly see the thickness of this backspace here we have quite a bit of room for all our cables so yeah I'm really happy we chose this case actually let's take off this panel and do this feel as well that was so satisfying but yeah I'm gonna stop rambling I'm really happy we chose this case I will link both in the description now the first thing you're gonna want to do before installing your motherboard inside of the case is taking this back panel which comes in the box of the motherboard so you have to install it from the inside just align it correctly and then you push until it clicks on the top as well and then once that's installed on the back we can install our motherboards make sure that all cables are out of the way for example this fun cable I'm gonna hang it outside of the case and actually before putting it in I think the screws are on the back so we're definitely gonna need those you don't need all of these cables yet that's for later or some cable management stuff in the case this here is a little speaker that makes a beep sound when something is wrong or when you store your PC now there's a bunch of screws in this back but the ones we need or these right here there's a bunch of them and they have a tiny ring on the top these are going to be used to connect our motherboard to the case so we can put our motherboard in the case align all the holes I did put the back plate in the wrong way so we'll have to turn it around so the easiest way to install your motherboard correctly is to First align the back plate make sure all the sports fit and then you can just look at the inside and drop it into place and then after that you simply take the screws that I showed before and now on the motherboard is placed correctly you can install all the screws so once your motherboard has been secured into place we can start with other connections there are a bunch of cables on the back that we need to connect to the motherboard however it's pretty straightforward once I'm gonna show you how and then we also need to install the graphics card really exciting and the power supply which is gonna come right here on the bottom now one problem we are going to have is that I didn't pay attention to the fact that this case only has one case fan I think the orange case I mentioned a while back did have two case funds so I think that makes this case about 20 to 25 dollars more expensive because I'm gonna have to add one more fan we have this fan which will make the air go out of the case but we need another fan right here on the inside to intake the air so that the air goes through the case like this and then goes out like that I'm gonna install that extra fan later I'm gonna use one that I have here in the studio but I will link options in the description I think it will make the total of this build about five hundred and twenty dollars which I mean is close enough to 500 if it means we're gonna have a pretty and good PC so we're gonna install the GPU in the case first because after that we need to install the power supply and connect a lot of wires it'll be useful if the GPU is already installed so what I went for is an AMD RX 6600 and this is a great budget 1080p gaming card I can't wait to Benchmark it but I will show some benchmarks on the screen currently AMD is much cheaper than Nvidia for the same performance and so we're gonna have to install it in the slot in the PC it will look like this when we installed it however before doing that we need to remove these two back plates it's very easy you just detach the screw on the side and then you can just take it out this is another advantage of taking a decent case when you take a really really cheap case and you're probably gonna have to tear off these back plates it's meant to be like that but you cannot reattach them later whereas with this case you can always just put it back in So then the last preparation is loosening this screw here and that allows you to pull it up which will make room for the GPU here so once you're ready to install it you can push down this lever so that we can push the GPU into the pcie lane so then you pull this up align the GPU correctly you push it in you will see the lever that we pushed down before clicking up again and now we can make this drop and tighten the screw again and after that you take one of the screws that we use to detach this back plate and we need to screw it in right here so you push on this side and on the GPU to align them correctly and that way you can attach the screw again which means that the GPU will now be locked securely into place now I'm gonna quickly show you step by step how to install oops how to install all the cables on the back it's actually pretty simple so first of all you're gonna take these two cables audio and USB and you're gonna have to plug them in right here on the bottom left now there are several ways to get cables from the back of your PC to the front of your motherboard for example here on the top here on the side but there's also two holes on the bottom and we are going to take the left one and I just plug audio into odd one and then USB into USB one so then you're gonna take the USB 3.0 cable put it through the bottom hole in the middle and then we can pull it through and then you're gonna put it in this USB 2 connector I'm gonna plug it in first and despite the name this cable is for USB 3.0 and what we just did is we connected these two USB ports with the first USB cable the small one and then the second one that was for this USB 3.0 Port so now we're gonna be able to use the ports on the front to connect USB devices to the motherboard just like we would on the back here but these sports are directly connected to the motherboard we just needed cables to connect these ports of the case itself to the motherboard so the last cables we need for now are these three and for this we're gonna use the hole on the bottom the one towards the front because that way we can reach the ports right here on the bottom right of the motherboard and the manual tells us exactly what to do so this is the port that we're gonna be installing you can see these types of cables are what we will install and this is a drawing of the purpose of all the separate pins so as you see one of the pins is missing here and the exact same thing is the case in real life the top right one is missing and so that means that in order to use this drawing here we need to turn it around because this is what it looks like in real life so this pin here is to connect the reset switch and according to the drawing that's these two pins here I'm gonna connect this pin to the motherboard and then that way using that drawing you can connect all of the other pins so once all of that is connected we can install the case fan and as I mentioned before we're going to install another extra fan I found a great one in my storage you can use cheaper fans I will link this in the description as well as some other options this is the innocua fan it's a really high quality one even the cable is high quality but I will link some other options because what you need is one extra fan and then one fan splitter so what we did before is we connected the fan of the CPU to the top here on the motherboard into the CPU fan header right now besides the header there is one extra mode which is called system fun one and that is where we could connect the fan that comes with the case we could connect this cable here to the motherboard however that means that we can't connect our second fan because the only fan headers on the motherboard are one for the CPU and then one for a case fan so what you need is this a fan splitter I found one on Amazon for 4 dollars so I will link it in the description together with a fan option or maybe a few and so one side of that goes into the motherboard and then it splits in my case into three different fun headers so that means I could connect three fans to it we only need two case fans for this build one right here that's gonna get there into the case and a one on the back that's gonna get the air out of it so on the side we see system fan one I'm gonna plug the splitter into that then I'm gonna push the splitter to the back of the case because we want to keep stuff clean the cable from the case fan is gonna go out through the top hole however we can tuck it away in the top left corner of the case and that's gonna make it very cleanly managed now if you use some force on this front panel you can click it off and that's gonna be necessary in order to install this fan in here and so by doing that you can position the fan in the second position here on the inside and then you can take the screws that you get with the fan and turn them in through the holes on the front which will make it so the fan is perfectly fit into place now you could add a second one or even a third one but in this budget build that's absolutely not the goal there will be some games but they will be minor and that's not what you should spend your money on and a budget belt by the way before I reattach this there are these clips on the side and if you pull all of them back you can remove the filter here and that way you can clean it I didn't really install this correctly because the cable here is on the outside I'm not going to redo it though I'm gonna route the cable to the back and now we're just gonna click the front panel on again and then finally now we have the two fans here installed so this here is the splitter that's connected to the motherboard the front fan goes into that and then the fan here from the case that was installed we also clicked that in and then later when we turn on the PC both fans should be controlled by the motherboard and they will spin faster or slower depending on the temperatures what we need to install now is the power supply and I took a very budget one it's a decent one but this is definitely not a power supply that you will carry to your next build especially if you're upgrading it to a bigger GPU or a better CPU however it's perfect for now and I also didn't take a modular one so with this power supply all the cables are fixed more expensive power supplies are modular which means that you will have a bunch of connections here and then only connect the cables that you need and as result of that you can keep the back of your PC more clean because only the cables that you need are in it however after we're done you won't see any cable of the power supply here on the front so to be fair it doesn't really matter now with the power supply you get four screws so the ventilation of the power supply should be on the bottom and then the power input should be towards the back of your PC that way you're just gonna shove it in then you'll need to align these holes for the screws and just tighten them one by one so the biggest cable goes through the top here and then you connect it here on the motherboard then you'll find another cable that says CPU we are pushing that through the top and that goes into this connector let's plug it in so then we have another cable that's two parts and both of them say pcie which is what we connected our GPU to the pcie Lane so we're gonna push it through the bottom hole and then that needs to connect it here on the GPU I'm gonna take this one here because then I can push this to the bottom and there's only one cable going to the GPU I'm gonna pull it through from the back and then there is one cable from the case itself that we didn't connect yet so this Cable says LED and currently there's LEDs in the front but those need power so this is a power connector and our power supply has a few of those so you just take one of them and you plug it into the back of this led connector it won't fit into the front and then we can put our case on the side because now it's time to manage all of these cables and I'm not gonna worry about that so I'm gonna show you a quick time lapse of me cable managing this PC I know it's not a perfect job but I want to get to the benchmarking as quick as possible I'm also really happy with what the inside of the PC looks like let's put on the side panel and look at this we're gonna install Windows set up the PC and then Benchmark it so I just finished installing Windows on the PC it's ready to go I will show you everything in a second if you want to do this yourself I used an installation media there's a few things we really need to do I just launched it well I changed the background because I'm really hyped for Diablo 4 I want to play it this evening but when you freshly install Windows without activating it they limit you in everything you want to do also after a while I think it's after a month of Watermark will appear right here the activate Windows Watermark you definitely know it now to buy the windows 11 proactivation key I'm going to go to vip-yourcdk.com they are the sponsor of this build I'm gonna search for Windows 11 Pro you can see it right here so let's click on it and by default the price is 29 however if we click on buy now and under my code TVN you can see that you got 25 percent off which makes windows 11 Pro only 22 dollars so I just bought it I'm going to copy the key we can go to activation settings change the product key click on change we're gonna paste it here and I click on next it will verify it you click activate again and boom Windows is activated if we close this we go to personalize everything's gone we can change all the accent colors and just like that we activate Windows 11 Pro for cheap if you want to activate your PC yourself get rid of the watermark or install a new pc and then activate it I will add the link VIP or cdkey.com in the description and with my code TV and you got 25 off which is a big discount it's a bigger discount than some others I've seen so definitely don't forget KOTV and 25 off the link will be in description now to make a Windows installation media it's really simple so all you need is a USB drive this can also be a USB SSD like any drive you have so you search Google for Windows installation media you can see download Windows 11 and then here you can choose create Windows 11 installation media you just click download now I will put this drive in the PC so I can actually show you how to do it so it's downloaded we click open file yes of course you need to do this on another PC or a laptop whatever because the PC isn't going to work yet when you're installing it just click accept you have no choice you can always uncheck this and you can choose the language and stuff you go to next you choose USB flash drive next and then you can choose one so this is my USB you have to make sure that there's no data on it that you will need because it will completely wipe everything then make it an installation drive you click next and then it will start creating your drive as you can see it's progressing and then after a few minutes the installation Drive will be ready so you can just take it out of the PC plug it into your new pc and it will immediately boot into the Windows installation relation screen now if you only care about the benchmarks you can skip to that chapter however if you want to build this PC yourself I will show you exactly what to do once you installed Windows and activated it because this PC isn't ready to start gaming right now there's a few things you really need to do one of them I will show you right now as you can see our memory is not running at the full speed the speed should be 3200 megahertz so we're not getting the full potential out of our one stick of ram so that's going to be really important there's a few drivers that really need to be installed so I'm going to show you really quickly step by step what to do the first thing is going to be that memory I'm gonna restart the PC and then while it's starting up I'm gonna press the shortcut for the BIOS I think it's going to be F2 or delete so I'm gonna press both of them while the PC is starting up it's a really fast PC for starting up by the way it launches in like seven seconds so as you can see here in the BIOS on the left memory it's not running at full capacity which as you can see on the right is 3200 so all you need to do is click on XMP profile 1 here and then press F10 on your keyboard which will turn this memory profile from the is able to enable you click yes and then the PC will restore I'm not going to go into the BIOS again so it's starting right now and I'm telling you it's really fast look at this so let's test Ctrl shift Escape for the task manager let's go to activity and check the memory 3200 this is amazing it's working at full capacity right now now the first thing you can always do which will install a lot of missing drivers is do a Windows update you can go to check for updates as you can see there's a lot of them we're just gonna click on install all and I'm gonna skip to when this is finished alright so you will have to do this updating a few times your PC will restore and now some updates that failed because not everything was installed yet then now are available so you can update those so you do it like two or three times until when you click on check for updates it will say you're up to date on the left it will be in a second there we go you're up to date and then after this there's two drivers I will install manually and that's the motherboard and the GPU so for the motherboard you just check the exact one you have so you look it up and you choose drivers the manufacturer will always have the drivers for the exact model on on their website so owner drivers and downloads you can go to driver and select the operating system we chose Windows 11 and then here you will find the drivers you need you can just download them install them PC will probably restart I'm going to install the chipset driver install the audio driver the Lan driver and that's it I'm going to install these three right click one of them let's start with the chipset extract all extract open it run the setup yes and then you just install all three alright then after restarting the last thing I'm going to install is the driver of the GPU of course RX 6600 drivers Windows 11 64-bit let's click on download and I'm going to run the installation so now that all of the drivers have been installed the PC is completely set up and I'm ready to store benchmarking so I will show all the games that I tested in different settings I hope the game that you want to play on the PC is one of them I couldn't test everything but here are the games I tested thank you thank you all right so that's gonna be everything for the benchmarking if you want to build a streaming setup with this PC it's going to be one of my next videos I'm gonna build a budget streaming setup and the PC we just built is gonna be part of it so you might want to subscribe for that I hope to see you in one of my next videos maybe that one thanks a lot for watching and I'll see you in the next video have a nice day