You just finished putting all the hardware together for your first ever DIY gaming PC
and got it to post but now you're wondering, what do I do next?
Well here... let me show ya.
After building a new PC the first thing I'll do is check to see if I need to update the
motherboard BIOS/UEFI.
When you're buying all your components brand new you typically don't really need to worry
about this, but sometimes a BIOS update is needed for certain components to work with
your motherboard.
I'm not going to go into detail about this in particular in this video because I have
a dedicated BIOS updating video that I'll link in the cards and the video description
if you need more information about all of that.
That video is much more specific on how and where to find your motherboard BIOS and walks
you through each step in detail.
In this video I'm only going to do a quick overview so to update your BIOS you'll need
to go to your motherboard manufacturers website to your motherboards support page and download
the most recent BIOS revision there.
You'll then boot into your BIOS and update it using the file you just downloaded.
Now that you are running the most current version of your motherboard BIOS the next
thing you're gonna wanna probably do is enable your RAMs XMP profile.
If you went out and spent uhh... you know, a little bit more money than normal to get
some high speed RAM; this is something you're gonna wanna go and turn on.
Enabling XMP on your RAM is a very easy process and I have another video you can check out
in the cards or in the video description if you'd like to learn more about it.
The next thing to do after building your PC is to install your operating system.
In this case we're going to be Installing Windows.
Installing Windows is a pretty simple process.
Just like with updating your motherboard BIOS and enabling XMP I have a dedicated video
showing how to install a fresh copy of Windows to a PC which is popping up in the cards right
now and linked in the video description if you're in need of a detailed step by step
tutorial.
For the purposes of this video we're once again just going to do a quick overview.
You'll first download the Windows 10 Media Creation Tool from Microsoft.com.
You then create installation media to a USB flash drive which takes about 10 or 15 minutes
to do.
Once it's created you can plug it into your new PC and begin installing Windows.
Just FYI, you do NOT have to have a Windows license key in order to install Windows 10
to your computer.
You CAN install Windows now and then purchase a key and input it later if you want.
Or you don't ever have to purchase a key if you don't want to.
You CAN use Windows 10 for FREE if you don't care about not being able to use some of the
personalization options and don't mind this watermark in the bottom right of your screen.
Installing Windows is super simple you just follow the on screen prompts and eventually
you'll land at your desktop.
The next thing you'll want to do to get your new build running as smooth as possible is
to install the drivers for your hardware.
I always start with the LAN driver first.
Sometimes Windows will have a built in LAN driver that will work but most of the time
in PC builds I've done I boot into Windows for the first time and I can't connect to
my home network or the internet at all.
I then have go to a different computer that has working internet and go to my motherboard
manufacturers webpage and download the specific drivers for my motherboard.
The motherboard in the PC I'm using for this video is an Asus Prime Z490-A so I'm going
to type the name of my motherboard into Google and here is the link to the product page for
my motherboard.
I'll then want to click on Support here... and then go to Driver & Utility... in this
drop down I'm going to select my Operating System, which is Windows 10 64 bit... and
now here are the different drivers for my motherboard.
The main ones I'm going to download for this video are the LAN driver here, the chipset
driver and the Audio driver.
If your motherboard has built-in WiFi or bluetooth or anything else you'll want to download and
install those as well.
Once we've downloaded our drivers we need to unzip them.
So we first need to navigate to our download folder and here we have the drivers we downloaded
all zipped up.
Like I already said I like to install the LAN driver first so we're going to do this
one here that says Gigabit Ethernet Driver.
I'm going to right click on that folder and click Extract All which will bring us to this
window.
And now I'm going to press the extract button here at the bottom and once the folder has
been unzipped we'll see this.
Now this driver appears to have the folders within the first zipped folder also zipped
so I'm going to select this one here that says LAN Intel and extract the files in it.
Ok, now we've got a bunch of different files here.
Under Type here at the top of the Window we want to find the files that say Application
and that should be our driver installer package.
This one here called Asus Setup should be the one we want so I'm going to double click
on it... it will then ask if we want to allow this app to make changes to our computer to
which we want to say Yes... aaaannnnddd... that's apparently it for this one.
Most of the time you'll shave an install Wizard pop up and you'll have to follow the on screen
prompts to install the driver; but apparently in the case of this Asus motherboard I'm using
it installed the driver just like that and now as you can see the Ethernet port on the
motherboard is working.
You'll then want to repeat this process for your Audio driver, chipset driver, bluetooth
and built-in Wifi, if your motherboard has those of course, and any other hardware you've
put into your system.
The most important one probably being your GPU driver.
Similarly to our other drivers we're going to need to download this driver from our GPU
manufacturer; that being either AMD or Nvidia.
Or in the future maybe even Intel depending on how their current efforts to produce GPU's
pan out.
Once again I'm not going to go into detail on where to download GPU drivers or how to
install them in this video because I have another video dedicated to that topic you
can check out that is, uh, yah... popping up in the cards here and linked in the video
description if you'd like detailed instructions on that.
With all the drivers now installed you're ready to download and install all of your
favorite applications.
You can switch out Microsoft Edge for Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox or whatever other
web browser you prefer using and then install your game launchers like Steam, Epic Games,
Ubisoft, Battlenet, Origin and what have you.
Wow!
This video really is becoming a plug for a bunch of my older videos isn't it?
Because I have yet another video linked in the description dedicated to how to copy your
games from most of these launchers from your old PC to your new one to save you time by
not having to re-download your games.
If you have really fast internet then this isn't going to be a problem for you at all
but if it's going to take you hours and hours or even DAYS to download all your games again...
uhh, then you may want to check that video out.
Please remember to do the YouTube stuff before you take off if you enjoyed this video.
And if you really, really like what I do here on my channel and want to help me continue
making helpful videos like this one, please check out my Amazon Store, which like everything
else is linked in the video description where you can purchase different things I think
are cool and have featured in my past videos.
Thanks for sticking around to the end.
I hope you have a great day and uh... maybe I'll be seeing you in another video here shortly?
Ok...
We'll catch ya later.