- Good morning, my friends,
and welcome to an all new experience.
Our wonderful sponsors Micro Center are new and improved.
Have you seen this?
It's like a brand new store in here.
There's a tech bar.
There's your find product fast sign.
This is like bigger than the old store by itself.
Today,
we are going to be building the bluest gaming PC we can,
to help celebrate the launch
of the brand new Tustin Micro Center location.
Or the relaunch?
It's very different in here.
There a lot of new things here in this store.
Not only is the actual store itself bigger,
but this is the concept store for Micro Center.
So this is the store of the future.
And because of that,
not only do they have a bunch of big deals on products
including these Samsung Chromebooks,
which if you come in store while they'll still last,
only 50 bucks each.
- [Ken] What?
Whoa. (laughs) - $180 off.
- [Ken] That might be the cheapest Chromebook
I've seen at retail.
- Yes, I think that's what the kids call the door buster.
Limit one per customer.
You're not a customer.
You're a freeloader.
Look at the SSDs. (whimpers)
Oh my god, Ken.
Like 120 bucks. (laughs)
They've got the new 4K Apple TVs for 80 bucks
and a hundred bucks.
- [Ken] Wow, they're serious about this grand opening.
- We're recording to this on November 9th.
So we gotta get this video up ASAP
because this stuff's gonna go fast.
Limit one per customer.
I don't think people realize how much is in this store,
available at your friendly local Tustin Micro Center.
No, Ken, you can't take advantage of anything.
No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
You can't take advantage of any of the deals.
Just look.
We gotta build a PC.
Do you see these ceilings?
I don't know where these came from.
Apparently they were there the whole time.
I'm scouting not only for this video,
but for future episodes of BROKE vs PRO.
So I know kind of what to expect.
I gotta have my advantage.
Look at all the filament.
- [Ken] Whoa, this is all 3D printing stuff?
- I'm still lost.
I actually don't know where I'm going.
We're gonna get st-
Look, we gotta stay focused.
Not get distracted by the deals in the new store.
We found the MP3 player section.
Wow, it's an actual MP3 player section.
I thought they were kidding.
You ready for your few Clips Sport Go.
- [Ken] Those things are actually really good though.
- [Austin] Are they really?
- [Ken] Yeah, they can play like FLACs and stuff.
- Look at all the UNI fans.
Look at the Noctuas.
The Hyper 212, look at how many Hyper 212s they have.
Look at all the fittings.
Beautiful.
Look at this.
Dude, they've got all the new stuff.
All the new 12th gen i5s,
i5s, i7s, i9s.
Look at this.
Yo, they've got the 5600G.
I haven't even see one of these yet.
Okay.
I'm gonna build something with that, all right, all right.
Dude, look at the lighting too.
It's like they updated the store
just to make our videos look better.
(gasps)
Oh my god.
These are all 6900XTs.
[Ken] Wait, these are,
wait, they haven't, - All of these are 60-
- [Ken] Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa,
wait a minute. What?
- There's probably over a hundred 6900XTs
on these shelves right now.
Yup, yup, yup, yup, yup, yup, yup, yup.
Dude, they've got everything.
With this much stock it actually might last a little bit,
but like I haven't seen this many graphics cards since 2017.
And that brings us perfectly to the build your own section,
which I feel like
we've kind of already been walking through a little bit.
So not only do they have the actual bar
where they will actually build a PC for you,
but it keeps going back here.
Have you seen the chassis garage?
So of course the most important component
when you're building the bluest gaming PC
is to find the bluest case.
And I think it's gonna be hard to go wrong
with the O11 Dynamic in dynamic blue.
So I think what we should do
is we should focus on trying to find components
that are neutral color or blue,
or have RGB.
As if there weren't enough reasons
to come in to your friendly local Micro Center,
in addition to all the crazy deals they've got going on,
is they also have a promotion right now
where if you check out the link in the description
and sign up,
you go in store next time,
you get a coupon to get a free 240 gig SSD for free,
which as you can see there are plenty out there. (laughs)
All right, so next up we have the Core i9 12900K,
which side note, just comes in some very cool packaging.
Look at this.
- [Ken] Oh, it's like a replica wafer.
- I know.
So this is our first time
doing any kind of Intel 12th gen build.
Now something I know about this,
it's obviously a very powerful chip,
but we also wanna make sure that we properly cool it.
So for a board,
obviously we need to go with one of the Z690s.
I kind of lean toward the black, the Carbon,
'cause I feel that's going to fit in better
with the look of the case.
So one thing you should consider
when you're building a 12th gen Intel sort of build
is that different boards will support either DDR4 or DDR5.
So there are advantages to both.
DDR4 is cheaper, a little bit easier to get your hands on.
DDR5 will give you the best performance.
And since we're going with the bluest,
the ultimate Intel build,
we might as well go with a board that supports full DDR5.
Let's find a GPU.
- [Ken] Oh, uh, uh, no, oh!
I can do it. I can do it just believe me.
- [Ken] Awesome.
- Yeah.
- [Ken] Fix your mess, you just moved their sign.
Move it back.
- Okay, fine, let me move my cart through.
All right, 3060s, 3080s.
I mean, dude, we can do the 3080 Ti's.
Wait, let's see if we can find a 3090.
3090!
- [Ken] Whoa.
- [Austin] Okay, I feel like that's the move.
- [Ken] Yes. - The Dominator Platinum.
It's the black color way again, which I think is important,
but also we have the full RGB array on the top.
- [Ken] 1200 Watts.
- I need a lot of power for building the ultimate system.
There's one ultimate SSD.
That's the move, 980 Pro.
Now we need to really focus on,
oh look, they've got the coolers right there. (laughs)
All right.
So big reason why I wanna go with the Lian Li Galahad
is the fact that this is going to support the new socket
on these 12th gen chips.
So if you look at the motherboard,
unlike Intel processors for a long time,
the physical socket size is now larger,
which means that older coolers,
basically all coolers that exist right now
will not work out of the box.
So that's something to consider.
Most companies are offering some upgrades,
so they'll just sell you,
or they'll just like ship you
like the actual like adapter plate or something
to make their coolers work.
This is exactly what we need,
because this will allow us to use our Galahad cooler
on our LJ 1700 socket.
Let's start paying attention to the aesthetic.
So this is actually our first time doing a build
with the Strimers.
So these aren't totally different
than something like these sleeved extensions
that we typically use.
The big differences is that,
these will actually give us full RGB.
So essentially the cables
that are running from our power supply
into our graphics card.
And maybe we'll see if we can find some more,
but at least we'll have them into our graphics card
will be fully RGB-fied.
I think we'll be in pretty good shape
to make this thing super blue.
All right, my friends.
It's time to get to building.
I'm gonna run you over with the cart but it's fine.
- [Jared] What is?
- Oh, you didn't see,
you didn't see what we're building today?
We're building the bluest game PC.
♪ I'm blue. ♪
- The bluest? - [Austin] Yeah.
- Like the color blue or like?
- [Austin] You act like you don't know what we're doing.
(laughs)
- You're, Jared, no one said act.
You'll be like, no, bluest?
- What the hell is the color blue?
- Blue? - I don't know what blue is.
- Oh my god.
So I just wanna prioritize today getting this thing,
even if we don't kill manage it very well,
just like somewhat up and running.
So we can then start spending time tuning
and making sure that everything is actually,
gonna be functional.
I also have my secret weapon,
but we're gonna use that later.
All right. - Secret what?
- [Austin] Don't worry about it.
Okay, so.
- [Ken] Oh man, that is, look at that.
- Hello, welcome to tech tech potato.
(Jared laughs) - Oh Jesus.
- Oh my god.
- [Jared] Yeah, this is very good-looking.
- [Austin] Oh wait, actually there's a slight problem.
That's a much darker blue than I thought it was going to be.
- No, it matches. - It's fine.
It's Intel blue.
That's not the same, but that works fine.
- [Jared] Dude, straight up.
we cut part off the box and we use it.
- Now, I'm actually excited.
I wasn't excited before now I am.
One of the other things they don't know about,
is what the actual RGB on the motherboard looks like,
but that is a very high end board.
So I'm assuming that it will be comprehensive.
Oh wow, this is my first time seeing 1700 and,
- [Jared] It's pretty chunky.
- Wait, what does it say?
LJ 1700 and 1800.
Is 1800 a thing?
Did they accidentally leak
the next generation of Intel processors?
Intel 17th gen leaked, confirmed right now.
How do you actually take this apart?
- He's gonna drop the CPU. - Excuse me.
You're wearing LTT merch.
You don't get to touch anything.
- [Jared] What do you mean?
You're a father and you can't open this box.
- You're imbued by the power of Linus.
Oh my god, Jared.
- I'm a supporter, very comfortable.
(all laughing)
- What is wrong with you? - Very comfortable.
- Oh my god.
Would I have to start making merch,
just so you stop wearing this?
So this is the Core i9 12900 K.
Do you wanna do the honors?
I feel like you're ready.
- Should we look up a video on how 1200 works?
- [Austin] No, no.
We're supposed to be making the video
on teaching people how to do this.
- We're experts.
We know what we're doing.
- [Ken] It's our first and last time.
(all laugh)
- [Jared] I do not like
how our laughs were perfectly synced. (laughs)
- [Austin] Do you even read the manual?
- [Jared] Why would I?
- [Ken] Do you read the manual?
- No, I read anandtech.com.
- Look at this.
This is some next level shot right here.
- [Austin] This is the POV.
- Some X games stuff.
- This carbon fiber looks absolutely sick.
What I've never seen before is this PCI slot.
It actually has two sides to the thermal pads.
So if you're using something, which actually to be fair,
the 980 Pro is not super inefficient,
but if you're using a super power hungry SSD.
Oops. Okay.
It'll keep it cool on both sides, which is nice.
This thermal pad feels like slime.
- [Ken] That's every thermal pad.
- Why didn't you immediately go to sniff it?
That is not the appropriate response
when something is slimy.
- So for the Strimers.
I always hate saying the word strimmer.
- [Jared] I thought it was strymer.
- Is it strymer not strimmer?
- Well that's what I always pronounce it as.
- Oh god. Strimer, it is strimmer.
- Yeah but, do we trust Bitwit?
I think that question you had in the beginning
was a very good question. - I trust Bitwit implicitly.
- Let's call Linus.
- [Ken] It's gotta be something Canadian line.
- We've got to get that Canadian accent.
- Oh, it's this strimmer, ey, hardy-har-har.
I'm Linus.
- [Ken] These are RGB cables in essence,
but because they have to run light,
they're also very, very stiff.
So doing the cable runs
will require a little bit of finesse.
Three of them. - Holy.
It's two.
- [Ken & Jared] What?
- MSI, thank you for not adding five more eight pins.
- [Jared] What?
- So that actually is going to make our cable runs easier,
'cause we only need to run two of the Strimers.
I mean actually we need to run four.
- Yes. - Oh you have.
- [Jared] Wait four?
- So we're trying to build the bluest gaming PC, right?
We've got an Intel processor, blue case,
but also we have to acknowledge
that we're using a team green graphics card
NVIDIA graphics card,
which doesn't seem fair.
It doesn't really seem like the way to do it.
So I would propose we build the RGB gaming PC,
Intel blue team processor,
Nvidia green team graphics card,
and an AMD blue graphics card.
- [Ken] Oh this. Oh my.
(Austin laughs)
- [Austin] Look.
It's blue. - So wait.
We're using team red in order to get blue in our PC.
That doesn't just? - Okay but no, no.
But okay, hear me out, hear me out.
- [Austin] It's great. It's great.
- [Ken] Yo, come around here, come around here.
Yo, look, look. - Look at the blue.
- [Ken] That actually.
- [Jared] Oh, yo, wait a minute.
- [Ken] Yeah, okay, maybe we might be on to something.
- Is it strictly necessary?
Probably not.
Is it gonna give us some headaches
in installing both AMD and Nvidia drivers
in the same system?
Maybe?
But it's the bluest graphics card
that I've ever seen in my life.
And so we'll use it for 3D video model render gaming
and then we'll use the 3090 for everything.
How's it going?
- Oh, uh, it's going well.
I'm trying to hook up all of these span cables
and this is actually kind of, what did I?
Did I did I break it?
So the cool thing about these Lian Li UNI fans
is that they just kind of nest together like this,
which not only just makes it really convenient
to mount them into a case,
but also you can daisy chain all the cabling
and connect them onto the included hub,
if you buy the set of them.
So this is probably the least amount of cable management
we'll have to do for not only powering fans,
but also doing RGB.
- [Austin] As of right now,
we're gonna be using the Strimers for our PCI power,
but we're gonna use these blue extensions,
which also are a very nice shade of blue
for our 20+4 pin and our CPU.
Is this your first time applying thermal paste?
You've done this before.
- What's thermal paste?
- [Austin] X is the move,
especially since it's the bigger chip,
we wanna do X it.
Okay, well that corner is the hot corner anyways.
It's fine.
- [Ken] Poor guy's worried about the comments.
- [Austin] Yeah, that was the force course, see.
Okay. Actually, no, no, no.
That is fine. That is fine.
The thing is when you put the thing on the thing,
it goes squish out like the thing.
- Those were the words of professionals,
ladies and gentlemen.
- So we are making progress.
We have our Carbon board installed.
We have the SSD installed.
We have our two DIMMs.
We have our cooler.
We have the actual radiator installed
and we're starting to put together our cable management,
which we still dunno exactly if we have the right cables.
But I think,
we almost gonna have to start plugging things in to see.
But the good thing is we can start installing things
like our graphics card.
(Jared whispers)
Stop whispering into the mic, Jared.
(Jared laughs) All right.
There we go.
That blue looks really sick, I mean.
- [Jared] I think AMD did Intel blue
better than Intel did.
- You know what?
Facts, bad things may happen, but it's fine.
We didn't say we're going to build the best PC.
We're just going to build the bluest one.
♪ I'm blue, da ba dee da ba di. ♪
("Blue Da Ba Dee")
- All right, let's just get to work.
- So today we start off day two
with a little bit of a problem.
So we spent a lot of yesterday,
and a lot of this morning trying to figure out
our RGB situation.
Now, as you guys remember,
we're trying to build the bluest PC possible, which-
- [Austin] I'm literally wearing blue for that reason.
- Yes, Austin is wearing his blue shirt.
The only things that we can't get blue are the RGBs.
Now- - What, you mean everything?
(Austin laughs) - I know.
Yes.
We have our MSI motherboard here and it works totally fine.
We have Windows 11 up and running.
We ran some apps.
We were doing some benchmarks.
Everything works totally well,
except for MSI Dragon Center,
which might be having some problems
with the fact that this is just a brand new,
kind of system altogether, Z690.
There might be some software issues
that are not allowing us to do what we need with RGB.
Most importantly,
we cannot even change the motherboard RGB to just be.
- [Austin] Now I can just flip that on and off on the board.
Why I cannot do is change it in any meaningful way.
So what we're going to do is this,
we're gonna swap our motherboard out.
If we wanted to spend all day,
we can probably find some way of using a chain of adapters
to try to get things to talk to each other,
but we have so many different things.
And even if we do all that,
we're likely not gonna be able to get
the motherboard RGB to work.
So in the interest of building the bluest gaming PC
down to my shoes.
- [Ken] That we can build today.
- Yes, that we can build today,
we're gonna swap out the board with,
thankfully we have one other Z690 in the office.
Look when it comes to building high-end gaming PCs,
ah, sometimes improvisation,
improvisation, improvisation.
And so my friends after what was a very long day,
the PC is almost done.
And I gotta say it's looking pretty blue.
So we've made a lot of modifications over the last day.
I'm pretty happy with that.
I mean, we haven't finished cable management.
If you look around to the backside,
it is literally garbage town central,
but it's fine.
We'll clean that up.
- There's a lot of junk in that trunk.
Right now,
we are working with I think, four different RGB suites.
We have our SL fans over here, our UNI fans,
that are working off of the Lian Li software.
We have our AIO and our top three Lian Li AIO fans
going into the board RGB, which is run by RGB Fusion.
Our graphics card is running off of the MSI Center,
Mystic Light system.
And then we have our RAM going in through iQ
and coordinating all that was a little bit of a nightmare.
But luckily,
we're only working with pretty much two different colors
or two different hues.
- [Austin] Okay I think it's time,
for a montage.
And then we'll explain how the PC actually works.
- [Ken] Hell, yeah.
- [Austin] That's the beginning of the montage,
is hell yeah?
Can you give a little more energy?
Let's do it one more time.
One more time.
(clears throat)
(Ken screams)
(electronic music begins)
(Ken screams) (electronic music continues)
(Ken screams)
- Behold my friends, the bluest gaming PC we've done yet.
Not that we've ever tried to do this in the past.
One of the big things I wanna talk about,
is the processor that we used.
This is the first time we built a system
with the brand new 12th generation Intel Core processors.
There are some pros and cons to this approach.
The pro is that this is pretty much the best gaming
and sort of overall sort of media encoding processor,
that is anything short of like a Xeon or a Threadripper.
You have eight performance cores which are hyper-threaded,
as well as eight efficiency cores
for a total of 16 legit cores and 24 total threads.
That's, while certainly does not come cheap,
does deliver a lot of performance,
but it is a little bit more complicated
than just going for straight Core i9,
slap it in there and call it a day.
On the surface Core i9s, i7s, and i5s,
they'll have more chips coming later next year,
or early next year that don't have overclocking,
the little bit more budget-friendly stuff.
They're very powerful,
and yet they're very power hungry.
Generally speaking it is going to be more efficient
when you actually load it up with games
and 3D rendering application.
Now specifically for this system with the Core i9,
what we could've gotten away,
with something like maybe a 240 millimeter radiator,
much below that you can start running into throttling.
You need a lot of cooling
to keep one of these processors running,
especially considering that you're gonna throw something
like a 3070, 3080, or 3090 in the system.
It can get toasted.
The other side is price.
So we opted to eventually go with the Core i9
paired with DDR4 memory.
Now for the maximum performance,
we would've gone with the DDR5 board
as well as DDR5 RAM.
That's certainly great if you've got the money for it,
but what is a little bit harder to compare
is if you're looking at AMD versus Intel.
The Intel chips might be roughly the same price as the AMD,
but the boards are very expensive on Intel for the moment,
'cause it's just come out.
And you also have to spend a lot of money
to get that DDR5 memory.
Inside this blue system though,
I am very happy with how it came out.
Not only does it have plenty of performance
to run the very many RGB programs we have.
And of course the world's greatest web browser,
our channel sponsor Opera.
I mean, you've seen this wallpaper, right?
I mean, clearly you need the most powerful PC in the world
to gaze at this beauty, look in the description.
But of course, thank you very much to Micro Center
for sponsoring this video.
If you wanna go check out the new Tustin store,
they have tons of deals going on
over the next couple of weeks.
And if you wanna know about any of the components
that we've used for this build,
billings will be in the description.
Now if you, excuse me,
I'm gonna go back to Tustin and move in permanently.
That's it?
That's the joke I live in Micro Center now.
I'm not even kidding.
I'm sorry, honey, that you had to find out this way,
but you just don't have the RGB I need.