This here is my current editing and gaming PC.
And this is a clean slate.
Time for something new.
I try to put myself in the shoes of a general consumer because that's where I was.
That's where I started and I was very frequently flipping hardware early on in this channel
just to keep the channel lively, just to keep the, you know, the builds fresh.
So I wasn't reusing the same stuff over and over.
And in the spirit of not reusing the same hardware,
we're going to be swapping from my Intel rig to an AMD one.
I kind of want to move away from Intel for a bit because I've been having some stability
issues and I want to see if I can replicate those with the AMD platform.
It's not Windows 11 dependent because I was seeing the same thing with Windows 10.
It might be the card and the drivers associated with the card.
I can't really figure it out.
And I've tried to get this on film, but every time it happens, I'm not ready for, you know,
filming.
So basically the Explorer will just crash.
Black screen.
It'll look like that for like 10 seconds.
Nothing on my monitors.
And then things will boot back up again.
And it happens so inconsistently that I can't really figure out what's causing it.
So that's one of the reasons why I want to start clean here.
The other issue with this rig is that this cooler from ID Cooling is a bit weak.
And this is just, this is totally my fault.
I really like the way this cooler looks.
I wish it was a bit larger.
But for $1300K, it's not really enough.
I have undervolted and underclocked the CPU just a tad and temps are in check.
But again, I'm losing out on some performance here.
It doesn't make a ton of sense to use this cooler.
I'm also in a position now where I need a few more USB ports at the back of my motherboard.
And yeah, this one isn't really cutting it.
It only has seven.
And that's a bit, that's a bit sparse for a Z790 motherboard, I think.
So we've a bit of disassembly and rebuilding to take care of in this video.
The only thing, now that I think about it, that we'll be recycling in this rig is the DDR5.
It's a low profile kit from Corsair.
And I think it's going to be compatible with our larger tower cooler
that we're going to be using for the new platform.
If I don't see any repeated, you know, black screens, like I have been with this rig,
then if I can fit it, I'll try to throw in the RTX 4080 in this one, just to see if that's the issue.
I have a feeling it is maybe a graphics driver issue or just a card issue specifically.
But it's very difficult to troubleshoot software.
So we'll try our best.
Are you ready?
Stay with me.
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So, like I said, the only thing we're going to be recycling from this rig is the DDR5.
So we might as well go ahead and take that out now.
Super good looking kit, if I do say so myself.
I think I'm going to go with the N7B650E from NZXT.
I just realized it only has one additional USB port from what we're starting with,
but at least it's something.
And of course, got our DDR5.
We've got an MP600 Pro XT 2TB.
That's going to be my storage drive.
It's a Gen 4 NVMe, very fast reads and writes.
And that will work, I think, very nicely with this motherboard.
We're going to use a Dark Power 13 850W power supply and then a Dark Rock Pro 4.
I'm not entirely sure how well these two are going to get along,
but I'll pin something in the comment section if it doesn't work out.
Oh, and I just forgot, I actually am recycling something else from the old rig, my games drive.
This is a 2TB SSD and it has all my games on it.
It's very nice and convenient to just like migrate this from rig to rig
and not have to reinstall all of my games,
which you can imagine would take quite some time, even with a fast connection.
I don't expect this is what's causing the black screens, however,
because, well, this is just idle oftentimes when it occurs.
Let's go ahead and kick things off with our BBM.
This stands for Big Beautiful Motherboard, by the way.
This socket looks familiar, a lot like Intel's LGA now,
which means the pins are in the socket, so be extra careful.
We're going to gently drop ours in here.
DDR5 is up next. Remember, we have four modules to take care of.
And there we are, looking real good.
Now, I think I'm going to leave this heat sink off,
since we already have a fairly beefy one on our NVMe.
And check out how beefy this thing is.
You can see why I wanted to remove that stock heat sink.
This one already has a very large one equipped.
She looks like part of the board with this color scheme.
Now, just taking care of these standoffs for the cooler support,
then we'll be able to put this entire thing in the case.
Drop it down nice and easy, then I think we will have just enough clearance here.
Yeah, look at that for that RAM.
This is a sweet fitment.
And the second fan is going in.
Now, the LANCOOL 205 Mesh C looks really good.
You can see it's got a fully meshed out front panel.
It's got plenty of space inside,
although it is slightly more compact than your traditional mid-tower.
It has seven PCI slots at the rear.
I think that might be what the C stands for.
You get a cable bar toward the front there.
You can fit slightly oversized ATX motherboards if you wanted,
although you're not going to have much clearance below the standard nine standoffs.
We've got a basement below.
You can remove the included hard drive cage
and then have a really long power supply if you wanted.
A cutout there for your graphics card cabling,
and then plenty of cutouts elsewhere,
although you don't get rubber grommets,
which is one of the reasons why this case was a bit cheaper than the competition.
It does, however, come with three RGB fans,
one 120 at the rear and two 140s at the front.
I've already removed those.
However, I'm just going to run some Silent Wings 4 fans from Be Quiet.
My only real concern is probably cable management.
There's not a ton of space behind the motherboard tray,
but it does look fairly clean back here now that we've got the three fans out.
You can see we've got an included RGB and fan hub,
so you can run both of your sets of cables into this.
That's really nice.
Helps clean things up a bit.
And look at all that space down below.
We're going to run a fairly large power supply again
in that Dark Power 13 down there.
Just don't mind the mess.
Be honest, are you one of those clean as you go type guys,
or do you just like let your whole room get super trashy while you're building?
Depends on the time of day for me.
We're going to gently drop in our platform here,
being careful to mind the standoffs.
Going to use the cutout at the rear as a sort of guide.
Oof, and I already see a potential issue.
I don't think that's going to fit.
That is either going to touch the glass or will be too tall for the glass.
So let's go ahead and do a quick test fit now.
Might as well get this out of the way.
The moment of truth then.
Yeah, I really don't think this is going to work.
Wow, it's touching perfectly.
I don't think we're going to have an issue with vibrations,
especially with these higher end fans from Be Quiet,
but it's almost like this cooler and this case were made for each other.
Holy cow, I can't believe how close that is.
And with the basic wiring taken care of, we can now move on to the PSU.
That conveniently rhymed.
Just when you thought power supplies couldn't get sexy.
Look at that, they even gave us some sweet, sweet PU.
I'm going to slide it in from the right side here.
Ooh, that is a perfect fit.
Come on now.
Oh, that's just super snug.
Holy cow.
All righty, and we'll tighten things down.
I don't want to forget our game storage drive and slide that in off to the side,
just so it's sort of out of the way.
Power things up.
Also don't want to forget our SATA data cable.
I'm going to add several fans to this rig, including a 120 mil at the rear,
which is going to be a tight fit.
Holy cow, tolerances in this case are pretty thin.
I'm going to throw a two 140 mils up top, the bracket in this case, by the way,
is removable, which is nice.
So we've got those two secured.
Easy does it now.
I get everything else here wired up, including obviously the 24 pin.
And we've things looking fairly clean back here.
Come on, zip tie.
Come on now.
There we go.
We've got several of these holding everything together,
and I'm only going this hardcore with it because I'm a bit afraid of
how much actual cable clearance we're going to have here with the right panel on.
I'm still undecided about the graphics card.
I don't exactly know what I'm going to do.
I really don't want to recycle the 48.
I'd like to move on to something else.
The issue is I, a lot of the programs I use, including the entire Adobe suite,
is CUDA accelerated.
So I actually do benefit from using an NVIDIA GPU in those regards.
But in games, again, I really don't care which way I go.
I tend to lean a bit more towards NVIDIA just for the software stability.
But I mean, I'm already having software issues as it is with my old rig.
So I don't think it would hurt to go with a 7900 XTX or something.
I'm torn.
And I already know this is going to be a super tight fit.
In fact, oh my gosh, it barely slides in.
Yeah, we're cutting it super close here.
Let's see.
Can we even fit fans up front?
Yeah, yeah, we can.
We can fit fans up front.
But we're going to be in the same situation we were in with the H5 Flow.
They're going to be practically touching the front of this card.
Um, it really does look good, though.
I gotta say, it looks really good having all this space down here filled out
with a larger heatsink in this card.
A lot of boring math later.
Well, OK, I'm kind of sort of backtracking now, and I'm second guessing myself.
So I've actually ripped the motherboard clean out of that case.
It's sitting right there, and I'm asking myself,
do I really want to have a CPU tower cooler touching tempered glass?
The answer to that is no, I really don't.
Long term, you know, who knows if you get vibrations and things.
It's just it's going to probably annoy me.
And I definitely don't want to go with a 48.
I want to stick by what I said earlier.
I don't want to put a card like that in my case again.
Now, I'm not really helping my case when I throw in a 7900 XTX
because it's still a really powerful card,
probably more powerful than I need.
But since I'm already switching to AMD for the CPU side of things,
we might as well just in a spirit of changing things up,
switch to AMD for the graphics card as well.
I don't think it's going to benefit me necessarily in Premiere Pro,
but the rig is going to be fast enough anyway.
I think just sheer horsepower alone will keep me going.
I'll be fine. I'll manage.
I'm also aware of the other elephant in the room.
Well, why not just swap cases then?
If you're having a CPU tower clearance issue, just get a wider case.
Heck, even the NZXT H5 Flow that we're coming from is wider than the 205 mesh C.
But now that I've started building in this case, I actually really like it.
I think for the price, it's a heck of a bargain.
So I want to stick with it just because I think it's a good case.
And there are other cooling options we could go with.
I think we're probably going to end up going with an AIO,
but we have enough clearance up top actually that we could mount one up here
and still have a little wiggle room down below.
Phew, that was about three hours worth of off-camera part swapping.
And I know it seems like I'm flip-flopping a lot.
I'm just trying to get this right because once it is finished,
I hopefully won't have to touch it for several months.
And it's important that this doesn't stay down for any decent amount of time
because I do use this to edit all the videos you see.
I also game with it.
So it's important that it stays up and running and functions properly.
I swapped out the tower cooler, obviously, for an AIO.
This is an ID cooling 240 mil rig.
And I swapped out the stock fans with some Silent Wings 4s.
These have higher CFM.
And the fin density in this AIO is actually pretty high.
I was able to wrap the tubing around the block a bit,
give it a little spiral effect.
I think it looks fairly clean.
Elsewhere, I didn't change too much.
I put two 140s up front.
I included some custom sleeve cables, actually some red accents in these.
And I think that's going to look really nice with the red accents in our graphics card.
Again, the 7900XTX.
And that card's not super beefy either.
It only uses two 8-pins, which is great.
It's going to come out to about here.
So we'll have some empty space toward the front.
And then we're going to also slot an Elgato 4K60 Pro capture card down below.
So yeah, a lot changed.
But we're pretty much back to where we were prior to all of this changing.
It just, yeah, sometimes it happens.
I'm not going to act like I had it all figured out to begin with.
That's cheating.
Here we go then, the 7900XTX looking super sexy.
Also, welcome to the red team.
I guess this is rather fitting here.
I really hope this looks as good as it performs because I don't really have a plan C here.
We're pretty much just committing to a full AMD build at this point.
Wow, that's like very tight tolerance.
Okay, something like that.
Why is this cringy?
Just get on in there.
There we go.
Yeah, I mean, I think it looks good.
The red on the cables doesn't exactly match the bright red in the card.
But it's something.
At least it kind of breaks up the random color in an otherwise black build.
I'm also going to slot in our capture card.
It's going to be a bit close to our discrete card.
I could lower it to the bottom slot.
I really don't like the slot spacing on this board.
If there was a slot in between the bottom two, that would be perfect.
Connected our supplemental PCI power cables.
I don't have them bridged, but they're actually staying rather tame right now.
So I'll leave them be.
There we go.
I really like the way this looks, by the way.
It's such a clean front panel.
And here we are.
What do you guys think?
I think it turned out quite well.
I know it's totally like subjective what you like and don't like.
But considering I was expecting to have an air cooler in here and maybe a bigger card
than what we ended up with, I think we did a good enough job keeping things clean,
keeping the exposed cabling to a minimum.
Glad I included custom sleeve cables.
Maybe would have liked for them to be like a royal red.
Might change those in the future.
They're just extensions, so they'll be easier to swap.
But otherwise, it's good.
It's probably not as good as the previous build, what we started with, but I'm happy
with just the idea of swapping to something fresh, swapping to all AMD in this case.
Excited to see how this will fare for me over the next six or 12 months.
And remember, there's no RGB in this.
So when we power it on, it should look pretty much the same way it does in some of these
B-roll shots, which I was aiming for.
It was intentional.
I'm just tired of the rainbow.
Frankly, I'm tired of even white LEDs.
I just want my rig to work and not blind me while I'm gaming.
So let's see if we did things correctly.
We've got power here at the rear.
We're going to power the front.
Uh oh.
That is books.
What's up, buddy?
Sorry, food is done.
Oh, food is done?
Yeah.
Oh, well, guess what?
I literally just finished building the computer.
Oh.
Yeah.
See?
So it's all ready to go now.
You like it?
Yeah.
Looks pretty cool.
I want to spin a fan.
Oh, the fans are already spinning right now.
It hurt the fingers.
Watch if I go.
Ow, ow, ow, ow.
The ow.
Ow, ow, ow.
I guess I really didn't expect there to be white LEDs in the block.
I couldn't tell if the block was semi-transparent or not for that very reason.
And then I, of course, forgot there was a sliver of white in the 7900XTX.
I don't think it's in the 7900XT, just the XTX.
I don't know.
But it's subtle.
It's very tame.
Not the end of the world.
This rig is also super quiet.
Thankfully, not hearing any coil whine at all, especially at idle, which I was hearing in my old rig.
That's a good sign.
It's just, I mean, I haven't even calibrated the fan curves yet.
It's just a testament to how quiet these Silent Wings fans are.
Even when you place them over a radiator, the high CFM models are just really good at not only
displacing air, but being especially quiet at the same time.
Other than that, I think all we need to do now is install Windows and reinstall every
single program I had on my old system.
That's going to take a little bit.
Like, I think it's healthy personally to occasionally reinstall Windows.
You know, things get very bogged down, very bloated in the long run.
You don't realize how many, you know, programs you have running that you may not use anymore.
And often they can, you know, take advantage of resources in the background that you could
otherwise be using for the programs you're using at hand.
So, you know, starting fresh, I don't think is a bad thing.
I tend to do it once every year or so.
And it does noticeably speed up the system.
When you have a fresh Windows 10 or Windows 11 install, it's just so much snappier than
a rig that's been running for two, three years, especially if it has tons of programs
already loaded on.
So if I'm being honest, that's probably what I'm looking forward to the most here.
I'm fairly experienced with the 7950X, not so much with the 7900XTX.
Golly, these names are just throwing me for...
What I really should have done is 7900X and then 7900XTX CPU and graphics.
That would have been the end of the world.
But I will report back shortly.
I'll let you know if the stability of the system is back, if we're seeing any random
black screens.
I was noticing it mostly when I was video editing.
So I expect that since we've swapped to all AMD, won't be CUDA accelerating or anything
like that.
We're probably not going to run into the same black screens.
If we do, then I suspect it's a Windows issue.
But I feel like it would be more widespread.
There'd be more reports of Explorer consistently crashing if it was happening across multiple
platforms and multiple hardware combinations.
So we'll see.
I'd say, again, just finicky software, but hopefully we'll be back up and running without
any issues.
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And I will catch you in the next one.
My name is Greg.
Thanks for learning with me.