It's been seven years and I finally am building a new computer! The last one I built was back
in around 2015, and I went all-out with that one and it lasted this long. So I'm
going all out with this one, so it can last hopefully just as long. So I basically spared
no expense in building this thing, also because I have to use this professionally.
I use it every single day for editing and stuff, it's got to be good. Oh, and if you're wondering,
no, I didn't get any YouTuber handouts on this, I did buy it all myself. And you can
just see the final product here. Though I will be changing the fan colors and stuff.
So what I'll do is give you an overview and show you all the different components going into it,
then show you the build process because things didn't exactly go as smoothly as I hoped, but
it all ended up getting put together in the end.
And then at the end, we can do just a little bit of benchmarking compared to my old computer, stuff
like that. So let me teleport you to the past right before I began building it. And I'll show
you an overview of all the components going into this. All right, so let's see what we got. We can
start off with the table. $25, Walmart, folding table, holding equipment worth many times that.
So that's going to be fun. For real though, we can start off with these CPU. The i9-12900K
Alder Lake latest generation Intel CPU, basically
top of the line. So I'm definitely excited to try this out. For the memory. DDR5, 128 GB
DDR5, 4800 MHz. Each of these is 32 Gigabytes on the slot. I know what you're thinking.
"What on earth do you need 128 Gigabytes for?", and
I have actually run into cases where I would have liked to have more, even though I have
like 80 Gigabytes in my computer now. Which was when I was editing some absolutely massive
Photoshop wallpapers I was making in Photoshop. And I was running into issues with memory.
So... And actually this was the main thing I was waiting to be able to buy before I even
bought anything else. I was like, "if I can't get the memory then
it will be useless". So I was able to buy this and then I was able to buy everything else.
For the motherboard, it is ASUS Rog Maximus Extreme Z690 motherboard.
This, as far as I know, besides the liquid cooled ones, is again they're top of the
line. We can go over in more detail what this has but it's got all the bells and whistles,
you know I love the bells and whistles. Though one thing I'm surprised [with] is
all the Z690 motherboards basically have not that many PCI slots.
So this is like top of the line. It's got only two 16x full width, PCI slots. And then a X1,
like really? What if I want to put more stuff in there? So that's kind of disappointing,
but really it was the only option that maybe until I'm more come out in the future. I don't
know. But, uh, I don't think I'll be complaining too much about this because
it's got enough M.2 slots, stuff like that.
We can go over it in more detail later. For storage, for the main drive it's going to
be two terabyte, Samsung 980 Pro. This is a 4.0 PCIE NVMe SSD M.2. And I also got a second one,
same thing, 980 Pro 2TB as a secondary drive for other stuff that I use for like a lot of my
video editing assets, stuff like that, that I do use pretty much every day
and would like to have as fast access to as possible.
Not in terms of like copying files, but more so latency is the reason I went with NVMe over
SATA. I don't know if it's going to really make a noticeable difference, but
I figured why not. Now as for the really big storage stuff,
I got two hard drives. So these are two Western Digital Gold, 18 Terabytes
each. These are going to go into RAID1 though,
so I'm not going to have 36. It's going to still be 18 Terabytes storage,
it's going to be mirrored. And that's because I don't necessarily trust hard drives too much,
especially ones that would potentially have this much data on it. That's one point of failure.
So basically I'm replacing the setup I have in my current computer, which is like three 6TB drives,
which I don't even use. I figured I'd replace them with one drive,
but just so I have some redundancy, put them RAID1, get a little bit faster read speed,
and then I'll feel comfortable in case one dies.
So that was my thinking behind getting these guys. CPU cooler, this time I won't with a
triple radiator. My current computer is a double radiator, so we're upgrading. This is a triple
120mm fan radiator. I'm going to put this on the top of the computer. And from what I was watching
with reviews, this is like basically one of the best ones you can get.
So I figured this is the one I'm going to get then. Then now I'm going to probably
rearrange the fan situation. Cause this comes with six fans on the radiator. It's a push-pull, so
three on each side. Probably not going to need that in my opinion. So what I'm instead doing is
actually going to replace the built-in fans, I'm going to repurpose the RGB fans that are on here.
And I got three industrial Noctua fans. So these are like the fastest ones they have,
they're loud as hell, but I figured these have super strong static pressure.
So these will more than probably be able to make up for the lack of push-pull in
the radiator between the radiator. More than enough power to push it through.
And then for the back of the case, which I don't even think I showed you yet,
is one of the other Noctua Chromax these are like the regular ones, not
industrial, so a little bit quieter. And I don't plan to run these on full speed,
it's just if I need it. I like to keep the apartment temperature higher than most people,
so that gives me a higher baseline. I need some better cooling, is my logic. Now for
the graphics card, I already have a 3080Ti in my current computer. I'm going to put it into
here. So I didn't have to buy a graphics card, thankfully. So I don't have that here,
but it will be in the build. And finally, we can talk about the power supply. AX1600i from Corsair.
This is as far as I know in the United States,
pretty much as high as you can get in terms of wattage, because I think there's what 1800 maybe
limit, in terms of wattage from the wall. And these are not 100% efficient and you're
probably thinking, "dude, you don't need 1600 Watts. What are you going to use this for?"
And I wanted to future proof it, I wanted to get a power supply that basically I would never
have to think about upgrading in the future, and I can use this in future builds as well.
And since it pretty much is the maximum that I would ever pull from the wall anyway,
it's a one and done thing. Finally, I'll just show you on the screen for the case.
It's the Lian Li O11 Dynamic XL, and I like Lian Li cases, my current computer case is a Lian Li
and it's a big one, so I don't mind big cases and this is probably going to be oversized.
But again, that doesn't bother me. It's glass on the side and front,
and I think it'll actually look kind of nice and I'm actually excited to have a
open window case for the first time in a computer. So at this point, I think I showed
you everything. I can now cut and then I'll take the computer case out of the box, put it up here,
show you some fan arrangement and then we can get started. All right so let's do a quick
walk around of the case. I took the side panel glass off already, so we can take a look inside.
So on the bottom there is a triple fan slot, and then there's also triple fan at the top.
So the idea is the air comes up through it. And then on the back, there's also a spot
for another fan. That's where the Chromax Noctua is going,
not the industrial ones, which are going to go on top with the radiator.
Also on the back, there are these two hard drive bays. So
each one can hold two 3.5 inch hard drives. Down here is where the power supply goes,
and of course there's the IO for the motherboard and all that. On the inside,
these are all 2.5 inch SATA trays, but these all can come out and be replaced with fans.
So that's probably what we're going to do. On the front we have various IO.
We have two different USBs here, microphone and headphone, USB-C. M and C switches,
honestly not sure what these are. I'm going to look them up, and then also on the bottom
more USB. And so I think it's time we can actually get started with the real build.
The first thing I wanted to get started on was putting in some fans. And I decided to start
with that bottom fan tray that did come out. So what I would do is open up the CPU cooler box,
which had a bunch of fans in it that I wasn't necessarily gonna use
on the cooler itself. So I took those out, took out the fan tray, which came out really easily
by itself, and then was able to just screw in
those fans and then put it back in. Then I opened up the Chromax fan from Noctua which had
a couple different options for vibration pad colors, but I decided to just go with black
to keep it simple anyway. Next came the power supply, nothing too exciting here.
I just took it out, had to take out a middle tray on the back of the computer, which is used for
mounting 2.5 inch drives if I wanted to but I don't need to, so I just took it out.
Then I was able to put the PSU at the bottom. Now for these slightly more interesting stuff,
we have the motherboard of course, took this out and there was a whole bunch of stuff in the box.
Mostly just a bunch of cable connectors for fans, RGB, and what-have-you. And the first
thing I noticed when I picked it up is, this thing was heavy. I mean, really heavy, dense.
More than I was expecting, but I guess considering it had a bunch of metal,
especially on the back, it was all heat sink stuff. So kind of made sense.
So I decided to put that in next and just drop it in there, and start putting in the standoff
screws. And there were a couple that I were looking for and I found out they
were beneath a metal plate covering the M.2 drives. So you can see I took that off here,
screwed in the rest. I think there were maybe two more, and then I was done with that.
Then we come to the most important, but also the most stressful part, opening up the CPU and
putting that in there. Fortunately, it went off without a hitch, despite me literally,
during the most important part of the computer build, I forgot to actually attach my anti-static
wrist strap so you can see it's not actually connected to anything here as I put it in.
Fortunately, nothing bad happened. Though,
forgive some of the autofocus and auto exposure issues on the camera. I should have disabled that,
but you can see it drops in. I was able to close it up. Apparently I was supposed to
take off that little plastic piece around the bar, but it didn't cause a problem,
and I did take it off later. Next real quick I took out the 2.5 inch drive mounts on the side so
that I could later replace them with fans. Next, I needed to mount the CPU cooler, but to do that,
I first had to install the bracket for the back of the CPU on the motherboard, and to do that,
I had to remove the back hard drive trays. Both of them unfortunately, but I was able to do it and
then just mounted it on there, screwed it in, and it was good to go to install the rest of cooler.
Then here is where I mounted the fans all onto the radiator before actually mounting
everything into the computer. And these are those industrial Noctua fans that I showed you before.
And see if you can notice in a second how I messed up, but I'll show you next
what I did. Anyway, I screwed these in and then I thought I was good to go.
So I went ahead and mounted that radiator. You can see here, I lined it up. It wasn't too hard.
It took about eight screws, I think. So it was definitely on there pretty securely.
And here you might be able to recognize what my mistake was,
although I still did not notice at this point, even though it's right in front of me.
But I mounted it and then was ready to actually mount the CPU cooler itself next.
So I went ahead and did that as well, which also had a problem that I'll show you later.
But I did not know that at the time as well. And for the cooler, I decided to just go with the
pre-installed thermal paste. I figured it would be fine enough. Here's where I realized my mistake,
though if you didn't notice it before. I put the cables for the fans on the wrong side. I wanted
to actually put them closer to the motherboard so I could run it behind the case, obviously.
So that meant I had to unscrew all the fans, which wouldn't be a problem normally,
except there were two screws that were completely blocked by the motherboard. So I couldn't get
a screwdriver in there. So I literally had to take out a bit from the screwdriver, and hand
stick it in there and unscrew it, which it did fit fortunately.
So I was able to get it out without taking out the whole radiator, which would have been such
a pain. Next step was to install those side RGB fans that came with the water cooler.
And I had to choose a fan controller. So I could either choose the ASUS one
that came with the motherboard or the EK one that came with the water cooler.
And I went with the ASUS one, just cause I thought it looked better, but
ended up actually changing it, which I'll explain later. And there was no room though for any of
these. So I ended up actually replacing the top fan back with the 2.5 inch mount and then just
mounted the RGB controller on there. So only two fans on the side, but I figured not a huge deal.
I skipped a bunch of the cable management stuff and running the wires,
but you could see the final result here, there's a ton of stuff back here,
but fortunately this won't be visible. Here's the front where everything would be visible,
and I think I did a pretty good job running all the USB internal cables and stuff.
The last thing to do is just install a bunch of the components, like graphics card, RAM,
that sort of stuff. We can move on to that next. For the two NVMe M.2 drives, the ASUS motherboard
actually came with this really cool adapter called a DIMM.2 adapter. Where basically it
installs into a slot that is basically the same type of thing as RAM, but it's dedicated for PCIe,
and it basically saves up two M.2 slots on the motherboard. So I figured I'd use
that for the main and the secondary SSD drive, just so it's easier to access,
and you can also see where it actually installs here right next to the RAM. So
easily accessible, and I just think it's cool feature so I'm glad it had that.
Then came time to install the RAM, there's four sticks here.
And I always forget how hard you have to press down to really click these in fully. Especially,
it was scary considering how expensive these things were, but I got all four in
no problems. I think I might've had to reseat it once or twice eventually, but I got them in there.
Then was the hard drives. This was by far the easiest, there were a couple of trays
you screw it onto, and then they slide right in. Before I put in the graphics card, there was one
more NVMe M.2 drive that I had to put in. And for this one, I had to go below that
plate, so I just took that out. There was a couple thermal pads that came with it.
And went in like a normal M.2 drive, screwed back on and we were ready for the big boy,
the GPU. And that went in with no issues also. I already had the power connectors
run through the bottom. I probably could have made it look a little bit
neater if I ran it through the side, but I'm not going to worry too much about it.
Now we get to a funny part, because I had to teleport here too, a little bit into the
future. After a bunch of troubleshooting, the computer would boot a little bit,
but then it would crash immediately before it even got to a POST, all sorts of error
messages. I was thinking maybe I had mounted the CPU cooler way too tight or something.
So I decided to take it off. And when I did... I found something I didn't expect,
which was the thermal paste had not moved. It had not even made contact with the CPU at all. So
basically what I realized was the CPU was probably just overheating
and just shutting itself off before it even got to a POST.
So I realized the problem was the springs on the mount for the CPU cooler was supposed to go above
the bracket, and I put it below, so there's too much space between it. I promptly fixed
that. And here's what it looks like when it finally boots up, or at least so I thought.
I still kept getting a bunch of weird error messages on the POST code and they kept changing.
So I figured all right, maybe I'll just try installing a updated BIOS, so I used the USB
feature, which didn't even require the computer to POST to be able to update the BIOS. That
worked out well. And I still kept getting really weird error messages. And finally,
I got to the point where I did fix most of the errors that kept coming up and being different.
And I finally got to where it was showing like, one of two error messages, either "POST ERROR"
or "CMOS ERROR", and I could not figure these out. I tried reseating the RAM,
tightening and un-tightening the CPU cooler. And eventually after hours,
I decided, "screw it I'll just try and plug in a monitor, see if it's actually showing anything."
And when I did, I realized that the stupid ASUS Q codes were wrong. There was no error.
It was just saying F1 to run setup. To like run the BIOS, cause it was a first boot, I guess.
And that was it. There was no error, it was just telling me to press F1.
So thank you ASUS for showing error when there was no error,
making me think that my computer is not actually booting and posting when it pretty much was.
Anyway, just if any of you come across this error in the future,
know that's what it is. Anyway here you can see the final product. I'm going to change
the colors of the RGB fans obviously, so it's not just a rotating rainbow. I don't know how
I feel about the, uh, LCD monitor stuff on the side. It just shows ROG, I might turn it off.
I don't really need it to be super bright and flashy all the time.
Anyway, I think it turned out well with the cable management,
you can see how everything turned out from the front, looking a bit nicer. And this
is obviously without the glass in it, but here you can see what it looks like with the glass.
And I think it looks pretty slick. So how does this computer stack up against my old computer?
Well I did a CineBench test for the benchmark and for my old computer,
the multi-core score was 10,342. And the single-core one I forgot to record exactly,
but I remember it was just over 1,000. On the new computer
however, on the multi-core it reached a score of a whopping 27,000 around there. Again,
I didn't record it exactly cause that's not the final score, because with that 27,000 score,
it was reaching temperatures I was not really a fan of, like 90 to 94 degrees. So what I instead
did was undervolt it just a little bit, 0.03 volts, and that dropped the score slightly.
So the final score, which I ran actually having stuff running in the background
and after the undervolt slightly. So this is kind of like a real world score, it's 26,389. Really
not much of a drop, also considering that there's now stuff running in the background. And with
just a tiny little undervolt and get this now, the temperatures are only 75 to 78 maxing out.
So 0.03 volts. I'll take that tiny little drop in performance
and get a whopping difference in temperature, not having as loud fans, I'll take that
trade. On the single-core though, the new computer scores 1,857. So not quite double,
but still pretty good as far as I'm concerned. And of course I can't forget the operating system.
What I went with was Windows 11 Pro, basically the same as what I had before, Windows 10 Pro.
And I'm still getting used to it. Honestly, not really a fan at this point. The taskbar,
for example, is missing some features. Hopefully they update it, I think they are continually
updating it. But my recommendation right now is if you're happy with Windows 10,
there's not really a need to upgrade until they maybe add some kind of killer feature.
For example, tab file explorers apparently might be something that's coming soon.
So that might be worth it. But again, as usual, like with all the suggestions I
make for upgrading your operating system, even with major updates, if there's not a
major feature that you specifically want, there's not really a need to upgrade usually right away.
So anyway, hopefully you guys enjoyed this build. Let me know
what you think down in the comments. Do you think I went too crazy with it,
or maybe I missed something that I could add, who knows. Speaking of Windows, if you want
to keep watching the next video I'd recommend is where I talked about "super hidden" files
I call them, in Windows and how you can use them. You probably have never heard of them before. If
you guys want to subscribe, be sure to do that and also enable the bell next to the subscribe
button to get notifications. So they don't get lost in the rest of your subscriptions,
I make videos about. So looking forward to hearing from you guys.
Thanks for watching. And I'll see you in the next one.