Speaker 1: So PC popularity is at its highest I feel that it's ever been at least as long as I've been doing this channel So I figured why not make an Kind of a high level don't make these beginner builder mistakes. We've done this video before however people continue to make the mistakes So we're gonna continue to make the videos So whether you're a beginner or a veteran builder you are a master of the PC master race You should still Watch this video because you probably have some insight and things that you could share down in the comments below if we've missed something something that you think is a blaring obvious that people do on accident that maybe could save people some headaches in the future. So these are in no particular order. They're just things that we continue to see over and over that people tend to sort of repeat, especially if it's their first time or easy things to overlook because you're so excited you're building your new computer. You tore it all out of the box. You can't wait to start watching those adult videos. I mean, play video games. And so you are just going to build it as fast as you can and you overlook some things. So starting off here, let's go ahead and start with the motherboard. One of the first things that we tell people to do is to build everything that you can on your motherboard before you put it in your case. You'd be surprised, even though a lot of cases may look like they have plenty of room, once you get it down in there, you've got it kind of scooted up against your IO in the back. You've got the top piece here. It starts to get hard to get screws in their place to mount it down, to mount your CPU, your RAM and all that sort of stuff. So we like to build as much as we can on the table before we even start trying to put things inside your system. So things that you can install on your motherboard before you ever get it inside of your case. The CPU, obviously. AMD CPUs are pretty easy to line up. Oh, a little side tip, don't get thermal paste in your socket. I mean, this one still works, but I didn't do that. But in my opinion, AMD has the easiest CPU to install because of the fact that the pins are located on the CPU, so you can get lined up and pushed in. Intel CPU sockets are the ones that tend to freak people out because they're much more delicate because they're LGA. The pins are actually on the motherboard, not on the CPU. So installing your CPU first is usually the very first thing we'll do. Other things that you can add is gonna be the RAM. You can get the RAM in here nice and easily. We'll talk about RAM channels in a second here. But other things that you can install that are now more common these days, which weren't necessarily in the past, are gonna be your M.2 drive. So if you're running NVMe or M.2 SSDs, installing them when they're outside of the case is gonna be a lot easier, especially if your case is upright and you know how to lay it flat because they're usually located underneath these metal covers. This particular board does also have an exposed one right here that doesn't have a cover because this is a Strix board. It's more of their mid-range line. A lot of the boards these days though do have covers on top of them because they will double as a heat sink with a little thermal pad under there. So just getting that installed, especially with how small the little retention screws are for holding down M.2 drives, a heck of a lot easier if you can just get in close to it and see all aspects of it and get it well lit than trying to do it inside of a dark case. Even if it's a white case, once you start leaning and hovering over it, you create shadows, it's hard to see. Just a simple build, easy technique. Now your cooler may be something that you can install outside of the case, but that's gonna depend on the size of the cooler. So what we have here is just a basic Noctua tower. It's not a double tower like a DH14 or whatever the number is on that. So depending on your particular cooler, you could probably install it without the fans and still be able to have access to the screws. The problem is if you're running one of those double giant towers, which will actually go like this way, that might make the upper screws up here really hard to access. So depending on the type of case you have, whether or not it has a motherboard cutout on the back, a big hole in the motherboard tray so you can access the retention on the backside, you may be able to get away with installing it first. just check for clearance, kind of do a mock-up where you just sort of rest it on top and see, can I even get to these screws? If the answer is no, then you'll have to install that once it's inside your case. So this particular motherboard has four RAM slots. Don't confuse this with four RAM channels. Mainstream motherboards, whether it be Ryzen non-Threadripper from AMD or anything non-X299 or whatever future X platforms or previous X99 platforms that exist for Intel are all gonna be dual channel. That just simply means there's channel A and channel B, which just gives you a dual channels to pull from for the CPU to store data into the memory. One of the mistakes people tend to make is they will take their CPU or their RAM sticks, the CPU sticks, and then they will mount them like this, right next to each other, which will work and the system will boot. However, you've just occupied one channel with two sticks of RAM. So you'll see all 16 gigs or 32 gigs or eight gigs or whatever, and it will work. However, you won't realize you're leaving a ton of CPU performance on the table because you're forcing single channel. You've got only channel A or only channel B occupied. So what you'll wanna do is definitely consult your manual to figure out which is the appropriate occupation or occupation? The occupation here is memory. Remember it. No, to occupy which slots to make sure that you're getting dual channel. Now, you'll also see on some motherboards, there's gonna be RAM sticks on one side of the CPU and RAM sticks on the other side of the CPU. Those are 99% of the time going to be quad channel. And then the only time you would actually see anything higher than that, it's usually in server grade stuff when it could be six channel, eight channel, whatever it may be. And so you'll wanna consult your manual to make sure that you're putting them in the right order. Every single motherboard manual will have a page dedicated to manual or memory slots telling you which to occupy based on the number of sticks that you have. A good rule of thumb is leaving space in between, starting on the very outside is going to get you dual channel operation. So in this instance here, we're occupying because we only have two sticks of RAM, the outside channel, skipping a DIMM, and then the next channel, and then having an empty channel next to the CPU. This will almost every time give you dual channel operation. So right now, if you've built a system recently and you don't remember whether or not you looked that up, look inside your system. Are they next to each other with two empty slots on the other side, or are they alternating space like that? Comment down below if you just realized you put it in a single channel. If you're installing a custom water loop with a custom block, or even an air cooling tower like this, a lot of times if they don't come with pre-applied paste, they'll come with a pre-applied plastic protector to keep this area as smooth as possible. Don't make the mistake like I have a thousand times, as many times as I build computers, I still make the stupid mistake of forgetting to remove the clear plastic label. A lot of times now they'll have writing on there that says remove before use. The problem is the cooler spends a lot of its time like this and you don't see the bottom and you're super excited and you put your thermal paste down and you smoosh it on there and you get it installed and you fire up your system and you're like, why is it overheating? And then you go, crap, I forgot to remove my clear plastic. It's like a vinyl almost, just like a screen protector, how they used to be rubber and plastic, not glass like they are today. If you've built yourself a rigid tube build and you've filled it all up and stuff, then you're really gonna hate yourself because now you got to drain it, pull the pipes off, get the block off just to go peel the plastic and go, I'm an idiot. So I've done it, you shouldn't. Now, speaking of cooler, there's something else you need to keep in mind and that is gonna be the orientation versus your RAM sticks. So if I was to orientate my cooler like this, that doesn't work because we're actually impacting the RAM. And remember, because we talked about RAM channels, we don't actually have a stick right here. If we were burning all four sticks, we even have less room to get our CPU to clear. You can see right there, it would not allow for the other RAM stick to fit whatsoever. So you're gonna wanna make sure that your cooler is installed in a way that's gonna allow you to be able to have the maximum clearance for your memory. Now, a lot of coolers are designed to sit a little higher and to overhang on top of the RAM, allowing for some RAM cooling because some of the air will make its way down, but that typically makes for really tall coolers, which means you're gonna wanna make sure that they're also going to fit inside of your case. That is another thing I've seen people comment about is they get their CPU cooler, they get it installed, they get their motherboard in, and then they can't get their side panel back on because they didn't account for the tower height or the cooler height, now not allowing them to be able to fit their side panel on. But that's something you're gonna wanna keep in mind. All coolers are usually able to be oriented in 90 degree increments, that way you can make it fit the way that you want. Typically, if you're running a motherboard in a traditional orientation like this, people will say you should run it facing up because heat rises, but it doesn't really work that way in a vapor chamber. The heat is always gonna make its way from the hottest point to the coolest point, so it's always gonna flow through the tower. As long as you have airflow going through the tower, convection isn't something you need to worry about. So something like this would make the most sense because it will clear your RAM, it will clear your heat sinks at the top, and you can have a rear fan right here by your motherboard exhausting the hot air that's coming through the cooler, making you have a nice, efficient airflow. So keep in mind, check the manual, check your CPU cooler specs before you even buy it to see if the maximum height is something that your case will allow for. Now you might've noticed we got a little bit of a flow going here and talking about things in the order which we also build them. Speaking of flow, let's talk about fan flow. This is one of those things that might seem super obvious to many people out there, but to anyone that's never even held a PC fan might look at this and go, which way does the air go? And you're turning the blade and you're like, Wait, does it sweep? Does it scoop? The easiest way to remember is airflow always flows from the non-caged side to the caged side. And when I say cage, I mean this. This is the pieces that hold the hub in place that holds the motor that turns the blades. So it's always going to flow out from the side that has the visible hub and the suspension cage right here. A lot of times fans will now mark on them. This particular fan doesn't. they'll have little arrows showing you, one arrow showing the direction the fan blade turns and another arrow showing that the way that the air goes. So that's something to keep in mind because if you take your cooler and you install it on your motherboard like this, but then you have the air going that way, and then you have a fan here pulling air that way, you're creating this crazy air divide and you're not having a nice, smooth, single direction of airflow. So you would want to install a push fan on your tower. Now we're talking about fans because airflow is very important. The last thing you want to do is create all kinds of crazy turbulence in your case because the most efficient cooling that you're gonna get out of your case is by having all intakes on one side moving the same direction, all exhaust on the opposite side moving the other direction, promoting case airflow. You want airflow over all the components. You want air moving over the RAM, over the motherboard, over the heat sinks, through the cooler, and out of the case as fast as possible. The fastest, most efficient exchange of air inside the chassis, or the time that that volume of air is exchanged with fresh air is gonna give you your best cooling results. Another mistake I see people make with fans is they'll put it on pool config on the backside. And oftentimes that's because they didn't really consider the clearance, like I said, with memory. So instead of having a push fan pushing air through your heat sink, they'll go with a pool fan going, I got more room over here. The problem is airflow always flows from least resistance. So that means it's gonna pull in a lot of air through the sides and not really promote air coming from the major surface area on the backside. We have tested this extensively. I have seen up to 10 degrees Celsius drop by moving from pull config on an air cooler to push config. Push is pulling air from the open side of the fan and the air has nowhere to go but through all of the fins. And the only way your air cooler is gonna operate on its maximum efficiency is if all the fins have airflow over them. Any fins that are not getting optimal airflow are doing nothing. And as such, your CPU temperatures are going to suffer. So remember, air flows from the side with no cage out of the side with the cage. And if you're running an air cooler and you only have one fin, push is the only config. Now, the exception to that rule is if we're talking about radiators. Radiators don't care where the air comes from as long as air is flowing over it. And the thing with a radiator is the fact that because it does actually seal, push config versus pull config has very little difference in terms of its actual cooling performance. There's one to two C difference there that you might be able to account for depending on the use case scenario. The most important part though, is making sure that your AIO or your radiator for a closed loop doesn't matter is exhausting air in the right direction. If you have it mounted to the top of your case, whether it's pulling air through or pushing air through, you wanna make sure that you're pushing it towards the outside of the chassis. I've seen people go, well, I wanna pull cool air from the top of the case down through. The problem with that is you really are forcing and working against convection. Now, fans can overpower convection. Convection is the natural rising of heat. Now, fans can, any fan speed whatsoever can naturally overcome the force of convection. Convection is a very weak force, but it is a natural force. So if you have your fans pushing it out, then you're just allowing the heat that does make it through the rad to just radiate away from the case. When you're pushing air down through the rad, it's now made that heat go into the chassis and it's gotta go somewhere. Usually you only have one exhaust fan in the back. So now you're asking three fans worth of air coming down into the case to be exhausted by one, which could lead to a little bit of a heat soak situation and just a non-efficient situation. We've tested this before. It only makes a difference usually if you're dealing with very hot CPU temperatures causing enough heat soak to actually soak the chassis. But if you've got a CPU under partial load and a GPU creating a lot of heat, something like a unicorn of an RTX 3080, you're asking an awful lot of one chassis fan in the back of your case to exhaust a lot of heat when you could just have it naturally pulling heat out the top. You could have natural convection happening here as well as assisted with the fans. So now you've got one, two, three, four fans removing heat from your chassis. So it should be pretty obvious to you which is the better choice when it comes to fan direction and orientation. Now, here's another common mistake, and I'm sure that someone watching this video right now has experienced this and maybe recently, given how many systems people have built lately, whether they are with the latest gen graphics card or not, what we're about to talk about in terms of size of the card applies to every single generation cards have ever existed. And that is making sure that your graphics card is going to fit in your case. There's a lot of things to consider with your graphics card. There's not just the height at which, how far does it stand up off the motherboard towards the chassis or the side panel of the chassis, usually like this. Very similar to what we talked about with the heat sink, right? There's a height factor there that has to be considered. Graphics cards are getting more and more powerful as time goes on. Even the mid-range cards are starting to have the extra height and the extra length associated with them to fit more VRMs and more memory and more chokes and stuff on the PCB. The only way to fit more is to add more space. And by doing that, they have started making the cards taller and longer. But height isn't the only thing you need to consider. Length is also important too, because depending on the size of your chassis, you might be forcing the card to butt up against the drive cage, or it might be butting up against the front panel where your fans are gonna go. And you might only have a space to put your front radiator in the front, because it's a 240. If it's something like an NZXT H10i Elite case, You only have room for one 120 on the top, so it can't go there. It has to go in the front. If you've now forced yourself to have to put your AIO in the front of the case like this, we're not gonna talk about orientation of the pump. We've done a video on that already. But if you have to put it in the front like that, and you have it in a mid-tower case, and uh-oh, we can't fit anything there, or you might be able to fit the radiator, but no fans, then that's something that you need to consider. This is a mistake people make all the time. They buy parts that look pretty and people recommend, but they don't think about the way they all have to fit together and work as a system. And if you don't think about the length of your graphics card, then you're gonna have a problem. Fortunately, every single graphics card on the market does have a specification in terms of its maximum length and maximum height. And every single case on the market does have a specification in there on maximum length and height graphics cards that will fit. It'll usually tell you maximum length that will fit with front mount AIO or front mount fan. There's 25 millimeter difference there if you're wondering. So those specifications are always listed. The same thing can be said for your AIO though, or your radiator or your water cooler, whether it's a closed loop, custom loop, open loop, doesn't matter, loop loops. If you go out and buy yourself a 360 AIO and your case only fits 240s, well, I sure hope you got a Dremel because let's just say no matter how hard you try, that ain't fitting in there. Same thing about the graphics card we said. That ain't fitting in there without some cutting. Last but not least, we are gonna talk about the power cables for your graphics card. This doesn't so much apply for mid-range cards. I'm talking about any 60 series cards, whether it be a 3060, a 2060, a 1060. And let's face it, the older the card gets, the less power requirement it really has because Moore's law, as we move forward, things are getting more powerful. Whether or not we're still talking about the exact Moore's law, it is still an effect in that as you move forward, things are more powerful. And as such, there's some things to consider here. I see a lot of people doing this where they will take this pigtail connector and every power supply comes with them. And I see people doing this because they think it's gonna look extremely ugly if they run two cables and have pigtails just hanging off. So what they do is they take the pigtails and they plug them in. And I think I already cut. Yeah, I did. I think I cut those off. Oh, well, just ignore it. This is a six pin. It should be an eight pin. They take it, they plug it in like this And I go, done. Here's the thing. Something like an RTX 3080. And yes, this only applies to the latest cards. However, 250 watt cards like 2080 Ti's and Titan X's and such also apply to this. The spec states that an eight pin PCI Express power connector is rated to 150 watts. 75 watts of power for the graphics card also comes from the socket. The thing it's plugged into on the PCIe slot. So 75 watts of power can be supplied by the PCIe slot. Now these are maximum ratings. This card is a 320-watt card. So if we add 75 to 150, that gives us an effective 225 watts of power to a 320-watt card. So what's it gonna do? Remember, power is not delivered. Power is drawn. The card says, give me this much power, and the cable is going to provide it. It's going to provide it. And what you don't wanna do is overstress your cables, depending, there's a lot of factors here that can play into this. Gauge of wire, the type of insulation, the rating of the power supply, and it will usually not be a problem. We've tested this with cards in the past, where we just have a single daisy chain like this and try and see if there's any sort of performance loss or stability issues. And usually the stability issues only pop up when we're doing things like overclocking to the ragged edge. But what we're doing is we're effectively operating outside of the spec that is considered the official spec of the PCIe and the actual cable. Now there's a lot of debate on whether or not that really matters. Lots of people right now are going, I've been running like this for five years and I've never had a problem. Absolutely, that's what I'm saying. But I'm saying in terms of best practices, this is not something that I recommend, especially if you're running modern high horsepower GPUs. Instead, if you go with a power supply that has individual cables for your PCIe, you are now operating perfectly within spec. We have 300 watts available to us with just these two cables, with 75 available to us through the PCIe slot, giving us 375 watts of spec power on a car that only requires 320. I would like to see more people doing this than using the pigtails. And I feel like the problem is the fact that manufacturers have started doing pigtails because it's cheaper for them. It's cheaper to add three inches of wire and another plug than to give you another eight, what is this, 36 inches of wire or whatever, because it's kind of a cop-out thing. So more manufacturers are now including individual cables like this without pigtails because they're recognizing that graphics cards and other things that use PCIe power, whether it be TECs or Peltier coolers or subambient cooling are also using PCIe cables to draw power. They're just 12 volt and ground in there. It's only two, it's only one voltage source and just grounds for it. It's better for your components. It's better for the power supply. It's better for everything involved. Mini tip, your graphics card is capable of running higher refresh rate than 60 Hertz. Every graphics card is. And if your panel is higher than 60 Hertz, it doesn't do it by default. So right click on your desktop, go to display settings, go to advanced settings, go to your resolution, and then on the dropdown, choose your highest refresh rate so you can get that buttery smooth goodness. So that is pretty much all I've got for you today. But these are the really common mistakes I see people make as new builders. I'm sure we've left something out. In fact, I'm positive of it. So you veteran builders out there, what do you think we missed? What is your number one tip to new builders? Put it down in the comments below. If you guys see a comment that you think is a good one that people should see, thumbs it up so it ends up towards the top. And as always guys, give this video a thumbs up if it helps, subscribe if you're new around here, share it with your friends that are talking about building computers. We'd love to expand the community, get as many people involved in PC as possible. 2020 was a great year in the sense of people adopting PC for the first time and that have never even considered it before. And I think that's a great thing to see. So let's all welcome them, give them our best tips. And as always, we'll see you guys in the next one.