Hi If you've been following my blog posts and uh, recent Forum threads, you'll know I've been uh, looking at uh, designing and building or specking and building a new video editing uh PC one that's um, you know, as lower noise as possible and quite reasonably cost under $1,000 and the parts they're finally in. So I'm going to assemble this sucker fingers crossed. hopefully I don't release the magic smoke I haven't Built My Own PC in I don't know 10 15 years or something used to build my own PCS used to be really into that sort of thing, but now H no I've been into Uh notebooks for the last uh, 10 years and um, really? so this is my first attempt at assembling a modern PC We'll give it a go and here are all the parts the entire system cost as I said uh, under 1,000 bucks? Yes, I'm an absolute, uh, tight ass I know that uh, you know some people pay that for just a bloody video card these days. Some of the gaming uh Fanboys but anyway, um I wanted as low noise as possible.

so I've got a Silencio 550 Midtower I'll talk about all these uh individually and what else have we got? We've got a umus, uh p8 z77 V motherboard uh, you know the the uh high-end z77 uh chipset that was under like under 150 bucks. I've got some uh Corsair 16, GB 2, 8, GB uh modules in there and uh no I didn't pay the sticker price on these things I've got a um Intel There was much debate on the V blog Forum about the processor folks. Should I go for the AMD 8 core Should I go for the Um core Intel Core uh i7 Well I went for the Intel cuz yes it basically is better all around even though it's more expensive I got the I7 377 K the K version is uh the the unlocked one so I can overclock this thing if I want um I've got a Samsung2 GB solid state drive uh what else have we got? We've got a Cooler Master Lots of debate over the cooling solution for this. um I Went for the hyper Uh 212 from Cooler Master same brand as the Uh case and uh, this is.

um, not only is it quite reasonably priced, it's like under 50 bucks but um, it is uh by some uh by measurements um I've uh seen on the net. uh this is the quietest fan on the market when it's in low speed mode and it's not too bad in high speed. um either. so we'll give that a go.

Yeah, bottom of the range Corsair vs Series 650 power supply yes I didn't I just wanted the cheapest in stock uh power supply they basically had there I wasn't too fussy so yeah Fanboys rant on rant on I Could have possibly got a more silent one but we'll see how it goes with my soundproof case. uh should be all right and just a cheap isus 24 speed uh DVD writer and um I've got some um extra hard drives uh to go in there as well that I had Exis in. So let's crack all this stuff open and start assembling. and here's The Cooler Master Silencio 550 case.

uh why did I go for this one? A couple of reasons one was that I course I wanted a silent in Quote Marks machine. Yes I know the silent Fanboys are going to jump down my throat and say this isn't a silent solution because there's fans in here. but uh anyway I just wanted a low noise solution. so this is a soundproof case hence the name Silencio.

um and it got reasonably good uh reviews out there and um also it's cheap. it's like a it was just on like a hundred bucks. which is you know 50 bucks cheaper than sort of other comparable cases. So not only is it silent which I like but it also um uh has a top-mounted Here it is top-mounted SD uh fast SD card slot which is because I edit video every day I uh carry my HD video files from the lab back home.

this is going to be my at home PC where I do my video editing so I can just conveniently reach down whack in the SD card. It's all done I Know it's a small little thing, but you know I just didn't want to. You know, don't want to have to open the door and reach down and stick the uh thing in an SD card. Slaughter have a cable hanging out the back to an SD card reader.

It's just a little nice touch. so I uh so I like that. So I sold on the soundproofing, the fact that it was 100 bucks and an SD card slot. so we will check it out and apparently uh which is really good as well.

It comes with a um a uh SATA dock like it comes with a docking uh station as well. so I can do backups I can just whack a driveing there you know I know you can just buy these and insert them but hey, it comes with it. Fantastic. So uh, you know I I think that was an awesome uh no-brainer Choice Really? for 100 bucks we've got uh, is there filtering in there? No, not.

re you know? Oh well. you've got the foam uh on the front as well. It's got a huge fan in there, presumably quite. uh, silent.

I'll talk about those later. I may have a replacement for that, but uh yeah. um just a mid tower case. um I'm not doing anything Fancy with it.

I'll have a CD drive in there. um and that's you know that's about a she wrote but that s do I reckon is going to come in handy. and on the back here we've got uh seven, uh slots down here. we've got uh, water cooling, uh, or you know, uh, cable ports or something like that.

In fact, there's another one up here as well. um, uh, fan, uh on the back, it's a Cooler Master uh brand fan. so um I may replace. That depends on the uh noise and you know, nothing.

uh, fancy at all. So and here we go. We've got the side panel. It's got the Uh acoustic foam in there it.

it looks reasonably looks like reasonable quality, dense foam. I Don't think it's you know, necessarily, just, uh, you know, entirely. uh, cheap, crappy stuff. So that's pretty good.

And it's got foam on the Uh backside in there as well. So it's basically foam on acoustic uh, dampening foam on the front, the side and the back. I mean this thickness, uh, foam, you know, really isn't going to do much for your low frequency, uh stuff? You know it's You know, it's attenuation of low frequency under a couple hundred Hertz isn't going to be um, you know that great. But it's uh, better than nothing because the uh dampen in I've done videos on this the on how to make acoustic uh foam paneling which I should probably Link in actually.

um, the thickness of the foam uh is basically going to determine the uh, uh, low frequency, uh, attenuation of the thing. So um, let's have a look in here. Apparently they've it supports Uh 2 and 1/2 in solid state. Uh hard drives which I've got and it's got USB 3.0 in there and uh Cable in.

it looks like it's got cable in installed as well. We got a speaker, a whole bunch of uh, cable, tires and other screws for the motherboards and things presumably and a whole bunch of rails for the um hard drives and all the internal connectors. They're all labeled nice Touch HD Audio Ac97 there it is. USB it's USB 3.0 uh compatible, uh, front connector, power, lead, and uh stuff like that reset switch so all nicely labeled.

good touch and I kind of like the look of these. Look at that, just uh, lock open so it looks like you don't need any screws for your uh CD drives and uh uh hard drives that you insert in there. you just go lock open Brilliant! And I think it's the same for the rails in here as well. They're uh, not.

You know you don't need any screws, you just uh Slide the things in and I think that's the same for all the internal hard drive slots as well. They've just got these uh pins. You don't screw them in, you just put them in the side of your hard drive and then just slide it in. Beautiful! Now down the bottom of the case here for the power supply.

They got these little rubber grommets. Nice little touch. little uh vibration uh dampeners for the fan inside the power supply. very nice.

And there's the internal uh sarda docking station. Now this case can actually fit three fans, but only two are fitted. So there's one. Here is um, this is the front of the case.

a spare uh spot for a second fan there. and of course there's one on the back here now. um uh Pete Mitchell from The Forum he saw in the previous mailbag sent me some uh knock t uh fans in here and apparently I didn't recognize uh, the worth of these things and how spectacular they are at low noise. Some you know, one of the quietest uh fans on the market and how I should uh bow in front of these things? so sorry to you all you Fanboys out there Fanboys see what they did there? Beautiful.

anyway? um yeah, they're very groy that's all the dust on them they are used but I might clean them up and eventually fit them in here. but uh, for starters, just use the stock fans which come with the case and um, if they're silent enough, well I'll just leave them. um otherwise I might uh fit these uh noock tour ones. and there is the 2 and 1/2 in uh Drive bracket.

Excellent! that will suit my 2 and 1/2 in solid state hard drive and on the uh underside of the motherboard. uh part of the case. We have a huge cut out here um for to access the uh heat sink after the board's been installed. Nice touch as well.

But I think that's standard on all cases these days, isn't it? And here's the Isus motherboard: the Uh P8 Z77 V And one of the first things that struck me is just the thinness of the board. I was expecting maybe like a 2 mm motherboard, but there's you know, actually some warp in that and this board. It seems thinner than your standard 1.6 and well, it's actually 1.5 just on one. Well yeah, if I get it just on 1.5 so looks like they haven't got a standard 1.6 mm.

um, stack up in there I Mean you know this would be an 8 or 10 layer board or uh, you know, something like that. minimum. Um, but yeah, I'm just a surprised at the uh flimsiness of it. I guess I I Don't know.

Anyway, if you take a look at the layout of the Uh tracers on here, you see all of these. They look like single uh traces coming out here. but they're all differential pairs, all routed differential pairs. This is the main Z77 chipset under here and all the differential pairs running out to all the Uh PCI Express sockets.

Wow, and you can see those there. They are the differential pairs. They got a minimum uh, spacing between each one. There'd be a ground plane layer absolutely directly under that.

and uh, here's the back of the processor over here. you can see some uh Serpentine uh traces happening over there to get a correct matched uh length and everything on that uh on that specific pair in there. Whatever that pair happens to be, it needs to match all the needs to match all something else some other pair. and uh, they've tune that using the serpentine tracers Brown solder mask.

yuck. And there's the LGA 1150 uh socket I've never uh, actually operated one of these before in important install processor first, then remove and keep the cover W No kidding. Ooh I like the sound of that GPU boost switch and it's got a bunch of Uh 6 git per second uh SATA uh interfaces as well and it comes uh, actually with some Uh 6 gig rated SATA cables in the Box couple of those as well. funky uh heat sink for the uh, aluminium and blue anodized heat sink for the Z77 chipset.

but really, there's hardly anything on these modern motherboards. it's all in the main chipset. You know a bunch of power supply stuff around here, all the Uh in inductors and the bypass um filtering caps for the various uh core voltages and stuff. But man, so why did I choose this uh isus one over others? Well, they've got a good uh reputation and uh, it happened to be one of the cheapest ones that had the Z77 chipset.

or I think it was the cheapest one at my local store with the Z77 chipset so sounded pretty good to me because one of the things I wanted uh, this for like the Intel I7 uh processor, it's got the integrated some pretty kickass integrated Graphics buil in um because I don't necessarily need I mentioned this on the Forum and I won't go into details here. don't necessarily need a uh GPU uh video card for my video rendering. it's all CPU uh intensive. So the inbuilt video card is more than enough and the I7 processor actually has the Intel quicksync uh video encoding technology as well.

So um, yeah, I I plan initially, at least to um, use the Um integrated graphics on this thing. and of course, it's got uh DVI um standard VGA and HDMI as well. I Presume: I can run uh two monitors at once. With that, we'll find out and they haven't really skimped on the port protection either.

Um, there's quite a few Poly switches uh, down here, there's at least five of them there. I can count for the USS 6 actually. um, at least six Poly switches on there to uh protect the power outs presumably on the USB ports. and it comes with an I/O connector shield for the back of the case.

Nice touch. All right, it's CPU installation time and here's my Intel I7 the most expensive thing in the whole system. 350 bucks worth for this chip and the stock uh, cooler which everyone assures me is absolute garbage. just noisy and you know barely does the job.

If you just want to do word processing or something, it'll do fine. but apart from that, no so I've been replacing that and we're going to just install the processor and the third party heat sink. and yes folks I am doing this on my uh, proper antistatic uh, rubber workbench and I do have my antistatic wrist strap on cuz this thing is worth 350 bucks I'm not taking any chances. does come in this plastic though.

It'd be interesting to know if this is just bog standard plastic or whether it or not uh um, ESD treated I assume it would be um, you know, uh cuz I don't know how sensitive uh, modern processors like this are to ESD ESD these days, but I'm not taken any chances. Anyway, here it is 350 bucks worth the I7 377k 3.5 gig. We'll probably end up overclocking and it's made in Costa Rica hi to all my viewers in Costa Rica I'm sure there's a few. um, and let's take this puppy out and uh, have a look at the bottom.

and here are the pads. All 1150 of them or so. and uh, and they're just that, um, pads because we're going to have uh, contact balls inside the socket and there's all the bypass uh caps on the back of that. So this is like a chip on board technology.

uh, essentially because the dyes attached to the Uh top side of the board and uh, then we've got all our B by pass stuff on the bottom. So there we go. and you can even see. looks like you can see the micro in each of those pads.

They've actually got the micro Vas right in the center by the looks of it. Yeah, there we go. You can see the V's on each pad there, tiny little, you know, .1 mm or less. and all these pads on the top side here must be Uh programming SL Test pads for production.

All right. So let's whip this in. and uh, we got to take off the Uh got to lever that up like that first and then look at that. Awesome.

We can see all our bypass caps in there. They've uh, got a few down in there. It's got to be right next to the uh, uh, you know, the core power supply. uh pins of course.

Um, that way you get your lowest Uh loop system Loop inductance and uh, your greatest Uh signal. Integrity So so what we need to do now is place this sucker in pin One. Absolutely vital. There's the Pin One marker down there and the Um pin one is down in this corner down here.

It tells you uh, on the top pin one and it also tells you that in the instructions. So I'm going to place this gently in here like this: Tada and I'm going to put that down, slide it across, and hopefully o oh it's pretty tough. It's pretty tough. It's very scary actually.

This is a $350 chip and uh uh no. I Have heard that they require a bit of force so I'm uh, here we go. come on and under there like that and then T we take that off and we're in one installed I7. Well, we haven't installed the uh heat sink yet and next up we have our Corsair memory.

uh I'll put this in now. why not? Works at Uh 1.5 Vols Version 3.24 Jeez. Getting pretty specific. there massive heat SN on it I thought I Actually ordered a low profile version of these.

Actually, these are quite, uh, tall so hopefully they don't interfere with my heat sink. Fingers crossed anyway. Um, so these are two 8 gig modules 1600 MHz of Vengeance o sound you know, appealing to the gamer. Market Obviously all those gamer Fanboys So uh, I'm going to uh, whack this in my board.

No worries. I don't think it uh matters. um Which slot I put though well, they they're pairs. um obviously.

but uh I think I'll put it in. well there's a and there's B so I'll put it in a which is the front one here. so let's do it. and uh, hopefully yeah, that's they're pretty darn tall.

I Mean that's uh, that's impressively tall. bit of force required on that. Get it in the right way and we're in. So yeah, they are massive.

I mean let's take a look at the height of that. Absolutely incredible. So yeah, as you can see, it's you know it's fairly close to the uh heat sink uh bracket here. So I'm not sure of the physical dimensions of my heat sink.

fingers crossed. And here's my Cooler Master heat Sink The Evo 212 Warning: please peel off this label before you use it. No kidding. H yeah, you've got to get your heat uh off there now I Love the copper bars on these.

They're are they're a completely seamless uh surface right over there and that's important. So uh, you get as much surface area as possible onto those uh, copper heat pipes. and uh, very important. they just go up into this radiator block up here and uh, then this fan just uh, blows it straight through.

and apparently yes, as I said, um, it is, um, the most silent fan on the market. almost like in the top one or two, uh when the fan speed is set too low which would be most of the you know, the time using the machine idle and stuff like that unless I'm doing uh, video, uh, rendering or uh, transcoding. So let's install. This looks a bit complicated and it comes with a whole bag of bits including uh, all of these uh bracket for the back which we have to install first, and uh, a bag of uh, bits in including some thermal uh, paste, some screws for the top, and uh, a separate bag for uh, just in case you want to install it in the LGA 2011 socket.

And apparently step one is to put the these screws through there like that. Have they got any? Oh, they've got like a black, Maybe. Yeah, they've got like a black washer on the bottom so they don't scrape the traces which are very close to the holes. By the way, they're uh, they're quite close so put those through there.

But I I don't know how you hold those in place while you flip it over. It's yeah, that's not going to work. Come on, give me a break. and then this is supposed to.

uh, a bracket is supposed to go on the back like well. I Don't think it's is it like, yep, it's like that. There we go. Is that it? No, that's not it.

This is where you've got to have like a third hand to sort of put the screws in and then rotate them, and then they actually rotate and lock in place. That's actually not too bad at all. I Rather think that's a bit clever, but uh, yeah, obviously. And then we got four nuts on there.

and, uh, thoughtfully, they, uh, really realize that your average punter is not going to have a socket of the right size. So just like Ikea they provide you a little uh, tool in there and you can just, uh, tighten those up using standard Phillips. Beautiful! I like it. and of course I probably should have, uh, done this before the uh, huge, massive uh RAM modules went in.

but oh well, and there we go. Our heat sink bracket is installed, our four pillers there and we're ready to install our heat sink. Now what we've got is this bracket in here just slides in here and it's got a springy little screw in it like that which then screws down into the base of that which then goes down into these and puts pressure down on the heat sink. And we need the thermal paste of course.

but uh, it's all rather neat and it looks like it's actually going to fit uh, with, you know, uh, 5 to 8 mm spare or something like that. Pretty pretty good. I Like it. not a problem, but hopefully it sit fits inside the case.

the height I don't know. look at this. Oh, there's not much room to spare in there. I've put my motherboard in there, but without any standoffs.

Um, that is. Yeah, it's very, very close to, uh, touching that. so hopefully the standoffs for the motherboard aren't that big. Well, I've probably got I don't know.

8 mm spare or something. So yeah, it might just fit and we'll just do the standoffs. and uh, once again, we uh, they assume you haven't got a socket driver so they give you a Phillips attachment for that. Excellent.

So uh I'll put these in the uh, screw these in the mounting holes for the these are the stand off for the motherboard. All right. I've installed the motherboard on the correct standoffs and uh, it looks like folks that is going to fit a treat. Yep, no drama whatsoever.

Beautiful. The Uh Cooler Master uh Evo 212 Heat sink fits in the Silencio 512 case. Well, it's not surprising considering that, uh, they're both the same brand. So now it's time to apply our thermal paste.

So we peel this off. We want a very thin layer of uh, thermal paste quite even and uh, so unfortunately, you're not going to get even with a uh syringe like this. so uh, we have to, uh, move it around like that and probably that is enough I'd suspect for the whole thing, it should be enough, but we need to get a uh, nice even code on that. I probably should use like a a credit card or something to, uh, smooth that down.

really? I mean it's going to squeeze out when you press it on, but uh, so I think that will probably do nicely. You just want to, uh, cover that entire copper surface there and it should, uh, spread nice and evenly and get a bit of ooze out once you uh uh, put Force down on it on the CPU But yeah, really, you know you want the thinnest layer possible. Um, that's the idea. The idea of thermal paste is just to fill in the tiny minute uh, gaps between the Um level surfaces of the copper and the top of the uh CPU um case there.

so you know just those tiny little gaps I Mean you know we're talking like you know, in the order of micron or something like that. it is quite small. So the less thermal paste the better. Now this heat sink bracket.

before you install it. You want to get the screws into the center position here. It could be hard afterwards. Well that's for this socket because they've got just like a you know a different sliding position in there for the different uh types of chips you got.

So if you don't have it in the right position before you put it in I'm guessing it could be a right royal pain in the ass. All right. Now is the time to install it. So I put that bracket uh through there like that it say it's got a little retention hook in there to keep it in position a little bit and uh then we want to place it over and uh, line up that and sit it on there and hopefully our screws will line up.

our screw holes will line up and uh Bob will be our uncle. Cool you might. you can adjust the rotation of this thing around like that, but it's going to always get you right in the center I believe. And then we want to screw in number one here.

and then you want to do after you've done that, you want to do the opposite corner over here. It's all very medieval this uh process and then so once you've done the two, those two corners, then you start on the other two corners and Tada we're in. um, it's not possible to really overtighten these. they uh, just do up and uh, they're quite well designed with the spring uh attachments in them and we can rotate that heat sink just a little bit, rotate it around its axis cuz it's just a pushing down on the one.

Center uh Point down in there Really? So uh, that's why we can still do that. but there you go. Um ah, actually looks like I've got to take doll to get the fan back in I've got looks like I probably have to take out the memory again, but that's no drama. Then we clip the fan on oops and the fan in.

this is just it's a Cooler Master uh brand made in China So I don't know who actually uh DF I don't know Delta fans is it I don't know, it's probably not manufactured by Cooler Master One of the major fan men manufacturers would do it. but as I said, um, It's um, probably. um on low mode. Anyway, one of the most silent fans on the market.

So of course you got to get the airflow right. There's an airflow marker on there if we can see that. So it blows through like this. So here's the back of the case.

back of the case is going to be out here. So you want the air to blow from this side because the air is coming in through the front of the case, around in the case and you want it to blow through this way out here and out your back fan. So we definitely want to put it on. Like so too easy.

Done. Uh no folks. we have a fail. It looks like my estimate, uh back that you know this would, uh, wouldn't fail with these uh um, memory modules.

they do it fails. So there you know that's uh, that's hopeless. There's the slot there and there's the fan. So um, bummer.

Um what? I'm going to have to do cuz I want the I want the air to blow out this side? What I'm going to have to do is take the fan back off and actually reverse this bracket. I Think I'm going to have to I assume I can put it on the other side and then clip the fan on this side. so it actually sucks the air through like that instead of sucks the air through the uh radiator instead of pushing through the radiator. One little touch they've got is these little uh, rubber, uh, vibration isolation pads on the fan that actually go against the a heat sink.

so it, uh, stop. You know it stops any vibration resonant modes between this and the radiator. um, unfortunately, the screws are under that so I'm going to have to, uh, take those off. but they've actually provided four more spare ones.

So when I take those off um to access the screws and put this thing on the, put these brackets on the other side, then I can just replace those. Excellent. And Tada there we have it. So we're uh now, um, uh, pulling the air through the heat sink like that.

Probably not as uh, good, not as efficient, but you know, yeah, you can go into all your fan. uh Theory and I've actually got some uh, I've actually done measurements and data on uh, that in terms of driving, uh, ducting and uh, stuff like that. but you know, cuz it can suck air from the uh vort, you know, from the sides here and then forms all sorts of vortices and stuff. but anyway, that is.

it's going to be good enough for Australia So there you go I don't know how long that's taken us, uh, quite some time to get to the point where, uh, we have a fully installed uh I7 processor on this Zeus motherboard with our dodgy, uh, pull fan instead of push. ah well, can't have it all. Let's install it in the case and I guess we may as well install our uh, little metal connector shield on the back. It's a bit of a pain in the ass.

It's got the RFI um, uh tabs on there to uh, make good RFI contact onto the case of the uh ethernet connectors and HDMI connectors and stuff like that so that sort of just have to hold that in place I think when you slide this into the case, yeah, as it turns out, that's uh, rather tricky to, uh, get that sucker in there and the motherboard lined up and uh, with the mounting holes and it for all to clip in into place and not to get the little RFI tabs down inside the connectors instead of on the top. and it's a bit messy. but uh, you shouldn't have to force anything in the end. It's uh, it all seems to go in quite well, so if you're forcing it, you're doing it wrong.

You have to force it to get it in there. But if you have to force and then screw at the same time, you're uh, you obviously haven't got it right. So this motherboard has six screws on it and uh, which isn't that many? um, compared to a lot of the boards from the olden days if I remember rightly, But back then every machine was uh, uh, custom. You know they didn't They hadn't standardized on uh, all these form factors and things like that.

So so there's our installed RFI shield in place. It also helps with the air flow as well. It means air is not. uh, sort of.

You know, being sucked in or coming out the back there. it's all coming out of the fan. But that's our fully installed Isus motherboard in our Silencio 550 case with heat sink and processor almost ready to go. Just the power supply and uh, hard drives and paraphernalia.

So as you can see with the fan mounted on this side to, actually, um, suck the air through the radiator like that? Not absolutely ideal, but I think it's uh, still going to work a treat. So what we've got in terms of, uh, air flow here is we've got the uh Grill down the side here where the air comes in, uh, filtered through, uh, the fan here into the shazzy and then basically this is, uh, sucking whatever residual areas on this side so you'll get a natural uh flow like that and through. And of course, most of the hot air is going to rise inside the case as well. Assuming that you keep it vertical like this and it's going to be, it's going to be reasonably okay about, uh, sucking that through the radiator and pushing it out the back fan there, so that's not too bad.

And then we've got our power supply. uh, down the bottom of course. and uh, we're about to install that now. and uh I haven't um you? I'm so used to power supplies.

Um, you know, the old style ones with the fan with a crusty little fan on the back like that? I'm not used to the new ones with the big uh fan on the uh bottom of this thing? so uh, totally different. but um, you know I wouldn't go back to the old days of old PC cases I mean this is a magic case. It's absolutely amazing what you get for 100 bucks these days. Absolutely incredible.

And they're all standardized so all the motherboards fit and ah, you don't have to dick around. and it's not just, you know, really crusty. um, you know, uh, sort of folded sheet metal, unpowdered, all that sort of stuff. It's all properly powder coated.

Really very nice cases, very nice designs. I really like them. You don't need screws anymore for your hard drives and and things like that. Just fantastic.

So yeah, last time I built a, uh, a desktop PC I Mean you know you didn't even have heat sinks on your chips because the things just you know they weren't that powerful and that, uh, fast enough. uh, chewing. all that power. you just didn't need it.

It it really wasn't an issue. You know you'd have like a 50 W power supply or something like that. crazy. and now it's power Supply time and you watch all of the Fanboys come out of the uh Woodwork and uh, complain that I've got probably the shittiest one on the market doesn't have this brand of cap that branded cap blah blah blah blah yeah, whatever.

let's crack the thing open and uh, have a look inside though, see what we've got And of course there's the uh, huge fan on the bottom I don't know where you know it says it's re you know it's low noise but H you know I it's not. um, specifically built down to price. Oh look, I mean it is built down to price warranty void if remove sticker? Yeah, screw that no pun intended and there it is and that's actually rather nice and clean. I Don't uh, mind that at all.

very, uh, minimalist and uh, let's just have a very quick uh poke around here. Looks like we got some exposed connections here on the power switch and the I Mains connector. They haven't bothered to, uh, heat shrink those at all, but you know I mean you don't necessarily have to. We've got our X and Y class caps there and uh oh, we got a fuse on board directly solded.

They didn't bother so socketing that they saved a couple of cents there. Single sided, uh folic base Board of course, uh, standard fair in whatever uh, power supply you're going to get and uh, actually, it looks like they've got some, uh, decent input filter in there. They got some common mode chokes and they've got uh, the filter caps. so that's probably a yeah.

Is that a move? that's a yeah, that's a Mo down in there I believe and uh. got our opto couplers and uh, internal heat sinks. Yeah, we got thermal grease on those. We'll check out the Uh brand of the cap in a second, but you know it's not too bad at all.

They've uh, have they put added look? they've added heat shrink to the Uh Bridge rectifier there. They haven't used a heat sink for that. uh Bridge rectifier at all. They uh, determined that they didn't have to I guess they've just freest stood that one with some extra lead length on there to, uh, get a bit more heat dissipation in the leads.

but uh, nothing else. Is that a? uh, is that a thermocouple on the heat sink there? I can't entite? Yeah. I think it is I think that's a Thermac couple on the heat sink I Believe So that's all right. it's got thermal protection.

It looks all right. They've gunked down. uh, the coils down in there just to stop them. uh, vibrating and moving.

Not bad. It's all right. Nothing wrong with this. Let's have a look at the brand of the cap.

Yeah, sorry. It's a very difficult to get a shot down there, but it's an aishi uh brand. It looks like an LK series and I you know they're not. They're not horrible.

Yeah, you don't expect uh to see Panasonic or uh you know, nipon chemicon or something in here, but you know I it's okay. Ah, the brand might be okay, but they've spec in the um the LK series and it's um 85. C for those ones rated 2,000 hours at 85 C Uh life. they haven't gone for the 105 cated ones the bastards.

so they've cut cost there so you know I guess thumbs down for a little bit of cost cutting there. They could have at least gone for the 5 cr r CS but this power supply is not going to get to 80 in my system anyway. so uh not, you know it's it's it's going to be adequate I mean you know we'll see how it goes anyway, but would have preferred to see that5. But anyway, this is the Value series power supply the bottom of the line.

so what do you expect? But they do have 105 cated uh aishy down in there which is okay. these green GF ones have no idea haven't seen before and unfortunately down in there we have a crappy Capson brand one. not the best at all. uh they are uh I think they are 105 C rated though.

but yeah, this is what you get in the Value series. I pretty much uh, pretty much what I expected. really for the bottom of the range price. like I said I bought a cheap power supply I knew it I got a cheap power supply and uh, but I don't think it's going to be an issue because um, this thing I'm not, you know, gaming 2 24 hours, a bloody day with two video cards taking you know, hundreds of Watts Um, this thing is going to take like, you know, 100 Watts total when it's rendering or something.

probably I think it takes in the order of like 50 Watts or something because I'm using the integrated uh graphics card or I'm going to start out using the integrated graphics card. so um, yeah, it's like, you know it's like whatever you know, it's probably going to last a it's likely to last a long time cuz it's a um highly, uh, overspeed to uh Drive the Intel maybe not if I had the AMD processor. The AMD processor takes a lot more than the uh Intel one, but um anyway, I think it's going to be adequate I See things really haven't changed in terms of you know, lack of mounting holes for the board. I mean you you plug in this huge connector here for the power into there and you know if you don't support the bottom of the board, you're liable to crack something I mean because the screw holes are right back sort of.

you know, in line with this and there's another like inch and a half or something. at least maybe you know, 2 in to the edge of the board where this connector pushes in. I mean just crazy. This requires quite amount of force because it's got a uh, it's got a lock connector on the side and yeah, you really have to get your fingers under that board to support it when you push it in.

and I Rather like this, this is a bit of, uh, fortuitous luck. The Uh ex. the separate 12volt Uh connector, which they've um, very nicely encased in the uh, uh, those Um mesh sleeves just nicely reaches almost perfectly up over the fan of the heat sink and then down into the 12volt connector on the motherboard. Very nice spot on.

I Like it. These Uh leads for the case are absolutely enormous. You can almost reach to another machine that's a USB Uh 3.0 and that will plug directly into the new USB 3.0 header connector down on the board. Beautiful! And by the way, the bottom of this Corsair case? quite quite nice.

They've got these uh, rubber uh feet on them for vibration isolation and another filter for the power supply fan. Very Ni nice. Now it's solid state hard drive time. 2 1/2 in hard driving? Well, it just slots in anywhere you like.

Beautiful. and of course, uh, for maximum speed, that's going to go into the Uh 6 gig. Uh Sara connector I've actually only got two of those. so um, yeah, um, not sure what I was going to do there because I'll probably run a like a single second Drive I was going to uh install like a raid uh system.

but I think I'll just have the second, maybe maybe the second drive on the 6 uh gig uh port and the um Unfortunately, the external um SATA uh external uh dockin drive up here will have to be 3 gigs per second. Still 3 gigs per second screaming. Now let's see how this uh I just got a generic uh CD uh DVD burner here at Zeus one and uh, we going to see how this goes into this uh, lock there? open there. We go see if this just adequately slides into here.

No, no, something's something's not giving. There we go that slides in and line it up with the front and just lock and that's yeah. I can't push on that anymore. Very nice.

One thing I'm actually quite amazed at is they still have the PS S 2 connector on here. Can you believe it? After all these years, you would think that you know. Well, I'm sure the biases do work with like a USB uh keyboard these days when you boot up, so you know I it's just Legacy I Mean you know they still got the VGA uh connector on here as well. I mean absolutely incredible.

All right. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to leave the hard drives for later. Um I'm going to power this thing up now. I've got these are my uh raid one of my RAID uh sets, but I've got a another Seagate 7200 that I'm going to install in here as my video rendering uh drive as well.

um I'm short on S cables actually. Um, but anyway. um, it's it's. ready to power up.

So I'm going to hook up a Mona keyboard and mouse and uh, see if we can, uh, fire this thing up and hopefully the Magic Smoke doesn't escape. and if you want to see the uh CPU bracket on the back, there, it is on the bottom side of the case. All right folks, here we go: The moment of truth: I'm we going to power this uh sucker on and uh, see what we get? I've got an old school uh VGA monitor hooked up I've got a USB keyboard and mouse I do have a backup uh PS2 keyboard if we really need it, but I'd be surprised if a modern bias couldn't detect a USB keyboard and uh, well, you don't need a mouse for the bias. In fact, I think this one might have a graphical user interface for the bias.

Anyway, here we go: I'm about to plug it in and uh, well. fingers crossed. Okay, power supply didn't blow up. That's good.

There's no standby light ready. I'm about to push the power button on the top of the panel and yep, fans are powered on. There we go It Beeped It beeped a Zeus Check it out. Yes.

Delete. Oh oh oh oh stop Stop New CPU Installed Beautiful Winner folks folks. Absolute winner. And yes, the bias has detected the Uh Mouse the keyboard uh two hubs, one drive generic storage device IDE Drive zero that a hard drive and it's detected the DVD Rider as well.

New CPU installed. Please enter the F1 to run setup. Ah, and there it is. I737 Okay, my installation was uh, bang on with the CPU It defaults to 3.5 gig which is its uh nominal uh clock rate but we can overclock that later in coming videos.

But we are a winner folks. so it should actually boot here. We go look at this graphical user interface. W Bias.

Geez, when I was a boy H You know, Gez, you know biases were uh uh, incredibly incredibly basic. Um, but this is, you know, absolutely incredible. Look at the all the effort they gone do with the clock up here. I mean how much code has to go into the the bias to do all this graphical interface? They got to have all the graphics routines to, uh, generate all this stuff and it's just it's just crazy.

But anyway, you can overclock this sucker. Optimal. You can. No, oh, hang on no, that's the right.

so that's power saving mode. sort of. Yeah, Power saving normal and isus optimal. Boot priority: Great.

Oh, you can drag. use the mouse to drag or keyboard and navigate Boot priority so you can drag and drop. Absolutely incredible And we can I Don't think we can adjust the core voltage there. That's just showing us.

Uh I think you can adjust the core voltage if you go in, but that's just showing us what it's currently set to. the CPU Fan: uh, 560 RPM Let me see if I can hear it. Yeah, I can hear it I'm not sure which one it is either the um, uh, the front panel one or the rear panel or the power supply. I'm not sure or could be the fan.

you know there are four. uh yes, there are four fans in this thing. um, at the moment. so but it's very quiet I haven't even got the soundproofing panels on the side yet.

So um, it's basically gone into the ambient noise of the room pretty much I mean I can hear it. but I'm not going to be able to do audio proper audio test in the lab here because there's too much just the airon noise in the roof from the other Um offices next door and stuff is uh, is uh, way above the Um threshold of the fans in this thing. so we have a winner. Different language: No.

I'll stick with English Exit Advance Mode Boot Menu Advanced Menu Advanced Mode enter Advanced mode Yeah, why not? W Here we go AI Tweaker Here we go. We can tweak all sorts of stuff. Turbo Ratio: I Won't do this in this video I'm not going to overclock the thing at all I Just want to, uh, get the thing I Was just happy for it not to blow up and uh, my $350 CPU um worked. So pretty happy happy with that monitor.

There you go CPU Temperatures at 32 Dees it's doing absolutely nothing. It's just running the bias of course. Motherboard temperature I wonder what the mother, what's that motherboard temperature is? Is that the Z88 Z77 chipset? I'm assuming um, or is that just like an ambient sensor on the motherboard or something I I don't know. um, but yeah.

Fan speed 600 RPM Very L. Shazzy's fan speed Yeah, the Shazzy fan is just hooked up to 12 Vols this uh, this fan over here folks is uh on. the front panel down here is just, uh, just hooked perly into the 12 Vols I haven't uh uh, got anything? uh, controlling the speed of that at all so it's just going fixed speed. but uh.

12 volt voltage 5.08 12 Yeah, 3.3 CPU Voltage is uh, running at just over a volt core speed uh core voltage CPU Q Fan control enable CPU Fan Low limit. What's the low limit? Oh there you go like you can C set the CPU to 100 RPM if you want jeez, really low, why not CPU fan profile Ah wonderful stuff Shazis fans, all the fans. Lovely anti- surge support o You can disable anti- surge if enable Sy system will have uh, Uvp or over voltage. oh okay.

under voltage protection or over voltage protection function. Oh well yeah, want to enable that? it's enabled by default. So yeah, tons of stuff for the thermal uh management of this thing. really quite impressive and booting up full screen logo post delay time I don't want to actually delay anything? You can just I Want you know, um oh to easily enter the Bier setup.

Okay, okay, yeah, so we'll just leave it at 3 seconds for now. and uh, fast boot blah blah blah blah blah. all the other paraphernalia next boot after AC Power loss. Oh, look a normal boot after AC power loss.

that's handy. So neat. I Like it and the tweaker. Yes, we been in there and then you can adjust all the all your power management.

USB Ser All that the Jazz you can, uh, tweak all that sort of stuff till the cows come home I Like this graphical user interface bias. it's really quite nice. Um, easy flush utility I assume I've got the latest bias in here. It's a brand new motherboard, but uh, I'll once I've got it all set up I'll have a look to make sure I've got the latest and uh, well, that's really quite neat.

So um, that should just work I should be able to put in my Windows 7 uh uh, 64-bit uh CD and um, install that on the solid state. uh Drive no I'm not going to run Windows 8 I don't know anything about Windows 8 I have a license of Windows 7 Pro 64-bit It all works. so I'm going to stick with that time to initialize. Well, uh, Windows 7 Pro is installing 64-bit uh I did one partition of 128 gig although it did uh uh, automatically add a system partition in there of like 100 Meg or something like that and it, uh, looks like it is going to take a while.

Um, well, I'm not sure how long I am actually timing it, but it said it needed about 32 gig or thereabouts free space. so that's not bad on my 128 gig solid state drive. although most of the apps I'm going to install on my uh secondary drive. but of course, uh, things like my, um, you know, my video editing app.

uh, you know Sony uh movie studio of course I'll install that on the C drive because um, on the solid state drive just for some extra performance. but most of the other apps I don't really care about will go on the secondary Drive Well, I got to admit, this thing is quite silent. Um, it really just um goes into the background noise. If you put your head near it you can.

you know you can actually hear it. but jeez, it's pretty darn impressive. Let me tell you, and uh, it's running the CD ROM at the moment I've put the side panels on I'm not sure which is the no noisiest, uh comp opponent I'll have to probably make that a separate video, just go through checking each of the individual fans, seeing which is the uh, loudest and possibly, um, uh, replacing them with those uh, silent, uh or those very low noise, uh, no, no or brand or whatever our fans they are that I've got after I clean them up. so I'm pretty happy with that.

We're still uh installing Windows Some time to go, but yeah, it's a winner. Well, we're almost done completing the installation. uh, 14 minutes? Not too bad I guess and it's complete. There you go.

Took 37 gig on my drive on my 128 gig solid state drive. I've got uh, well, um, sorry, uh, 34.7 gig and 76.9 almost 78 gig left heaps all right now I've got all my drives installed I've got my solid 128 gig Solid State uh primary boot Drive I've got my 2 gigs 7200 RPM uh Seagate uh video rendering Drive I've got my media drive up here that I originally had in a separate networked uh media box so that we can you know watch TV shows and stuff like that. It's hooked up to my media box in the Loung room, but now I'm just going to run it through here. Doesn't need a separate box, separate power adapter, all that sort of stuff.

That's a 1.5 gig. uh Samsung And with the um uh, CD drive up here, the DVD drive drive and also the external uh Sater um docking station I've used up five out of my six um SATA connectors. Unbelievable. Imagine if you're running like a software raid or something as well, forget it and this sucker only draws about4 wats in standby mode.

Not bad at all. So let's uh, boot the thing up and uh, see what power consumption we get for just idling windows windows. It's uh, pretty quick though with the solid state drive. I got the 3 second uh isus, pair up there we go 88 Watts This thing's got like a 5-second cycle time or something 5sec measurement period or something to that effect.

maybe 10, but we're talking 80 OD Watts Windows booing and Windows is in. We're in like Flyn There we go, there's our Windows boot. Completely clean system of course. Okay, it's dropped down a bit.

There we go: 58 WS Let's see if that changes. 51 Okay, so we're probably talking 50 Watts on idle which is basically uh what I was expecting and what I was told to expect. um for an Intel I7 system would have been much higher I think it would have been like 30 Watts more like 80 Watts if we had the AMD uh 8 core processor or something in there. The Intel is very low power processor, especially when it's not uh, doing anything.

So there you go. Um, just idle 50 W So I you know, um, that's running uh, two hard drives by the way, plus the DVD drives in there, but that's probably shut down. Um so a solid state drive plus two um SATA um hard drives as well. Not bad.

And of course the big test. How fast does it render? well? I've installed handbrakes and I've got my system monitor there I just ran it. Uh, the test file. If you haven't been following the forums, you won't know what this means, but my previous one did it in over 2 minutes and this one with the same test file took 52 seconds folks.

Fantastic! Let's run it again. Here we go: Start this is my uh and bingo average frames per second. my other one, like average is like 20 or 22 24 something like that. Um, slightly less than uh, real time and this one's doing 70 frames per second average 75.

There you go. average of 75 frames per second on that uh HD test video. Brilliant. So I've more than doubled my speed exactly as I expected and you can see my uh CPU cores um over here they haven't uh, pegged 100% whereas they were pegging full 100% before on.

Uh. all well, all four four cores plus the four virtual cores. So there you go. This machine is a winner and I haven't even tweaked it yet I haven't tweaked it for Speed or anything like that.

It's just a stock installation and bang. There It Is It takes 52 seconds to uh, render that test video file. so man, imagine what's going to. well I can get some improvement by overclocking this thing and doing stuff like that.

And by the way, that is reading and writing the file to the 7200 RPM uh drive. And as I've mentioned before, it really drive speed has nothing to do with it. It's all CPU power here. Even the slowest hard drive can easily um, uh, keep up with the data rates uh involved here.

so not a problem that's reading and riding to the same Um secondary SATA 7200 RPM Drive Beautiful, Absolute winner. I'm going to call it quits there I Have to finish setting up this machine. It's probably going to take me another day to install all the software and everything like that and I will follow up with some real uh, you know, direct uh comparisons between um, this and my, uh, previous uh notebook setup. so that'll be a separate video.

Hope you liked it. It was just me assembling a bloody computer. Really? Anyway, catch you next time.