You forgot to mention removing the plastic before mounting the cpu cooler. Still can't believe people miss it..

Biggest: Not turning on your power supply and thinking you messed up elsewhere.

Biggest mistake: Getting sacred and not building yourself!

#16 - Bend your motherboard or gpu #17 - Not peeling off the protective foil from cpu cooler before install #18 - Not checking your finished build for loose screws, washers or any leftover metallic material which can short your motherboard

One note for the antennas: if you have signal strength problems then the antenna come with your motherboard would be your best bet since those would have greater sensitivity. Shorter antennas would be fine if you care about aesthetics and you are okay with the signal strength.

Don’t do 16, just use something called fancontrol, other KZfaqrs have done videos on it, it’s software and entirely free and has more features than NZXT’s software which requires you to spend money on the fan controller. It’ll let you control any fans plugged into your motherboard down to your VRM fan too! And allow you to select pretty much all temperature sensors too. Argusmonitor you still have to pay for and it has less features and just doesn’t look modern in any way

9:00 you didn't mention fan control, its free and open-source and it is quite powerful being able to mix temps of difrent components and alongside other features it is precise and easy to use

FanControl is way better than NZXT Hub or Argus Monitor. Completely free and does everything those tools to but better.

Tip16 : you can also use FanControl freeware to control fan speed using whatever sensor you want with any curve or function that you fancy :)

Love the small tips format. It’s always the small stuff that deters new builders

I'll upgrade my prebuilt soon, thanks for the video! Now I can avoid some of those mistakes.

My first pc build went well, i bent all the pins on my motherboard and cpu.

Ive been building pcs since the 90s and i still get nervous doing it. Thank you for the reminders, sets the mind at ease mid-build!

One typical mistake is forgetting to set the xmp

Anyone who doesn't use Pcpartpicker is missing out. I love it and plan out builds for fun.

PC building is fun. I did it myself but with the help of course from you guys from KZfaq. I built my gaming pc last year and that was one of the most unforgettable experience I have.

Great video! Always like to watch stuff like this before I make any tweaks to my system. You never know what you might be missing!

I've been looking for antennae like that ever since building my desktop and had no idea those existed, they're perfect!

Gonna have to disagree with getting a cheaper CPU for gaming, it really depends on the type of games you play. If the game is optimized correctly yes it should be mainly using the GPU, but some games are VERY CPU intensive. I mainly play a lot of MMO's and a better CPU makes a huge difference, especially when there are lots of players on the screen. I also play some games that are optimized very poorly and heavily rely on the CPU.

Brilliant tips, thanks a lot 👍👍👍. Building my first desktop PC and this definitely helps. All the best in 2024 and beyond.

did the exact thing you told me not to do about swapping the drives and it worked perfectly. take that!

My most annoying build mistake is finishing the build to then later notice that the metal latches for grounding the I/O shield to the motherboard have slipped into the ports. So you have to take the motherboard out again and it could short something out if unnoticed.

Another tip: You should not spin the fan when cleaning them.

Been trying to upgrade my pc for the past 2 years. I had a 1060ti 6gb, i5 4600, 16gb sub 2kmhz ram, generic mtb and 450W psu. Finally upgraded a few days ago to a 7800x3d, nd15s cooler, 1000W gold/plat psu, 32gb ddr5 6000 cl30 rgb ram that I also turned into temp gauges and a few m.2s all seated in an asus b650-A gaming wifi mtb. Holding off on a better gpu as I only got a 1080p monitor for now, so I went with the 4060ti. After setting it up, installing drivers and making tweaks, it's been so-far been smashing everything I throw at it pretty well. I do a lot of VR gaming, and it's been such a breath of fresh air being able to go back to titles I was playing on my other rig of sub 30fps to now capping frames without sutters. Main idea is to future proof everything necessary and incrementally upgrade my gpu if anything interesting drops over it's lifespan. Was going to go with the 7800XT when it dropped, but the price where I live and limited availability of the model that'd fit my case is unreasonable, though the only reason I wanted it was for the performance overhead I now realize I don't need for the titles I currently play. Sure, I might want to try some of the new AAA titles down the line, but I'm not unused to gaming on low settings if required- so it should be fine.

So glad you mentioned swapping in the boot drive from an older machine. I cannot tell you how many times I see new builders ask if that is OK or if it will work. Yes it CAN work in some cases especially going from a similar spec machine to another but is ALWAYS a bad idea, worse yet is people responding saying "Oh yeah that's fine" or "Sure no problem I do it all the time" just makes me want to pound my head against a wall. They don't realize all the things in the registry that tie's the OS to the old machine from installed programs and games and apps to drivers, settings and timings etc. Again it CAN work on occasion but at best can result in an unstable or slower machine and at worse cause BSOD's or simply be unbootable from the start. And really even those insisting it's fine (for them) it's just being lazy and inviting trouble in the long run.

Thanks for the tips, the #13 was very helpful to me, such an amazing web and tool I didn't know it existed.

This is fantastic! Thank you so much! Is there any change on the recommended CPU ?

My man flexing in the last shot:) Great video!

Waiting for your next ITX build. Gonna see how you cram all that power of the 40 series into one shoe box style case.

Great video, good tipps. Thanks!

Very good and sound advice. Well done.

Oh hey I did that display into motherboard thing! Just yesterday I was finishing up my first PC build, tried doing benchmarks and whatnot to make sure all the parts were working right, and I couldn't figure out why my GPU wasn't doing anything. The system recognized it, I could manually force specific apps to run using it instead of the dedicated GPU, but it was defaulting to the integrated graphics and only Microsoft apps would let me choose which GPU I wanted to use manually, with no software-side option to switch the default. And then the solution was to simply swap where I plugged in the HDMI.

one of the best tips I got with compatibility for your mobo while researching parts is reading the manual for pci specs or certain features or lack of features and like he said checking bios and chipset updates

Impatiently waiting to see how your main build upgrade in sff case will look like)

What about using sleeved aftermarket cable extensions attached to your normal power supply cables?

Great video! Any plan to review alienware aw2723df?

PC Part Picker saved my ass many times, although I hate it sooo sooo sooooo much when they don't have listed on their PC Building List popular/good components, such as CPU Coolers, cases, PSUs, and heck, even some GPUs

Thanks, all advise is very true and helpful, I agree with you 💯,

I love this series of yours. Still recall that 50 PC Build Tips from last year

Great video. I think it can be worth spending a bit more on a better CPU e.g. I thought I was saving money buying an i5 but eventually upgraded to an i7 for better performance, but would have saved more money and hassle just getting the i7 in the first place.

Hey just wanted to ask how is the review for the gwolves hsk+ going has it arrived yet? I fell really tempted to buy one but there aren't many objective reviews for it

Nice, been there done most of those and often find it it many of those that others I am helping have done.

Ther thing i struggle the most is cable management when it comes to the fans cabling...

UNSTABLE MEMORY!!! I’m going through this right now, only my 3rd build I’ve done. Upgrading to a 4090 and replacing my current mobo and memory so hopefully I have no issues this time. All these blue screens and memory crashes have been driving me crazy

Great stuff. I would add not checking the Mobo's Q codes or status led's when trouble occurs. I recently wasted hours solving an issue pointed out by my start up status led.

4090 owners, take note of step 12!

Thanks for the antenna tip. Bought with your link. Have been using the motherboard antenna and it’s been the sole thing killing my 0 visible cable game.

Great vid as always!

You glossed right over the importance of coating the ENTIRE SURFACE of the CPU with thermal paste. Using a few globs instead of a thin layer completely covering the CPU will result in areas having no paste at all, and thus no cooling. I am US Navy trained and retired after 35 yrs of hardware and software support mostly in mainframes.

You've got the best tech videos

That very useful information. Thanks.

Forgot to peel off the plastic cover of cpu cooler before mounting it. I can't believe I did that when I upgraded my cooler 😆

On the subject of the case fans, you really don't need a controller. What I did, was in the bios I set the case fan curves to the mosfets, since those heat up under sustained loads from GPU, CPU, or both together. They also take longer to heat up which means that if your GPU just has a short burst of activity, the case fans won't ramp up unnecessarily, and also when there has been load for a while, they will continue at a higher RPM and ramp down slower than the GPU itself which is helpful to bring the entire system back down to ambient temperatures. All you need to do is find out the temperature range your mosfets are running with something like HWINFO64 while under load as well as not under load, and then set the curve up based on that.

Not mixing modukar cables is one thing....how do you feel about cable extensions and 90 degree adapters for 24 pin?

Thanks for this well done video.

Argus monitor, hmm, never found that digging on the web, thanks for the pro tip!

2:52 "fresh install is the best way to go" spoken like true nuke & pave artist.

Why not use a torque wrench for cooler installation? I am a mechanic, so I have a few torque wrenches around. When I install a cooler, I tighten it to 30 or 40 in. lb. in a crossing pattern. Is it totally necessary? Maybe not, but it is an easy way to ensure you have even pressure on your IHS.

I believe the RAM speed (rating) is MT (mega transfers) not megahertz (clock speed). So DDR4 3600 runs at 1800MHz and does 3600MT / s.

Personally, I think they should have mentioned static discharge when building people underestimated how easy it is to fry your motherboard when you don't ground yourself

+1 on slightly increasing memory voltage if you can't boot with XMP enabled.

Any plans to review the Fractal Design Ridge?

also to mention is before upgrade the cpu, especially with the AMD am4 platform is upgrade the bios before to set the new cpu. I had many builds where I sold the cpu before doing the upgrade, then the computer would not start. And upgrading after hand is difficult, because on my latest build, the manual said it loud and clear: before upgrade the cpu, please upgrade the bios first.

Great tips, thank you.

For Linux the boot drive issue is not a thing. For PSU I normally buy compatible ones from Corsair, this helps with pin out. Problem with the fan controller is that I assume you would need software for that.

1:20 yeah, when i built my pc in 2019 with r5 3600 on b450m motherboard, i had problems like this even pc not starting anymore cmos had to reset many times, but as time passed updated bios many times it fixed it self, makes sense taht am5 is havign same problems now...

I also use Argus monitor as I set everything to the water temps of my reservoir. I disagree with using NZXT Cam as it's just more bloatware especially after you said not to add the motherboard bloatware software.

Memory stability with ryzens... On my 5600x setup with B450 mobo stock XMP profile is setting DRAM voltage to ONLY 1.23V where 1.35V is recommended

From my experience, you have to be careful of not scratching your motherboard from the bottom when installing it in a case. In the middle of where your ATX motherboard goes(in most or all cases under the m.2 slot) there is this one spacer for the screw with more height(which is in some cases very sharp) to lock the mobo in place and make it easier for screwing it on and if you're not careful there is a slim chance of damaging the board if you are sliding it towards the I/O shield to the back of the case and then if something turns out to be wrong with the mobo, the RMA is gone

The WiFi antenna also works with the Bluetooth. If you're using wireless earbuds to listen to ASMR, the longer antenna extends your range, especially around walls.

Pretty spot on. Good vid.

Definitely recommend Fan Control!

Quality vid, as always

The corsair commander core XT also gives you the ability to drive system Fans off GPU temperature .

the display cable into the mb one make me chuckle wont lie

NZXT fan hub synching with GPU?! awesome

The PC partpicker isn't accurate for RAM compatibility. It's best to find the compliant RAM from motherboard compatibility list and then verify it with the RAM compatibility

Are you going to review the new benq 1440p monitor/ 240 hz ?? I’m interested on what you may think

thanks for the insightful video

PC part picker: "Disclaimer: Some physical dimension constraints are currently not checked, such as CPU coolers and RAM clearance."

Ali I am looking fwd to another lowest possible PSU comparison. With AMD RX7900xt gpu.

You are so well respected that info from you is just pure gold. Great advice. Thank you. I'm really looking forward to your next SFF builds with the latest CPU GPU combos. The cooling solutions vs speed and noise will be so different now as the CPU maxs temp before throttling.

I did number 6 back when I built my first PC 10 years ago lol. Had to call EVGA support and lie like; "Yeah, the monitor is connected to the graphics card and not the motherboard." Then I told him I had to hang up and fixed something I had been battling for 2 days.

Just a quick heads up, if you fail to or forget to download the motherboard wifi crap onto a usb there's no panic. You can connect your phone to your home wifi and USB tether it to your PC. That's what I did all the time with the first desktop I ever had.

Why should you do a fresh install when changing CPU/Mobo vs just plugging in your old boot drive? What's the difference?

you got any thoughts on the alienware AW2723DF? really concidering buying it but cant find too many reviews

One iv found is make sure the case you're going to use has the same IO options of the Board you're going to use. Example front panel USB A-C some cases still don't have both it's one or the other 🤦‍♂️

for the tip with the fan controller id rather just have the fans constantly at max speed since noise or power arent problems

+1 for Argus Monitor!

the 2nd thing is what acutally happened to me and the bios update fixed it

Nice Video keep it up!

Never thought of using an external fan hub controller and basing it off of gpu temps. I’ll look into the Argus Monitor first. Thanks!

And never touch the contact strips of the RAM and the CPU. You can cause static shorts and contact difficulties.

i've ignored a lot of these things upgrading, and yet my pc still stands. I've broken a mobo jamming a cpu in, i've swapped ssds across pcs, i've used random ass ram, and completely ignored fan curves.

My first (and yet only) pc was like 4 years ago and it was kinda "easy" i just watched some tutorial for the build and got recommendations for the build from KZfaq videos and discord servers

As someone who is putting together a build now and 1. is using the 13600k with a powerful GPU (RTX 4070 Windforce) 2. is using DDR4 3600MHz memory in the future config this was extremely satisfying to watch lol, you just reassured my choices, great video btw!

I have a pre built pc and planning on upgrading it. New everything but cpu and gpu. Is that gonna work? is there anything i have to know before finding parts and building?

What is the best ITX motherboard for intel 13 gen and DDR5 ram??? I feel like reviews on all ITX boards are mixed or nonexistent. Thanks in advance

The most recent building mistake I made was that I got a case with 4 usb ports on top but I got a motherboard that only has one usb header. Meaning only 2 of my 4 case usb ports work. Not the end of the world considering the motherboard has plenty of usb ports as well but definitely something to consider when shopping for your motherboard 😂.

Don't be impatient when setting up an itx build and at the last moment realised you forgot to plug in the internal usb cable...