These are the BIGGEST Mistakes people make with their PCS!

Look, as much as you guys have tried to convince me no one's building computers anymore, no one's building. It's dead. It's over. Every time I go to MicroEnter or even Best Buy, I see cart after cart full of PC parts leaving the store. And I keep hearing my first build. Hey, you got me into this. This is my first build. This is my cousin's first build. So, I'm done listening to that nonsense of people trying to convince me that there's no one out there building computers anymore. and I'm making a video specifically to those that maybe are making some really common mistakes. So today I'm going to kind of break down some of the major components in the system and the biggest mistakes people make when it comes to that particular part of the PC. And I bet you by the end of this video some of you that probably thought you had your all together are realizing oops. Okay, first one we're going to talk about here we actually did a recent video about uh is about power supplies. And here's the thing. Power supplies are so freaking boring. It's a box that has wires that sends power to the cool stuff like the CPU and the motherboard and the graphics card and the RGB, right? And then power goes in and FPS comes out and it's like, yay. But here's the thing. Power supplies, as you guys know, and we showed are not created equal. In fact, more often than not, uh, lesser end quality power supplies have a hard time supplying their rated power. Whereas, if you go with a qualitybuilt power supply, they can supply way more power than they're spec. Allah, the SFX 650 W uh EVGA power supply that we recently ran nearly 900 watts through and had a very hard time getting it to actually turn itself off because we were pulling too much power through it. That's an example of a power supply that is speced well below its capability and that's for safety reasons. But when it comes to building your power supply, yes, build your own power supplies. It's the only way you can guarantee you're getting what you paid for. No. When it comes to specking your power supply, they are not created equal. Most people just look at the box and go, "What's the wattage? " And then they call it a day. You can find $30 power supplies that are so-called 700 watts. You know, they're a silver box with a very generic label on it and probably a language you can't read. And then you've got another 700 watt power supply or whatever that might cost, you know, $90, $100 or more. And the major difference is not just the brand, it's the quality of the components that are inside of it. So, rule of thumb, give yourself an extra 20 to 30% at least of headroom that you think you may need. So, if you need a if you need 700 watts, get yourself something closer to a,000 watts. But more importantly, make sure it's from a brand that is reputable. Most power supplies are made by either Superflower or CSIC and at the end of the day those are like the two major ODMs. There are other brands that are out there and almost every other every brand that you see like Corsair, EVGA, CS, wait, Silverstone, uh [snorts] MSI, Gigabyte, they all just throw their labels and their connectors on the box that is built by one of these ODMs. So 80 plus gold would be my minimum recommendation and then oversp spec it. Now you got to keep in mind the efficiency rating and this is where the real mistakes come in. The efficiency rating does is not a quality rating. They are not the same thing. Just because it's 80 plus or 80 plus gold or even 80 plus bron well bronze and silver or something you don't see these. It's like gold is like the new minimum where you used to be able to get 80 plus silver 80 plus bronze or bronze silver then gold then platinum then titanium. But anyway, I digress. Just because they have a 80 plus rating doesn't mean that they're built high quality. It doesn't mean that their digital um overcurren protection and digital rail monitoring can handle transient spikes the same way other brands can. So, if you kind of cheap out on your power supply, then you're going to start seeing transient spikes causing system shutdowns or system restarts or reboots. And I get emails about that sort of stuff all the time. We're going, I'll just be playing a game and then my system just restarts. Not like a shutdown, but like a it's like you hit the restart button. And more often than not, that's your power supply that did that. It's one of the biggest mistakes we see people make. And the worst possible scenario is it could fry all of your components because let's face it, it is responsible for sending the power to the components. And if the power supply allows 12vt to turn into 15 volt maybe for a few milliseconds, that can cause damage. Another mistake people make is with modular power supplies, they lose a cable and they go, "Ah, what the heck? " And they just grab a different cable from another box maybe and then just plug it into your power supply. And although it may key in and fit, does not mean the pin outs are the same. And that leads to fried components. That happens quite it's even happened around here. Unfortunately, never with me. But Nick has fried an SSD once because he grabbed the wrong cable for a wrong power supply and it keyed in. But the 12vt and the ground were opposite of each other. So that was one dead power supply. Phil just likes to manhandle through the key. If it doesn't fit, he just likes to force it in there. Anyway, um that's a big mistake people make when it comes to power supplies is they look at the price and they go, "Man, I don't want to spend

extra money. It's a boring part, but it is the part that can live with you. One of the among the longest of all your components through upgrades in the future, and it's responsible for the safety of your entire system. Don't cheap out on it. " That's like going, "Yeah, I want a really fast car, but I don't need brakes or airbags. " All right, the next one is CPU cooler installation errors. Something we have never done around here. We have absolutely never made a mistake. The most obvious one is on the bottom of your air cooler or even your water block if you've got an AIO is a plastic protective sheet. It almost always is written in red that says please remove before use. The problem is you get so caught up in building your system and you're like, "Oh, it's time to put the cooler on. " Yeah. You put it down, you put down your thermal paste, you forget to take off the plastic sheet. That plastic sheet, instead of transferring heat from your component to the cooler, insulates the heat inside of the part it's supposed to be taking the heat from, leading to what may seem like normal behavior when you're using your system. You'd be surprised how cool the system can actually stay, even with the plastic film on there. you might notice slightly higher idle temps, but as soon as you put the system under any sort of load, it'll start to thermally shut itself down because it hits 100 C, 105C pretty much instantaneously. And then eventually it will shut itself off as a thermal protection uh built-in feature in your system and then you start chasing that going, why are my temps so bad? And then you take your cooler off and you go, oh yeah, I've done it. Phil's done it. Nick's done it. I'm sure you've done it. And it's it's an easy one that we make because of the fact that we're just getting ahead of ourselves and we're kind of forgetting standard operating procedures. And so, uh, that's one of the really common mistakes. Fortunately, it's an easily fixable mistake. You just take it off and put new thermal paste and you're good to go. But when it comes now to installing coolers, including AIO's, you have so many different socket types now. You've got AM4, you've got AM5, you've got the all the different LGAs when it comes to Intel. And all of those might have different Z-axis heights of how high the cooler sits off of the CPU. If your cool if your different standoffs are too short, you can put too much tension on the cooler, bend the bracket, potentially damage the top of the CPU IHS, or damage the cooler itself because you pulled down the arms too tight. All of the access heights when it comes to the cooler standoffs are specific to your socket. So, if you're not paying attention and you grab, say like an LGA1 1200 for Intel and then instead of an LGA 1700 and have different standoff heights, you could either be putting too much force on the CPU, which can then lead to poor contact uh or even lifting of the CPU in different areas where you no longer make good contact with all the pins, or it doesn't make good contact with the IHS at all. It could be sitting too high off the top of the IHS. You've got a thick amount of thermal paste between those two contacts. And although thermal paste is designed to be thermal, you know, thermally conductive, it only has a minimal operating range and a maximum operating range at which that thermal conductivity is going to work. So if it's not making solid contact and solid pressure with the component, then you're going to have the same sort of result where you're noticing climbing temps and temps go off the chart and then your system starts to shut down. Another thing I've seen is where you have these plastic spacers that go on the standoff and the standoff might be the right height, but then you use the wrong spacer, pushing it off too high. And that same sort of thing can happen. And it's something that's become more of a problem over the years as we've seen so many sockets now maintain uh relevancy well into the future of future exa uh sockets existing. Then people kind of become confused on what parts they're supposed to use when it comes to putting this uh their cooler together. Fortunately, cooler companies have started kind of learning and they're becoming a bit more universal now on the way the brackets work. In fact, a lot of modern coolers now, even if you're on an AMD socket, will still use the Intel bracket that's pre-installed on the cooler and then the adapter that you put on automatically in one piece just makes it all fit, which is really nice. But they're not all that way. I mean, some of them are gonna just you get this major sleeve of parts and you're like, "What the heck am I supposed to do? " and then you're looking at the manual and you unbox things and it's labeled on the plastic, but then as soon as the part is free from the plastic, you lose track of what was what and then you can find yourself in a situation like this. So, my biggest recommendation when it comes to building your system and not making that mistake is identify your socket, identify the right parts, take those parts out, maybe put them in a ziplockc baggie or a little bowl so you know those are the right ones, bag everything else up and put it away so you don't accidentally have the opportunity to mix and match parts. to double check before you unwrap them because they're usually not marked on the part themselves. There might be a certain color where you might have a purple standoff or a light blue standoff or a brown standoff and then those correlate with which socket they're supposed to go to, but that's a really common mistake that a lot of people will make. Fortunately, it's not one that can necessarily damage your component, but it's one that you will absolutely notice something is not right because of the fact that uh if it's not making the right contact, it's going to be pretty obvious when your system starts thermal throttling or even shutting

down. Okay, now we're going to move on to the motherboard cuz there's a lot of opportunity for mistakes when it comes to the motherboard. Don't freak out about the fact that the sockets exposed. This motherboard is end of life. We're not using this sucker anymore. In fact, it's more of just a display piece at this point. But first and foremost, we'll start with the RAM. Assuming you have a golden toilet and you have a G6, you know, airplane and you're super rich, you have RAM to install. Most motherboards, you'll notice, have four slots for RAM. Most people are running only two sticks of RAM. And the biggest mistake they make is not referencing the motherboard manual to determine what the appropriate slots are for two sticks of RAM. If you're running four sticks of RAM, congratulations, you're rich and you can just populate all four RAM slots and it doesn't matter. But there is a specific configuration that your motherboard will use to use what's called dual channel. If you have two sticks of RAM, you want to be able to use those two channels simultaneously. If you put the RAM sticks next to each other, which is pretty much 100% of the time incorrect, that means you've put them both in the same channel, you have just slowed your system down by as much as 20% because your CPU is not now only having access to a single channel of RAM, not dual channel, which is exactly what you would want. So check out your motherboard manual because more often than not you'll find that the farthest slot outward is one channel. You can skip one and then go to the next slot. But every so often, it's very weird, you'll find where it's the innermost slot, skip one, and then the next one where the out outer slot is empty. So if you just check your motherboard manual and look for channel A, channel B, it'll be it labeled usually A1, A2, B1, B2. That way you can make sure you have an A1 and a B1 occupied because if you have A1 and A2, then you only have a single channel of RAM. Fortunately, it's an easy fix. Look at your manual, look at your RAM, realize your mistake, and move it. And then what's going to happen is when you reboot your system, it's going to retrain. And congratulations, you just sped up your system by as much as 20% depending on your configuration. But one of the biggest mistakes people al also make with that is the fact that they then don't go in and turn on expo or XMPP or at least try because those are technically overclocks of the CPU as IMC or internal uh integrated memory controller. But if you're just running at the standard Jex speeds, then why the heck did you even buy RAM that's faster than that? Because that's just performance that's being thrown away. Now, we talked about this a bajillion times in the last 14 years of running my channel, but you'd be surprised how every time I mention that, somebody in the comments says, "Oh my gosh, I didn't realize it was off. Thank you, Jay. you just uh sped up my system and you're welcome, but it's one of those things that's going to continue being a point of conversation because it's not something new builders think about. It's not something the motherboard even tells you is an option. And if you've never done, you know, PC building like this in the past or looked into the tinkering of the settings, you would not even know that that's a thing. You would see that it's a Expo and XMP are on the box or the RAM, but so are a million other things that you're going to think is just marketing fluff, but it's a real thing. So obviously you need to try and turn it on and see if your system will run. Not all systems will run at their advertised speeds because you can quickly buy RAM that's faster than what the stability for the IMC on your CPU is. So it's one of those things where I don't recommend buying the fastest RAM that you can find. Let's say hypothetically this was 6 months ago when RAM wasn't, you know, 500% of what it's actually valued at. Uh, you know, I would, we all know 6,000 to about 6,400 is the true sweet spot where anything above that is not guaranteed to run. and it's really just kind of a diminished returns especially today. But continuing on with motherboard blunders because there's plenty of them because everything plugs into it. We're going to now talk about the fact that people will more often than not install their SSD, but they forget to take the plastic off of the thermal pad that's built into the SSD heat sink. Now, any motherboard today, almost all of them is going to have some sort of a built-in heat sink that touches the SSD. And just like the plastic film that is on your CPU cooler, the thermal pad right here is going to insulate your SSD from transferring heat rather than transferring the heat to the top of this heat or to the heat sink. So, your drive is going to start to get hotter and hotter the more you use it, which means it's going to become slower and slower. It is an ASIC just like anything else. It must be kept into an optimal temperature range. Otherwise, it has to start slowing itself down to keep from turning itself into a barbecue. And if you forget to take the plastic film off of your thermal pad, then you're going to find yourself having an issue where your drive is potentially because as drives go get faster and faster, they get hotter and hotter because they need more voltage to supply that level of speed. Now, the biggest mistake people will make too is not noticing whether or not they have a dual layer SSD. And what that means is you'll have chips on both sides of the PCB. Because of the density that NAND has gotten, more drives these days, if they're 2 TB or less, are more than likely going to be single-sided, which means the top of the heatsink or the bottom of the heat sink itself is going to touch the top of the drive, and that's all you have to worry about. But not all drives are built that way. Lower-end brands or manufacturers might

still be utilizing less dense NAM, which means to get the capacity that's advertised, they have to put nans on both sides of the SSD. And if you don't remove that thermal pad cover on the bottom side of the heat sink, now you're going to have a very uh lopsided temperature distribution across your drive, which can lead to the same slowdown because of the fact that it's going to be measuring the hottest temperature and regulating itself based off of that. SSDs have sensors among them. All the nans usually have a sensor as well as the controller. So, you need to keep it all nice and cool. Speaking of drives, another common mistake people make is buying themselves a Gen 5 drive and then expecting magic to happen. If you're not actually plugging a Gen 5 drive into a Gen 5 slot on your motherboard, you're only going to get the speed of whatever that slot is. We talked all about that in our bifurcation video. And because of that, there was a lot of people that actually mentioned I like how I can get the cover back on. There we go. A lot of people mentioned, "Wow, I went with all Gen 5 drives, and I didn't know that when I'm running my drives plugged into a chipset, not only is it dropped down to Gen 4, potentially even gen 3, it's not even going to be running necessarily at like a full 4x. It might drop down all the way to a 2x depending on how many drives you have installed. So now, congratulations, you've literally flushed money down the drain. " So pay attention to your motherboard layout. Look at the box more often. Let's say you're standing there in MicroEnter or I don't know, Memory Express or wherever else you're buying PC parts. Look at the motherboard. On the back, it'll usually have some sort of a layout showing exactly which slots are what. Worst case scenario, go online and download the manual. The manual will tell you as well. And just make sure you're not over buying when it comes to SSDs. Just because you have a Gen 5 drive does not mean you're getting Gen 5 speeds. Okay. Now, I'll talk about graphics cards. There's not a whole lot you can mess up here other than All right, grab your Astral. I know you all have one. So, when it comes Look, I paid for it. I'm going to squeeze every drop of milk out of this. Why I went with milk? I don't know. Juice would have been a better option. — Milk was a bad choice. — But, uh, when it comes to graphics cards, there's not a whole lot of mistakes that you can make, but there are some. For instance, the first one would be not buying a big enough power supply if you go with a big old graphics card. Okay? But that would be talking to all 2% of you that might fall into that category. A couple mistakes though that can be made. Maybe not slotting it all the way down into your uh PCI Express slot, not making sure that tab is locked. So if it doesn't make great contact with all the pins, you might get a D6 code or some other uh display related trouble code or beep or red light on your motherboard. And then receing your graphics card uh will usually fix that. But the other thing too is maybe not plugging in your supplemental power. Very rare these days that people don't think to do that because the day of having PCI Express powerless graphics cards is almost extinct now. Like you could find like some 60 tier cards and even 50 tier cards that might have like just PCI Express slot power is all it needs to run. Um but usually when that happens though, you'll get a message on the moni monitor that actually says please plug in the power cable. uh because the graphics card can power itself enough through the PCI Express slot and still communicate with the motherboard and say, "Hey, I don't have my power that I need. " The motherboard will then put a screen a message on the screen that says, "Hey, please uh turn it or plug in your PCI Express power. " But this may not seem like a very big deal, but graphics cards are getting bigger and bigger [clears throat] unnecessarily. It's one of those like gosh, if we go back to Jurassic Park and the kid is crawling around in the jeep when they're broken down next to the T-Rex exhibit and he finds those uh night vision goggles, he's like, "Sweet night vision. " And the lawyer goes, "Hey kid, is it heavy? " Yeah. Then that means they're expensive. Put them down. So, it's like people have kind of realized when it comes to manufacturing, if we make it bigger and heavier, it gives you this perceived value. like, oh, it's a it's a high-end product, even though it might be like the 3060 Stricks was a ridiculous graphics card because it was like the size of a 3090 and the price of a 3080, but it was a 3060. And so, it gives you this perceived value. The mistake I'm not talking about here is buying one of those. We're assuming you've already got it, so you've already made that mistake. But the next mistake is SAG. And SAG may not seem like something that is that big of a deal. It's not just an isore. It puts unnecessary stress on the PCI Express socket on the motherboard. And what could then happen is you can start having that socket start to bend some of those pins over time or potentially even on lower-end motherboards start snapping solder joints off if the graphics card is not being properly supported. So, it's a problem that sort of came out of the perceived value of manufacturers saying, "Hey, a bigger, better looking graphics card is more likely to be purchased if you're, you know, sitting there showing like ne next to a barebones graphics card versus a very high-end graphics card. " Now, you're dealing with all that sag on the socket. So, it's important to try and come up with or purchase or use included anti-ag brackets that might be

built into your case or come with your graphics card just to take that tension off of the PCI Express slot because it might not seem like much, but let's say it's got some sag. And some older graphics cards, it's very noticeable because they don't tie in the bracket to the actual cooler. It's independent. So, the cooler can flex off of the bracket. you're moving your PC, you're doing some cleaning or something, and you kind of put it down real hard. That's more tension on the socket, which can cause problems with your motherboard. So, it may not seem like much, but sag can actually cause damage over time. So, support the graphics card as best you can. You know, this is not one I would have ever included in a beginner mistakes video, but nowadays, not updating your BIOS can actually lead to problems. Allah 9800 X3D having issues on most ASRock boards and some ASUS boards, 13th gen and 14th gen Intel across the board. Uh we've always kind of in the past before these major issues really started cropping up and becoming normal. Um we would say if it ain't broke, don't fix, especially if it comes to your BIOS because BIOS is one of those things that's scary for a lot of beginners to flash. It's like you got a cat that accidentally steps on the power strip and shuts it off mid flash. Um, you know, then you break your motherboard or you get some sort of a weird, I don't know, brownout or electrical surge or lightning strike. Any act of god could potentially happen causing you to brick your stuff. That's a little different today because of the fact that almost every motherboard, including lower-end boards, have BIOS flashback or BIOS recovery features built into them where even if the BIOS is completely borked, you can recover. In fact, I think what we should do maybe to demonstrate this. First of all, hit like on this video if you think we should do the ultimate how to flash your BIOS for every manufacturer video. For instance, we do ASRock, we do MSI, we do Gigabyte, we do ASUS, we do whatever else brands there are, and then we just chapter it out where it's like, okay, if this is your brand, this is how to flash your BIOS. And then we do one that's also how to recover your BIOS, where we intentionally brick it in the middle of the flash. We just yank that power cord and see what happens and then show you how to recover it. If you want us to do that video, hit like on this one and make sure you let us know. But I think the ultimate for every manufacturer in one video how to flash and recover your BIOS is probably an important thing to have these days because Phil will tell you they're all different. They all have different requirements. naming structures. They all different procedures and it's very frustrating to try and find it because most of the manuals for these manufacturers haven't been updated in generations either. So even they have some incorrect stuff written into their own manuals. So anyway, I think we we'll definitely do that video. But getting back on topic here, back in the day, we would say don't do it because of the risk without BIOS flashback. But now that BIOS flashback is a thing, uh I think it's important to do that because BIOS updates is the only way to truly get the most memory compatibility out of your system and hopefully if the BIOS developers are doing their job correctly, the best way to make sure that any of these issues that have cropped up that can actually cause damage to CPUs and other components on your motherboard are fixed is through BIOS updates. So, I think it's something that we have changed our stance on now. Make sure you're on the latest BIOS after you buy your motherboard because the motherboard could be generations old on BIOS cuz who knows how long it's been sitting in a warehouse from the moment it was made, flashed at its production, and then sat on a container coming across the ocean, then sitting in a warehouse distribution center, and then sitting on a store shelf. It could definitely be out of date. Not only that, CPUs. You can buy a CPU that's newer than your motherboard even today, and then you're sitting there wondering why your system won't boot, so you need to flash your BIOS. Yeah. Perfect example, most recently for us is when we built uh Phil's new editing rig with the Thread Ripper 9980X. Um that CPU was newer than the motherboard. The motherboard had apparently had been sitting on the shelf for a long time because we bought that CPU 6 months, 7 months, maybe eight months after it came out. So both those like we've had the CPU since it came out and then that means that motherboard was sitting on the shelf at least prior to that. So perfect example of you get the components, they're new, you're like I bought them at the same time, they should work together and then they don't. So BIOS updates is a is a big deal and knowing how to do that is important. The last one's going to be static. This is such a fun one to talk about. In fact, it's been a long time since I've seen anyone when I'm building a system say, "Jay, you're not using an anti-static strap. " I we have I'm not saying static electricity can't damage your components. It absolutely can if you inject that static somewhere it's absolutely too sensitive to handle but we have done so many ridiculous tests to see what static does to a PC. So, there's still some rules of thumb here to limit the exposure of potential static damage or ESD or electrostatic discharge into your components is one, don't build on carpet.

— Oops. — Uh, two, don't wear socks. And it doesn't mean like wear shoes without socks. It just means don't be standing on the static on the carpet with socks only cuz that can create a lot of ESD through your body. There's a reason why every time I unbox a case, I get shocked to hell. It's because I'm always wearing rubber flip flops, like rubber insulated shoes, and then that box is all static charged because of the styrofoam, and then I touch it, and it just transfers itself to me, even though I'm wearing rubber and like and insulated from the floor. Anyway, that's enough shock to probably damage something if I were to touch the motherboard or whatever. But don't build on carpet if you can help it. Don't wear socks with no shoes while building. And then just don't touch pins for sure. Like pins specifically. Like if I if you take this motherboard and be like and you touch like the SSD cover or something, nothing bad's going to happen. If I was like right into the socket, that's a problem. You also shouldn't be touching pins anyway, like at all. It doesn't matter if it's motherboard, like fan headers, RGB headers, USB, you just shouldn't be touching the pins no matter what. But that's all I got to say about that really. Um it's one of those things where it's becoming such a moot point these days. is like the ESD protection and the grounding and the capacitor designs alone on components are really robust and beefy. Maybe it's time that maybe it's time for us to really revisit the whole static electricity video. Really put our money where the mouth is where my mouth is and use a 5090 or something. I don't know. We'll see. Then if it breaks, everyone's going to tell me how wasteful and non uh grounded I am. Phil space palming so hard right now. That's an electrostatic discharge joke, people. I wasn't grounded. — Extra stupid dumb joke. — And then the last one, uh, mistakes people make is the idea of being able to future proof your system. We did a whole video about that. Uh, there was a lot of good points in that video and you guys made, too. So, make sure you guys check that video out. Put a link down in the description below if you haven't seen that already. But more importantly, I'm curious, what was your biggest mistake that you've made when building your first PC? Or even, it doesn't have to be your first PC. If you just made a really stupid like, "Oh, that was a beginner mistake. " What was it? Put it down in the comments below. I bet you anything like here's the thing. I've been doing this for 35 years. Not YouTube, but I've been building PCs and such for 35 years and I continuously make mistakes because you just get in autopilot and you're not thinking and then you can easily make just some dumb move that you're like, why did I do that? But anyway, thanks for watching guys. Sound off in the comments below and as always, we'll see you in the next one.