DIY Building a Custom Live Streaming & Gaming PC

We do a lot of live streaming over on our YouTube Channel for our own weather balloon flights along with various SpaceX rocket launches & events.  To facilitate that, we need a powerful PC and it was time to build a new one.  Here’s what we did to get our own custom built PC good enough for any live streaming or even gaming!

The goal for today is to take all these parts put them in this empty case and build ourselves a PC. Let’s go!

Today we’re going to be building a PC from scratch. This is something that I’ve wanted to do for a really long time, but I’ve never done it so this is going to be a bit of an experiment. The reason behind this is, if you’ve been a subscriber to the channel for a long time then you know that we do a lot of live streaming for SpaceX launches and for our own weather balloon flights. That live streaming needs a powerful computer. Our computers to date have been okay at that, but we need something better! Some of you might know this about me, but I am a software engineer. That’s what I went to college for and that’s what I do day in and day out every single day at my regular job. I feel like I’m doing the industry a little bit of a disservice by the fact that I’ve never built my own computer. How could I work in the software industry with computers for a living and never have built one from scratch?! That’s changing today. I’m no expert in putting this together, but I feel like we can work through this together so just be gentle in the comments, all right?

Before we dive in and start taking things apart let’s talk about what we have here and what we’re going to be putting in the machine. Let’s start with the case. This is a Corsair 465x iCue case big enough to fit our ATX sized motherboard. The motherboard is this ASRock Phantom Gaming 4 with the x570 chipset. It fits the AMD AM4 socket for processors. Speaking of processors, we’re going to be putting in an AMD processor obviously it’s going to be the AMD Ryzen 7 3700X. This thing is a beast! It’s an 8 core 16 thread processor. It’s got a base speed of 3.6 GHz and a max boost speed of up to 4.4 GHz. It’ll give us plenty of power. It’s not the best that’s out there, but it’s going to be pretty good for us.

Cooling that CPU is going to be the Cooler Master Master Liquid ML240R with RGB lights that’s going to be our liquid cooling for the processor. We’re also going to be putting in 32 GB of memory or RAM that’s 3200 MHz speed memory that we’re putting in. We’re also going to put in two hard drives. We’ve got an SSD from Samsung the 860 QVO that we’re going to put in. That’s a 1 TB hard drive that’ll have our operating system on it. Then our main overflow storage for all of our files and videos and all that kind of stuff is a Toshiba X300 performance hard drive. It’s a 7200 rpm hard drive.

Powering the whole thing is going to be our power supply unit which is a 750 watt power supply unit. It’s an 80 plus gold certified efficiency rating. That will have plenty of power for the whole thing. Lastly, the main workhorse for this is going to be our graphics card or GPU. This is an MSI Gaming X Trio which is an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Super. This thing is also a beast! It’s not the best that’s out there. You could still go a step up, but this thing is going to give us what we need.