Original subtitles

0 Now, as a nerd, one of the things I love to do is get inside the computer. 1

So what I'm going to do in this episode is give a quick tour of the major components that are inside 2

of a typical system unit on a desktop PC. 3

Now keep in mind just because I'm a desktop PC in this situation that doesn't mean that laptops and 4

tablets and just about everything else have very similar components. 5

So let's just kind of go through this guy. 6

Now this is a very nice...beautiful... 7

I'm very proud of how nicely I put this together. 8

And now I'm going to take it apart on camera. 9

This should be fun. 10

So first I see these nice little white boxes. 11

Watch this. 12

So this is just used to control airflow a little bit. 13

I'm going to take these parts off and show you some of the neat stuff underneath. 14

I'd say don't try this at home but if you're watching a video like this this is what we do at home all 15

the time. 16

Alright. 17

So let's take a look. 18

Let's get an idea first of all. 19

You can just barely see that, 20

but I've got a power supply here and there's tons of power connectors on this particular system they 21

actually go underneath. There's a little gap so that the cables aren't laying all over stuff. 22

And then they pop up all over the place. First of all let's take a look at this. 23

This guy right here right here is a video card. 24

Now what I'm going to do is take this video card out. 25

Whoo. 26

Alright. 27

So this is a nice, very nice, high-end video card but by taking that out we can get a little bit better 28

vision of what's going on inside this computer. 29

First of all this big black rectangle you see here is what we call the motherboard. The motherboard is 30

the primary device by which we connect all the innards of the system unit together. 31

So things like RAM and CPUs and internal hard drives and just about everything that's inside the box 32

connects together via this thing called a motherboard. 33

So the motherboard has power connections on here. You see there's a power connection here, 34

there's a power connection here, so that's what actually gives power to everybody inside the system. 35

So the next thing I want to show you guys 36

this right here...come out. 37

This is a RAM stick so when we talk about RAM these individual guys are called sticks. 38

That's the term, "stick," doesn't say how many megabytes or gigabytes it is, it's just a stick. 39

They're actually very very pretty sticks, too, by the way. Underneath here, this is actually a liquid cooling 40

system. 41

We've got fans and there's liquid which runs in here and underneath here is the CPU. 42

You know what, it's going to be a little messy, but let's take a look at the CPU. 43

So this fairly messy looking device right here is the CPU for this system. On this particular system, 44

this CPU is made by Intel and it's called a Core I9 processor. 45

This goo you're seeing on top is called thermal paste. 46

The reason...thermal paste, heat dope, it's got 100 names, thermal compound... 47

and what that's designed to do is to provide a really good thermal seal. CPUs make a lot of heat. 48

This cooling system, this liquid cooling system takes that heat away and then the fans on top blow it 49

out. 50

So the thermal paste just allows a good heat conductor between the CPU and my cooling system. 51

Now let's see if I'm really brave here 52

it's going to be hard for you guys to see but that's actually a messy but very functional CPU right 53

here and a very powerful one. You'll notice that it snaps in. Different speeds have what are called different 54

form factors that allow them to fit in different motherboards. 55

We have entire episodes on CPUs so that's one to give you an idea of what that looks like. 56

I'll just put that guy back in before I cause any more damage. 57

Now as we look around this board you'll see a lot of other things that are kind of interesting. 58

First of all is underneath this little bit of heat sink right here 59

so you see this guy right here. 60

This, believe it or not, is mass storage. 61

This is what we call an M.2 SSD. 62

Now I've got it under the this thermal tape which actually takes heat away from it but I can pull that 63

out and that is the primary storage for this particular system. 64

Now if you take a look over here, it's hard, 65

it's pretty much impossible even this angle, but these are connections for me to install hard drives. 66

I've got slots right here for me to plug in as well. 67

A large number of hard drives, six looks to be an absolute maximum for this particular motherboard. 68

But if I wanted to add more hard drives like even plug into the back of this system, we call these expansion 69

slots. These particular type of expansion slots are known as PCIe and you saw when I pulled the video 70

card off it was snapped into one of these expansion slots. Gives PCs a lot of flexibility. If there's 71

some type of device I want to plug in that doesn't come with the system 72

I can buy an expansion card as we call it, snap it in, and it allows 73

great expandability. 74

Now on the motherboard itself there's a lot of interesting things that are going on. 75

First of all underneath here, and I'm not going to take this off because it's almost impossible, is what 76

we call the chipset. The chipset defines all the different features that this motherboard can do. 77

How many USB ports it has, 78

how many hard drives it can support, 79

how many of these PCI slots, all of that is defined by the chipset itself. 80

So a lot of times when we're talking about a motherboard we'll say, "Oh it's a particular type of X99 81

chipset," or something like that. 82

Now we also have...these are power...but all of these connectors here...this is a little bit tricky, but I can pull 83

these up so you guys can see it. 84

So these are the connectors that allow us to do stuff like the on off switch at the front of the computer, 85

reset button, things like that. 86

These are all handled through this guy and on this particular system, I might add, was a real pain to get 87

those things installed. Again, a little bit tricky to see, but we also have connectors for extra USB, 88

all kinds of stuff that you might want to add to a particular system. So that, my friends, is a quick view 89

of the inside of a typical system unit for a desktop PC. 90

Now in other episodes we're going to go into all of these parts in a lot more detail. 91

But for right now, the important thing is that you understand what type of parts to expect, you 92

expect to see a power supply, 93

you're going to expect a CPU, 94

you're going to expect RAM. And have some rough idea of where they're going to fit within the system. 95

This is actually the most fun part for me and it looks like it's going to be fun because I get to put 96

all this back together right now.