17 WINDOWS 11
USING ANOTHER SYSTEM search for ‘Windows 11 media
creation tool’ and click on the first link to the official Microsoft
website. Click on the second option ‘Create Windows 11
Installation Media’ and download. For this step, you need
a clean USB drive of at least 8GB formatted to FAT32. If
using the one for the BIOS, make sure to wipe it first. Once
downloaded, run the program, and when it gives you the
option to choose which media to use, select USB and then
the specific drive. This will download a bootable version of
Windows 11 to the USB drive. Insert it into your PC, turn the
system on, and head to the BIOS by mashing the ‘delete’ key
on startup. In the ‘boot’ section, change to boot from a USB
stick, hit F10 to save and exit. Your system should restart and
run through the installation process.BY THIS STAGE in the build, everything has been put together
and we now have Windows 11 running smoothly. However,
the PC still needs a few more tweaks to get things properly
up and running. First off, we connect it up to the internet
and update our ASUS Armory Crate, which is an all-in-one
utility for ASUS boards. This has all the necessary drivers
to install, plus the chipset for our Intel CPU. With these
installed, we headed over to the Windows Update section
in the settings just to double-check everything is up to
date there too. The final thing we need to do is head over to
ninite.com and download our first few pieces of software.
Ninite is a great all-in-one solution where you can find all
the necessary applications in one place.18 UPDATES, DRIVERS, FIRST SOFTWARE
1
2
3
4
(^1)
Even in this huge case, the
ASUS ROG STRIX RTX 3080 is a
monstrous GPU and performs just as
well as it looks. In an ideal world,
we would try and swap this out for a
3090 but it was hard enough in the
first place to get a 3080.
(^2)
To match the lighting with the
front of the case, we’d love to
replace the stock fans with some of
the same fans from our AIO. This
should hopefully spruce up the
interior of the can a little too.
(^3)
Although we have plenty of
RAM in this machine, there is
nothing wrong with adding a little
more. Four DIMM sticks will look
better in this chassis—with only two,
it can look a little lonely.
(^4)
Annoyingly on our GPU, there is
a loose PCIe cable from the PSU
cables that came with our NZXT
C850. Next time around, some
aftermarket cable solution would
sort this solution and look a lot
neater around the whole machine.
FEB 2022 MAXIMU MPC 27
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