Performance in an attractive package
Finishing building this monster gave us a greater understanding and appreciation of hardline water cooling. As a rookie, it can be daunting, especially when you first start bending your tubing. It’s difficult — you have to take a step back, deconstruct your system a few times, and decide what’s the best way to run various tubing lines in your chassis. It’s definitely a labour of love, but once complete, it’s hard to argue that it doesn’t look incredible.
But it’s not all about how pretty your rig looks, but how it performs when pushed up against that rendering grindstone, right? So, to clarify on our overclock stats, we achieved an impressively stable 5GHz on our Core i7-6700K, with 1.41V on CPU core voltage. We kept the 32GB (2x 16GB) HyperX Savage Black DDR4 at 2,400MT/s, because the increased frequency also increased the CAS latency, making it less than worthwhile. And we also left the Fury X at stock, because although it is possible to overclock the Fiji GPU inside, it’s incredibly finicky to get stable enough, especially with high CPU overclocks.
All in all, this rig was quiet. Really quiet. Even under load, the most we saw was 60°C, and it still wasn’t enough to make the fans kick in. As far as our rendering tests went, we were impressed; 1,074 is nothing to shake your head at, especially for a 4/8 processor. Graphically, the Fury X is certainly a contender — if you’re not looking to overclock, it’s a solid 1440p card. In Batman: Arkham City, we scored a healthy 101fps, and both 4K titles scored frame rates in the high 40s. Dropping anti-aliasing would dramatically improve performance, as it’s often unnecessary — certainly at such high pixel densities.
During the build, we came across a few problems, notably positioning the reservoir. If you want to utilise dual 240mm radiators in this build, attaching the reservoir to either via a bracket is a nightmare, and on top of that, a combo pump res just won’t fit mounted on the centre support beam. We had to ghetto mount our EKWB DDC pump on to the centre of a Phanteks pump mount from an Evolv ATX, then drill that into the chassis’ mid plate.
For liquid cooling, the Manta is an incredible feat of engineering. The fact it isn’t stymied by that traditional ITX size, ensuring you get the most out of your liquid cooling, is right up our alley. And as far as utiliing a single PCIe slot goes? Well, most people don’t use more than a single GPU, and for good reason: If you have the cash, you go for a better graphics card, as opposed to running SLI or CrossFire, and having to deal with the problems and slow updates associated with that.