“The Core i7-6950X is Intel’s first deca-core processor, and coming in at a respectable $2,579 (ha, who are we kidding — it’s insane!), it’s the backbone of our PC.”

CASE WOES

The 400C is one of the cleanest cases out there, but there’s a few things you should bear in mind. Firstly, the power supply cover. To install your PSU, you need to remove that little devil by undoing the three screws on the rear of the motherboard tray. You can then remove the panels and gain access to install the PSU. Unfortunately, there’s no other way to install it. Next thing you’ll want to do is slide the 3.5-inch hard drive bay across to the left — there are another two thumbscrews located just below the ones from the PSU cover for this. By doing this, you gain extra space to plug in your cables and keep everything nice and organised. One quick tip: Install the PSU and route the CPU power up to the top of the chassis prior to installing the motherboard. It’ll save you a lot of e ort in the long run.

MEMORY AND COOLER

For this build, we chose Corsair’s Hydro H100i V2. We’ll be honest, there’s not a lot of di erence — certainly from an installation standpoint — between di erent AIO coolers. In this chassis, we chose to install the radiator in the front of the case, ensuring we could pull cool air into the system. Install your radiator and fans before your motherboard; this way, you can route the fan cables where they need to be ahead of time, so there’s no hassle later on, trying to install them around your hardware. It’s also a smart move to install your memory rst, before attaching the heatsink, so you avoid trying to manoeuver your DIMMs around the AIO’s tubing runs. DDR4’s notches are a little more subtle than the DDR3, so make sure you line up the notch on the bottom of the DIMM with the notch on the motherboard.

PCIE STORAGE

Intel’s 750 Series PCIe SSDs bring large capacities and jawdropping read and write speeds to the masses. We took advantage of the 1.2TB variant, coming in at $1,349. If that’s a little beyond your budget, you could easily opt for a smaller 400GB version instead, to house your OS and most-used programs. On top of that, if the PCIe card look isn’t your jam, or if you fancy running GTX 1080s in SLI, Intel also sells a 2.5-inch variant that connects to the ASUS X99-A II via the U.2 standard. And if you really can’t be fussed with that, you could opt for a Samsung 950 Pro instead — although it can throttle just a touch under load, this M.2 drive will sit snugly below your graphics card, making placement in nitely easier.

KING OF THE HILL

The GTX 1080 is the pinnacle of single GPU graphics technology at the moment — it kicks absolute arse — but in relative terms, not a lot has changed since the last generation, as far as installation goes. Plug it in, screw it down, make sure it’s got enough breathing room, remember it’s a blower-style card — it sucks air in for its coolant, as opposed to circulating it — plug in your power, and you’re good to go. The biggest change for us lies in that single eight-pin power connector. Although you could, hypothetically, daisy-chain two GTX 1080s o a single cable, we advise against it, especially considering how power-hungry these babies are. Your best bet is to run two separate cables up to each of your GPUs here, especially if you want to overclock them. And, boy, do these things OC!

INSTALLING 3.5-INCH DRIVES

Installing the two mighty 6TB WD Blacks can be a little tricky, especially as the Corsair 400C is a fairly compact case. Make sure you run your SATA cables from your motherboard rst, and ensure you’ve got a SATA power daisy chain running out of your PSU. Another pro tip is to avoid any of the angled SATA cables — your best bet is to use straight ones, especially if you’re occupying both bays. These two Western Digital Black drives boast some insane capacities, ensuring you’ll have plenty of redundancy for when the crap hits the fan. We chose to keep them stock, but setting up a RAID 1 or 10 array isn’t a bad idea. On top of that, there are three additional 2.5-inch slots on the back of the motherboard tray, if you want to expand your SSD storage even further.

FILLING THE LOOP

We’re a big fan (ha!) of Noctua here in the o ce — who isn’t? — and, for this build, we opted to pump the air around with these little beauties. We chose to run two Noctua NF-F12 iPPC 2,000rpm 120mm fans for the front AIO cooler, pulling cool air through the radiator and into the chassis. And then we have two NF-A14 iPPC 2,000rpm 140mm fans drawing cold air directly in through the roof. There’s a couple of reasons for this. Firstly, the horrendous number of cables littered across the top of the motherboard is a nightmare — having them potentially get caught in the fan blades is just going to suck. Secondly, a positive pressure system will make cleaning out your build a little easier in the long run, because all the air drawn into the chassis is ltered, and it’s pushed out of all the un ltered areas. We’re all about that system maintenance.