The ultimate PC upgrade

Is this slightly extreme build necessary? Absolutely not. But does it look good? Damn right it does, says Zak Storey.

THE CONCEPT

Winter is here, the cold dark nights have firmly fixed themselves upon us, and as the bitter chill of the north wind bites into the flesh in those dark and sombre hours, it’s important to have something to comfort the soul, as we come out of the snow (if we’re lucky) and into the warmth.

“Something?” Well, this is APC, so it has to be a system. In short, the aim of this is to be the ultimate upgrade. After a year of fantastic releases and phenomenal performance increases, our reviews editor decided it was about time he pursued an upgrade of his own. What are we upgrading from? Well, at the heart of the system was an Intel Core i7-6700K @ 4.8GHz, 32GB of Kingston HyperX DDR4 @ 2,400MT/s, an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070, one Samsung 950 Pro 256GB M.2 SSD and a 1TB OCZ Trion 100 SSD.

There are a few other details — the Corsair Hydro H100i GT cooling the CPU is kept chilled by four Noctua NF-F12 iPPC fans, and the power is supplied via a Corsair AX1200i inside an NZXT Manta chassis.

It’s a respectable rig. Already quite the powerhouse of technology, but not without its flaws. The fans are too loud, they spin at too high an RPM; the GPU, although powerful, isn’t enough to satisfyingly gaming at 4K; and the ASUS Z170i Pro Gaming is having trouble booting from that Samsung PCIe SSD, with load times reaching into minutes in some cases.

The solution to all these woes came from two desires. One, to swap out from a 28-inch TN 4K Iiyama Prolite B2888UHSU (seriously, who thought of that designation?) to a 27-inch IPS 165Hz 1440p AOC Agon AG271QG. And the second to utilise the absolutely stunning NZXT Source 340 Elite chassis.

GLUTTONY AND HARDWARE DECISIONS

For this build, it was all about keeping it as clean as possible; accenting just the hardware, and drawing away from the cables and anything else cluttering up the interior. To start, we opted for the ASUS Z170 TUF Sabertooth motherboard, with a twist. The thermal armour covering the majority of the mobo helps keep it looking slick, but the mid cap, with its chrome finish, is a bit gaudy, so that would have to be plastidipped. Then it was on to the cooling. As the NZXT Kraken X52 had just arrived in the office, it seemed like the obvious choice. For fans, we opted for three of Corsair’s ML120 Pros with white LEDs; their super-low RPMs mean they can run whisper quiet, and they look awesome. We had them in a pull configuration on the radiator, purely to ensure we could see some form of movement inside the case itself.

For graphics, we went with two MSI GeForce GTX 1080 Gaming Xs, and with one of MSI’s HB bridges as well, to give them a little more pizazz, and to put to bed the question of whether or not the HB bridge makes a difference. Memory was provided by four sticks of 16GB G.Skill Trident Z DDR4, and the storage changes came in the form of swapping out the 256GB 950 Pro to a 250GB 960 Evo, and the 1TB OCZ Trion 100 for the now slightly ageing 2TB Samsung 850 Pro 2.5-inch SSD instead.

1 ALL THINGS COOLING

It’s the small details that matter the most. With limited airflow, we had to be smart about how we installed the setup. By default, the S340 supports up to two 140mm fans in the front, one 140mm fan in the roof and one 120mm fan in the rear. To ensure we had a positive system, the plan was to install the Kraken X52 in the front of the case, using the two ML120 Pros as intakes, and then only have one ML120 Pro exhausting air out of the back, leaving the top fan empty. The only problem being the excessively open grille letting in dust. To counter this, we opted to grab two Silverstone magnetic dust filters, one for the rear of the chassis and one for the roof. These set us back about $16 each, but are well worth it in the long run.

2 SLI BRIDGES AND YOU

The next addition to this build was the SLI bridge. Now, we’re still not entirely convinced about how much this actually affects performance, but judging by the fact that the Fire Strike scores are slightly higher at 1440p and 4K, we assume it’s doing something worthwhile. That said, what it definitely does add is a bit of bling, along with additional support between the two cards, reducing GPU sag in return. The LED lighting, although not controllable, does look pretty swish with the GTX 1080s, and the brushed aluminium finish fits in nicely with our overall aesthetic.

“It was all about keeping it as clean as possible; accenting just the hardware, and drawing away from the cables and anything else cluttering up the interior.”

3 CABLING AND CASE MANAGEMENT

For cabling, we decided to opt for a set of pre-sleeved cables from BitFenix. In fact, we were pretty shocked to discover they sold full kits, but with support for a variety of brands, including EVGA, Corsair, Seasonic, Be Quiet! and Cooler Master, it was a no-brainer. The original intention was to pop out the ATX pins and fit them with E22 stealth combs, to further smarten them up, but, unfortunately, they turned out to be too tight to remove from the factory fitting — a tutorial for another time, perhaps. On top of that, the S340 Elite comes with fantastic cable routing options, with the SATA SSD mount in the floor (if you’re not running two HDDs behind the PSU cover), the GPU power passthrough and, of course, the giant cable bar running up through the centre of the chassis.

4 SSD DECISIONS

2.5-inch SSD support in the S340 Elite is an interesting proposition. You have three options for placement. You can place one at the front, on the side of the PSU cover, two below the graphics cards, with easy cutout holes for cables to reach through, or two in the hard drive cage, inside the PSU cover. Because we opted to use a 250GB Samsung 960 Evo M.2 drive for our OS, hidden away under our motherboard’s armour, we decided on a single SSD on the PSU cover, and removed the additional two SSD sleds below the GPUs, to make it look a little cleaner. We were fortunate with this build in that the two MSI cards, spaced so far apart, successfully cover those two sleds; without them, two empty bays would look a little out of place.

5 TAMING THE KRAKEN

What a beautiful piece of craftsmanship — NZXT’s latest AIOs look stunning. The infinity mirror on the CPU block is nothing short of awe-inspiring, but to run a block like that, in this manner, requires a plethora of cables, including a substantial micro-USB cable, and a proprietary fan/pump cable. These were a little difficult to route. We ended up running the micro-USB through the CPU power cutout, and the rest of the cables into the back of the chassis, to the top-right of the motherboard, before routing them back through to reduce cable slack. The pump header was then carefully weaved around the thermal armour and into the fan header, below the four sticks of DDR4.

6 LIGHTING PERFECTION

Lighting in this build is tricky. We’re still not 100% sure whether this will be the final configuration, but it does look cool. The general rule of thumb for lighting anything is that the lights themselves shouldn’t be seen, but the light they throw should. You can work different angles and highlight different products by utilising either LED strips or individual LEDs. One thing to note: You should almost always use white LEDs; using any other colour LED strips pulls all the colour out of your components, and just bathes them in the color of the lights. Also, you need to be smart with your strip purchases. We use magnetic BitFenix Alchemy 2.0 strips in our steel chassis builds, and normal adhesive-based ones in acrylic or aluminium cases.