A renewed office workhorse

We decided to reuse some old hardware to breathe life into a new office desktop, says Zak Storey.

THE CONCEPT

Rest in pieces, my merry little workstation, you served this editor well. Over the last 18 months, your tiny ITX form factor made you an office dream, and contributed to vast quantities of words in the battle against magazine deadlines.

Featuring a Core i7-4790K, 16GB of DDR3, and a GTX 970, this SSDpowered, liquid-cooled machine lay within Fractal Design’s Define Nano S, looking lively each morning, and serving the magazine with vigor until its dying day. Alas, thanks to one too many ghosts in the system, one too many BIOS glitches, we had to put “Old Yeller” down for good.

When it comes to review hardware, we usually consider the parts to be loans. If a manufacturer requests a part back, we return it as soon as possible. Some manufacturers leave us permanent samples (CPUs and reference GPUs, in particular), so we can work closely with their AIB partners and compare against future launches; other parts we request to hold on to (motherboards for dedicated test benches); and some companies just forget to collect their gear (power supplies, SSDs, memory and so on). Cases are usually a permanent fixture, because shipping them back and forth to tech journalists across the US is a nightmare.

So for this build, the rules are as follows: Key components (processors, motherboards, power supplies and the like) can’t be less than a year old, cases have to be reviewed, and the GPU can be as new as you like, as it’s easy to swap out.

IT’S ALL ABOUT BALANCE

The Phanteks Eclipse P400S, at just $119, has a gloss white finish, solid metal panels, tempered glass, magnetic dust filters, hidden SSD mounts, a PSU cover, a fan controller, RGB lighting, noise dampening and a magnetic 12-inch RGB LED strip. Exceptional spec for the price, and it looks outstanding.

From the cupboard, we dragged out our ageing Core i7-5820K, for 6 cores and 12 threads of pure perfection, plus 32GB of quad-channel Crucial Ballistix Elite DDR4 and baked all of it into the ASUS X99 TUF Sabertooth we’ve had kicking about since 2015.

We reused the Crucial MX200 960GB SSD as the data drive here, but as its now end of life, we’d recommend the 1.1TB MX300 instead. For the OS, we used Kingston HyperX’s Predator M.2 PCIe SSD.

In 2016, Be Quiet! sent us a sample of its upcoming 240mm AIO Silent Loop. Unfortunately, it never made it past Asetek’s trademarking campaign against the closed-loop liquidcooled industry in the US, and it’s yet to make it on sale. You can buy it, but it’s extortionately priced, and imported from Europe.

For GPU, we went for a reference GTX 1080 Ti. We’re starting to receive a lot more aftermarket 1080 Tis, so popping this isn’t the end of the world. And if we need it for something else, swapping it out for another isn’t going to be an issue. It can easily handle the two 27-inch 144Hz screens connected to the build, with more than enough grunt for lunchbreak gaming in ultra spec glory.

1 DUST FILTERS?

We know what you’re thinking. “Where are them filters at?” We haven’t removed them for the sake of snapping a clearer picture here — they’re actually baked into the front panel in a very intuitive way. Because of the design of that panel, the only air intakes are situated at the top and the bottom of the trapezoidshaped structure. What Phanteks has done is create two tiny, removable fan filters, which slot across both of these entrances. This saves on cost for Phanteks, and still acts as an effective dust filter for the end user.

2 UNRELEASED AIO

It’s a shame that the Be Quiet! 240mm AIO Silent Loop never made it to market, because it’s truly a thing of beauty. The brushed aluminium block is exceptional, with a single braided cable for the pump and that’s it. No LEDs, no excess mess, and a fantastically simple mounting solution. Even the coil-wrapped tubing grows on you over time. It’s right at home with our 32GB of Crucial Ballistix Elite and the X99 TUF Sabertooth motherboard. Our white AX1200i cables, on the other hand? Well, they’re starting to look a little grubby, so it’s probably best that they’re relegated to this system.

3 MORE COOLING OPTIONS

What you’re looking at here are the two Silent Wings fans included with the Silent Loop 240mm AIO. However, they’re actually optimised more for airflow than static pressure. So instead of mounting them on the cooler, we popped them on top to, act as exhausts — and utilised a whole plethora of Silent Wings 3s for the AIO instead. One of the more impressive inclusions with the Eclipse P400S is the multiple options for cooling. By default, the case comes with two magnetic white plastic vent covers. You can pull these off for unfettered airflow and more fan mounts, and leave it open, or attach the two 140mm magnetic dust filters that Phanteks has included with the case.

5 CHILLINGLY SLEEK

And here are those two magnetic dust filters we spoke about earlier, sitting proud and true. You can mount two 140mm fans here, but because OCD is a massive thing for this particular writer, keeping the fan branding consistent is key. We also couldn’t mount the AIO in the roof, because the X99 TUF Sabertooth is a fairly chunky piece of gear. And with the CPU power in the way, it’s impossible to mount the AIO there with this particular combination of parts. To compensate, we decided to ramp up the cooling with push/pull on the AIO instead.

4 REAR I/O GALORE

A big consideration when it came to choosing the X99 TUF Sabertooth was I/O. To give you an idea of the setup, we have Ethernet going in for internet, one local WD My Cloud NAS network, a Logitech C930e webcam, a Razer Chroma keyboard, Mionix Castor mouse, external hard drive, SteelSeries Siberia 840 headset wireless hub, a Samsung Wireless Qi Charger and two DisplayPort screen outputs as well. On top of that, from time to time, USB sticks, additional external hard drives, and peripherals that we’re testing are all plugged into the hard-working machine. The Sabertooth and GTX 1080 Ti combine to provide more than enough I/O for that profusion of gear.

6 NOISE DAMPENING

Here’s the front panel detached from the chassis. You can spot the two tiny removable fan filters located at the top and the bottom, providing both easy maintenance and cleaning, and sufficient filtration. You may also notice the sound dampening material lining the front panel. It can also be found on the rear side panel, and the two plastic roof covers — if you decide to keep them in, of course. The tempered glass acts as suitable noise dampening as well, helping to keep the humming of whatever fans you install to a minimum.