Cooking up a gamer’s delight
Take the most powerful mainstream graphics card around, add high-end hardware and a little RGB, and bake at 4K.
“We barely looked at the price tag during its construction, and didn’t pay much heed to it when we did add it all up”.
The build for this month is laser-focused on performance. We barely looked at the price tag during its construction, and didn’t pay much heed to it when we did add it all up. We did, of course, have a pretty good idea what the best value components were, and what sort of ballpark we were going to end up playing in, but on the whole, money wasn’t a factor. No, this machine was all about one thing: performance.
Specifically, we wanted to build a machine that wouldn’t be constrained by bottlenecks. From the off, we wanted to give the Asus GeForce RTX 2080 Ti ROG Strix Gaming OC room to strut its stuff, and once you’ve got a serious bit of silicon like that in your machine, lots of the other
components fall into place. The big selling point of this graphics card, and the GPU that powers it, is that it makes the dream of 4K gaming a reality. Yes, even at the highest settings (although there’s an important caveat when it comes to RTX titles: Even this card struggles to maintain 60fps at ultimate settings). Which means that while we generally don’t include screen recommendations on these pages, we’ll make an exception, and suggest that this rig is ideally paired with a quality 4K monitor.
So, over the next few pages, we show you how to build the sort of machine that gaming dreams are made of. Let’s see what spending five times the cost of our budget build delivers in performance.
A FACTOR OF PERFORMANCE
As we’ve said, we’re not particularly concerned about costs with this build, which gives us plenty of scope when it comes to picking the individual components. We wanted to make sure that we weren’t holding the GPU back, so enlisted the help of the Core i9-9900K for the main grunt work, as the all-new Ryzen 3000-series CPUs are busy being benched in the Labs for review, so this is the go-to option in the mainstream space for performance junkies, for today at least. The Core i9-9900K was still locked under a waterblock in a previous build, unfortunately, so in order to use it here, we had to strip down that PC, which involved a fair amount of foul language, a reasonable number of spillages, plenty of scratches and bruises, and bright red hands at the end of the irksome proceedure.
With the GPU and CPU selected, the choice of motherboard went to MSI’s MPG Z390 Gaming Edge AC, because it was fresh in the office for review, and in terms of memory, we went for 32GB of HyperX Predator DDR4-3200 RAM – this should be more than enough for what we’ve got in mind for this build. Storage-wise, we’ve gone for a speedy 1TB 970 Evo M.2 drive, which is fast without being prohibitively expensive. We’ve paired that with 12TB of spinning platter storage, giving us plenty of space for work and play.
When you’ve got such great hardware beating away at the heart of the machine, it makes sense to show it off, which is why we turned to the new Define S2 Vision RGB from Fractal Design. This is a vibrant and spacious case, with plenty of support for cooling options, which is good, because we’re also using the Corsair Hydro H115i Pro all-in-one. It’s is a hefty piece of cooling, but we had some interesting plans for how to install it. So, let’s get building ....
1 START WITH THE BASICS
To make sure that the core components were working, we slotted the CPU into the motherboard, connected the cooler, added the RAM and M.2 SSD, then connected the power, with it all on top of the mobo box. We hooked up a screen, then shorted the two pins on the front panel block that normally connect to the power button. This core was detected, and it booted without fuss. It’s worth holding the cooler so air can flow freely through it. Once done, we disconnected the power supply and cooler, and started prepping the case. The smoked-glass side panels pop off once the thumbscrews have been removed, while a button at the top of the back panel releases the glass panel roof. We could remove the PSU shroud as well, but didn’t feel this was necessary for what we had in mind.
2 INSTALL THE MOTHERBOARD
The Define S2 Vision’s main chamber offers little in the way of resistance to installing a motherboard, but the PSU shroud made things feel tight on the bottom edge. Maybe we should have removed it after all. Don’t forget to slide the I/O plate into place before putting the motherboard in, and ensure the clips sit on top of the ports, not in them – which is what happened to us. Luckily, we spotted this before turning it on, so managed to avoid causing damage to the ports. With the motherboard and plate in place, it’s simply a case of screwing in the eight screws that hold the board in position. We don’t usually connect the case cables at this stage, but things were so tight at the bottom of the case that we felt we needed to do so here before adding even more cables to the mix.