Build the perfect 1440p gaming rig
Zak Storey builds the perfect 1440p gaming PC.
Zak Storey builds the perfect 1440p gaming PC
“When it comes to Nzxt, the company has a bit of a reputation for breaking the rules on what we’ve come to expect from new product launches.”
When a new cooler comes out from a manufacturer, it’s not often met with much fanfare. These launches, especially in the tech journalism world, happen frequently, and usually only warrant a solitary news post on the likes of Tom’s
Hardware. Even then they’re not likely to garner much in the way of traffic. However, when it comes to Nzxt, the company has a bit of a reputation for breaking the rules on what we’ve come to expect from new product launches. You can see this in its cases. Go back to 2010, and its chassis stack was fairly mediocre. Fast forward a few years, and you get innovations like the S510 Elite, the Manta, the H700 series, to the point where the company has dramatically ascended through the ranks to become a top-tier brand.
Perhaps even more impressive than its cases is the company’s cooler design, specifically its Kraken series AIOs. The first gen was very much like the rest of the Asetek AIOs out there – pretty mediocre, some light branding, and a bit of RGB. The second gen came with its own infinity mirror and some stellar lighting effects thanks to Nzxt’s own CAM software suite, and that was it. In 2019, though, we witnessed the launch of its third-gen Krakenseries coolers, most notably the new Z range. These flagship coolers come with one heck of a premium price point, but also with a fully integrated 2.36-inch LCD digital display.
In fact, it’s such an impressive part that we decided to theme an entire build around it. So the task here was simple; combine a truck-load of Nzxt parts with a $4,000(ish) budget, and aim to hit that 60fps sweet spot at 1440p.
“The logic behind picking the standard 2070 was that it should, by all visible measures, be considerably cheaper than the RTX 2070 Super, as it packs about 10 to 15 percent less performance overall and has been out for far longer. ”
Best laid plans… … of mice and men often go awry. When we originally set out to do this build we wanted to see what we could do with the Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070 – not the Super variant but the standard 70 version. Pairing it with a Ryzen 5 3600X seemed like a good mid-range choice, and as most of our testing is done with Intel processors with GPUs, this pairing made for an interesting case study. The logic behind picking the standard 2070 was that it should, by all visible measures, be considerably cheaper than the RTX 2070 Super, as it packs about 10 to 15 percent less performance overall and has been out for far longer.
We reached out to manufacturers to request a GPU, went ahead and built the entire system, and photographed it all, only to then realise that the RTX 2070 was coming in at more than the reference Founder’s Edition RTX 2070 Super. We fell prey to that old adage – never assume, because it makes an a… Well you know the rest. Anyway, we can only guess that this price jump is down to a lack of stock or Nvidia phasing the original RTX cards out of existence. So we went back to the drawing board, rebooked photography, and grabbed that 2070 Super instead. That’s not necessarily a bad thing – the Founder’s Edition is still a classy card, and it complements this build quite well.
As for other components, this rig was all about style and showcasing that stellar cooler. To that end we opted to take Nzxt up on its offer of an H510 Elite case too. Its crisp clean glass panels and solid internal design makes building a mid-range system within it fairly easy, and it looks fantastic to boot. On top of that, we threw in a PCIe 4.0 M.2 SSD from Corsair, 32GB of G.Skill Trident Z Neo memory for some more RGB elements, and left it at that.