A new office desktop from a collection of old hardware.

We decided to reuse some old hardware to breathe life into a new office desktop

LENGTH OF TIME: 2-3 HOURS

LEVEL OF DIFFICULTY: MEDIUM

THE CONCEPTCEPT

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

Featuring a Core i7-4790K, 16GB of DDR3, and a GTX 970, 70, this SSD-powered, liquidcooled machinene lay within Fractal Design’s Define Nano S, looking lively each morning, and serving the he magazine with vigor until its dying day. Alas, s, thanks to one too many ghosts in the system, one too many BIOS glitches, we had to put “Oldd Yeller” down for good.

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

So, for this build, the rules are as follows: Key components nts (motherboards, processors, power supplies) es) 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 $80, 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 aging Core i7-5820K, for six 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 PNY’s CS2030 240GB 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 liquid-cooled 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 enougheno grunt for lunchbreak gaming in ultra spec glory.

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DUST FILTERS?

WE KNOWWHAT 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 trapezoid-shaped 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.

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UNRELEASED AIO

IT’S A SHAME that the Be Quiet! 240mm AIO Silent Loop never made it to market in the US, because it’s truly a thing of beauty. The brushed aluminum 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 coilwrapped 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.