READY FOR WORK
THIS SYSTEM was built to do anything and everything. Whether that’s casual gaming, testing benchmarks, web browsing, media editing, general office stuff, you name it, it can do it proficiently and efficiently. Arguably, the old system would have done this as well—but as competently? Not likely. In today’s era of Ryzen multicore processors and PCIe SSDs, however, it would have made more sense to go out and buy a Ryzen 7 1700 and something of equal caliber for the motherboard, if you were building this yourself. But that’s not something we have the luxury of doing in the office.
The build itself was relatively unchallenging (outside of the socket needing a bit of love). Working inside the P400S was exceptionally enjoyable. We can’t emphasize enough how impressive this case is as a value offering. You could pay $120 for this thing, and still feel as though you’re getting a good deal. Mounting any AIO radiator, fans first, is always challenging, so that’s something to look out for, especially if you’re considering a push/ pull orientation, because you have to thread the long bolts through the fans, then into the threads of the radiator, without necessarily being able to see them. It can take a few attempts to get it right, but that’s about the only awkward part of the entire build.
And then there’s the performance. It’s definitely an upgrade over what we had prior to this, and it performs great, outside of the ecosystem. Compare it against Ryzen and any modern offerings, however, and the chinks in the armor start emerging. The PCIe SSD, although providing fantastic reads, is a little lackluster on the writes, and the CPU rendering performance, although impressive, lacks substance in contrast to its Ryzen counterpart. Admittedly, video rendering isn’t something we do on a day-to-day basis, but when we do, we need it done ASAP.
Graphics is where it’s at, though. And the GTX 1080 Ti is the king of the hill right now. However, it’s in rather an odd position as a card, because it seems like good value, but only thanks to Nvidia artificially creating that market, because AMD has yet to provide any substantial form of competition at the high end. It’s cheaper than a Titan Xp by an incredible margin, while touting very similar performance, and it’s leaps and bounds more powerful than its GTX 1080 predecessor, by a factor of almost 30 to 40 percent in most cases—for only $200 more. You feel like you’re getting a good deal, but in reality, if AMD were actually competitive right now, seeing this card at $500–600 wouldn’t seem like such a huge shock. In this build, it dominates our testing suite at 1080p, as is to be expected. And it makes gaming at 1440p during lunchbreaks particularly enjoyable.