IT LIVES!
IT’S ALIVE! OK, so it wasn’t really dead to begin with, we’ll admit, but it was certainly in dire need of some TLC. The Intel Core i7-3820 at its heart was an intriguing part for its time. Competing directly with the Core i7-2700K, it made little sense in the PC ecosystem, much like Intel’s current Kaby Lake X parts do. A quad-core Extreme Edition processor, back in the 32nm days? Odd. That said, it served its purpose, and played all the latest games and the programs needed to produce a magazine without a hiccup.
The build process, despite the excessive levels of dust and blackened hands we ended up with during construction (we’re still not sure what caused that; mold probably), was a relatively painless process. Using compressed air helped a ton with the initial clean-up, and after removing the fans and going over the whole build with a microfiber cloth, it started to resemble a new chassis again. We have to give credit to BitFenix’s design team from back in the day, because this case is still fantastic to build in. Especially if you have a modular power supply. Fortunately, our Shinobi isn’t the windowed version, so cable management in this build was less about aesthetics and more about function than anything else.
But it’s all about performance, and although neither storage nor memory capacity have changed much with this upgrade, the key components—CPU and GPU—have. And what a difference they’ve made. Single and multicore performance saw almost a 50 percent improvement in performance, with graphics performance stomping its way up by a massive 100 percent in some cases.
In its day, AMD’s Radeon R9 390 was an incredible piece of flagship technology, but comparing it to Nvidia’s Pascal architecture is akin to comparing an ant to a cat. The difference is staggering. It’s difficult for us, in the short term at least, to quantify just how much of a change the additional cooling solutions have added to this build, especially as we’ve swapped over processors as well. Hopefully, the IP67 ratings on the CPU cooling fans should ensure they last much, much, much longer than the Thermaltake stock fans that came with the previous AIO.
Things that are still due an upgrade? Outside of the case, there’s not a lot. It fits the bill perfectly for the tasks we need it to do. Perhaps a Samsung 850 Evo would make more sense as a primary OS drive, because those read speeds are a little on the slow side, but aside from that, it’s all set for another five years of hard labor. At least until the case begins to rot away….