TURBO

BACK DOWN MEMORY LANE AGAIN. Last issue, we complained about having to pull our high spec rig down to using a lower spec RAM kit: four 8GB sticks of RGB-flavored G.Skill TridentZ that cost a whopping $10 more than the RAM from our previous build. This issue, that same kit has jumped up another $10. No, wait, missed a zero: $100. Our solution, given there’s no other option, is to take the hit. Our PSU has gone up in price, but staying modular and keeping the wattage up is all but essential, so we’ve stuck with that, too. One saving grace: At press time, the fantastic 12-core 1920X was on offer, absorbing pretty much every cent of the additional outlay elsewhere, and if you see a Threadripper for under $700, you are under orders to snap it up.

On top of that chip, we’ve finally switched out the NZXT Kraken radiator for a more traditional air cooling solution. It’s a chunk cheaper, but Noctua’s NH-U14S, finally available on Newegg, really works—with the airflow of an additional 140mm NF-A15 fan, it drags through enough air to quell the heat of even a fully clocked 4GHz 16core processor in the throes of epic rendering.

This machine can do just about anything. Its GTX 1080 Ti is nigh on unstoppable, the Ryzen CPU is, though, being stared down by Intel’s eighth generation crop—a real, ahem, bulldozer—and sticking with a reasonably high-end RAM setup means we’re not going to be fighting with any bottlenecks any time soon. Expect the lineup to change significantly over the next few months, though, especially that case.