COMPONENT JUSTIFICATION
OK, SO THIS ISN’T what you would call a cheap build—we made sure of that during the selection process. The idea was to piece together one of the world’s gnarliest ITX systems we could, while still conforming to the NZXT Manta’s aesthetic design styles.
With that in mind, there were only a few motherboards we could choose from. For us, the Asus Z170i Pro Gaming was the best choice. We stripped the heatsinks, sprayed the tops with Plasti Dip, leaving the sides stock to allow for good heat dissipation, and took advantage of that M.2 slot hidden on the underside of the motherboard.
Our next port of call was memory— 16GB seems to be the norm nowadays, but we wanted to push the envelope on rendering performance, so we decided to double the average, and instead went with a pair of HyperX’s Savage 16GB 2,666MT/s C15 sticks.
Next up was the processor, to match the Z170 board. The Core i7-6700K was a no-brainer, but instead of taking our chances with the silicon lottery, we opted to grab ourselves a pre-binned chip, capable of pushing 5GHz with liquid cooling—and, boy, was that worth it.
For the power supply unit, we went with a Corsair AX1200i. Overkill? Most certainly—we only expect to pull 580W from the wall at most. However, this selection was all about noise reduction. We wanted to ensure that, even under load and overclocked, the PSU was only drawing about 50 percent of its capacity from the wall. This way, the fan wouldn’t run, and we would benefit from that reduced noise output.
Storage was tricky—we knew we needed to take advantage of that M.2 slot hidden under the board, so we chose Samsung’s 950 Pro 512GB PCIe SSD, for the best possible read and write speeds. Being located on the back should help with cooling. For backup storage, we opted for a OCZ Trion 100 1TB SSD— affordable solid-state drive.
For the GPU, we ultimately settled on the Fury X. Being VR-ready, with 4GB of HBM for incredible memory bandwidth, and tasty FreeSync compatibility made it an easy decision. Couple that with the sexy single-slot GPU adapter EKWB provides and, hot damn, is she pretty!