DISSECTING THE BEAST

IN OUR CONTINUED ATTEMPTS to annoy our photographers, we decided to go with the shiniest, most reflective case in the world, Corsair’s Crystal 570X, with its included RGB fans. It’s a dash gaudy, a fingerprint magnet, and lacks a lot of the home comforts we expect from a case at this price point. Still, the last laugh was over us, as it’s not the friendliest of liquid-cooling chassis. At least, not if you’re planning on mounting a reservoir anywhere.

Case aside, the core components are fairly high-end. It’s not a cheap build, but not ridiculous either, featuring a GeForce GTX 1070, 32GB of DDR4, and Asus’s king of X370 mobos, the Crosshair VI Hero. And it all went together quite nicely. That G.Skill memory comes packing 16GB per stick at an impressive 3,200MHz, which is apparently the optimum for Ryzen parts, as the infinity fabric connecting all the core complexes runs at the same frequency as the memory, which seems odd, but we’ll bite.

The GPU is the kingpin of this build. The 1070 is a stunning sweet spot of a card. Perfect for 1440p and high refresh 1080p, if you ramp up the power target, and throw a +200MHz clock on the core, it’s easy to get an extra 10–15 percent performance from it.

Unfortunately, ours was a reference card, and is currently unavailable—however, the cheapest GTX 1070 you can buy on Newegg features a reference PCB, which is fully compatible with EK’s latest aluminum waterblock.