LUST FOR LIQUID
WE HAD A TON OF FUN constructing this build—and converting it over to liquid cooling was fairly painless. Plus, watching those GPU temps drop so dramatically was simply joyous. We’re still not 100 percent happy with the whole shebang, but at just $260 for the loop, we can let EK off. Our tubing runs are a bit too long, and if EK had included a vertical bracket instead of a horizontal one, we’d have mounted the radiator in the front of the chassis, then attached the bracket and the res to it.
Cooling aside, the system runs a treat. That Ryzen 7 1800X certainly doesn’t disappoint, smashing through Cinebench with a score of 1,597, and providing some solid single-core performance, too, at 159—comparable to a stock clocked Skylake Core i5, which is more than enough for us in any game.
It still has issues in certain older titles; frame stuttering is definitely there, but it’s not the end of the world, and as drivers advance with Ryzen in mind for modern titles, it’s hardly a big loss. The biggest problem is our sudden envy over eight-core systems. Watching the rendering times of videos fall, and those 16 little squares eat up Cinebench in seconds, made our Core i7-6700K systems seem a little lackluster. Sure, they’re great in game, but the lack of computational throughput leaves a sour taste in our mouths.
One thing we haven’t really covered is the lack of storage. We’ll be honest, the deadlines were particularly tight for this one, and getting a system set up and ready to go for our cover shoot was a challenge. As always, it had to look good and function almost immediately, so we went with the easy option, and just threw a 275GB Crucial MX300 SSD at it, and that’s about it. In the real world, that wouldn’t be enough for a system of this caliber. Investing in a 1TB SSD, or even an SSHD, to mount in the back of the chassis, would more than make up for the lack of internal storage. And you could just as easily run a PCIe SSD on the motherboard, and swap out the SSD for something more budget and capacity oriented.
Memory performance intrigued us— latencies have fallen dramatically with Ryzen recently—once upward of 100ns, they’ve now fallen to 78ns and below. Whether that’s down to better BIOS, or benchmarking software now registering Ryzen properly, is up for debate, but either way, it feels smoother.
So, was it worth it? If you’ve read our liquid cooling feature (pg. 36), the answer remains the same: yes. The cooling is staggering, especially on that GPU, and the performance is solid. Cryptocurrency mining is still butchering GPU prices for now—something that looks unlikely to abate any time soon— but this is still a fairly decent price point for the performance, and it looks killer to boot.