BUILD A COMPACT $1900 RIG
Versatile and balanced for every task
THE CONCEPT
FOR MOST OF THE FREELANCERS here at Maximum PC, the workhorse machines in our daily lives are typically paradoxes. The digital equivalent of the ship of Theseus; every part of them transplanted and replaced over the past decade, until nothing of the original truly remains. So, are they still the same PCs? More to the point, for this humble writer, has it really been a decade since we last sat down with a desk full of components and built a rig from scratch? The former question will remain paradoxical, but the latter has a new answer: no. We’ve built a new machine to escape the ridicule and derision of the MaximumPC team, and bring our lumbering skills back up to scratch.
As is, no doubt, hugely apparent, a massive part of our decision-making process when speccing up this machine was our desire for an alternate aesthetic. The black-based glowing RGB monolith is a modern staple, but we’ve added contrast and brightness, pulling out lurid color in favor of a slick monochrome combo. Liquid cooling is all the rage, but without the budget for such frippery (and with a mind to do something different yet traditional), we’ve opted for massive negative pressure airflow. All components included, there’s a total of 10 fans spinning away inside.
Our sub-$2,000 budget (and that overarching color scheme) really determined the makeup of the PC itself, but even after splurging on fancy fans, we’ve not been forced to skimp on the goods. It’s landed squarely at the mid-range, with Intel’s 4GHz, quad-core Core i3-8350K (probably the best overclockable chip you can get with limited cash right now) sitting at its heart.
MONOCHROME MEDITATION
APPROACHING A FRESH, modern case as someone who’s scraped their knuckles on cheap Chinese boxes in the past is a revelation. While so many aspects of the PC building process have remained familiar over the past 10 years, there’s an astonishing level of logic, flexibility, and build quality evident in NZXT’s white-outered H400i microATX mini tower case. It’s made for cable routing, for pretty builds, for compact constructions, for a subtle first glance, and a remarkable second, and it’s just brilliant to work with.
Getting massive airflow into the case meant ripping out the stock fans and raiding Noctua’s warehouse for a stack of cooling gear, namely a foursome of NF-A14 140mm fans for the rear and front of the case, an NF-F12 fan for rear exhaust, and a pair of the same to replace the decidedly not-monochrome brown fan of the NH-U12S cooler. Each fan includes replaceable corner vibration dampeners in a host of colors—critically, for us, four each of black and white. Topping it all off is a white NA-HC2 cooler cover to make the CPU pop and complement the H400i’s cable tidy bar.
It might seem like we’ve chosen the components specifically for their hue: the gloomy Asus ROG Strix Z370-G mobo, the bright glossy Asus GeForce GTX 1060, the white LED brilliance of Corsair’s Vengeance RAM, the mat ink of a 500GB Samsung 850 Evo SSD up front on display, the milky braided modular tentacles of the Corsair RM750x PSU. And we have. But, damn, that Core i3-8350K needed a collection of capable counterparts to really make it fly, and that’s precisely what we’ve offered it. For a midrange build, we’d expect this to burn through the benchmarks right now, and give us plenty of room for future expansion.