WATER WALKING WITH RYZEN

The trials and tribulations of building one of the world’s most compact liquidcooled rigs

THE CONCEPT

WE MENTIONED back at the beginning of the feature how this special build differs from our Dream Machines: It’s devised with a single person in mind, as opposed to just pushing everything to the max, like our big builds do.

This machine is designed around the whims of our crackpot deputy editor. ITX builds are a passion, and pushing as much power as possible into as small a form factor as possible is incredibly enticing. In fact, it’s arguably what this industry has been all about for the last 60 years. Enabling more and more performance out of less and less space.

That said, this build project didn’t actually start out with ITX in mind. There have been numerous revisions, countless spec list changes, and a whole heap of adjustments made before even getting to this point. Originally, we planned to take advantage of Intel’s perfectly balanced Core i9-7900X—delidded, of course— housed in an Enthoo Evolv ATX. Then, with the advent of Spectre and Meltdown, we transferred our proposition over to the notion of Ryzen once more—a Ryzen+ build, to be exact—but still taking advantage of that ATX form factor, and with an SLI Asus GTX 1080 Ti configuration. Fast-forward to March/April, and that notion was finally shrunk down to an ITX system, and a second look at a custommodded NZXT Manta, a chassis we’d worked on in the past. After we realized our custom case ideas couldn’t be brought to fruition in time for getting the issue to print, we finally settled on working with Lian Li’s PC-Q37—only for the spec to then get shaken up once again, with the launches of Samsung’s 970 Pro drives and Asus’s X470-I motherboard.

In the run-up to this issue, it’s been hectic, to say the least. The organizational side of things has been turned on its head so many times, it’s been enough to drive the chief color picker insane, and for the team at the MaximumPC photography studio to put out hits on all of us—deputy editor in particular. Stress, upon stress, upon stress. Why do we do this again?

LIQUID LUXURY

LET’S GET DOWN to the nitty-gritty as to what makes this build tick, and why we chose what we did. We’re in a very unique position for once, because we’d usually write this segment after the build is complete. However, in this case, and due to the horrendously tight deadlines this build suffers from, we’re actually writing it beforehand.

There are some huge variables in our build’s spec, due to launch dates and shipping delays; the big ones being storage, motherboard, and memory. As backup, we have the Asus X370-I ROG Strix Gaming ITX mobo, 16GB of 3,200MT/s Corsair Dominator Platinum, and a 512GB/2TB single Samsung 960 Pro.

In an ideal world, and if everything pulls through for the final photography shoot, they’ll be upgraded to an Asus X470-I ROG Strix Gaming, 32GB of Kingston Predator DDR4 @ 3,000MT/s, plus a Samsung 970 Pro 512GB combined with a Samsung 860 Evo 1TB M.2 drive. The latter are the perfect combination for this build. So far as hardware is concerned, it’s that combination of storage solutions that particularly interests us, and that mostly stems around just how that second M.2 slot can switch between SATA and PCIe modes, and what overall throughput and performance will be with it.

Much like the cooling you add to a system like this, when approaching a water-cooled rig’s construction, you need to be fluid in your approach. Get the hardware you want ahead of time, try to plan the layout as best you can, then work around each problem as you come across it. Sometimes, this means getting in more gear than you need, be it fittings, tubing, fans, you name it. It’s a sacrifice that has to be made, especially in the smaller form factor builds, because clearances and bends become ever more complicated. We got in a whole ton of liquid-cooling fittings ahead of time: 12x 90-degree fittings, 8x 45-degree fittings, 4x snakehead S fittings, 12 standard hard tube compression fittings, soft tubing fittings, pass-throughs, Y bends, valve fittings, and excessive levels of extension fittings, in an attempt to make everything fit just right. We didn’t end up using all of these, of course, because there’s just no way to accurately predict how much you’re going to need.

If you’ve got the time, it’s always wise to do these builds slowly, buy the parts as you need them, get your tubing runs right, and don’t rush it. It might take a month or two to complete, even with the applicable budget, but it’s the only way to make sure you don’t spend any more cash than you absolutely have to.

That said, if you ever do any more builds in the future, or even tweak your system, having spare fittings lying around can be a lifesaver, especially if you’re in a pinch. For us, our build is yet to come—we’ll see you on the other side.