PC Builder Masterclass
Nvidia’s RTX graphics cards may be ahead of their time, but what sort of rig can you build with one now?
On the surface, this should be a fairly straightforward “Build It.” The remit is simple enough: Piece together a reasonable home for Nvidia’s latest and greatest graphics card, the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti. Having said that, the word “reasonable” takes on a slightly different angle when said graphics card is going to set you back over $2,000. Plus, there’s the added fun that we don’t know for sure which processor is going to give this new silicon the necessary room to strut its stuff, because we’re in unknown territory when it comes to ray tracing. Do we want more cores, faster single-core performance, or some hitherto unknown combination of the two?
We briefly toyed with the idea of pairing this new graphics card with Intel’s even newer Core i9-9900K. We backed out of that idea, though, as we felt that we’d be treading on the toes of the forthcoming Dream Machine (while we haven’t made the final decision on the CPU for that build yet, the Core i9-9900K is in the running). The other reason we didn’t want to build with the new Intel CPU is that building with two completely new pieces of gear is just asking for trouble — much better to go with something that you know for certain just works.
So, the star of the show here is the graphics card, pure and simple. And while we don’t entirely know how everything is going to shape up for the future of hybrid rendering, we do need to give that card room to breathe. That means plenty of RAM and storage, and all ensconced in the kind of case that shows off your new super-expensive polygon-pushing pride and joy.
FUTURE-PROOFING
We can’t escape the fact that the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti is really expensive. We’ve opted for a third-party offering, with the overclocked, triple-cooler card from Asus providing the reason for this machine’s existence. To make sure it’s kept fed with data, the rest of the build is pricey as well. To be fair, though, you wouldn’t want to slide a $2.079 graphics card into a bargain-basement budget rig.
For the heavy lifting, we’ve turned to Intel’s current top-end CPU, the Core i7-8086K. At least, it was top-end until Intel released its new processors as we were writing this, but as the 9000-series family hasn’t been fully unleashed yet, we’ll stick with what we know is a strong gaming processor. Capable of turboing up to 5GHz on more thread-shy titles, and offering six physical cores (that’s 12 threads, thanks to Hyper-Threading) to more modern titles, this processor can handle the most cutting-edge of games with ease.
Processor and graphics card sorted, the next big decision is what motherboard to use, and here we’ve elected to use the Asus ROG Maximus X Formula to provide the backbone for the machine. This is a top-end board, with plenty of quality features, including decent audio, integrated Wi-Fi, and RGB Armor to keep the build looking sleek, as well as colorful. The solid steel backplate means there’s no flexing when you’re building, either.
32GB of RAM and a 1TB M.2 SSD mean that we’re not hanging around waiting for our next game to load, and also ensure that we have a speedy experience in Windows and more serious titles as well. Finishing off the specification, we have a Raijintek Orcus 240 AIO cooler that we’ve been keen to try for a while, a quality Be Quiet! 850W PSU, and for the case we’ve turned to the Corsair Obsidian 500D, which is a striking-looking chassis for any high-end build. Oh, and don’t forget a copy of Windows 10 while you’re at it.
1 STRIPPED DOWN
We love starting a build by stripping the case down to the absolute minimum, and that’s exactly how we got the ball rolling here, although in this instance, there isn’t a lot to remove. The Corsair Obsidian Series 500D is an open design, and easy to work in from the get-go. Popping off the doors is simple, and doesn’t require any tools, because they’re held in place with a magnetic strip. Simply swing them open and lift them off the hinges, and you’ve got easy access to everything. Spinning the machine around, the only obvious thing to temporarily remove is the cable cover, which again is simple to do. The drive cages on the rear can be popped out too (thumbscrews abound), and you can ease out the dust filters as well (which are held in place magnetically), although you don’t need to do so to start building.
2 STANDING OFF
Time to build. The Asus ROG Maximus X Formula is a solid, heavy motherboard, but easing it into the awaiting space instantly threw up an issue – it wouldn’t lay flat, due to a location peg in the center of the motherboard. We sometimes see these used to help out during installation, but here we found it slightly misaligned, forcing us to remove it. Once done, it was still a tight squeeze getting the motherboard into place, in part because it boasts an integrated I/O plate. That and the fact that there isn’t much clearance at the bottom of the case, due to the PSU cover. There is a trend for I/O plates to be used on high-end motherboards, but it’s worth knowing that they can be tricky to install, even in more open cases, like this one.
3 CORE COMPONENTS
With the motherboard in place, we can now start installing components. Normally, we would install the CPU outside of the case, just because it can be a little tight, but there really is so much space inside the Obsidian 500D, that this wasn’t an issue. In fact, we had more trouble with the motherboard’s Armor than we did the case, although this was more of a problem when it came to installing the cooler, but we’ll come back to that later. The RAM was the next thing to install, and sliding all four sticks into place is as pleasing as it is capacious. Again, there’s plenty of room to do so – the fact that there’s no front drive cage helps here.
4 COOL DRIVING
M.2 SSDs can get hot under load, so it’s a good idea to have a decent heat spreader present. The one you’ll find on the Maximus X Formula is particularly huge, and you’ll find it as part of the large ROG eye logo, toward the bottom-right of the motherboard. Releasing the three screws on this plate enables you to remove it and reveal the M.2 connector. We were momentarily thrown by the fact that the retention screw for the drive wasn’t preinstalled, but actually in the motherboard box – it took longer than it should have for us realize this. Once found, though, securing the 1TB Samsung 970 Evo SSD was easy, and that huge cooler means that it shouldn’t be throttling anytime soon. It’s worth noting that it isn’t easy to access this drive once your graphics card is installed, but this is often the case with the location of M.2 connectors.
5 THERMAL CONSIDERATIONS
It’s at this point in the build where things can get tricky, and sure enough, installing the cooler had us wishing that we had a spare hand. It’s actually a great system once everything is set up, because the cooler is held in place by just two screws, but getting to that stage isn’t easy. You have to hold the backplate in place on the rear of the motherboard while screwing another plate into place on the processor side – long arms are essential; a spare hand or two useful. We elected to place the radiator in the front of the case, to keep things clear at the top, but an argument could be made for roof-mounting instead. It’s worth noting that the pump isn’t integrated into the CPU block, so ensure you plug this and the various fan cables into your motherboard.
6 TRACING RAYS
It’s time for the star of the show, the Asus Strix GeForce RTX 2080 Ti OC, to get eased into position. After removing the two blanking plates, this is straightforward, although care is needed because this is a heavy card, and you don’t want to drop it on to your motherboard. If you get a PCIe extension cable, this case does support vertical mounting of your graphics card, which would look great against the side panel’s smoked glass, but these things aren’t cheap, and we’ve already dropped a big chunk of cash on this machine. Still, it’s an option. At this point, we installed the power supply, and discreetly threaded the various cables through to where they were needed. The top eight-pin EPS connector can often be tricky, but we had cable to spare here.
Gamer’s delight
There were no nasty surprises putting this machine together, other than the final price—although we feared this was always going to be the case with Nvidia’s latest and greatest GPU. You could easily spend a whole lot more, and the core performance wouldn’t change too much, while spending less could well throw a monkey wrench in the works. This isn’t a budget build by any stretch, but it is probably the most affordable way of building an RTX 2080 Ti machine that isn’t held back by the processor or storage.
The trickiest part of the build involved the cooler, and we could have mitigated this by installing the bracket outside of the case, simply because holding the backplate in place would have been easier (and wouldn’t have required quite so many hands). We could have gone for a 360mm radiator in the front as well, which would have improved airflow further, although we didn’t have a problem with heat in this machine anyway. The fact that you can control the lighting of the cooler using the tiny remote was a bit of a bonus, though, and it can look pretty if you care about such things.
The goal of this build was to piece together a cutting-edge gaming machine that will survive the ravages of time, and give the RTX 2080 Ti the best possible future. We feel we hit this brief pretty convincingly, and the benchmarks would seem to back that up, with some impressive results when compared to our zero-point machine. The Total War: Warhammer II result, which rolled in 120 percent better than our zero-point, shows the kind of improvement that is possible with this new graphics card, although this is over the older GTX 1080.
At this point, we’re still not sure how the RTX 2080 Ti performs in real-time ray-tracing titles or DLSS, but we’ll revisit the performance at these tasks in a future issue, possibly with this build (if we haven’t stripped it down by then). For now, this certainly makes for a smooth gaming experience, and returning to a normal gaming machine after using this on a 4K screen makes for an uncomfortable experience.
We like to ask ourselves what we’d change at the end of every build. Here, we’re not sure that anything stands out. The case is a delight to work in, and looks great when all the cabling is tucked out of sight. We are tempted to try mounting the graphics card vertically, and this could be the chassis that pushes us over the edge to try it, especially if we use a graphics card that lights up as much as the rest of this system.