Clean and powerful?
Well, the white yacht has certainly traveled across some rough waters to finish its voyage – it wasn’t exactly plain sailing sorry folks, our puns are getting out of control. We all know first builds are awkward but we got there in the end. With patience and a level head, this build was successfully completed. As far as looks go, it sits in the classic stormtrooper monochrome design category, but that isn’t a negative. These colours are timeless, especially when sitting in the pretty yet affordable Nzxt H510 case. And this PC runs as well as it looks. Any RGB colour complements this look, and for the price, you cannot go wrong with the case. The actual installation was simple enough; the only hiccups on the journey were due to the fact that this was a first-timer’s build. If you’ve managed to build a PC with no issues at all, we tip our hat to you.
Cables were a little tight in the case toward the top and bottom, forcing us to remove the top exhaust fan at one point to gain more access to the CPU port. Other than that, the case has great cable management routes and Velcro to keep everything neat and tidy. This helps a lot when building, because a busy, tangled mess can easily overwhelm a newbie.
A few tips for beginners: Keep everything neatly organised when building, have a designated place for each part, and keep things spaced out. Make sure you box everything up once you are done, to keep parts out of your way. Also, work on a large table with a screwdriver to hand at all times, and use a little dish to keep your screws together. For a beginner, this mid-tower ATX case is great to work with on the whole, and a good place to start when it comes to jumping into custom PC life.
Benchmarking
It was great to incorporate Intel’s leading CPU into this build. The Intel Core i9-11900K only gave us a minor problem when it came to the BIOS.
Luckily, while researching the stop code that it was giving us and looking into any potential BIOS issues, we found that MSI had released an update regarding this processor. It now supports Intel ABT (Adaptive Boost Technology) for i9-11900K to i911900KF CPUs. Perfect, right? This solved our issue and we were able to benchmark the PC properly. Paired with a more-than-capable RTX 3070 from MSI that we were lucky enough to get our hands on, this makes for a mean machine. With both of these sitting on our MAG Z590 motherboard, it should provide decent longevity. The board is a big part of the Rocket Lake appeal and worth the large price tag. We benchmarked this against the previous next-gen Intel build from 2020. That Intel Core i9-10900K build performed well based on rendering.
To start with, this i9-11900K build beats the i9-10900K rig in gaming pretty significantly. We achieved just over 100fps on Rise of the Tomb Raider,
“A few tips for beginners: Keep everything neatly organised when building, have a designated place for each part, and keep things spaced out. Make sure you box everything up once you are done, to keep parts out of your way.”
whereas on the older build we managed 69fps, which isn’t bad, but it’s a great result for this cheaper PC. With Total War: Warhammer II, we gained an extra 10fps over the older PC, so again this is a positive for the latest chip. It also wins on the 3DMark: Fire Strike benchmark, with a performance increase of 15 percent. Sure, our MSI GeForce RTX 3070 8GB Gaming X TRIO plays a role in this, but with the RRP in mind, it’s a big difference.
Where the rendering machine reels some points back in is with the CrystalDisk read and write tests, and the Fryrender benchmark. Saying that, the results were not too far off at all – with a PC that can render nearly as well but can game a lot better, our build seems like a good path to go down. In Cinebench R15, the multicore index score was down by seven percent compared to the rendering PC, but it beats it on the single-core index by 12 percent.
Final points
Both machines are more than capable for a multitude of purposes, but we are glad to see how well our new mid-tower yacht looks and performs. With gaming coming in comfortably over the 60fps target and decent rendering speeds, too, it seems like a great all-arounder. This PC also sails along quietly, which is always an added benefit. To improve the build, two more sticks of the Corsair Vengeance RGB Pro SL DDR4-3600 RAM would be nice. Also, if we could have replaced the stock exhaust fans with the same Corsair ones we have up front, that would have helped with aesthetic consistency. Overall, for a first build, it was challenging, but it proves that you shouldn’t be afraid of starting custom PC builds – this new kid on the block certainly had an enjoyable experience.