BUILD A POWERHOUSE E

Piece together your own wn dual-GPU monster PC

THE CONCEPT

WINTER IS HERE, the cold dark nights have firmly fixed themselves upon us, and as the bitter chill of the north wind bites into the flesh in those dark and somber hours, it’s important to have something to comfort the soul, as we come out of the snow and into the warmth. Something? Well, this is MaximumPC, so it has to be a system. In short, the aim of this is to be the ultimate upgrade. After a year of fantastic releases and phenomenal performance increases, our reviews editor decided it was about time he pursued an upgrade of his own. So, what are we upgrading from? Well, at the heart of the system was an Intel Core i7-6700K @ 4.8GHz, 32GB of Kingston HyperX DDR4 @ 2,400MT/s, an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070, one Samsung 950 Pro 256GB M.2 SSD, and a 1TB OCZ Trion 100 SSD. There are a few other details: The Corsair Hydro H100i GT cooling the CPU is kept chilled by four Noctua NF-F12 iPPC fans, and the power is supplied via a Corsair AX1200i inside an NZXT Manta chassis.

It’s a respectable rig. Already quite the powerhouse of technology, but not without its flaws. The fans are too loud, they spin at too high an RPM; the GPU, although powerful, isn’t enough to satisfyingly game at 4K; and the Asus Z170i Pro Gaming is having trouble booting from that Samsung PCIe SSD, with load times reaching into minutes in some cases.

The solution to all these woes came from two desires. One, to swap out from a 28-inch TN 4K Iiyama Prolite B2888UHSU (seriously, who thought of that designation?) to a 27-inch IPS 165Hz 1440p AOC Agon AG271QG. And the second to utilize the absolutely stunning NZXT Source 340 Elite chassis.