THE CLASSY CONQUEROR
WE COULD HAVE GIVEN this build a funky Warhammer40K name, such as the Emperor’s Chosen, or Gabriel Ti-gelous. But that’s not our style, and the Classy Conqueror fits the bill a hell of a lot better. After all, this is a system that any PC enthusiast could be proud of.
Building a rig at such short notice threw up a lot of challenges. Usually, we spend an hour or two planning each build, requesting the parts, then piecing it together however we see fit. Having to improvise and make decisions on the fly, however, turned out to be far more satisfying than we thought. The Kraken X42 forced us to rethink our cooling strategy: Instead of having two intakes in the front, two exhausts in the roof, and leaving the rear blank, we opted to run three intakes top and front, and one exhaust running out the rear.
We also chose to use a BitFenix Alchemy 30cm LED white strip along the top, to illuminate the interior, pulling light straight down on to the GPU, CPU, and memory. It looks stellar, glinting off the braided tubes connected to the AIO. That said, it was actually an older, used adhesive LED strip, and toward the end of the build, it repeatedly fell off, even with a brand new layer of double-sided tape. Solution? Cable-tie it. It’s held in place by three cable ties, through the unused 140mm fan mounts at the top of the chassis. We also only used two screws in each fan, to save time, even if it was only seconds in reality.
What about performance? Well, it’s a weird one—with Ryzen dropping, and the 1600 and 1600X coming in at Core i5 prices, it’s hard to say that this system actually represents respectable processor performance. Singlecore performance is identical to team red’s, but multicore is a bloodbath: 606 points in Cinebench R15—hardly anything worth writing home about. That said, there currently aren’t any ITX Ryzen boards worth investing in, and the game difference can be staggering in some instances. Speaking of games, the GTX 1080 Ti really does push the limits when it comes to our benchmark suite, smashing all of the 1080p tests with ease. The lowest, Deus Ex— a title notorious for both its poor Nvidia optimization and ridiculously aggressive antialiasing at x8 MSAA—came in at 29fps. Otherwise, it was an easy 60fps sweep across the board, with an average of 92 frames per second in Riseof the TombRaider, and 106 in FarCryPrimal.
That said, this rig shines in both high refresh 1440p and 4K gaming. We’re not quite at 60fps with the AA ramped up just yet, but if you drop those AA tendencies down a tad, it’s not difficult to hit that 60fps sweet spot.
When all’s said and done, this build was a pleasure to produce, and a very proud moment for this reviewer, seeing it going out live in the DawnofWarIII campaign. It looks a treat, and would be at home on any enthusiast’s desk. Drop down to some more suitable memory, a Z270 Strix ITX board, a lower-end PSU, and a reference GTX 1070, and you’d be looking at a very graceful 1440p gaming machine.