WHEN LIFE GIVES YOU LEMONS…

SPEND WAY TOO MUCH MONEY on a motherboard and call it a day? That’s our philosophy for this build. Damn, that mobo is pricey, but not without good reason. We wanted to go with Coffee Lake for this rig on a number of grounds. Six cores and 12 threads is enough to take care of any application we can throw at it. Whether it’s rendering, streaming, gaming, or two of those at once, this machine is more than capable of outputting a significant amount of content, quickly and efficiently. On top of that, Coffee Lake has proved that Intel still dominates the field when it comes to single-core performance, and because games typically rely more on clock speed than on multiple cores, Intel is also still the chip of choice for most AAA titles.

Couple that with a motherboard that goes above and beyond when it comes to connectivity and quality audio, and we’re on to a winning combo. The Godlike supports up to five M.2 PCIe SSDs, a sixth via U.2, plus six SATA drives for storage alone. On top of that, it packs in four separate PCIe x16 slots, triple Gigabit Ethernet, and wireless A/C. MSI has crammed practically everything on to this lumpy chunk of PCB, and, to be frank, it looks baller to boot.

We decided to go with some serious storage for this build, with less emphasis on solid state for once—sorta. We’re talking a 512GB Intel 760p PCIe SSD for the boot drive, with a stellar 12TB of spinning platters from Seagate’s BarraCuda Pro HDD. For our GPU powerhouse, we’ve gone with our ever faithful PNY GeForce GTX 1080 Ti—a no-frills card, and that’s all there is to it. Job done.