SYSTEM UPGRADE

$1,500 budget for a gaming makeover

THE CONCEPT

A BUDDY of ours approached us at the end of last year with a question. His rig was getting dated, his Core i5-4690K quadcore processor wasn’t as punchy as he’d like, and although he had a fairly solid GPU (a GTX 1070), he wanted to know what we’d recommend he do with a $1,500 budget. Cue a quick trip to PCPartPicker, and a few select questions.

The first thing we always ask people who throw that particular query at us is: “What are you interested in doing with your rig?” It’s a very open-ended question, but it makes a lot of sense to ask, because there’s no perfect solution that’ll answer every problem in the world of computing. Sure, a $25,000 hyper-rig might be able to game well, compute advanced neural nets, or simulate your fantasy football league with ease, but if you only want to play World

ofWarcraft at 1440p, spending your money on a 28-core Xeon processor and 2.5TB of ECC memory is not going to be a good investment, no matter how you spin it. Our friend’s answer was fairly simple:

WoW at 1440p, and AAA gaming on the side. He’s already got the screen setup, plus the GPU, so all that was left for us to do was work on the infrastructure—the storage, processor, motherboard, cooling, and, more importantly, the case—and give the whole thing enough gumption to last four to five years, without feeling sluggish once more.

PARTS GALORE

SO, WHERE DO WE BEGIN with that budget? First things first: processor and motherboard. Because this guy’s mantra is gaming, we’ve gone with an Intel Core i7-8700K. We chose it for a number of reasons. The big clock speeds and single-core performance should help quite dramatically in game—six cores and 12 threads are plenty for what he has in mind—and despite the fact that it doesn’t have a soldered IHS, temperatures are roughly the same as its eight-cored 9900K sibling. It’s also much cheaper than the latter part, which is good news for us, because it’s more important that we spend that cash elsewhere.

Speaking of which, the motherboard we’ve picked is the latest Z390-i ROG Strix Gaming from Asus. This little ITX juggernaut is packed with all the staple ITX features we’ve come to love from the Taiwanese company, with impeccable audio, integrated M.2 heatsinks, and a whole splurging of I/O on the rear.

Memory-wise, we originally bought a kit of 32GB (2x 16GB) Corsair Vengeance LED DDR4 @ 3,200MT/s, which, although more than adequate for this rig, unfortunately conflicted with our liquid cooler, because it was too tall. So, we swapped it out for the G.Skill Trident Z kit we already had in stock (included in the “Ingredients” list on the right).

On top of all that, we’re packing the whole lot inside an NZXT H200i small form factor chassis, along with a Kraken X52 240mm AIO, and an M.2 PCIe SSD.

1 H200i SUPERIORITY

AS USUAL, WE BEGAN THE BUILD with a case strip-down. We’ll be repeating this until we’re blue in the face, but it’s so much easier to build a system in a case that has as many of its panels removed as possible. Of course, if you get the opportunity (especially in an ITX build), you should always test your hardware outside of the chassis first, before installing it, because it’s easier to return and RMA parts when they’ve been assembled on top of a mobo box (all of them are antistatic) than install it all, try to get it to work, then have to pull it all back out, at which point you need to send it back to your eseller of choice. Unlike the H400i variant of NZXT’s lineup, the H200i comes with a removable front panel, too, making it easier to install 240mm AIOs in there.

2 USB 2.0 CONUNDRUM

WHO’D HAVE THOUGHT we’d reach this point? Yup—not enough internal USB 2.0 headers on the motherboard to satisfy our needs. We require two of them, but the Z390-I only supports one. Why two? One for the NZXT H200i’s integrated fan and lighting controller, and another to power and control the infinity mirror baked into the NZXT Kraken X52. It’s a little frustrating that we can’t complete this setup right now, so we’ve taken the liberty of pre-installing the CPU USB cable, ready for when our additional USB 2.0 internal hub turns up.

3

REAR I/O PLATE

IT MIGHT NOT have enough internal USB 2.0 headers, and that’s a bit of a shoddy front panel header (more on that later), but that’s not to say the Asus Z390-I ROG Strix Gaming isn’t a good mobo. One thing we’re particularly fond of is the inclusion of a pre-mounted rear I/O shield. No more building half your rig, forgetting it’s there, sitting at the bottom of the box. We’re also in love with the included M.2 heat spreader, which should help dissipate the heat when our friend is hammering in those sequential transfers on his Samsung 970 Evo 500GB.

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MEMORY MISHAPS

WE FIRST SPECCED OUT THIS BUILD to use Corsair’s Vengeance Pro RGB memory. With white LEDs, these things would have looked baller shining away on the interior of this setup. Alas, the best-laid schemes of mice and men, and all that—we just couldn’t get them to fit with the cooler without conflicting with the inlet and outlet ports for the tubing runs to the radiator. There was a solution—rotate the CPU block, so both ports were facing upward—but our OCD was screaming about the misalignment of the NZXT logo (yep, we’re that petty). So, we swapped the Vengeance Pros out for a sweet G.Skill Trident Z kit instead, which fits just fine here, and doesn’t cause any conflict.

5

FRONT HEADER HELL

THIS IS JUST DUMB. What you’re looking at in the shot below is the location of the front headers. That’s right, sitting directly above the GPU—right in the middle, not at one end or the other—is the front panel header for your on and off switch. Seriously, Asus? This is a premium top-end motherboard, developed for premiumlooking systems, and you place the I/O header there? We had little choice but to run the cable along the top of the GPU, and then just hook it out of the way—but, man, talk about frustrating….

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SMART FANS?

IT’S NOT AS SMART as we’d like, but the fan controller in the back has been developed to analyze the noise in the chassis and adjust the fan curves for it. Unfortunately, it’s a bit sluggish, and takes a ridiculously long time to set up those custom fan curves based on noise. In fact, we recommend you go into the CAM software and set up your own instead. It also supports the integrated LED lighting strip in the top of the chassis, and you can add another (available separately) if you fancy more RGB fun. It supports a bucketload of fans, too, which is nice, as we don’t need to plug any into our motherboard. We do recommend plugging your pump into the CPU fan header, though, to stop the Asus mobo protection freaking out, and preventing you from booting.