WORK TO DO?
THERE YOU HAVE IT: a fairly clean upgraded system. You might be asking what we kept from the old rig, and that would be a fair question. It was the GPU, and only the GPU. As a GTX 1070 Dual is still a fairly recent card (and new GPUs are ridiculously expensive), it made sense to hold on to it for now, rather than waste the budget. It’s a good card, and as our friend predominantly only plays WoW at 1440p, it’ll be more than enough to keep him going for at least another two years.
That said, ironically, it’s probably one of the few things we would change about this system. Getting that out and replacing it with something like an EVGA Black 2080 XC would make the most sense, both aesthetically and for the future life of the system.
All in all, though, we didn’t have any major problems when it came to building this system. The only tricky bit was routing those front panel headers on top of the GPU. We also plugged in the HD audio pass-through to the left of it, which means carefully and expertly installing your GPU after you’ve done that, making sure you don’t pinch the cable too badly in-between, but that’s an inevitability with a lot of small form factor systems. If this were a build for one of our team, the likelihood is we’d have not installed it at all—after all, pass-throughs are notoriously dirty when it comes to quality audio, and it’s not exactly too difficult to install your audio cables to the rear I/O of a machine like this, especially when it’ll plop on to most desks with ease.
Performance-wise, the numbers are good, and where we’d expect them to be. Cinebench R15 multicore clocks in at a sweet 1,522, with single-core just nudging the 200 bracket at 197. CrystalDisk read and writes were equally as high, and gaming performance was also fairly well rounded.
What would we change if this were our build? Not a lot. Perhaps different memory. Liquid-cooling this rig, although tempting, isn’t particularly viable. The NZXT H200i certainly ain’t no Manta, and running a single 240mm rad, regardless of how thick it is, wouldn’t be enough to satisfy the cooling of both a GPU and a CPU in a setup like this, especially with a full-length card. It’s not impossible, of course, but you have to question whether it would be worth it. The biggest change we could make is to delid that CPU, and drop some liquid metal in it, or at least some better quality thermal paste. A temperature drop here of 10–15 C would make a world of difference, especially in the warmer months.