PACKING HEAT

THE BIG THING with this build is the case—the Hydra Mini in black. This is a bespoke chassis made by a small company in Italy and constructed from a single sheet of stainless steel, which is then powder-coated in matt black, white, or clear-coated with a satin finish. It’s then perched on top of four aluminum feet. It looks sublime: It’s simple, elegant, and open-air, meaning I can swap out parts as and when I need to for testing, and as far as cooling is concerned, there’s certainly enough access to airflow.

That said, it does have drawbacks: It’s made in Italy, so shipping takes a long time; you are going to have to clean it more; and there’s no front I/O outside of the DimasTech power switch. On top of that, it has a flipped design, with a PCIe riser cable, so the GPU is situated in the back, and everything else is in the front. That leads to some cable-management issues, both during the build and after.

For other components, I’ve gone with an Intel Core i5-10600K, 16GB of Corsair Dominator Platinum RGB memory with a C16 latency (if you go for C18, it drops the price by $70, by the way), a 2TB Samsung 970 Evo Plus for storage, a Zotac GeForce RTX 2080 Super AMP Extreme, a 750W Corsair SFX PSU, complete with a mix of stock and pro cables, and perhaps the most controversial pick of the lot, a Noctua NH-L9i Chromax Black CPU cooler.

Why so controversial? It’s a 92mm low-profile CPU heatsink. It’s very good, but it’s only rated to cool up to 95W of TDP, which is enough for a Core i9-9900K at stock, but Comet Lake is hot, and the 10600K clocks in at 125W, or 95W in a “configurable TDPdown” mode, something you can only configure if you’re an OEM manufacturer. So it is going to be enough? It’s time to crack out the screwdrivers, grab that hobby knife (yep), and get to work.