THE PERFECT BUILD (FOR ME)
THIS IS ONE of my favorite builds of all time. The Hydra case is a ridiculously affordable ITX chassis that has such potential. I’ve seen liquid-coolers do crazy things with this, albeit with significant modding, and even as a stock build it looks impeccable. There isn’t official support for AIO liquid-coolers or radiators on it, but you could prop one up to the side, or drill some holes in the Hydra Mini and make your own bracket for one.
Combining the Corsair Dominator Platinum RGB memory with the Asus ROG Strix Z490-I Gaming motherboard and that black Noctua cooler gives it a stealthy vibe, and works well with the subtle lighting elements. When configured, it’s very classy. The Capellix LEDs in the Corsair memory are seriously bright, and the swathe of RGB baked into the GPU around the back is acting as a sort of ambient backlighting.
The build process was fairly seamless. I had no major issues at all outside of how to route the CPU fan cable. And that was more just me being stubborn than an actual problem. I could’ve just installed the cable at the top right of the machine, but then I’d have been left with an unsightly loop.
So what would I change? Well for starters as much as I love the Zotac card, it’s no doubt going to have to go back to Zotac at some point. To that end, I’ll be swapping the card out for one of the EVGA RTX 2080 Supers found in the 4K Gaming PC from last December. Reassembling that cooler may take some time, but it will give me the perfect card for my 3440x1440 screen. The only concern here is that the XC Ultra Gaming is a triple-slot card (despite having a smaller cooler than the Zotac). Officially the Hydra only supports dual slot because of the size of the bracket. I may also ditch the SF750 power supply for the Silverstone Strider 800W, as that has custom-sleeved, short, black and red cables.
As for performance, most results fell in line with what I expected from the components at hand. The more interesting element is the temperatures, especially with that 92mm heatsink. Idle temps sit around 40-45C after a day’s work. Under load that goes up to around 80-90C at stock—but we’re talking serious load. To get around that (although it’s still 10C from TJMax), I’ve offset the CPU VCore voltage using Intel’s Extreme Tuning Utility by -0.04V, and dropped the max turbo frequency to around 4.3GHz across all six cores, (4.7GHz on two cores) and that’s dropped temps to just over 80C at the top end.
It’s whisper-quiet at idle. At a fixed 40 percent RPM until 75C, that Noctua is inaudible, and when not under load both the GPU and the PSU fans don’t spin at all.
This is a stellar machine, super-silent, gorgeous, and perfect for anyone who’s looking to build a ridiculously small, slick home office PC that’s a bit different.