This article was published in the June 2015 issue of Maximum PC. For more trusted reviews and feature stories, subscribe here.
Dual Nvidia Titan X cards await within this treasure chest
Length of Time: 1-3 Hours | Difficulty: Medium
The Mission
Over the past six months or so, we've seen an impressive new slate of hardware arrive on store shelves, from Intel's Haswell-E generation of workstation CPUs sporting 6–8 cores, to futuristiclooking cases from Corsair, to the return of Nvidia's flagship GPU in the guise of the GeForce GTX Titan X.
We decided it was high time to bring this all together, while also checking out the viability of an older power supply and a new closed-loop liquid CPU cooler from Silverstone. To a degree, this is an "out with the old, in with the new" kind of build, where we bid farewell to a venerable piece of gear that's been eclipsed, while embracing the future of enthusiast gear.
We usually build with parts that have been released roughly within the past year, but not everyone is so fortunate. And sometimes you have equipment that's a little long in the tooth but still works fine. Might as well integrate it into a new build, right? And as we learned, the "old" stuff can still scale to handle cutting-edge gear, though the margin can get pretty thin.
Here Be Dragons
As much as we like the portable form factor of a Mini-ITX case, a full tower like the Corsair Graphite 780T is more forgiving. It also looks pretty cool. Since our power supply uses rounded cables, we need a little more leeway than usual for cable management (most vendors are moving to flat cables, which take up less space). Our PSU is the well-regarded Silverstone Strider Gold, which came out about three years ago. This 1,200-watt version can supply up to eight PCI Express cables, so it's pretty expandable. The unit is also relatively compact, with a length of only 7 inches. For reference, the Corsair AX1200 is 8 inches long. Compactness has long been a hallmark of Silverstone PSUs, and it's something we've often relied on.
We've paired our videocards with the Intel Core i7-5820K. This one has six CPU cores. It's slotted into an Asus X99-A/USB 3.1 motherboard. As its name implies, it has integrated USB 3.1 ports, and it can do NVM Express as well. Last but not least is the 240mm Silverstone TD02-E closed-loop CPU cooler, which is a recent update of the original TD02. Also in the mix is a 1TB 840 EVO we wanted to give one last run, and 16GB of 2,800MHz Corsair Vengeance low-profi le DDR4. We opted to not put a hard drive in this particular system, since we almost never use them in Build It.
1. Thar She Blows
We've come to enjoy these handy fan grills that pop out really easily when you give the top corners a simple click. Once you've experienced them it's hard to go back to the days of wrenching off the front of a case in order to access fan mounts and drive bays. Behind this grill, we then discover two pre-installed 140mm intake fans, which glow bluish-white when powered up. You've also got the option to mount three 120mm fans, or one 200mm fan.
If you remove the drive cages found just behind these fans, you can also install a variety of radiators, all the way up to 360mm. The cages are just screwed in—there's no need to reach for the hacksaw. These fans can plug into the case's integrated fan controller, which we'll talk about further on.
2. Batten the Hatches
The 780T also has a clicky grill on the top. Below is a recessed set of fan mounts, so you can put fans up here without obstructing things inside the case proper. This spot will take three 120mm fans, or two 140mm fans. If you have a 25mm radiator, there's enough space for "push-pull," which puts fans on both sides of the rad.
We installed the Silverstone cooler's fans below the rad, to reduce noise. This required mounting the rad with some longer screws than those provided, because the 780T's mounting holes are padded with rubber grommets whose thickness adds another 3mm or so. Luckily, you can get inexpensive machine screws in a variety of lengths from a home improvement store. Take the shorties to act as visual aid.
3. Check Your Rigging
The 780T'S integrated fan controller has four connectors (three shown here, because we're using three case fans), and they're all within easy reach of the case's pre-installed fans. Sometimes the rear exhaust fan's cable isn't long enough, but that wasn't a problem here. The controller itself is powered via a SATA cable, so make sure you have an extra when building with this case. It has three speeds, but these fans didn't get loud even when maxed out. The controller is handy because it frees up your motherboard's connectors for additional fans. We also note the connectors here are industry-standard 4-pins, instead of being proprietary.
4. Anchors Away
As has become common on the high end, the 780T's undercarriage has some niceties, as well. Down here, we have not one but two dust filters that can slide out for easy cleaning or replacement. Observant readers may also note the fan mounting holes peeking out. The bottom of the case has one 120mm fan mount that's immediately accessible, and another 120mm when you remove the lower drive cage, which means you have space for a 240mm radiator. That's useful for a water-cooling loop attached to a videocard. This case has some impressive airflow potential. The black ABS plastic feet on either side of these filters elevates the case about one inch off the floor, giving your power supply's intake fan plenty of clearance to get cool external air. Each corner of the feet is also rubberized for stability.
5. The Poop Deck
Not the cleanest wiring job we've ever done, but that was kind of the point. We wanted to demonstrate how messy things could get, while still allowing the side panel to go on without any effort. We've six rounded power supply cables coming through, a SATA data cable, three fan cables, a variety of front panel cables, and even cables from the CPU cooler mounted in the top of the case, which we tucked back here just to make things look nice and clean up front.
The Strider Gold's 24-pin motherboard cable was just barely long enough, but we had no trouble with the 8-pin power cable that went to the upper right-hand corner. The SATA power cable had to terminate at a 90-degree angle to fit into the back of the SSD, but that's not unusual. Once we were done back here, the tool-less side panel just angles in at the bottom and snaps shut at the top. To remove it, just pull the handle and lift it away.
6. In the Crow's Nest
In case you haven't seen how the 2.5-inch drive trays work, here's a close-up. It's another tool-less container, where you just slide the drive in from the side. The tab at the bottom snaps in when the drive has slid all the way to the left. The installation of the tray is also tool-less. There's a bracket mechanism on the other side of this tray that snaps in. It can be a little tricky to put it back in once you've taken it out. We recommend a flashlight and some patience.
There are usually four of these trays in the back, but we removed the bottom-most one to make room for our cabling shenanigans. Admittedly, these trays are not snug. That's fine for an SSD, which has no moving parts. If you're using a 2.5-inch mechanical drive, the top of the tray has two screw holes to create a tighter fit. Whichever type of drive you choose, we recommend a flat SATA data cable if you need to face the drive outward like we did.
1.) Thanks to the height of this case, the radiator and fan disappear completely inside this upper shroud. 2.) With one PCIe cable removed, you can more clearly see that we're only using two of them, thanks to this cable design. 3.) We left the drive cages in so that you could visualize how much space a 10.5-inch card takes up. The 780T is deceptively large. 4.) Based on its size, you wouldn't think that this PSU could put out 1,200 watts. But Silverstone is known for compact designs.
Land Ho!
You may have heard that the Intel Core i7-5820K has fewer PCI Express lanes than the other Haswell-E CPUs, and that's true. But 28 lanes is still more than two videocards know what to do with, so we don't need to bump up to the 5930K, which would also cost us another couple of hundred dollars. Of course, we're already blowing two grand on our videocards, but we had multiple reasons for that. Besides having top-end performance, these cards also draw a healthy amount of power. We're also overclocking our hex-core CPU from a base clock of 3.3GHz to 4.2GHz, on all cores. And there are five case fans in this system. This combination of parts gives us a solid testing environment to see how this 3-year-old power supply still handles itself. Like we were hoping, it didn't break a sweat, and its fan made hardly any noise.
Sadly, this PSU can't be a mainstay any longer, because its PCI Express cables have a total of "only" four 8-pin connectors. Reference versions of a card like the Nvidia GeForce GTX 980 use two 6-pin connectors and seem to signal lower requirements than we've seen before; vendors can produce cards like the MSI Gaming 4G, which requires two 8-pin connectors. This PSU's combined PCIe cabling is nice, though. Each has both an 8-pin and a 6-pin connector. So if the card doesn't need more cables than that, you only need one per card. That helps with cable management and makes the case interior look cleaner.
The company's TD02-E closed-loop CPU cooler, meanwhile, came out earlier this year. Despite having to cool six Haswell-E cores running 900MHz faster than their base clock, our temps never got above 72 degrees Celsius. You could definitely hear the fans working to keep things cool, but it was never distracting. Part of this is thanks to the radiator's dense fin array, and that requires fans capable of moving a lot of air, but Silverstone is no slouch in the fan department either. The two bundled units are rated to move up to 92.5 cubic feet per minute. For reference, the Corsair H100i is rated to move up to 77 CFM. For an 8-core CPU, we'd still recommend at least the H110i GT, if not custom water cooling. But the TD02-E did impressively well with our respectably overclocked i7-5820K. Overall, we enjoyed building this rig and finding out what this gear was capable of.
