hard disks to be installed or vertically mounted
graphics cards to be used. We’re more interested
in the water-cooling support and Phanteks
delivers here too. There’s space for a 360mm
or 420mm radiator up front and 360mm or
280mm radiators in the roof, meaning it’s perfect
for adding some CPU water cooling now and
expanding your loop later to perhaps include the
graphics card or additional radiators.
Alternatives
If you prefer a more stand-out case then
Lian Li’s PC-O11 Dynamic is an excellent
choice. You’ll need to find room for its huge
footprint, and it comes as a bare shell out of
the box, but there are plenty of aftermarket
water-cooling add-ons.
COOLING
Corsair Hydro X water cooling
and SP120RGB Pro fans
£386 inc VAT and £40 inc VAT
overclockers.co.uk
We’ve opted for a water-cooling system to
deal with our toasty 24-core CPU this month
and it comes in the form of Corsair’s Hydro
X components. We’ve added its fittings for
flexible tubing, but Corsair does offer parts
for rigid tubing too if you become more
comfortable with that in future. Its XD5 RGB
pump uses the popular Laing D5 pump
with a PWM cable, allowing you to fine-tune its
speed to acceptable noise levels. It comes with
the necessary gear to install it to fan or radiator
mounts too.
The waterblock is the XC9 RGB, which is
compatible with both Threadripper and Intel
LGA2066 sockets. It’s simple to install, has
funky RGB lighting and pre-applied thermal
paste. We’ll also be using a 360mm radiator
with a trio of Corsair’s SP120 RGB fans, which
should be able to run at extremely low noise
levels even under load, plus 10/13mm tubing
and a fill port.
A
AR
tha
wa
he
Thre 85 C during
an stresstest.Fora better-
performingoption, EKWB’s EK-MLC
Phoenix costs less than a custom loop and
offers a Threadripper-specific waterblock
section that connects to its modular quick-
release radiator.PSU
Corsair RM850i 850W
£137 inc VAT
ebuyer.comThe Threadripper 3960X saw our system
pull around 500W from the wall during
a stress test last month, so you’ll need to
factor in a little more than that to cope with
a hefty GPU as well. Games won’t use
anywhere near the CPU’s full potential,
though, so it’s unlikely you’ll ever see more
than 600W being used. We’ve chosen
Corsair’s RM850i PSU for our system, as it
provides plenty of headroom, even if you
decide to manually overclock the CPU. Its
fan only spins up at high loads too, meaning
most of the time it sits silently in your case.
We’ve also added Corsair’s custom cable
set to the equation to jazz things up a bit.incVAT
overclockers.co.ukWhileharddisksstillhave the best storage
to value ratio, SSDs are constantly catching
up and outstrip them by huge margins
when it comes to speed. With 2TB of PCI-E
4.0 NVMe storage available for less than
£400, if you’re building a blazingly fast
content creation machine, it can pay to keep
your programs and files on these speedy
devices. We’ve added a pair of drives to
our system – one 2TB Corsair MP600 to
house Windows, programs and games, and
another 1TB MP600 to act as a second drive
for your project files such as video clips. As
well as being able to dish out read and write
speeds in excess of 4,000MB/sec, loading
files off a second drive can have speed
benefits as well, but for the moment 2TB is
the largest desktop-focused PCI-E 4.0 SSD,
so you’ll need to double up if you want more
storage space.Alternatives
It makes sense to opt for PCI-E 4.0 SSDs, seeing
as that’s one of the main benefits of the TRX40
platform and PCI-E 3.0 SSDs aren’t much
cheaper. However, it’s worth remembering that
you can get an 8TB hard disk for the same cash
as our 1TB PCI-E 4.0 SSD so if storage space
is more important and you can’t afford to add
moreSSDs to the equation, Seagate’s 8TB
arracuda can be had for less than £180.TOTAL
£3,891 INC VAT
dAternatives
RCTIC’sFreezer 50 TRcostsa lotles
anmostliquidcoolers,neverminda
ater-coolingsystem.It won’toffermuch
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eadripper3960Xbel 8 5°Cd
end dSSD
1 TBand2TBCorsairMP6
£189inc Tand 69m
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