PC Gamer Presents - PC Hardware Handbook - May 2018

IN AN IDEAL WORLD, WE WOULD HAVE

POPULATED BOTH SYSTEMS WITH A WD BLACK

6TB HDD FOR ONBOARD STORAGE

INTEL BUILD

Unfortunately, Western Digital didn’t get these drives to
us in time for our Build It photo shoot, but in an ideal
world, we would have populated both systems with a WD
Black 6TB HDD for onboard storage. Back these up daily
on to an external NAS, and you’re guaranteed to have
plenty of onsite storage.

INTEL COOLING

NOCTUA NH-D15 £83

INTEL CASE

RAIJINTEK

ASTERION PLUS £140

INTEL PSU

EVGA SUPERNOVA

1600 T2 £440

We needed something reliable and powerful to alleviate all that heat,

and the challenge fell to Noctua’s NH-D15. Astoundingly, it held out

fantastically well, even with the 6950X clocked at 4.2GHz. In fact, if it

weren’t for the fact that it’s so easy to install an AIO, this may very well

have been replacing our Kraken X62 that’s on the dedicated test

bench. It’s that good.

The Asterion Plus is a full tower, acrylic-
covered, aluminum box. It looks stylish, and
comes with support for plenty of hard drives,
and a slim 5.25-inch bay. Is it the best solution

for this system? In hindsight, we perhaps

should have used a Define R5 instead, but this

case was more than adequate for the job that

we wanted it to do.

This SuperNova is a 1,600W beast of a PSU, fully

modular, and comes with a Titanium rating, for a

power efficiency of 96 per cent. Couple that with the

inclusion of two eight-pins, nine eight-pin PCIe, five

six-pin PCIe, and 16x SATA power, and it’s one of the

best equipped PSUs out there. It even supports

floppy! Floppy!

STORAGE

WD BLACK 6TB £236

AMD INTEL

Feature

AMD vs.INTEL