Okay, that price: ouch! Why the big
bucks? Where are the compromises?
And what makes this system so much
better than the competition? That X99
platform. Knowing the Intel build was
never going to win as far as affordability
was concerned, we decided our best bet
was to ignore the price differentials and
leverage those two extra cores and the
greater support for DDR4 over the
X370 opposition. By default, our Ryzen
system consisted of an eight-core,
16-thread processor, and 32GB of
DDR4, likely operating at 2,133MT/s,
depending on motherboard revision.
That’s nice for it. In contrast, we
doubled the memory capacity to 64GB
of 3,200MT/s DDR4, and added an
extra two cores and four threads. Boom!
Couple all that higher-spec quad-
channel memory with the more
powerful cores, and our real-world
benchmarks should be substantially
different from the Ryzen cousin.
Enough to shatter those real-world
benchmarks in half? Well, maybe.
Apart from memory and chip
differences, the two rigs feature
identical storage setups. To retain some
tenuous notion of parity, we decided to
run each system off a single Samsung
960 Pro 512GB PCIe M.2 NVMe SSD,
and a 2TB WD Black hard drive – we
didn’t want the storage to have a huge
impact on the real-world figures,
preferring instead to set the chips
against each other and see what
happened. Couple that with the fact
that the X99 smokes X370 on the
number of SATA ports and potential
PCIe drives, and you can see what
we’re getting at.Feature
BUILD IT: THE INTEL RIG OF DAMNATION
Ahh, that beautiful X99-E-10G WS. To be quite honest, we could
have gotten away with a cheaper motherboard, but why would we?
The connectivity, combined with its strong overclocking prowess
and workstation pedigree, made it the perfect choice. Also, the
beauty of X99 is its lack of need for a backplate. We simply installed
the motherboard into the system, popped the memory and chip in,
and could leave the massive CPU heatsink until last, thanks to that
reinforced socket, making life a dream in comparison to our Ryzen
competition. With a fairly easy plug-and-play build process, slotting
together the first three key components was ease itself. Getting the
fans on would be another matter (see below), but hey, sometimes if
you want to achieve great things, you’ve got to put the work in.
Which we did.MOTHERBOARD MOUNTING
1
THE KING OF CRAZINESS
Raijintek’s Asterion Plus comes with an assortment of
cooling from the get-go – pretty impressive for this kind of
chassis. And those fans? Well, they’re not bad either. You
get two 120mms in the front, and a single 120mm in the
rear – the only nuisance is those Molex adaptors.
Traditionally (well, back in the late noughties), if you didn’t
have enough fan headers on your board, you could plug
them in via Molex, to get them to run at a constant speed.
However, because we didn’t need them, we simply cut the
Molex part off as close to the three-pin header as possible,
and plugged the fan header into the board instead. Okay,
yes, hacking bits off of things will definitely invalidate any
warranty, but you’re building your own PC, you were going
to be doing that anyway.FANS WITH MOLEX?
2
INGREDIENTS(^) PART STREET
PRICE
Case Raijintek Asterion Plus £140
Motherboard Asus X99-E-10G WS £500
CPU Intel Core i7-6950X £1,630
Memory G.Skill Trident Z 64GB (4x 16GB)
DDR4-3200 £900
GPU Zotac GeForce GTX 1080 Ti 11GB
Founder’s Edition £750
PSU EVGA SuperNova T2 1,600W 80+ Titanium £440
Storage 1 Samsung 960 Pro 512GB PCIe NVMe SSD £276
Storage 2 Western Digital Black 2TB 7,200rpm HDD £102
Cooling Noctua NH-D15 CPU heatsink £83
OS Windows 10 Home 64-bit OEM £80
Total £4,901