FEATURE
BUILD IT: The Intel rig of damnation
It’s been a struggle to find a system in which we can use
EVGA’s 1,600W T2 – without occupying those PCIe slots with
another three GTX 1080 Tis, there’s very little need for a PSU
of this calibre. However, the biggest problem by far isn’t the
fact that it remains heavily under-utilised, but more that the
thing is so darn long. So long, in fact, that it ends up touching
the hard drive cages located under the PSU cover, even in this
rig. It’s a frustrating fix, but for the sake of the build, as we’re
only running one hard drive here, we opted to pull the hard
drive cage out entirely, and run off the single one on top of the
PSU cover. In a real-world scenario, you could get away with
running a 1,200W PSU or smaller, then keep the additional
HDD cage, to allow for a total of three 3.5-inch HDDs.PSU PROBLEMS
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And here’s our solution to the conundrum we mentioned: You can
mount an additional two SSDs here, on top of the PSU cover – or,
using the included rubber locking grommets, a single 3.5-inch HDD.
You need to use a straight SATA data cable, and the end of a SATA
power, but it’s more than suited to chilling out here. Let’s just take a
moment to appreciate that Samsung 960 Pro 512GB – we do enjoy
some of that sweet M.2 love. What a standard!HARD DRIVE SOLUTIONS
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Noctua’s NH-D15 is a monster of air cooling capability. With two
NF-A15 140mm fans, it cools the same surface area as a Kraken X62
or Corsair Hydro H115i AIO. But with two major differences: it works
by convection, not a pump, and is half the cost of the Kraken. And
with Noctua’s legendary fan lifetime (150,000 hours), and six-year
warranty, there’s no fear of it dying on you. But it wasn’t all roses: we
had to raise up the closest fan to avoid making contact with the
memory, and drop down the GTX 1080 Ti by one PCIe slot, so it
didn’t make contact with the GPU’s backplate.NOCTUA COOLING
SUPERCOLLIDER Look at that Rear I/O, or perhaps we should say lack of.
There’s not a lot of it on this board. Four USB 3.0 slots, one
USB 3.1 Type A, and another Type C, and, of course, the
standard 5.1 + optical-out audio solution. But the real kingpin
of this device is the dual 10Gb/s Ethernet ports, and a fairly
good excuse for skimping on the internal storage. Couple this
system with a QNAP TS-431X-2G NAS, with built-in 10GbE,
for a $350 starting price, sans hard drives, and a nice chunky
10GbE Internet connection, and it would be a workstation
force to be reckoned with.LIMITED I/O
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