Node 202 GTX 1070 Build

[taydan04]

   This is a follow on post from the one I posted in the New Builds / Planning Thread 

   Its finally here! Money saved up, everything was in stock at my local e-tailer and a friend was willing to go on a road trip to their store to collect so no waiting for delivery! I now have every part I need to build the machine I have been planning since the start of the year (with the GTX 980Ti substituted for a GTX 1070). And here it all is;

 

What you see here is;

• Case: Fractal Design Node 202 (Without PSU).
• PSU: Corsair SF600 600w SFX
• Motherboard: Asus ROG Maximus VIII Impact (mini-ITX).
• CPU: Intel Core i5 6600K 3.5GHZ.
• CPU Heatsink: Noctua NH-l9i with the low profile fan swapped out for a full sized NF-A9.
• Memory: 16GB of Corsair Vengeance LPX DDR4 3000Mhz
• GPU: MSI GTX 1070 Founders Edition 8GB
• Storage: 2x 500GB Samsung 850 EVO SSDs (RAID0)
• Additional Fans: 2x Noctua NF-P12 PWM Fans
• OS: Retail copy of Windows 10 Home (USB)
• Periferals:
  • AOC E2770S 27" 1080p 60HZ Monitor with a TN Panel
  • Razer Deathadder Chroma Mouse
  • Razer Blackwidow Ultimate 2016 Mechanical Keyboard
  • Cheap generic mouse mat.

   Now I know what will stick out here, why all that power plugged in to a £150 1080p monitor? Well the monitor I want is the 1440p 144Hz Dell S2716DG G-Sync monitor (I was originally going to go 4K but the unreasonable premium for the GTX 1080 in the UK put me off so i thought, if I'm going to buy the king-of-1440p GPU's I may aswell get the monitor to match.) which up until recently was around £350 but has gone back up to £500. We all know never to buy a dell product at full price with how often they have offers on so I decided to hold off until then and get a cheap stand-in monitor for now. The AOC has actually surprised me a fair amount, yeah the build quality leaves something to be desired but the panel quality itself is up there with much more expensive TN panels from the likes of Samsung, especially considering allot of Samsung TN Monitors use AOC panels anyway. 

 

  Now to start with the build, I'll skip past the CPU and RAM installation as I'm sure your all very familiar with this haha. Lets see how all of this is going to fit and function in such a tiny case shall we? We'll start with the installation of the 2 120mm fans along with a quick look at the layout and how in the hell I am going to cable manage this thing. Ill apologize now for the difference in lighting in the pictures. Some of them were taken from the test fit earlier in the day.

 

 

Okay, so the fans fit fine but at this point I was already sweating about what in the hell I am going to do with all of these cables and there is nothing even in the case yet! Well it must be possible otherwise fractal wouldn't have released the case so I power on and move to installing the motherboard now housing both the CPU and the Memory already. Along with the Noctua NH-L9i with the replacement fan already installed.

 

 

I do find the form factor of the Maximus VIII Impact quite satisfying with the additional VRM's mounted on the daughter board at the top of the board. I know its a design Asus has been making a use of for a few Intel generations now but I still appreciate the idea. You may ask why I didn't go for the Asus Z170 Gaming board and the answer is more personal preference than anything. Anyone looking to build a similar machine, the Z170 Gaming is much cheaper and will get the job done. My preference was founded on 2 points, splitting the CPU power across more phases reduces how hot each individual phase gets and is one of the reasons this board can hit such high memory frequencies so effortlessly. The other reason is the sound solution, the Supreme FX Impact is one of the highest rated signal-noise ratio sound delivery methods found on any motherboard, let alone mini-ITX. Right, so next up lets get those SSD's mounted in to their little caddie.

 

 

1TB of SSD in RAID0, something I have wanted to do ever since TRIM was supported in RAID by Intel. Lets see how this fits in to the case all wired up to the motherboard shall we?

 

 

As you can see, I opted that the best way I could get the mass of cabling already invading this case by force under control was to utilize the area around the 120mm fans in the GPU bay. This isn't an elegant solution by any means but with such finite space there really isn't much else I could do with them. And hell, if you think that is messy! Want to see it with a PSU in it? Well, okay, here.

 

 

Please forgive me for the incredibly man-handled looking PSU cables. The solid-core wiring makes those ribbons ALLOT more rigid than they look. The majority of them will support their own weight held out length ways. Not that I am complaining this was definitely a better option than the multi-coulored mess of wires that is the optional included PSU you can get with the Node 202 and I praise corsair for their non-offensive black ribbon styled cabling. But, I digress. It is time. For the 1070.

 

 

Oh just look at her... In all of her pixel-pushing glory.

 

 

And she fits perfectly! Absolutely perfectly... Although it isn't in this picture or the next I did notice the 8 pin cable is wedged behind the card and relocated it behind the 120mm fans with the others!

 

Wait, what was that? Oh okay... One more of the 1070;

 

 

In all seriousness, Yes! Everything survived the final assembly and is now ready to be closed up and get windows jammed on the thing. Wooh!

 

 

She's all closed up. *Tears up* *sniff* They build up so fast! ;(

 

Anyway... as far as setting her up goes, I went in to the bios and set up some fan profiles, enabled RAID and set the memory to XMP Profile 1 for that 3000Mhz goodness. Other than that, I did Play with some CPU overclock settings but I found with such a low profile cooler there just wasn't the thermal envelope available. Even the slightest overclock pushed the core temps in to the mid-90's at full-load and I just wasn't happy with that. Not that I mind too much. A 3.9ghz turbo boost that it hits pretty much 24/7 when under load even on all 4 cores is more than enough for my gaming needs.

 

 

And here she is, the whole set up, what? Are you still here? What did you say? You want me to overclock the 1070? Okay voices in my head, I always obey you. How about we start with some baseline tests so we know exactly how much we gain. We'll start with a benchmark run of Unigine Heaven then move on to a screen grab from Doom 2016 and compare the 2 at stock and at my maximum achieved stable overclock. With the Unigine benchmark, as to make it more fair with GPU Boost 3.0 being temperature sensitive I will let Heaven run on loop until the core clock sticks to a figure then hit benchmark, lets see the results.

 

 

Okay, a pretty impressive stock result, lets see DOOM completely maxed out on every option in 1080p.

 

 

132FPS?!? Okay so that is higher than I was expecting at stock, but hey, it is 1080p after all! 

 

Okay, so lets crack open the latest Beta of MSI Afterburner (Updated for pascal) and see what we can do.

 

 

I'm not sure if it is down to the silicone lottery or the confined case but I just wasn't able to push any further than +170Mhz on the core without it immediately becoming unstable. Although I was able to get +500 on the memory which I am pretty happy with (9000Mhz total effective memory speed). Lets see what gains we get shall we? Just as before we will start with heaven looped until the temperature peaks and flattens off before running the benchmark. 

 

 

Now that's not bad at all! Almost a 10FPS Increase! The core clock settling in at around 1925Mhz. Now for DOOM.

 

 

Another 10ish FPS increase here too! In the end I decided that the huge amounts of extra noise the GPU fan kicks out when overclocked just wasn't worth the 10FPS increase and settled on running at stock for now, still WAY more graphical power than I need at 1080p!

 

Okay, one more benchmark, shall we see how those SSDs are fairing in RAID0? Lets load up CrystalDiskMark and find out!

 

 

And there you have it! That about raps up my build log. If there is anything any of you want me to bench or try out on it just let me know but, for now at least, I'm gonna go play some DOOM.

[KamilKrait15]

why did you replace 980ti with 1070? im curious...

[taydan04]

The rest is up now! it decided to publish itself while I was typing it! haha

 

13 minutes ago, KamilKrait15 said:

why did you replace 980ti with 1070? im curious...

Well, at stock speed they are close tot he same performance. If you get a good boost or overclock the GTX 1070 it is slightly faster. Plus the 1070 is around £100 cheaper in the UK than a 980Ti. ^^

[KamilKrait15]

1 minute ago, taydan04 said:

The rest is up now! it decided to publish itself while I was typing it! haha

 

Well, at stock speed they are close tot he same performance. If you get a good boost or overclock the GTX 1070 it is slightly faster. Plus the 1070 is around £100 cheaper in the UK than a 980Ti. ^^

From which website? This is why i ask

 

[taydan04]

1 minute ago, KamilKrait15 said:

From which website? This is why i ask

 

Oh, well shut me up! haha. Well at the time I was looking at Overclockers UK! Personally I would have still gone for the 1070. That 8GB of VRAM is sure to come in handy as games seem to be steadily making more and more use of it!

[Daveeede]

I'm looking into doing a nearly identical build. How are temps on the GTX 1070? Do the 120mm noctua fans make a significant difference? Looks like a tight fit in there.

[taydan04]

1 hour ago, Daveeede said:

I'm looking into doing a nearly identical build. How are temps on the GTX 1070? Do the 120mm noctua fans make a significant difference? Looks like a tight fit in there.

Its difficult to see temperature differences on the GPU as it will always aim for ~80 degrees regardless. I can say that playing DOOM with vsync turned on the card runs at around 60-70 degrees. From what I have read, if you are going to have the Node in vertical orientation the fans in the GPU bay don't make much of a difference. However horizontally like mine they are good for both pulling cool air from under the case for the GPU to intake and getting a positive pressure going in the case, may help somewhat to prevent dust buildup.

[Jellis]

I am looking at building almost an identical version of this PC for a console machine. I was wondering if you know the total weight after being built.