After many revisions and about 18 months, HEDT "Arthas" is finally complete!

Kalm_Traveler · December 21, 2019

I'd say this one started early last year when I platform-upgraded from x99 and a 6900k to this x299 and the 7960x.

It started off in the old rigs Thermaltake Core X9 horizontal case and two Titan V's, then Titan Xp's, and lastly Titan RTX's. In the old case, it had a green theme with a Hulk Venom thing going on but never really seemed complete or ideal for my vision of what this "pointless overkill" (as JayzTwoCents calls them) was meant to be.

Earlier this year I gave in and finally swapped to the Thermaltake Tower 900 with larger radiators (560mm quad vs the thicc 480mm quads in the old case), split the loop into separates for the graphics cards and cpu, and had fun in February at that time reaching 5th overall for 3dmark's then-new Port Royal benchmark (down to ~ 50th now), Not content with operating temps on the cards or CPU, I recently swapped the graphics card blocks from the old Bitspowers to these Aquacomputer blocks with active backplates, and in an effort to eek out every last degree of cooling from the CPU swapped the EK monoblock for separate Heatkiller CPU and VRM blocks.

The final cherry on top was replacing the useless-to-me Asus OC Panel II which I had hoped would allow me to monitor loop temps (it doesn't) with an Aquacomputer Aquaero 6 XT. It is perfect.

Ambient temp on the Aquaero is showing 24.2 C, cpu cores under light use are 28-30 C, GPU cores are reporting 33-34 C. Overall I'm finally content with this thing. Obviously there are better CPUs out there (especially from team red now) but this started as my first real dream build about 2 years ago and now that it is in its final complete form I wouldn't change anything.

Bombastinator · December 21, 2019

Red has better price/performance and a few of them have better single core but you already bought the thing so price/performance doesn’t matter anymore. Those are some seriously low temps. Your CPU seems to be overclockable from the literature (could be wrong about that) though and it sounds like you have temperature room so I suspect even that is not a factor.

Enjoy! That is one powerful PC and should remain so for a very long time.