Frozen In The Blizzard

[Mathew Lang]

Frozen In The Blizzard

Snow White Color Theme & Massive Air Flow

 

"When I was young we didn't have it good like you kids today with you're giga this and peta that. We had kilas and if you were willing to walk in the snow you could fight that blizzard outside and invest a weeks pay in a single megabyte of ram! Bah! Air Flow you say? Stop being weak you little snott! I didn't need any Air Flow for my 386 but if you really want some Air Flow just give me a moment, Grand Pa had some beans for lunch earlier today, you're about to get some Air Flow soon you whipper snapper."

 

- Grandpa

 

Weather Forecast Data

 

Case: Fractal Design Meshify S2 with Duel Tempered Glass Panels

Power Supply: Be Quiet Straight Power 11 750W 80 Plus Gold

Mother Board: MSI MEG X570 Unify

CPU: AMD Ryzen 3900x

RAM: Micron Crucial Ballistix Gaming(HA! Marketing!) Memory 32GB (4x8GB DDR3600, 2666 OCed up to 3600)

Boot Drive: Corsair Force Series MP600 NVMe PCIe Gen4 x4 M.2 SSD 1TB

GPU: Gigabyte GeForce RTX 2070 Super Gaming OC 3x White 8G (Virtically mounted through a Lian Li 011D-1X PCEI 3.0 x16 kit)

CPU Cooling: Noctua NH-D15 Chromx.black (Noctua NA-HC4 chromax.white added for looks)

CPU Thermal: Noctua NT-H1 Thermal Paste

Case Fans: 7 Noctua NF-A14 IndustrialPPC-3000 PWM (Noctua NA-SAVP1 chromax.white Anti-Vibration PADS replaced the brown included pads for looks), 2 Notctua NF-F12 IndustrialPPC-3000PWM (with the same white vibration pads)

LED: 7 Phanteks 140mm Halos Lux Digital RGB Frames, 2  Phanteks 120mm Halos Lux Digital RGB Frames (These are connected through a single Phanteks Digital-RGB Controller to a JRGB port),3 Phanteks Neon M5 Digital-RGB LED Strips (connected through a 2nd Controller to a 2nd JRGB Port)

Comments From The Weather Man

 

This was a really fun build. I started by stripping down the S2 case so that I could understand my options and was not disappointed by all of the nooks within the case which left many possibilities to be explored. I stated by choosing the Unify Board because it was the most basic x570 board I could find which also had just enough features for multiple future planned upgrades down the line. Even though this build has quite a few LED elements, I appreciate that this board has minimalist design which does not force its own lighting on my design. I am also happy with the Bios options which will make my Overclocking adventure a really fun story to tell when that time arrives.

 

For the CPU I went with a 3900x. This was a future proofing choice. It will handle my Multi Tasking habit and also not bottle neck a planned upgrade to a Duel 3000 Graphics purchase for Christmas. This CPU is being cooled down by a NH-D15 with White Caps added for looks. The fans have been setup to blow cool air to the center and then get sucked out the bottom by the lower case exhaust arrangement. The vertical GPU orientation allows the air to flow down with no impediments. Future upgrades include liquid metal and Lathing as part of the future Overclocking Adventure.

 

I went with Crucial ram for pure aesthetic reasons and I went with 32gb because I tend to run allot of programs at once and the extra Ram allows me to Game while I work.

 

For the GPU I just wanted a white card that was good enough to give me a good experience today without spending too much. I will end up selling this on Ebay when I upgrade in December. This 2070 allows me to easily game at 4k/30+ FPS in FFXV and other titles I have tested so far. Gigabyte has software to change the color of the on board LED but once you choose your color you can just delete the program as the card holds your choice permanently. I did Vertically mount this because this case has about 20mm between the side panel and the card for plenty of airflow. This places the card perfectly in line with the top of the Noctua Heat sink. If I had done a Horizontal mount I would have to worry about GPU sag and it would have not lined up with the dimensions of the heat sink as nicely.

 

I do not need allot of storage so I went with just a single 1tb NVME gen 4 as my boot drive. I am very happy with this choice as it takes advantage of the PCIE 4 and gave my higher then advertised results when I ran it through some benchmarks.

 

For airflow I went absolutely overboard and threw in as many fans as the case could hold just because I wanted too. The one thing to note here is that while most people will have a single case fan blow out behind the CPU I am actually bringing air in through that location. The reason I am doing that is because my CPU fan setup wants air from both sides of the CPU and then is exhausting the hot air down. Because of this I did add a small air filter between the case and the fan. All 7 intake fans are filtered.

 

I was forced to place to 120mm fan in the bottom of the case instead of 140mm because the larger fans would not fit due to the LEDs and the Power Supply. This also left me a little extra room for cables and with the 23 extra components I have many wires to manage.

 

Power was chosen for silence more and size vs power so that I could fit everything in. I also went with a 750w to allow for all of the extra components. I know a single case fan does not have allot of pull but when you have 11 fans and 12 lighting elements then the those small numbers start adding up to something that at least has to be considered in your power totals.

 

Finally to give me a massive increase in FPS, CPU clock speed, Extra RAM speed and lower heat ratings across the board I added LED elements throughout the case. To achieve these amazing stats I went with the Phantek Digital LED system with Halo products on each case fan and NEON stips along the motherboard and the base of the panel. This products works with MSI's Mystic Lighting product and finally brings lighting to my Noctua Fans (I hope Noctua does not repo my fans!). I have these lights synced with my system's sound output which provides me with a simple light show and also keeps the lights off when I am not using my computer without requiring any thought. Something to think about when it comes to LED products like these is that they do burn out eventually. So doing it this way will keep them working longer.

 

Frozen In The Blizzard has been a passion project of mine for the last two months which began with my first post a while ago about stripping down the Meshify S2 case for this build. At the time I had bigger aspirations about doing an entire series about the build. Life gets in the way and my lack of experience with media and story telling really made the venture more then I am ready for. I did take lots of video and photos to document the adventure I had and maybe in the future I will have the talent to tell the full story of how this build got from point A to point B.

 

Thank You!

 

In conclusion I want to thank everyone in the community. I am not able to give credit to all of the individuals because I just do not remember every single person but I want to thank every person who created a video I watched, a post I read or a website I looked at to help me with this build. Your content matters and it helps all of us with these builds we share with you.

 

 

 

"I looks like that Blizzard is finally done. You're Grand Dad told me you built a new computer. Can it dial up Facebook for me?"

 

- Grandma

[Simony]

Looks sickk dude. 

[banana_havoc]

My only suggestion might be to grab a piece of about 1/4" acrylic about the same size as the pump mounting slots on the back wall and sand down the sides of it and mount a light strip facing into it to illuminate the slots from behind, would go well with the lighting you already have.

 

Good job!

[Mathew Lang]

I agree with you that something needs to be done in that area. I was talking to JMMods about cutting me about four SSD covers with the name of the system spelled out as:

 

FROZEN

IN

THE

BLIZZARD

 

Then have some snow flakes on some SSD coverse on the back side. All of them lit up. That way when I complete the cable management it will be a complete 360 degree presentation. The amount of cables is.... high.

 

Between now and then I am tweaking the system. I have it overclocked at 4400/1.42v with no crashs after running for an hour. The Graphics card is bumped up 100/900 over spec with no crashes. I am going to start tunning the memory and then ill investigate what else I can tune on it. I have been moving fans around in different configurations to stamp out various hot spots in the system as they have made themselves present. It runs between 28-40c on idle and tops out at 78c at full load. This is all closed system, airflow only. I dont want to use measurements with the panels open. I want to see just how high i can get the specs at stable.

 

My fear is that when the 3k series of RTX cards comes out that they wont release any white cards and ill have to use my arts/crafts skills on it.