The Loot Crate.

[AlienALX]

I had two gaming rigs. One for home (this one)

 

 

And this one for away (my mother's)

 

 

Both used to have 2080Tis in them. A Kingpin in the home rig, and an Aorus Xtreme in the away rig under a Bitspower block. The Aorus has dodgy VRAM, and in Unreal Engine I could not get the temps under control in PUBG. Not the core temps, but the VRAM. Water cooling it helped to the point where it worked, but I still need to under clock it by 100mhz in PUBG. I was going to put the Kingpin in, but blocks are rare and I didn't see the point given the VRAM under clock loses no performance.

 

So, I decided to build a third spare rig. Which then turned into me putting my two consoles up for sale (PS4 Pro and XB1X) to be replaced by this rig I am doing now. I also built a server recently, but never used it. And when I thought about it I realised I never would, given my NAS works fine. So I decided to strip that out and put the 1920X, Aorus Pro TR4 board and 64gb RAM to better use. Or rather, some use, rather than none.

 

 

It will be ran at 4k on my TV, so CPU speed isn't that important. It will also become my new HTPC, with me rolling the EVGA sound card from my old one (pictured here)

 

 

All into one rig. The server has 11 SSDs in it, so I will take the two 1tb. I also have a Revodrive 3 X4 960gb.

 

 

Which I will use for games that benefit from the speeds. It's very fast.

 

This is the GPU I have that I will be using. Right now it's packed back in the box.

 

 

So it certainly won't be short of chops.

 

I then needed a case, but had 0 money for one. The 6800XT, whilst really cheap, has cleared me out for a few weeks. So I put my PS4 pro up for sale and sold it. I then went case hunting, but needed one where I could fit a rad and fans in the roof and a rad and fans in the front (due to it being dual 240 AIOs for cooling). I spent all day. Either the case will only take fans or a rad in the roof (with no fans on) or you go to full tower which doubles the cost. Now I love PUBG, and play it 5 nights a week, so when I saw that NZXT made these in 2018 I began the hunt.

 

 

 

Now I'll be honest here. I did not expect to find one. I have, numerous times, searched for their Fallout 4 case and the Nuka Cola one, but there are none. Like literally zero. Another problem was they were £199 new. Which was double my budget. However, after doing some research and watching a few videos on Youtube I found out who the main importer was for them in the UK. Turns out it was a company called ADMI. AKA - AWD IT. So I went to their site, and could not believe it when I found one for £99. There was but one catch. Apparently it was a used demo model and had some scuffs and marks on the right panel. I figured I would take the chance, and just in case I bought these decals from the German expo of PUBG in 2018 for £5.

 

 

I figured hey, if it has marks I will just put stickers over it lol. So I clicked order and held my breath. Imagine my surprise when I got a brand new case without a single mark on, with all of the peelies still in place.

 

The only marks I could find were on the outer cardboard box.

 

 

A look inside.

 

 

 

[AlienALX]

I then began hunting for the rest. I realised I had a PSU sitting in my stash at my mother's house. And it isn't the splodey one.

 

 

It's actually a very good unit. The smoothing caps are a pain, but I will be using custom extensions any way. Talking of which.

 

 

So the colour coding on the cables will go as follows.

 

24 pin - 20 wires red, the last four swapped for blue.

8 pin EPS - red. 4 pin EPS - blue.

Two 8 pin PCIE in red, the third in blue.

 

Visible SATA cable for the EVGA Nu Sound - red.

 

I then needed one fan. The rads will both use Noise Blocker Eloop in black, pushing air out. I will have a single intake at the back (this) bringing air in.

 

 

Also note I bought some Phanteks Neon clone strips. I love the way they are diffused to look like smooth neons rather than seeing all of the individual bulbs.

 

Air drop !

 

 

The last thing nagging me was the RAM. I have 8 sticks in there. Four black, and four white. I bought all of these with an Amazon voucher my mother got when she got her new internet sub. She gifted me the card for setting it all up and etc. So colour wasn't really a worry, given they were on sale for cheap. However, in a themed build like this? yeah that white ram will stick out. So I thought about it and did some searching, and found these new in the box for £10 each. I got two.

 

 

I got them earlier and changed one shroud to blue, leaving one red. The bonus is it will provide air for the VRM.

 

I then needed a tool to remove the cables for the 24 pin, and also so I could re-pin a SATA run from an EVGA PSU that fits but is wired differently.

 

 

Because all of mine were busted.

 

I then set about making sure I could rewire Lian Li's proprietary connector for the RGB. Turns out this was inside.

 

 

So that should be doable.

 

I did do some building.

 

 

But then temperatures soared so I tapped out and came to my mother's house.

 

 

I shall continue when I return on Tuesday. I also found my pan.

 

 

So that will be going in also.

[Somerandomtechyboi]

The black white rams are pretty interesting, even thought they were ram slots for a second, btw you shouldnt have to worry about mix match ics since its most likely just rev e, worst case itll be diff bins of rev e

 

12 minutes ago, AlienALX said:

 

Btw whats this doohickey?

[AlienALX]

That's for de-pinning the cable extensions so I can switch around four blue cables into the 24 pin. I've had numerous tools over the years but they all break eventually. The PSU is missing one SATA run which I may or may not need, but I found an EVGA one from my Supernova in another rig that fits. It's wired wrong for the GB, but I can fix that by buzzing the pins and switching them around. I depinned my last PSU with a jewellers screwdriver and stabbed myself multiple times

 

The RAM spec is identical, they are all 3200, Same CL too. I bought them on clearance on Amazon for £85 a kit (4x 8gb)at the time which was really cheap for quad channel kits, hence I wasn't bothered about the colour. Hardly any one makes quad channel kits now, so you end up paying a premium for dual channel kits in multiples.

 

RAM is much cheaper now of course, but this was at Christmas. That said it cost me nothing because I used a voucher.

[AlienALX]

Wow. That tool is actually insane. I've never used one that required absolutely no force whatsoever and no yanking and wrecking your hands. I figured I would be there all day, it took about 5 mins to do all of it !

 

 

I originally did 4. I thought I was brave doing that ffs. But it wasn't enough, 6 looked better. I then changed two of the blue 8 pin to red (so it works out the same on 3 8 pin PCIE) and removed the extra 4 pin from the secondary EPS (I need an 8 and a 4).

So the cabling is done.

 

[AlienALX]

SSDs were in a bad way. Labels were torn and scraped. So I tarted them up a little.

 

 

Still waiting for more decals. That said you don't see much of them any way.

 

 

Rear fan in, first hose clamp fitted.

 

 

GPU and tons more wiring later.

 

 

I've also double clamped the hoses. Stops them from pushing out onto the case window.

 

I managed to get the RGB working beautifully. It comes out of the mobo into the left side of the lower strip, up the case into the right side of the top strip and out of that into the fan. So any chase effects go around the case beautifully. Right now she's farting rainbows as I am way too busy on the software side to worry about it.

 

 

I ended up going with the SB ZXR.

Still to do. Get more extensions on the fans and fit the hub to the floor of the case. Then fit the memory coolers and wire those in.