Ultimate all-round PC and desk setup

Alikhanizadeh · February 11, 2018

Hi all
Long time LTT lurker first time poster.

I probably spend more time using my PC than I do anything else. I use it pretty much every day for work and for just about everything else too. Since I can’t (and don’t particularly want to) avoid it, and since I only have the one life to live I’d like to make using my PC as much of a productive, healthy and enjoyable thing as it possibly can be. That and I love a good project and confess to being a bit of a hardware enthusiast.

The new PC will be used for;

Photography (Adobe Lightroom, large batches of RAWs)
Video editing (Adobe Premiere & After Effects)
Solid modeling (Autodesk Inventor)
Graphic design (Adobe Illustrator)
Music, listening and also looking to get in to doing some production with Ableton Live.
Finally, I wouldn’t call myself a gamer but with a 1080ti on water it would be rude not to really…

By all-round I mean a PC that does everything as well it possibly can without compromising other areas. To me that means;

The ultimate balance of cores/clock speed/IPC
Not using any hardware that excels in one area but brings a performance hit/has compatibility issues in other areas (e.g. SLI GPUs, high core count Xeon processors, some types of RAID)
Near silence
A clean, minimal aesthetic in a case that isn’t too ridiculously big

The all round performer approach extends to the peripherals and desk setup too. The aims here are;

Decent ergonomics that won't break me.
Professional, accurate colour and sound reproduction
To make a productive environment with minimal distractions and everything to hand.
To make a really cool place to work

I'm starting off with the peripherals and desk build first, then I'll move on to the PC. First purchase is an Asus PA328Q.

It's a 32 inch 4K, with an IPS panel. It was the best wide colour gamut, high accuracy monitor in this size and resolution before going for the likes of an Eizo, which are around 4 times the price.

I have a Spyder5 Elite colorimiter I use to calibrate it. Surprising how much difference it makes even on a "pre calibrated" high end monitor. I use the rough industry standard Gamma of 2.2, white balance of 6500k and a brigtness of 120cd/m².

Next up, sound. This is really important to me, I love music (according to Spotify I rack up an average of 5.2 hours listening per day...) so I want something that sounds stupendous. I also use speakers for editing sound as part of video production and would like to get in to music production in the future so I want something accurate too. I used to use the better Logitech 2.1 systems, they we're okay to listen on, but I found them really lacking when it came to actually working with sound. so, I was looking either for really accurate HiFi speakers that weren't too "coloured" or Studio monitors that didn't sound too "boring". I spent a lot of time A-B testing speakers in my local shops and eventually decided on a pair of Adam A7X studio monitors and an Adam Sub10 MK2 studio subwoofer.

Also got a set of IsoAcoustics aperta 200 stands. They are similar to the popular L8R stands but solid aluminium and with some other minor improvements. Quite hard to get hold of. I'm considering making longer rods for them to make them a bit higher.

They sound SO SO SO good. I've had them for 10 months now, listen to them at every opportunity and the grin still hasn't worn off . I felt like I was listening to all of my music for the first time, they reveal details I've never heard before in tracks I've listened to hundreds of times. I think if I were condemned to a desert island and allowed to take one possession it could well be my speakers.

I made some custom XLR cables (Van Damme Cable, Neutrik connectors) to connect everything up to a Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 audio interface.

Alikhanizadeh · February 11, 2018

Next, I needed something to sit on. I picked up a 2nd hand fully specced Herman Miller Aeron on eBay. It's hard to find shops with a decent selection a chairs to try, I did try what I could and found the Aeron pretty comfy. Over time it has become apparent that I like to sit in a lot of odd positions that don't work that well in the Aeron. It is extremely comfy if you sit like a normal human though and It's such a fantastic looking piece of design. It needed a bit of a "tune up" when I got it and this is still ongoing. I modified the arms to make them more solid, next job will be replacing the ram as it's a bit wobbly.

Now I had something to sit on, I needed something to sit at. It had to be a sit stand desk as sitting all day is really not great for you even in the best chair. I was about to pull the trigger on an Ikea sit stand desk when I managed to get another eBay steal. I paid £250 for a nearly new Gresham Rise desk worth £1600. It has 3 x 3 stage Linak Danish made actuators which meant it could lift more weight, was more stable and could go both lower and higher than average. This ended up being invaluable so I was pretty glad I went for it.

Next, things to put on the desk. The ubiquitous Logitech MX Master 2S.

...and the not so ubiquitous completely blank Das Keyboard 4 Ultimate. It's fitted with Cherry MX blue mechanical switches.

I like having a positionable lamp on my desk. This an original 50 year old made in england Herbert Terry Anglepoise.

I kept but restored the original paint, rewired it with twisted cord flex and new grommets, fitted new a Bakelite switch and modern plug and wired in an earth. I replaced the nylon bushes, spacers and linkages with custom chrome versions. I replaced the switched bakelite bulb holder with a lighter chrome one so I could fit a (heaver) LED bulb. It positions and balances better than any other light I've ever tried. You can move it with one finger and it stays wherever you put it with no bounce, drift of stiffness, even at the limits of it's travel.

Alikhanizadeh · February 13, 2018

So far, it looks like this.

Pretty cramped. I can't get my speakers or monitor far enough back on the desk, I also hit the right speaker with my mouse. I wasn't overly keen on the white top either and found the cable management holes were more of a hindrance than anything else.
(Currently running off a Dell laptop as I'm in between PCs)

Drew up a design for a larger top and had it CNC routed out of 40mm thick FSC European Oak by a kitchen worktop company.

Alikhanizadeh · February 13, 2018

Here is the new top after delivery.

I like the curve in the old top so I incorporated one in to the new one.

Old top off...

...New top on. I relocated the transformer, cables and control panel to the left hand side of the desk as I preferred them there.

Voila.

Alikhanizadeh · February 13, 2018

Time to move on to the real build log!

rob5ft19in · February 13, 2018

Really interesting build!! Followed!!

Nicnac · February 13, 2018

very nice wood maybe get separate stands for the speakers? and how about mounting the monitor on a monitor arm to save some more space? would also look even cleaner That way you can put your pc on the desk. Other than that it looks like it's going to be a very cozy, high-end setup!

Tech_Dreamer · February 18, 2018

Beautiful.

Alikhanizadeh · February 19, 2018

Thanks for the kind words everyone.

On 13/02/2018 at 12:47 PM, Nicnac said:

very nice wood maybe get separate stands for the speakers? and how about mounting the monitor on a monitor arm to save some more space? would also look even cleaner That way you can put your pc on the desk. Other than that it looks like it's going to be a very cozy, high-end setup!

Most of the floor standing speaker stands I've seen seem to be a bit wobbly. There is just about enough room on the desk for them with the big new top. I'm definitely considering a monitor arm!

Alikhanizadeh · February 19, 2018

Here is the (initial) list of the main PC components;

Enthoo EVOLV ATX Tempered Glass case in satin black
ASUS Prime X299-Deluxe motherboard
Intel Core i9 7900X processor - delidded with liquid metal and speed binned for 4.7GHz @ 1.25V by OCUK
Corsair Dominator Platinum 64GB 3200MHz Ram
Asus GTX 1080Ti Strix OC Graphics card
Corsair HX1000 PSU

This is will be cooled with the following;

EK XRES Revo D5 PWM pump and reservoir combo
EK Asus X299 nickel/plexi Monoblock
EK 1080Ti GTX Strix nickel/plexi full cover GPU block
EK 1080Ti GTX Strix black backplate
EK CE (45mm thick) 280 radiator
EK PE (38mm thick) 360 radiator
Loads of EK black nickel HDC fittings and 12mm PETG hardline tubing

There are lots of other bits going in to the build that aren't really worth listing. There is also a lot still to be determined, I'm going to figure it out as I go. I still need to figure out;

Storage
Wiring
Fans and airflow
Case modifications and general layout

Alikhanizadeh · February 19, 2018

First job was to fit the processor and monoblock to the motherboard.

Since the processor had been speed binned and delidded by OCUK it just came in a little plain white box. Annoyingly it was also caked in old thermal paste .

I considered delidding it myself, but since the pre-done one came with a year warranty, the guarantee it would hit 4.7GHz (which was my target anyway) at 1.25v, and only cost an additional £100 (on an £890 processor) I decided it wasn't really worth it.

Here is the board and monoblock.

I used the included EK thermal paste and thermal pad for the VRM MOSFETs. Went for the pea technique.

Seemed to give a decent spread on a test run.

Got it all together in the end after a struggle with the monoblock screw holes not lining up with the holes in the motherboard. Had to release the bolts on the monoblock to line the holes up as much as possible and still had some "adjusting" to do with a file.

Alikhanizadeh · February 19, 2018

Next I pulled the case to bits.

Here are the radiators I'll be using.
After a substantial amount of mocking up, test fitting and deliberating I decided to put the 360x38mm radiator in the top and the 280x45mm in the front. I did a lot a research before buying these radiators looking at the dimensions of the case and the superb test data on xtremerigs.net. I found that this combo should actually perform better than two slim 360 radiators. I think this is pretty much the best performing radiator combination the can be squeezed in this case without drastic modification.

Many of you will be aware of the restrictive top on this case and how that results in recirculating hot air inside the case when using a top rad. I have seen various hacks to help alleviate this but decided to make the top section pretty much from scratch to give me the maximum amount of space, the best possible cooling (without cutting a hole in the top) and a perfect fit.

I removed the slide out tray and cut out loads of metal until there was barely anything left of the original top and started making a new piece out of 1.5mm steel.

Here I'm "tracing" the radiator to make a paper template

...and here I'm using the template to mark out an opening and bolt holes for the new metal.

Here are the two rough pieces.

Alikhanizadeh · July 5, 2018

Bit of a delay on the updates... Life gets in the way sometimes.
Here is the general idea of how the panel I made in the previous post goes together with the radiator.

A bit of fettling later and they were ready for paint.

Fasteners are temporary, I will use all black ones in the final build.

Alikhanizadeh · July 5, 2018

Before I needed to put my graphics card together with it's waterblock

I'm using a Asus GTX 1080Ti Strix OC graphics card

Along with an EK1080Ti Strix nickel/plexi full cover waterblock block and a Strix specific EK black backplate

EK components really are beautifully made.

First step is to pull the original heatsink, shroud, fans and backplate off, voiding the warranty. Then clean off the original thermal paste.

Then apply new thermal paste and pads, again I used the EK supplied materials.

Then fit the waterblock, flip it over and repeat for the backplate.

Alikhanizadeh · July 5, 2018

That's the graphics card assembled.

Alikhanizadeh · July 5, 2018

Now for the first mock build with the main components.

Here is the top panel in it's final state.

SiberionHusky · July 5, 2018

Wow, this is looking really great so far! I like the thought and effort being put into this build. That top radiator panel is sweet!

Alikhanizadeh · November 5, 2018

I have actually made a lot of progress since the last post but just haven't had time to post any updates. Such is life.

Anyway, next up: more butchering of the case.

I'm using a 280mm radiator in the front so I will be using two 140mm fans. As you can see the case is a bit restrictive for this size of fan.

Chop, chop, chop

Much better

I really don't like this area of the case in the photograph below with loads of holes for HDD shelves in it.
1. It's useless as HHDs are so huge and cheap you only really need one or two and SSDs are rapidly expanding in capacity and dropping in price.

2. It's useless as I have other plans for locating my HDD
3. It's useless as I will have my coolant pump/reservoir, radiator and plumbing in the way so I couldn't fit drives there anyway.

4. I want to mount my pump/reservoir here and the number of existing holes makes it a bit tricky.
5. It looks ugly

My plan was to make two "blanking plates" to fit either side of this area to solve the above problems.

I had to cut off and drill out any parts that stood proud of the surrounding area. Here is the end result of the hacking. The rough looking paint is just to protect exposed metal, it's all going to get covered up.

Here are the blanking plates before paint. You'll see how they fit soon.

Alikhanizadeh · November 5, 2018

After much mocking up, measuring and testing the layout was concrete enough that I could get the panels ready for paint.

You can now see how they fit and where the pump will fit.

You can see I used long bolts and nylon spacers to stand the pump bracket off from the panel. This is important for routing the cooling loop as you will see later.

Here is the other panel on the back of the case. Excuse the fingerprints. You can see the panels still allow use of the original cable pass through grommets.

I also needed to make a panel to blank off this opening in to the basement.

Here is what I came up with

and here it is fitted.

Alikhanizadeh · November 7, 2018

Time for the plumbing. Here are the beginnings of the routing for the loop (the green stuff is rubber coated garden wire). Flow direction is clockwise. Although in reality loop order makes an almost immeasurably small difference due to flow rates I still wanted to keep a logical order to the loop.
That is, top rad (takes air from inside the case) --> front rad (takes air from outside the case) --> pump --> CPU/VRM monoblock --> GPU block.
The 7900x OCd is easily going to the hardest component to cool in the loop so I wanted to give it every chance by being the first in line after the rads. Every degree helps with this i9.

I'm using PETG tubing and EK HDC compression fittings in black nickel.

I chose some complicated angles for my runs and found bending tubes freehand pretty difficult (see the bowl full of scrapped tubes) but I got there in the end.

Here is the final line up of fittings and tubes that I will use.

Alikhanizadeh · November 7, 2018

Now, I flushed all of the pipe fittings and cooling components, filled the system up, bled it, set up Windows and ran some benchmarks and thermal tests. I had some further thermal mods in mind but I want the run some tests before I went any further. Most temps were fine but core temps were little hotter than I preferred so I on with the mods.

First, I pulled the cooling loop apart. I wanted to try I re-seating the monoblock with a different thermal compound and I also noticed there appeared to be some yellow grease leaching out of the monoblock O-ring and there were a few bits trapped in the cooling channels.

Spread looks okay?

EK thermal pad on the VRMs had leached quite a bit of oil.

You can see the goop and bits in the block.

Stripped, cleaned and reassembled

Alikhanizadeh · November 7, 2018

I decided to swap the EK paste and pads for Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut and Thermal Grizzly Minus pad 8s.

I kept applying and re-applying the Kryonaut as I kept getting bits in, after a while I noticed the bits were actually IN the syringe, The whole syringe was full of crap mixed in the with paste, a bit rubbish for what is supposed to be the best paste out there. Must have been a dodgy batch.

Here is the final application (spread, as per Kryonaught instructions), I managed to pluck most of the junk out.

Despite the contamination it did drop the temps a very small amount (which is impressive considering EK paste is actually really good). The Thermal Grizzly Minus 8 pad dropped the VRM temps a lot.

Alikhanizadeh · November 7, 2018

Next were some more fairly straightforward modifications to the case to improve airflow.

Air exiting the top of the case after passing through the top radiator has to pass through these two mouldings.

I ground the fins back to make a larger area for air to exit.

Extending the front panel is pretty much a must do modification for anyone with an Enthoo EVOLV case. It sits too close to the front fan intake and chokes it

There are many different ways to do it but I used long cap head 6-32 UNC screws with a washer and a nylon spacer to create the stand off.

You might have also spotted that I have removed the light conduit for the front LED. It restricts airflow and I didn't want it anyway. Less is more!

The temps are getting closer to where I need them to be now but there is still more to do.

TekRed · November 7, 2018

Keep an eye out on the petg tubing as it does not not like heat. I had petg on a previous build with a 1950x and gtx 1080 in the same loop and the tubing heated up and caused it to shrink around the fitting causing it to loose its seal and leaked all over my 1080, had to get a new card because of it. I will only ever use acrylic tubing for now on as it has a much higher melting point.

Looking good though!

Alikhanizadeh · January 20, 2019

Ouch. Thanks for the warning, I'll keep an eye on it. It's on my desk so It's not hard for me to check.

On to the build. I was getting much closer with CPU/GPU temperatures but was now struggling with negative air pressure in the case and slightly higher than ideal PCH/RAM/motherboard temperatures.
Long story short, the best fan configuration for the cooling loop means the only intake fans are those on the front radiator. This leaves me with insufficient cool airflow over passively cooled components in the case. The fact that I have lot of negative air pressure that I want to resolve means that it makes sense for me to find a way to add an extra fan to pull ambient unheated air in to the case.

The standard rear fan position worked best as an exhaust in tests, so that's out (it just made a loop of hot air when used as an intake, it also opposed the general front to back, bottom to top airflow direction in the case).
I tried all sorts of things without much success. Here I'm testing two 60mm Noctuas below the radiator (didn't work, the front panel is too restrictive so they just fought the 140mm fans for air).

The catalyst for a solution came from my PSU surprisingly enough. The Corsair HX1000 I bought for this project has a horrible coil whine so I intended changing it. I realised if I got a shorter PSU with connectors that terminated at the top I may be able to squeeze an intake fan in the floor of the case. The case feet raise the floor of the case enough to allow air in and the "basement" divider is liberally perforated to allow air in to the upper portion of the case so it should work.
The Corsair AX860 turned out to be the perfect replacement. Side by side you can see the difference in length and connector layout.

The AX860 has no coil whine, was more efficient and as a bonus has no capacitors on the cable and fewer double wires.
AX860 24 pin on the right, HX1000 on the left, looks like there are some capacitors in that bulge. I'm doing full custom cables from scratch later so that will be helpful.

Here is the floor of the case marked up before cutting and drilling.

Fitted up a spare fan with some temporary fasteners to test it.

It actually worked really well, dropped the temperature of the passively cooled components, created neutral to positive air pressure and even dropped the temperatures in the cooling loop as it feeds some ambient air to the top radiator.

I painted the bare metal and substituted the Phanteks fan for a BeQuiet Silent Wings 3.

I tried a few different filters and eventually settled on this Akasa filter.

Fitted up.

Here is the view from inside with the temporary cable spaghetti. You can see the fan between the PSU and HDD.

That leads me on to the HDD I'm using. I decided from the start that I only wanted one internal HDD. With the decreasing cost, high speed and small form factor of SSDs, I see little need for a HDD other than for bulk storage for archived projects. This single drive will act as my local bulk storage and I will have a multidrive NAS in another room connected over gigabit ethernet as my main bulk storage.
Main priorities are reliability and silence for this drive. After much deliberation I went for the 10TB version of the Western Digital Red.

These large capacity WD drives are essentially new versions of the famously reliable HGST hermetically sealed helium filled drives. I would normally go for the WD Gold drives but these are actually pretty noisy, as are Red Pros. The standard Red 10TB seems to be the sweet spot of the range when taking noise in to consideration. It's the quietest performance WD drive, still has the massive 256MB cache, it's still helium filled, still has an exceptional MTBF and is only fractionally slower than the most expensive gold drive. Unlike the Gold, Red Pro, Black ect, this drive is 5200rpm which is largely responsible for the reduction in sound. Despite this is actually out paces my WD Black 6TB and destroys my Black 4TB in benchmarks.
I find HDD noises are greatly amplified by the PC case so I always prefer to mount mechanical drives with a suspension mount. I'll be using a Sharkoon suspension mount that I used in my old build.