The Precipice of My Sanity (i7 8700, GTX 1080TI, Tower 900)

[JMCB]

Chapter One – Planning or ‘Lack Thereof’

On a spur-of-the-moment decision on a trip where I was originally “just looking”, I decide to buy a 4k monitor at Fry’s. I took it home to replace my aging 30” HP zr30w. Boot it up. Damn, does the screen look sweet. Time to try a game. I throw PUBG and Star Wars: Battlefront 2 at it. Wow, gaming on it with my current setup isn’t ideal. Low frames, load times, etc. I’ve been putting it off for so long, but I guess it’s finally time to upgrade.


My Original System

It’s been awhile since I’ve done a new build. Heck, the last time I did a computer build was before they had hard tubing commonplace in water cooled systems. This was a record for me; the longest I’ve ever held on to one system (CPU/MB almost 6 years, GPUs 4 years). So, with tax season at hand (and a well-deserved bonus work paycheck in my grasp), it was finally time to treat myself to a new system.

First thing I ever do with picking out a system is look for a case. It may seem a bit strange, but I want it to look pretty, and it’s the thing that will be standing out the most. There was a case I’ve been eyeing for a while online, and on my previously mentioned trip to Fry’s I saw it out. The Thermaltake Tower 900. That thing would look sweet with two reservoirs and some slick water cooling setup. Checked online. Yup, they were looking pretty sweet indeed. Most of the builds I’d seen were sporting the Snow edition, I decided to pay the extra $20 and go for the black, and do an inverse with a black and white theme. Hopefully it’ll turn out sweet, but we’ll focus on that more later. It’s time to start picking the components!

 

Initially, I couldn’t decide which chipset, Intel x299 vs z370 or AMD x399. After refreshing myself with a few different articles and videos, comparing benchmarks between the different formats, and a few dozen more articles later, I removed AMD from the running (not to say they are terrible, but I’m trying to squeeze every bit of performance out as I can, even if it costs a bit extra). So that left me between x299 and z370. I decided that I was going to go for the x299 format because I could later upgrade to an 18+ core processor later on down the road. Then all logical reasoning went out the wind.

 

I go on Newegg to proceed to make system purchase. Check prices on everything CPU/MB combo-wise. There was a solid combo offer on Newegg for an ASUS ROG Strix Z370-E motherboard with an Intel i7 8700k. Done.

Well, instant change of mind. I thought initially it would have been more of a sidegrade from my previous i7 3960x processor, but performance numbers online showed otherwise. Besides, one of the reasons I went with x79 in the past compared to whatever consumer end systems at the time was the plan to run multiple graphic cards with more PCI-E lanes. Since I don’t plan on doing that again, it became a non-issue.  

Speaking of graphic cards, in my current system, I have four watercooled AMD 290x video cards. When I first had this setup, games looked amazing on it, but slowly after time, AMD started supporting four-way crossfire less and less. It got to the point where in order to run quite a few regularly played games, I would need to disable crossfire completely in order for the game to run. And whenever a new game came out, this was 90% always an issue. In addition, when I finally bumped the resolution to 4k, it was the final nail in the coffin. I would need to upgrade my system in order to play games maxed out again. I needed a GPU that would be able to give me better performance than what I currently had. Well, you all know what card that is; the Geforce GTX 1080 TI.

Damn, video cards are expensive. Silly alt-coin miners, taking all the supply and jacking up the prices. Nothing was reasonable online, and the reasonable ones that popped up were quickly bought up fast. I only have X money, I need this card without breaking the bank. I could have probably settled for a Geforce 1070, but then I found it: The Gigabyte Geforce GTX 1080 TI Turbo, and it was “only” $899. I instantly bit. My god is it ugly with its white and orange color scheme, watercooling will fix that issue, so it was again, a non-issue.

 

I hit the purchase link, and after a decline on my card and a phone call to my bank, and another click, all the sweet gear was heading on its way.

Here’s the breakdown of what I purchased:

System:
Thermaltake Tower 900...Tower
Intel Core i7-8700k CPU
Asus ROG Strix Z370-E Motherboard
G.Skill TridentZ RGB Series 32GB DDR4
Gigabyte Geforce GTX 1080 Ti Video Card
Corsair HX1200 Power Supply
Samsung 960 EVO 500 GB M.2 SSD
WD Blue 4TB HD
LG Blu-ray Rewrter Optical Drive (What? I use this.)

 

At this point, I’m pretty excited, no, STOKED, for this build, but staying up late ordering this bad boy and bank phone calls wore me out. Besides, I also had to work really early. I decided I’ll order all the cooling tomorrow on separately. Time to take a break.

 

A work day passes, come home, I start getting notifications of stuff getting shipped out, nice! Time to start working on the cooling.

The idea is to do two separate loops – one for the CPU and one for the GPU. They will be opposing colors and stand out from the case. The CPU was going to be a black block, black radiator, black fittings, and clear hard tubing with PrimoChill Opaque Sky White liquid premix. Picked out an EKWB EK-CoolStream SE 420 radiator and an EKWB EK-Supremacy EVO CPU block. The GPU was going to be a white block, white radiator, and clear hard tubing with Liquid.cool CFX Opaque Black. It’s going to be epic. But there’s a slight problem…

The graphic card PCB wasn’t reference.

F***!!!! F***!!!! What a n00b mistake. This is what happens when you haven’t done any of your favorite hobby in years!! Public service announcement – don’t get rusty, you’ll miss something. But another PSA – we can fix any problem.

Looked online, nobody makes a full cover block for this card. I could go for a universal block, but I’ve had bad experiences with those in the past. It’s ok. I’ll just sit on this graphics card for a bit until either I find a deal on a reference GTX 1080 TI or wait it out for when the 2080 GTX comes out and just flip it to the miners (right, RIGHT?).



Because of this small little update, at this time, I’m going to hold off on the liquid cooling for the video card, and just do the CPU loop. That means a few temporary changes. I still want to do my color scheme in the long run so I’ll keep the CPU side black still, and since the card is white, it’ll substitute nicely in place of my original plan. I’ll use RGB lighting to make it glow orange to make it match for the time being as well. It’s working(-ish). Major decision was a change to hold off on the hard tubing for the time being. I don’t want to have to redo any of that, because it’s a bit more expensive and it’ll be the first time I’ve ever used it. For the flex tubing, I went with some PrimoFlex Crystal Clear tubing.

Time once again to do that buying thing, so I hit the purchase link. Decline again. Sigh…my bank hates me. Another phone call to my bank, and after 20 minutes on the phone I finally do the last click, and the final pieces are on their way:

Cooling:
EKWB EK-Supremacy EVO CPU block
Thermaltake Pacific PR22-D5 Reservoir/Pump Combo
EKWB EK-CoolStream SE 420 Radiator
PrimoFlex Crystal Clear tubing 10 FT Pack
PrimoChill Opaque Sky White liquid concentrated premix
XSPC Black Matte Compression Fittings (8 qty, overkill, but cheaper with the pack)
3x MASTERFAN PRO 120Air Pressure RGB w/ Controller (Gotta add that orange color to match that ugly GPU cooler)
MasterAccessory Universal LED Strip – RGB (This counts as cooling? No? Ok, but I purchased it at the same time, yikes, get off my back).

Future Purchase:
Gallon of Distilled Water (or could watch money burn and just throw the concentrated mix into the reservoir).

Well, that’s a lot to write for just the planning step. I can’t wait to go over the journey of actually building this bad boy with all of you (I also like to write – guess that helps). Anyways, thanks for reading all this, if you did. To give you a preview of what’s to come, here is a picture of some of the parts just arriving to my place. DAMN, the Tower 900 is a lot bigger than I remembered seeing in the store. I think I saw a different case at Fry’s…

[JMCB]

Pictures (click link to view them all):
https://imgur.com/gallery/66GIl

Completed:

[JMCB]

Reserved for Chapter 3.

[dizmo]

I look forward to seeing how this turns out! I hope you populate the front bay with a nice fan controller from Lamptron.

Also, that is probably my favorite large case. Please do it proud with sexy tubing runs.

[JMCB]

2 minutes ago, dizmo said:

I hope you populate the front bay with a nice fan controller from Lamptron.

Son of a...
 

 

38 minutes ago, JMCB said:

Chapter One – Planning or ‘Lack Thereof’

I'm probably going to forget even more things. HAHAHA

[dizmo]

12 minutes ago, JMCB said:

Son of a...
 

 

I'm probably going to forget even more things. HAHAHA

Haha, they make by far the sexiest ones! I'm actually pretty sure there's a Lamptron fan controller in that box art.

Plus it's RGB? It was RGB long before RGB was in.

Just like I loved Dashboard Confessional long before all those mainstream emo kids.

[JMCB]

https://imgur.com/gallery/66GIl

Posted my gallery. The system is 85% complete. I plan on doing a second loop for the GPU, then adding hard tubing throughout the build.

I plan on doing a writeup (and I eventually will) but work decided to kick my butt.

[stealth80]

13 hours ago, JMCB said:

https://imgur.com/gallery/66GIl

Posted my gallery. The system is 85% complete. I plan on doing a second loop for the GPU, then adding hard tubing throughout the build.

I plan on doing a writeup (and I eventually will) but work decided to kick my butt.

oh no  you should have done hard line from the off, you're gonna need all new fittings 

 

Looks great so far!