My new 200K Gaming Computer

[Kratos47]

Hello TE friends,

I just wanted to share my experience regarding the new gaming computer I assembled yesterday. I was in the process of buying these equipments since last 2 months but unavailability of 2 components in India & upcoming release of AMD Fury X in the past made me wait for it.

Part I
The Purchase​

Anyways, getting straight to the point, these are the components that I have bought:

*I apologize in advance for not posting high resolution snapshots because I only have a shitty phone camera since my digital camera broke last year.*

First of all the pricing:

• MOBO<------------------>MSI X99A Gaming 7 USB 3.1<----------------------------->25500 INR (This is around 1500-2000 cheaper but I was impatient and bought it expensive without waiting for responses from other online sellers)
• GPU<--------------------> MSI GTX 980 Ti 6G OC edition<-------------------------->55500 INR (Got a pretty good deal imo since other online sellers are selling it around 58000-60000)
• CPU<---------------------->Intel i7 5820K<------------------------------------------------>29755 INR
• CPU Cooler<------------->Swiftech H320<----------------------------------------------->13545 INR
• Monitor<----------------->BenQ XL2420Z 24' inch<----------------------------------->24965 INR (Not shown in the picture above)
• RAM<--------------------->DDR 4 Corsair Vengeance 2800 MHz<------------------>14644 INR (On Amazon.com you can get it around 1K cheaper in Gskill) Don't buy from India as DDR4 is twice the amount here for some absurd reason.
• Cabinet<------------------>NZXT Phantom 820<---------------------------------------->18689 INR
• PSU<---------------------->Antec HCP-1300<--------------------------------------------->17419 INR (Got a good deal at Primeabgb)
• Mouse<------------------->Logitech G402<------------------------------------------------>2017 INR (Not shown in the picture above)
• Mouse Pad<------------->Razer Goliathus Control Edition<-------------------------->650 INR (Not shown in the picture above)

Below are a bunch of images of these components, as they arrived at my home, in case anyone wants to take a closer look. Images are arranged in order of arrival:

Spoiler: Product Screenshots

CPU Cooler:

Was showing a friend its length, bigger than my old HP Probook laptop lol:

Monitor: My Monitor came out in some serious packaging:
LOL:

Hooked it up immediately to my old computer since I switched from an old 900p monitor and wanted to see this one in action:

Very pleased with the purchase.

Cabinet: Then came the computer case NZXT Phantom 820

The case and the way it's been packed and arranged for easier installation is just awesome. Very impressed by this:
Liked how they put all the screws, cable ties etc like this:

Case itself is a thing of beauty. Was actually looking for gun metal colour but matte black isn't bad either. Not bad at all:

Then came the MOBO and CPU:

Then the gaming mouse & pad:

Mouse G402 is pretty decent, definitely better than your average mouse but not high end like G502. This is an entry level high end gaming mouse and i recommend trying this before spending some serious cash on gaming mice.

Then few days later I bought my PSU when i found a great deal on it, the Antec HCP-1300W:

double ball bearing fan by delta which is the OEM here known to make best power supply components known to man.

Modular connections for better cable management in your PC. Cables that aren't going to be used won't be connected.

Bunch of relevant cords and wires to power the rig.

Then finally after 2 months of patience, I managed to buy MSI GTX 980 Ti 6G OC or gaming edition graphics card:

Sexy.

Also my RAM, which i bought from USA was blocked in Delhi since my home town is in UP and I had to deal with sales tax people and fill a Form 39. Although it was the responsibility of courier but DHL didn't care just to save few ****s, which ended up in only my frustration. Anywyas, RAM also arrived at the same day before Graphics card, so I didn't had to wait for it. I think 20 days of waiting for stuck shipment was more than enough already.

So in the end I managed to get all my components. I will shortly write Part 2 where I would explain how I assembled it. More coming....

 

[Chaos]

Awesome! Where did you get the MSI 980 Ti from? I was looking for this - waited for a couple of weeks but couldn't get it and ended up buying a zotac. The MSI is the quietest card out here. You got it at a stunner of a price.

You should have gotten 4x8GB instead - 4x4GB in this day and age is limiting. Also you should have gotten a G-Sync monitor. No point spending so much and not getting a good display. That Benq TN has very poor quality color.

 

[Kratos47]

I got the Graphics card from SMC International, Nehru Place, Delhi. Official MSI retailer.
16GB is more than enough for me, both my professional graphics design needs and gaming in free time. I was running 6GB DDR3 earlier and this in contrast is way much better.

As for the Monitor, I tapped out on my budget and will be upgrading to G-Sync monitor when prices drop down a bit next year. They are very expensive. A friend of mine will buy this from me next year. As for the colour quality, I personally don't see an issue. A great improvement over my previous 900p LCD. Though out of box its settings were horrendous and colours were washed out. So had to calibrate it and read a few articles before finding the best display settings.

 

[ryanrulez4ever]

@Kratos47 congratulations Bhai, Party toh banti hai , now set it all up and lets go get some CS GO action !! with majority of TW3 and take care of your arm while you're assembling (you're still healing from the injury remember) ,i know the excitement of owning such a beast of a rig !! if needed seek help from friends, im planning on upgrading to a 4k monitor as in when we have a higher refresh rates (might add another 980ti in SLI) and use windows 10 you'll get higher FPS from TW3

 

[iamnew]

wow super awesome rig.At some point you should definitely move to 4k.

 

[asingh]

Waiting for OOB images...!

 

[Soyab0007]

Can I say it Monster Rig?

 

[mathrisk]

nice !!! and congrats

 

[Kratos47]

Part II
Assembling the mammoth
​

So lets begin the assembling shall we?

Step I - The very first thing after opening the cabinet was to put the IO shield firmly at the rear of the case, because last thing I wanted was to assemble everything and then forget putting the IO shield. IO shield that came with the motherboard was classy with a cushion on the internal side, so that it doesn't grazes the motherboard.

Step II - Then I placed the motherboard and screwed it tight:

After that I removed the protective shield from the CPU socket and placed the processor carefully inside it. Key of placing the processor right, is by seeing the small arrow sign made on processor and MOBO to know its exact alignment in MOBO.

Step III - Now comes the toughest part imo, that is to place the CPU cooler and apply thermal paste before placing it. For this I had to disassemble my cabinet a bit by removing the front and top panel & filters, thereby exposing the internal cage, where it will be screwed to. View of the top section from underneath:

After fitting the cooler's radiator it looks like this:

360mm of radiator is certainly lengthy and this Swiftech H320 AIO CPU liquid cooler is broad as well.

Then I applied the thermal paste on the CPU:

Swiftech H320 comes with a small amount of Tim Mate 2 thermal paste. When I bought this cooler from MD computers and received it, I saw that the box in which it came was damaged and the radiator mesh were also slightly bent in some places (i fixed that myself) but on top of that the thermal compound was also missing. I complained about this to MD computers and he even deleted my review from their website.

After that i talked to the Swiftech Distributor in India which is Tirupati computers and they sent me the tim-mate2 thermal compound for free. Very nice fellows.

Anyways after placing the CPU cooler on top of CPU it looks like this:

However as you can see from the above picture(s), the radiator fans will act as intake fans, while I want them to be exhaust since there's also a 200mm case fan on top of it that does the same job. So that the configuration of air ventilation will be push and pull. Radiator pushes the hot air out and then case pulls that and does the same thing as well.

Also in this configuration the cooling pipes were a little congested with case's internal front end, so I opened it up and fixed the alignment from pull to push configuration. I accidentally read too much from the manual and wasn't paying attention to my personal air ventilation setup, the first time.

Step IV - So after fixing my error, it was time to put the RAM inside the MOBO DIMM sockets. This is a quad channel motherboard so they were placed in DIMM 1-3-5-7 slots so that they work in quad channel configuration.

Step V - Then it was time to put all the internal hard drives including my SSD inside the case. Very easy plug and play kinda installation. The case comes with a flexible tray which goes into the HDD inbuild cage:

Step VI - The last remaining part was to install the graphics card in the PCI-Ex 3.0 x16 slot. After all that the system looked somewhat like this:

What a bloody mess lol.

Also i forgot to mention the CPU cooler also comes with a PWM fan controller and it's really cool. A close up shot:

This is amazing. The black 4 pin connector is for the Cooler's pump, so you can even see its rpm from a software while running your OS. The rest of the whites ones are the 3 fans of the radiator. What it does is that it makes sure all four of them run in unison, meaning at the same rpm speed. So via software i can control all four with a single click or automate them to run at different speeds, like run at full speed whenever when i'm doing something heavy or slow'em down when my PC is idle etc.

Then at last I also thought to plug my other additional drives in the second cage underneath the main one. Why didn't you connect them earlier? The problem here was that i was out of SATA power cables. The PSU comes with only three. All of them were used by CPU cooler, case fans and its LED lighting, the 4 drives & my DVD Writer. Now the DVD SATA power cable had 2 more slots in it but then it conflicted with my cable management because of its length.

So, i checked out my stash of old cables from my previous builds to see if I had a connector and luckily I did! I found a 4 pin molex to sata power connector and ended up installing my external HDDs (previously used them as external) as well, since they're easy to remove in case I do need them, which i don't since i already have two 1TB portable drives.

Installation was fairly simple:
-First connected the molex power cable and then joined it with the sata power converter, used that to power both the hard drives and used to to sata data cables to join it with MOBO.
-Then slid the hard drives in the cage, which can be easily removed:

Design is very user friendly. The drives lock up once pushed and won't fall off, even when you're handling the cage vertically accidentally or without much thought:

How it looks inside the case:

Final Step: Now came the final step which was obviously cable management and powering up the rig giving the end result of all the labour done here:

Part III
After shots​

So just posting more after shots of the running rig.
- Here i'm running my PC and doing some normal browsing and from the screenshot below you can see Graphics card fans are not spinning:

This card is an absolute ninja when it comes to performance. they only start when GPU takes a heavy load and its temps reach 60ºC. Nice.

- MSI's card also comes with pretty sick dragon LED and the following video shows it in action:

- Now i'm showing how the cooling works in this case:
First there's a big 200mm fan at the front that sucks air in, it's an intake fan. After that in the middle of the cabinet just behind this front fan, is another intake that helps it in spreading\bringing fresh air inside.
*The following picture says 140 but it's actually a 200mm fan. My mistake in the picture.*

^The second LED fan inside the cabinet is from my previous PC. It doesn't come with the case and the ones that come are plain white and not LED fans, although all the NZXT fans are high quality fans.
The LED fan that i'm running here is Xigmatek XAF series fan.

-Then there's another 200mm intake fan on the side of the panel that brings more air in:

-Then comes the 3 radiator fans on the top. They blow internal air towards the rad, which further takes it heat outside the case from the top thereby cooling the hot radiator (which becomes hot from the liquid cooling of CPU) in the process as well.

Above the 3 rad fans and rad is another 200 mm fan on top that helps them release hot air from above. Then there's another big 140mm exhaust fan at the rear of the case:

-PSU's fan also sucks cool air from the bottom and then blows is out from the honeycomb mesh at the back of the PSU, so hot air of PSU doesn't enter the computer case at all.

-NZXT really hit the mark with aesthetics. Case is definitely an eye catcher. Placed the Intel & MSI logos:

-There's a knob at the front, where you can change colours instantly, so a red theme suits the PC as well since most of the equipment is in Black\Red theme:

-Bought a red RAM kit because of this although a reflective finish on RAM chips would've worked better. GSkill RAM has that but these are from Corsairs. Anyway not much of a gripe with the RAM since i care more for its performance in Overclocking:

-Nice LED border in MOBO from MSI:

-Front panel has these 3 buttons with which i can shut down or increase\decrease the speed of all system fans (not CPU ones, always best to keep them independent)

-2 USB 3.0 on front and a bunch of other USB 2.0. To keep those little presky pen drives plugged in as i tend to forget where i put'em.

Small HDD LED indicator beside it.

Case accessories comes with a rubber lid in case you don't have anything to put in the USB slots, to prevent dirt entering in the slots:

Nice touch, shows how much effort they put in the design and thought given for such small things.

So, that's it. I will post some benchmarks after sometime. Hope it was a decent read.

 

[Kratos47]

@Kratos47 congratulations Bhai, Party toh banti hai , now set it all up and lets go get some CS GO action !! with majority of TW3 and take care of your arm while you're assembling (you're still healing from the injury remember) ,i know the excitement of owning such a beast of a rig !! if needed seek help from friends, im planning on upgrading to a 4k monitor as in when we have a higher refresh rates (might add another 980ti in SLI) and use windows 10 you'll get higher FPS from TW3

Yeah I can't wait to play TW3. They say patch 1.08 will come this week so i will probably play something else till then. Lot of games on my to-do list.

And yeah it was somewhat hard assembling the rig, when tightening screws required some strength, so did it with left hand in some places. Then got a little pain when i had to lift the whole thing up and place it on the table from the workbench. Though not i'm okay.

I'm also considering SLI upgrade in the future, though pascal release might interfere with this equation.

wow super awesome rig.At some point you should definitely move to 4k.

I'm not a 4K fan as I like to game on relatively smaller displays. I just plan to buy a G-Sync 1440p monitor next year and that too is like 50K. Maybe if i was a few years younger i would've invested in 4K but don't have time to play games that much like i used in my college days.

 

[thunder.dragon]

That's a nice sweet rig buddy.. If you are selling the 980Ti let me know I will grab it..for SLi with my Giggy G1 Gaming.

Kidding.. Nice mate.. 1440p monitor is taxing for lesser VRAM card hence I bumped up to 980Ti too and I can tell you already observed the difference with extra 2GB.

4K is not something that will be that beneficial as 6GB might shutter occasionally in some games. 200%DSR is almost pure 4K rendering anyways on top of 1080p so you can test that out - Moral avoid 4K for 30" and lesser monitors.

 

[subhasis]

Wow why wont someone give me that on my birthday present ...i wonder

 

[mutant]

Nice price for that monitor, did you get it online?

 

[Kratos47]

Nice price for that monitor, did you get it online?

Yes. It was on summer sale on Infibeam.com.