Gadgetory

I issued a challenge to our staff to this video using only parts from our inventory sheet assemble a gaming computer that can play 120 Hertz with 1440p and high settings also keep it up close $1700 as possible we know we can hit 144 Hertz of 1080p of course of movies with 1440p while avoiding multi-gpu does complicate the aims of this refresh was dropped to 120 Hertz to make the challenge more achievable that would also almost certainly necessitates overclocking something we'll explore here before getting to the build this coverage is brought to you by catalyst energy Mint's a three-pack catalyst contains the equivalent energy of over 21 energy drinks and that $20 works out to be more affordable and portable than the energy drink alternative use code gamers nexus for 5% off at the link of the description below this build was largely a two-man project Eric Hamilton writer for the website gamers Nexus thought net and patrocles and work together to pull together the parts without going outside of inventory or what I had available so that means no external purchases were supposed complicate things a bit part of this of course meant they immediately pulled my i7 7700 K out of the game and pro carbon for use in the build which is here by the way and we did run into thermal issues with the gigabyte gaming 7 to the Pro carbon ended up being included in this but the gaming sevens did have an update so I'll have more info for you on that this week they also threw a GTX 1080s CW into the mix as it's our highest clocked card we have and to save on budget a further object for kit of 8 gigabytes of memory but it's easily overclocked memory so we're running what is natively a 32 hundred megahertz corsair dominator platinum kit but since this build has an objective of high speed to meet a challenge they shaved off dollars from higher capacities and opted instead for easy overclocking as for other parts to team tossed in a Samsung 850 Evo for the SSD a Seagate Barracuda could drive for the two terabytes of hard disk storage and then pulled out a dusty Corsair 600 C that we like the thermals for I think last year when tested it but it's been in storage since then so it has to be cleaned off a bit other than that the power supply used is the same one that we use for our case testing benchmarks and that that Corsair rmx to these power supply and then we've got the 1080 FTW for the video card and one case pan with the rest taken care of by the liquid cooler cooling on the I 777 100k isn't easy as it turns out and that is especially true with overclocking for cooling that my Kraken X 62 to 80 millimeter cooler was looted from its carton and front mounted in the 600 C we found this cooler somewhat necessary for overclocking with 77 on TK in the review depending on the motherboard but the case of course also changes that could no longer open air and this depends largely on V core settings fortunately that won't matter as much because we're manually tuning as for the motherboard we found that our MSI tomahawk Z 270 boards shown in some b-roll shots of this build limited our overclocks to around 4.8 gigahertz so that was later swapped for an MSI gaming Pro carbon instead we're hitting a cpu OC of 5.1 gigahertz with that board memory was able to sustain almost 38 hundred megahertz or thereabout with the CL 16 timing and we later overclock the GPU by another 100 to 125 megahertz offset from base so how did we do well we didn't quite hit the 120 Hertz mark with games at their higher settings because part of my requirement was more Triple A games that have come out recently like watchdogs to that's very ambitious battlefield 1 and GTA 5 it's bit old now but still pretty high-end in terms of graphics it's not hard to hit csgo rocket League dota 2 those types of games with 120 or even 144 Hertz at 1440p with this set up that would not be an issue at all but doing this was a bit different so as you might expect it was hard to get those higher frame rates with GTA 5 we achieves 123 FPS average after all overclocking was applied though held a 114 FPS average with slightly lower low values prior to overclocking this one actually makes the mark of 1440p with 120 Hertz refresh and does pretty well at sustaining it on your load there are some scenarios that drop us below 120 Hertz like some timescale shift in but not many watchdogs to however isn't so friendly even with the overclock we're only getting two 90.5 fps 1440p with high settings it be possible to hit higher refresh settings with dropped quality but this game is somewhat of a bear to work with anyway and you still have trouble getting up to that 120 number what battlefields 1 we can just barely hit 120 FPS average after all the overclocking and after dropping settings from ultra too high still that's not with a 64 player server so once you get into multiplayer FPS will fall hard under those conditions and you'd likely need to drop the settings to 1080p for resolution and maybe be able to keep quality at high we ran some of these games at 1080p as well by the way just for reference and saw battlefield 1 and GTA 5 both exceeding requirements for 144 Hertz gaming but again that's at 1080p with a GTX 1080 so it's a very expensive system for 1080p but if you want high refresh I guess that's what you have to do for these games just for fun we also ran a blender workload on the GPU and saw the render finish in about 22 minutes given that the CPU rendering we're closed we're taking something like 42 minutes without the overclock that's a big advantage for the GPU enables rendering and cuda helps with that because we're dropping the render time by about half and just to round out the testing we do the simple noise has been temperature test on the rig as well we were hitting about 30 DBA with silent settings on the Kraken and on the rear case fan 35 DBA with medium noise settings and 51.5 DB a bit loud with performance focus settings and 100% fan speeds with a gaming workload only and without using our normal Delta's here since it was a one-off test the GPU was hitting 82 Celsius with a 55% fan speed on the GPU TV temperature under this workload with performance settings for the cooler stayed around or below 50 C and that's again with the gaming workload when we tortured both the CPU and GPU simultaneously with synthetic workload we were easily hitting 98 C on the CPU but that was wasn't prime95 and fir mark Ronnie had the same time on an open-air bench we can stay below 90 C under these conditions but boxing it all into one case really shows the difference because we're having trouble exhaust in that area as fast as it's heating up this is more of a one-off project for the weekends but it shows that we're kind of approaching those higher refresh capabilities with 1440p with modern hardware and that's a cool thing to see because like we stated with the RX 480 and gtx 1060 when they launched 1440p gaming is pretty much something that can be widespread now as soon as people start adopting the monitors because any 200 plus solid GPU can handle reasonable if not high or ultra settings at 1440 with a 60 FPS plus frame rate for the most parts here are reviews for more on that of course but when you look at the higher refresh is like 120 Hertz this is pretty much getting there with some of these games GTA 5 and battlefields are in the maybe territory GTA 5 definitely battlefield 1 too big maybe depending on how large the servers already that you play on 144 Hertz is still out of range but with 1080p not a problem at all especially if you are ok with going for high settings instead of ultra 144 Hertz with even battlefield 1 in this rig at high ish settings was achievable and that's again not something that's really been possibly for this latest generation of course veo will be interesting to see as well for the very same reason if you're playing things like csgo and rocket League and eSports titles where you might more likely want 144 Hertz as a refresh because you feel like you can actually see the difference or feel the input difference things like that that's been possible for a while now but this does it a little bit higher resolution the higher settings so interesting project fun to do will post a build list in the description below if you want to buy any of the parts used in this PC build along with the article that contains the full write-up of all the parts it's really targeted at people who are building their first system in terms of just like a guide of how to build it so many of you won't need the guide step-by-step how to put it together but it's there if anyone wants it as always thank you for watching at patreon link of the post shell video for more information links in description below subscribe for more I'll see you all next time you you