And finally, the grand winner of our Show Us Your PC contest. (If you’re catching up, yesterday we revealed our Second Place winner, Wednesday featured our Third Place winner, and on Tuesday we showed off our two Honorable Mentions.)
Ladyfolk and mentlegen, our first place winner: A FANtastic Build
Skye recently built this beauty after 6 years with an Intel Core 2 Duo running Windows XP. We’d say it’s a heck of a successor!
Most strikingly, he replaced all the stock fans in his Corsair Vengeance C70 case with Noctua’s NF-S12A FLX and NF-A14 FLX fans.
“The airflow path through the case is fairly typical, although I’m using a lot more fans than most people bother with,” Skye said. “The four on the front bring air in through the drive cages, and the top and rear fans act as exhausts, pulling the fresh air through the hot components.”
Oh, and if anyone was wondering about the AX1200i, he confirmed that Corsair packages it in a velvet bag.
Skye also wanted to make sure this beast could read every card format imaginable, so he threw in a NZXT Aperture M card reader on the front.
Note the nuclear launch button. What’s up with that?
“That button with the adorable little plastic safety cover on it like it’s going to launch a nuke if you’re not careful is meant to be the reset, but I rewired it so that it goes to the DirectKey header, which makes it reboot directly into BIOS. Much easier than watching for that brief window of time when you can hit the delete key.”
We’ll let Skye explain his reasoning behind getting the ASUS Sabertooth Z87 motherboard:
“ASUS’s Sabertooth series is all about ruggedness and resiliency. The plastic covering protects the entire board, and it comes with tabs that you can put in unused DIMM and PCIe slots to keep their connectors protected from dust. Underneath this shielding is a series of thermal sensors that let you monitor the board’s status, and the top left VCORE area has a special ventilation assembly. A lot of people might think this is all a bit silly, and certainly you don’t need it, but it’s pretty cool — and it looks fantastic, too.”
Skye also replaced the 40mm fan on his motherboard with another Noctua fan, and the mobo’s I/O shield comes with an accessory that allows you to stick a dust filter over the gap.
He also replaced the fans on his Noctua NH-C14 cooler with two different Noctua fans: Noctua’s NF-A14 PWM and NF-A15 PWM.
Skye also picked up an AVerMedia Live Gamer HD video card and an ASUS Xonar Essence STX sound card (with replacement Sennheiser HD650 op-amps) – both dwarfed in size by his video card: the ASUS GeForce GTX 680 DirectCU II TOP.
“It’s a monster; takes up three slots! ASUS’s cooler design for the GTX 680 uses direct contact with nickel-plated copper heat pipes. This is a highest-binned, factory-overclocked model. Plus, it just looks awesome.”
And here it is inside the mothership:
“In addition to the airflow path from front to rear/top, I’m using two more 140mm fans mounted onto the side window that will blow directly onto the video card and the CPU cooler. This creates a three-dimensional air path that I think will be a great utilization of the ‘C-type’ cooler design,” Skye said.
And here’s the rear, including DEMCiflex after-market magnetic dust filters:
Some more filters on the side:
And we have a successful boot, complete with champagne:
Skye’s complete list of specs:
- Corsair Vengeance C70 Military Green case
- ASUS Sabertooth Z87 motherboard
- Intel Core i7 4770K CPU
- ASUS GeForce GTX 680 DirectCU II TOP video card
- 16GB Kingston HyperX DDR3 RAM at 1866MHz
- Samsung 840 Pro 512GB SSD
- Western Digital Black 4TB hard drive
- Western Digital Black 2TB hard drive
- Noctua NH-C14 CPU cooler (upgraded with NF-A14 PWM and NF-A15 PWM fans)
- AVerMedia Live Gamer HD capture card
- Xonar Essence STX headphones amplifier and sound card
- Sennheiser HD 650 headphones
- ASUS BW-12B1ST Blu-ray drive
- NZXT Aperture M card reader
- NZXT Sentry Mesh fan controller
- 5x Noctua NF-S12A FLX fans
- 4x Noctua NF-A14 FLX fans
- Noctua NF-A4x10 FLX fan
- Viewsonic VP2770-LED 1440p IPS monitor
- BenQ XL2420T 1080p 120 Hz TN monitor
- Filco Ninja Majestouch-2 keyboard
- SteelSeries Sensei [RAW] mouse
- Blue Yeti Pro microphone
- DEMCiflex magnetic fan dust filter set
Congratulations, Skye! Of all the contest entries, you’ve managed to conjure the most envy from the Logical Increments team!