Everything ICUE

2020 was the right time to completely overhaul my Gaming Rig. As an RGB fan and a Corsair fanboy through and through I decided to go all in. As a Microcenter employee there was no better place to get everything I needed all at once than my own store in St.Davids PA.

Every component I selected was carefully planed out with advice from our BYO staff to fit MY needs and desires , not theirs. It is very easy to become overwhelmed by the sheer number of options and frills or to even understand WHY one component would be a better fit over one that is seemingly the same.

This is a 1440p focused gaming rig that can chew through any new AAA title with features maxed and mid range titles at excess of 120fps without breaking a sweat. Because Ryzen and RTX chips take advantage of thermal throttling to maintain consistent performance I decided on a fully Corsair Hydro X hard line liquid cooling loop. With this configuration my GPU idles at 27c and under a full load caps out at 42c and my CPU idles at around 38c and caps out at 68c under load. By maintaining temps below the thermal threshold while under load I can be comfortable knowing that I am getting every mhz of potential power I paid for.

As a fan of corsair peripherals and their ICUE rgb system I chose a 680x case. Because corsair believes in broad compatibility every fan and cooling component has various options for placement. That is not to say if you are going Hydro X that you have to use a corsair case. Cases are like shoes, you like what you like. At the same time , dont start with the case unless you are doing a SFF build... Pick the parts you want and find a case you like that both accommodates the current build but provides you with enough flexibility to make future upgrades if need be.

I also opted to place 2x 2tb Inland Premium NVME SSDs in RAID 0 , not for performance as the gains are negligible, but for the vanity reason of having a single 4tb drive to install everything to the same drive letter. This is one extravagance I strongly recommend against if you are unfamiliar with maintaining a raid as you may find yourself in a situation where you could loose everything and need to rebuild it. IF you do opt for a NVME RAID configuration , do so knowing that on X570 chipsets currently you must disconnect all SATA devices from the motherboard every time you update the BIOS or revert back to default BIOS settings for any reason or the machine will not post.

Hard line liquid cooling can be daunting and can seriously damage components if any one component is not installed properly, but this build could just as easily been done with safer albeit less visually appealing soft tubes. The service departments in Microcenter stores will also work with you to design and assemble a custom cooling loops. It takes a lot of time and patience to make the proper bends to make a truly awe inspiring build and our people really know their stuff. As someone who has been liquid cooling computers since Koolance began making consumer products (20 years?) I was over confident and opted to do it myself. But again every tool and material I needed was available in store for my immediate satisfaction.

You may however notice that despite my experience and even with careful and meticulous planning and measuring one of my bends ended up a little bit off. While I fully intend to replace the run, it doesn't look bad at all. The reason I did not replace it before filling is quite simple, these bends were a test run for my even more daunting next attempt... A no angled fitting glass tube run (start TBD).

I also intend to swap the motherboard and pcie power cables with cablemods colored cloth braided extensions.

COVID-19 has brought much of the world to a halt but Microcenter has been open through it all and we will continue to serve the country in making sure you can get all of the technology needed to keep working and be entertained in your own home.

*some components are not availble via the part selector so i included current SKUs in the comments so that you may search microcenter.com . I also omitted peripherals but I utilize all corsair. K95 Platinum Keyboard - Dark Core SE mouse - Void Pro headphones - ST100 Headphone stand - MM800 RGB mouse pad (prefer RGB over the MM1000 Qi because i have a wireless charge on my desk anyway)