BEGIN THE BUILD

Big, Blue, and Beautiful

Looking at the numbers, we’re pleased with how this turned out. Roughly 20 percent performance improvement over our zero-point 1440p system is in line with the theoretical improvement of the 2070 Super over the GTX 1080 that system uses, and broader graphical performance in Fire Strike Extreme is great, too. The eight cores of the Ryzen 7 3800X work hard, hitting a good score in Cinebench R15 with no overclocking.

There’s room for overclocking in both the CPU and GPU. The 3800X can hit as high as 4.5GHz with a manual overclock, potentially higher on individual cores with Ryzen Master’s auto-overclocking mode – although you’re constrained by the silicon lottery to a degree; the highest manual clock we reached was 4.3GHz. Cooling is well handled by this case, with great airflow that kept idle temps very low. The GPU and memory idle at 28 C, while the CPU varies from 30 C to 45 C.

At maximum stress, the CPU peaked at 68 C, proving that air cooling is very much a viable option. Running graphical benchmarks didn’t see the GPU temperatures rise above 60 C, either. This