Since the announcement of the Crosshair VIII Impact I knew I wanted to do a 3950X build with the board. No better case to house these components than the Ncase M1. V6 came just in time.
Case: When the V6 opened up for pre-order the first time around I held off. Shortly after I had some major regrets not hopping on it when I had the chance. Well fast forward a few weeks later I noticed they planned to open up pre-orders again so I bought one without hesitation. I chose the slowest shipping option (4-5 weeks) but to my surprise it arrived at my door in 1 week. No complaints there. I had a V5 build a few months ago that I powder coated since the black attracts fingerprints and oils like crazy. Not to mention the panels can get scuffed pretty easily. So I knew I had to do the same for the V6. No only is my case one-of-a-kind, it's much more resistant to fingerprints and is much more scratch resistant now.
CPU: The original plan was to put a 3950X in here and I still plan to. But since they delayed the release I tossed a 3600X inside in the meantime as a placeholder and will just sell it off when I upgrade. Why do I need the 3950X? I don't. What will I use it for? Probably just games and web browsing. Maybe some video work in the near future. A motherboard of this caliber deserves the best CPU to go with it.
Motherboard: Out of all the SFF X570 boards out there, choosing the impact was a no-brainer. Not only does it look the best aesthetically, but everything on the board is just laid out perfectly. The 30mm fans over the VRMs and Chipset are PWM controllable via the BIOS. 24 pin and 8 pin CPU are right next to each other. Makes for much cleaner cable routing. So-dimm card is a nice touch (although it does sag a bit, I put some rubber spacers between the card and the GPU backplate to balance it out). Rear I/O is perfect. I love that the Q-Code LED is back there as well as the clear cmos and bios flash. Ran into a few issues during the build process. The Q-Code LED wasn't much help, the LED indicators on the motherboard helped tremendously though. I almost thought my board was defective. Literally tried swapping every component in and out to troubleshoot it cause I didn't want to believe the board was at fault. The board was sold out everywhere so I definitely did not want to send the board in. Turns out both my RAM and CPU were defective. Swapped both of them out and the computer posted no problems.
RAM: I originally had a 2x8GB C14 Kit of Vengeance RGB Ram. But I had 32GB of RAM in my previous build so I returned that kit and picked up a 2x16GB C16 kit of Trident Z Neo Ram. Lets be real, I won't notice the different between C14 and C16. Had it in my system for about a day until I noticed that a lot of people used this Corsair kit in their X570 build, so I checked the RAM compatibility list for the impact and hey, it's compatible. So I swapped the Trident out for these so that I can control everything with one software. Not to mention these are brighter and easier to control. Again, do I need 32GB of RAM, nope. I was actually tempted to toss in a 2x32GB kit into this build at one point. But they were Corsair LPX sticks and I wanted the option of RGB. (Even though I keep all the LED's in my build off)
Storage: This is one of the main reasons I wanted to go X570. Gen 4 NVME. I knew I wanted to RAID 0 and with the prices of these drives being relatively cheap, I snagged 2x 1TB and went to town. This is my first time doing any form of RAID. Off the top of my head I think I was getting over 6000 mb/s read and over 8000 mb/s write after the RAID. I'm not sure how much faster RAID 0 makes your drives but they're rated for around 5000/5000 stock so any performance increase no matter the amount is welcomed by me.
Cooler: Not much to say about this one. I'm a fan of this cooler because of how silent it is. Pump is inaudible. Maybe because of the fact its not asetek. Knew I would be tossing in the 16 core behemoth eventually and an air cooler was not going to cut it, especially a SFF air cooler. So this was a no-brainer. Fans are set to exhaust heat out of the case. Temps may be a bit better if I swapped them to intake, but I didn't feel comfortable dumping heat into the case. In a build this small, I believe exhausting as much heat out of the case is much more crucial than bringing cool air in just to cool the CPU. (I haven't peeled the plastic off the CPU block yet, saving that for after I swap out the CPU)
GPU: Was planning on tossing in a 2080 Ti Strix but after thinking hard about it, I wanted as much room for routing cables as possible so I went with the EVGA XC2 Ultra. Originally, I did not plan on swapping the cooler out. The card ran at respectable temperatures. Usually topping out at around 72C. I was able to get the card to pass Superposition a few times at +190Mhz at 100% fan speed. But if I tried doing that with my custom fan curve it'd crash. But I think I got a lottery winner here if I ever plan to put this under water. I found it to be 100% stable at +125Mhz. I wasn't comfortable with the card putting so much heat into the case, even with the V6's updated side panels, it doesn't guarantee none of the air won't get recycled back into the case. After much research I saw that some people had successfully installed the Accelero III onto their 2080 Ti so I went ahead and pulled the trigger on one as well. Temps now stay below 60C and I'm able to completely vent all the heat out the bottom of the case. (fans are set to exhaust if that wasn't clear).
Fans: NF-A12x25 for days. No other fan is even worth considering. These perform and they're silent. Tossed 2 on my H100i and 2 on the Accelero III. I don't mind the color much since it's never seen. I'll probably still swap them out for the black ones when they drop just cause lol
PSU: There aren't many options on the market. Not that I'm complaining, I've owned a few SF750 and they've always performed so this was also a no-brainer.
