Here we go! If you've been following along, the hardware I've selected for this iteration should not be crazy surprising:
Asus Z370-I ROG STRIX
Intel Core i7-8700 (6c/12t, 3.2GHz, 4.6GHz turbo, 65W)
EVGA GeForce 1060 SC GAMING (ACX, single fan)
16GB G.Skill TridentZ RGB F4-3200C16D-16GTZR
Noctua NH-L9i (thanks to [USER=43]@Josh | NFC[/USER] for the video on how to get the best possible temperatures with this cooler)
Samsung 960 EVO 500GB
HDPLEX HiFi 400w + Dell 330PM111
And the chassis? SKYREACH 4 MINI, of course!
Okay..the only thing that might be kinda surprising here is the CPU - well, using the Single Thread chart from PassMark as a rough guide, it's pretty easy to see that at 65W, you can't beat the i7-8700. The Coffee Lake processors are just wicked fast for gaming, and for this specific scenario we need all the single thread horsepower we can get for many emulators. As I mentioned before, though, where it gets interesting is in instances like the one with ParaLLEl - to get the most accurate imitation of a real N64, we've got to run Angrylion, and it'll even work a 7700K hard. This seems to be in general the direction that the emulation development scene is heading - so in hopes of getting a few more years out of this build, I'm going higher end this time.
I'll need to go get in line for NFC's latest case, but in the meantime..she POSTs, so it's back to the test bench for the photo shoot:
