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Case - Corsair 780T Graphite Series Black
Mobo - AsRock X99 Extreme4
Processor - Intel I7-5820K 3.3 GHz LGA2011V3
Memory - 4x8Gb Crucial Ballistix DDR4 2666 1.2V CL16
CPU Cooler - Corsair H115i Liquid CPU Cooler
Videocard - Gigabyte G1 Gaming Geforce GTX 980Ti
Hard Drive - Intel SSD 750 Series NVMe* RCIe* 3.0 x 4 Add-In Card
Power Supply - EVGA Supernova 850P2
OS - Windows 10 Pro 64-Bit USB
Keyboard - Corsair K95 RGB
Monitor - Asus VG248 LCD
DVD Burner - Generic
Went with the I7-5820K because I couldn't justify the cost of two 980Ti's in the build. Though you can actually run an SLI setup with two cards with that processor though one would only operate at 8X.
I was planning on getting another M.2 drive to use as my main boot device, but after conferring with the tech a the store I was told there was some dodginess around the X99 chipset and M.2 NVMe support. Basically the chipset came out before M.2 NVMe support was a thing and while you can often get them to be recognized it requires going through some gyrations like flashing your bios in order to be able to boot to a NVMe drive.
Since I wanted to get my build up and running, preferably with as few hiccups as possible I opted for an Intel SSD 750 Series NVMe 400Gb add in card.
Case - is huge. Quite a lot of room to work. And it looks great, IMO. Love the baleful red LEDS in the two front case fans. The case isn't completely tool free as advertised. If you want to remove the 3.5" drive bays you need a screw driver. And since I didn't need them I took them out. I mention it because I of course managed to drop one of the drive bay screws into the case while I was taking them out. And it was nowhere to be found no matter how much I shook the case.
I had a little trouble lining up the screw holes for the power supply and I think I managed to strip out one of the screws that I got in at a bit of an angle. Some cases have plates that bolt onto the P/S and then you slide the P/S into place and cinch it up with screws that go through the plate. That might have been a nice addition here.
There were lots of rubber lined ports in it to allow you to route cables nicely to decrease clutter. There are also lots of slots alongside the common cable channels through which you can thread zip ties in order to clean up you cables even further.
The front panel cables are a bit messy. Lots of little individual cables, many of which are only one or two wires. That is normal for things like Power LEDs. I was again finding myself wishing they would just standardize those into one block such as with USB headers. But since they haven't done it in all the years that I've been building my own systems there is probably some technical reason why they don't.
The case has a centering post (not a stand-off) that the motherboard accommodated, so installation of the motherboard was about as simple as it gets. Even the I/O plate went in easily, which I've had trouble with on other cases.
The AsRock X99 Extreme4 came equipped with a solid backing plate and stand-offs that were ready to accept the set screws for the Corsair H115i Liquid CPU cooler, which was slick because it meant I didn't have to mess with installing the plastic backing plate that comes with the H115i. Not hard but the instructions are a little deficient in that they aren't quite clear on how wide you need to set the stand-offs on the backing plate for the LGA2011 chips.
Processor installation was also smooth. Two latches to open. Drop the CPU, matching up the triangles on the socket and the CPU. Then lock it down in the correct order and then pull the brown cover/alignment plate that seems to be a standard thing these days and presto done.
Memory installation was simple though the AsRock manual has two pictures that contradict each other. Basically if you have 4 sticks of memory they all need to go in the gray/black slots. Current DIMM slots seem to only have a latch that move on one side. Generally they latch automatically when you seat the memory, but not always, so be sure to check that the latch is secured.
After I got the mobo, the processor, and the memory installed, I installed the H115 on the top of the case with the air flow directed out. It is a small thing, but I wish that Corsair would have the direction of air flow marked on the fan cases, as I've seen on other fans. Just a simple arrow would remove any question, though it isn't hard to tell on fans that have a back cage structure though I've noticed that smaller fans (under 140mm) often do not have the cage structure.
The Gigabyte G1 Gaming Geforce GTX 980Ti is huge. Owners of mid-size and smaller cases are probably not going to have room for this titan. Installation was straight forward, but it does end up covering a bunch of the uppermost SATA ports, so if you want to use those ports be sure to install your sata cables at a minimum before installing the vidoecard.
The Intel SSD add-in card slipped in without a hitch.
This is the first time I've tried a Windows install off a USB thumb drive. I couldn't find a setting to tell my computer to boot from USB, so I simply restarted the computer after and as soon as it restarted the install process started. Yay! The installation was simpler than the DVD version. It still happened in stages, but it was cleaner in that it didn't ask me anything else after the installation process started until it got to the Big Brother part of the install. Yikes! Microsoft, why don't you just send an agent to live at my house? I recommend choosing what you want to report rather than going with the Express (Recommended) responses and choose what, if anything, you want Microsoft to see about your presence online.
Asus VG248 LCD has some really nice features in that you can rotate the base, you can raise the height of the monitor and you can have it oriented in either landscape or portrait fashion. But it only comes with a DVI cable. Which works but isn't how you get the highest performance out of the unit. For that you need a DisplayPort cable. Urgh. This reminds of the days when DVI first became a thing and all monitors still shipped with VGA cables, so you would generally have to mail order for a DVI cable and there were two types so you could screw it up. I get why they do it as people might not have a videocard with a DisplayPort, but really if you are paying big jack for a monitor or possibly the videocard you would thing one of the two vendors would include the cables that allowed you to get the most bang out of their devices.
Corsair K95 keyboard. Looks super sweet at night when cycling throuh various color patterns. The wrist rest was a little trick to install and once installed one corner stays slightly raised on it for some reason. This means it bounces a little when I take the weight of my hands on and off it as I am playing. I'm still getting used to the position and feel of the keys. For some reason my left hand seems to get off to the left by a row of keys fairly frequently. Not sure if it is because of the extra real estate over there where the 18 macro keys live or what, but I suspect I will get used to it fairly short.
You can definitely hear the fans in the case running, so it isn't as quiet as the build I did for one of my kids (see my blog post New Build about 5 pages back). But the noise is by far less than I've had with some past builds. There is a fan speed controller on the case so if I want to dial them back a bit I can.
Oh sound. In pretty much every build I've had some interference come through in the sound when using the front panel audio connection and often even the back panel connection, however on this build it sounds clean so far when going through the front panel connector listening through a HyperX Cloud Gaming Headset - Black (KHX-H3CL/WR). So happy dance on that.
League installed, running at pretty much max settings, Vsync off. Holding at least 200+ fps even when in the thick of things. Should get a DisplayPort cable sometime today and may actually pick up a second VG248 so that I can view things like Mobafire while I am in the load screen though since there is only one DisplayPort on the videocard the one I am not playing on will be running off of DVI assuming that is feasible.
Mobo - AsRock X99 Extreme4
Processor - Intel I7-5820K 3.3 GHz LGA2011V3
Memory - 4x8Gb Crucial Ballistix DDR4 2666 1.2V CL16
CPU Cooler - Corsair H115i Liquid CPU Cooler
Videocard - Gigabyte G1 Gaming Geforce GTX 980Ti
Hard Drive - Intel SSD 750 Series NVMe* RCIe* 3.0 x 4 Add-In Card
Power Supply - EVGA Supernova 850P2
OS - Windows 10 Pro 64-Bit USB
Keyboard - Corsair K95 RGB
Monitor - Asus VG248 LCD
DVD Burner - Generic
Went with the I7-5820K because I couldn't justify the cost of two 980Ti's in the build. Though you can actually run an SLI setup with two cards with that processor though one would only operate at 8X.
I was planning on getting another M.2 drive to use as my main boot device, but after conferring with the tech a the store I was told there was some dodginess around the X99 chipset and M.2 NVMe support. Basically the chipset came out before M.2 NVMe support was a thing and while you can often get them to be recognized it requires going through some gyrations like flashing your bios in order to be able to boot to a NVMe drive.
Since I wanted to get my build up and running, preferably with as few hiccups as possible I opted for an Intel SSD 750 Series NVMe 400Gb add in card.
Case - is huge. Quite a lot of room to work. And it looks great, IMO. Love the baleful red LEDS in the two front case fans. The case isn't completely tool free as advertised. If you want to remove the 3.5" drive bays you need a screw driver. And since I didn't need them I took them out. I mention it because I of course managed to drop one of the drive bay screws into the case while I was taking them out. And it was nowhere to be found no matter how much I shook the case.
I had a little trouble lining up the screw holes for the power supply and I think I managed to strip out one of the screws that I got in at a bit of an angle. Some cases have plates that bolt onto the P/S and then you slide the P/S into place and cinch it up with screws that go through the plate. That might have been a nice addition here.
There were lots of rubber lined ports in it to allow you to route cables nicely to decrease clutter. There are also lots of slots alongside the common cable channels through which you can thread zip ties in order to clean up you cables even further.
The front panel cables are a bit messy. Lots of little individual cables, many of which are only one or two wires. That is normal for things like Power LEDs. I was again finding myself wishing they would just standardize those into one block such as with USB headers. But since they haven't done it in all the years that I've been building my own systems there is probably some technical reason why they don't.
The case has a centering post (not a stand-off) that the motherboard accommodated, so installation of the motherboard was about as simple as it gets. Even the I/O plate went in easily, which I've had trouble with on other cases.
The AsRock X99 Extreme4 came equipped with a solid backing plate and stand-offs that were ready to accept the set screws for the Corsair H115i Liquid CPU cooler, which was slick because it meant I didn't have to mess with installing the plastic backing plate that comes with the H115i. Not hard but the instructions are a little deficient in that they aren't quite clear on how wide you need to set the stand-offs on the backing plate for the LGA2011 chips.
Processor installation was also smooth. Two latches to open. Drop the CPU, matching up the triangles on the socket and the CPU. Then lock it down in the correct order and then pull the brown cover/alignment plate that seems to be a standard thing these days and presto done.
Memory installation was simple though the AsRock manual has two pictures that contradict each other. Basically if you have 4 sticks of memory they all need to go in the gray/black slots. Current DIMM slots seem to only have a latch that move on one side. Generally they latch automatically when you seat the memory, but not always, so be sure to check that the latch is secured.
After I got the mobo, the processor, and the memory installed, I installed the H115 on the top of the case with the air flow directed out. It is a small thing, but I wish that Corsair would have the direction of air flow marked on the fan cases, as I've seen on other fans. Just a simple arrow would remove any question, though it isn't hard to tell on fans that have a back cage structure though I've noticed that smaller fans (under 140mm) often do not have the cage structure.
The Gigabyte G1 Gaming Geforce GTX 980Ti is huge. Owners of mid-size and smaller cases are probably not going to have room for this titan. Installation was straight forward, but it does end up covering a bunch of the uppermost SATA ports, so if you want to use those ports be sure to install your sata cables at a minimum before installing the vidoecard.
The Intel SSD add-in card slipped in without a hitch.
This is the first time I've tried a Windows install off a USB thumb drive. I couldn't find a setting to tell my computer to boot from USB, so I simply restarted the computer after and as soon as it restarted the install process started. Yay! The installation was simpler than the DVD version. It still happened in stages, but it was cleaner in that it didn't ask me anything else after the installation process started until it got to the Big Brother part of the install. Yikes! Microsoft, why don't you just send an agent to live at my house? I recommend choosing what you want to report rather than going with the Express (Recommended) responses and choose what, if anything, you want Microsoft to see about your presence online.
Asus VG248 LCD has some really nice features in that you can rotate the base, you can raise the height of the monitor and you can have it oriented in either landscape or portrait fashion. But it only comes with a DVI cable. Which works but isn't how you get the highest performance out of the unit. For that you need a DisplayPort cable. Urgh. This reminds of the days when DVI first became a thing and all monitors still shipped with VGA cables, so you would generally have to mail order for a DVI cable and there were two types so you could screw it up. I get why they do it as people might not have a videocard with a DisplayPort, but really if you are paying big jack for a monitor or possibly the videocard you would thing one of the two vendors would include the cables that allowed you to get the most bang out of their devices.
Corsair K95 keyboard. Looks super sweet at night when cycling throuh various color patterns. The wrist rest was a little trick to install and once installed one corner stays slightly raised on it for some reason. This means it bounces a little when I take the weight of my hands on and off it as I am playing. I'm still getting used to the position and feel of the keys. For some reason my left hand seems to get off to the left by a row of keys fairly frequently. Not sure if it is because of the extra real estate over there where the 18 macro keys live or what, but I suspect I will get used to it fairly short.
You can definitely hear the fans in the case running, so it isn't as quiet as the build I did for one of my kids (see my blog post New Build about 5 pages back). But the noise is by far less than I've had with some past builds. There is a fan speed controller on the case so if I want to dial them back a bit I can.
Oh sound. In pretty much every build I've had some interference come through in the sound when using the front panel audio connection and often even the back panel connection, however on this build it sounds clean so far when going through the front panel connector listening through a HyperX Cloud Gaming Headset - Black (KHX-H3CL/WR). So happy dance on that.
League installed, running at pretty much max settings, Vsync off. Holding at least 200+ fps even when in the thick of things. Should get a DisplayPort cable sometime today and may actually pick up a second VG248 so that I can view things like Mobafire while I am in the load screen though since there is only one DisplayPort on the videocard the one I am not playing on will be running off of DVI assuming that is feasible.
I do get a bit of a ?hiccup? when loading into Dynamic Queue champion select, which I wasn't getting on the Mac laptop I was using before this.
When I first plug the cable in it is recognized as being connected via DisplayPort but then it shortly glitches out and only shows two bands of mostly randomly colored pixels across the screen.
I tried flipping the cable around and it work for a little bit longer but then the screen just goes blank.
I then tried plugging it into another DisplayPort on the videocard and basically ended up with the same outcome described above.
I read one post that said you have to unplug the monitor (remove the power cable and then plug it back in), but that didn't seem to help in my case.
I'll see about picking up another DisplayPort cable tomorrow and see if that fixes the problem. If that doesn't work then I am probably going to try a high end DP cable from an online vendor.