BUILD IT
Mirror Maze PC
Get lost in a silent labyrinth of mirrors, nickel, and chrome
NIELS BROEKHUIJSEN, WRITER FOR TOM’S HARDWARE
LENGTH OF TIME: 16–24 HOURS DEPENDENT ON SKILL
LEVEL OF DIFFICULTY: ADVANCED
THE CONCEPT
THERE’S A couple of approaches you can take to building a PC. By far the most common is a rather pragmatic one, where you build a machine that’s solely meant as a means to a specific end (say, for gaming, or some other task, or within a set budget), keeping looks in the back of your mind, but mostly as a side concern. However, with this build we decided to take a completely different approach.
This month, we’re not building a PC that’s meant to squeeze as much power as possible out of each dollar spent, but rather one that tries to offer the most refined experience—not just beautiful looks or record-breaking performance. Naturally, when tackling a build like this, custom liquid cooling is a must, as this will help keep the components cool and quiet, and obviously gives us that stunning aesthetic edge that we’d be unable to achieve with standard components.
That said, the whole idea for this build was sparked when Lian Li announced its PC-O11 Dynamic in a Special Edition Space Gray variant. We knew this chassis could be the start of something great, and thus was born what we’re calling the Mirror Maze build, a system with tons of reflective, shiny components designed to pump out frames and churn through productivity tasks, but be quiet enough that you’d barely notice its presence, even when running at peak performance.
THE PARTS
THE DECISION to use the PC-O11 Dynamic was an easy one to make. This chassis is among the most popular water-cooling cases out there, and it brings with it a robust platform of thirdparty hardware that you can pack into it as well. However, the standard model is common and a little plain, so we’re spicing it up with this special Space Gray edition, a chassis built in collaboration with the PCMR community. It comes with mirrored tempered glass panels that, while making it a major pain to photograph, also make it perfect for the mirror maze theme we’re going for.
On top of that, we’ve included an eight-core Ryzen 7 3700X, an Asus Crosshair VIII Formula motherboard, 32GB of G.Skill’s Trident Z Royal memory @ 3,600MHz, an EVGA Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Super, a 1TB Samsung 970 Evo Plus M.2 SSD, an 850W Be Quiet! Straight Power 11 80+ Platinum PSU, custom cables from CableMod, and a ton of liquid-cooling componentry from EKWB, including a full-sized distribution plate, complete with pump and reservoir support, specifically designed for the PC-011 Dynamic. All of that is chilled by no fewer than nine Noctua NF-A12x25 fans, in that classic beige and brown color scheme (more on that later).
We originally built this system back in August 2020. Parts were still readily available, but since then, everything—regardless of whether it’s a brand-new AMD chip or the last-generation graphics card—has increased in price, in some cases by a factor of two. We’ve also tweaked and changed the build quite a lot since we originally built it, so you might want to check out the final page, where we go into detail about what exactly we’ve swapped out since first putting this monster together.
1 SIDE RADIATOR INSTALL
NORMALLY, aside from stripping down the case and ensuring everything works beforehand, you’d chuck the motherboard in straight away, and get the hardware connected. But because the top radiator can only go in once the distribution panel is installed, and the side radiator only fits if the distro panel isn’t installed, we’re starting there. A 360mm radiator doesn’t neatly fit in the bottom of the chassis without modification, but much like leaving empty RAM slots, we don’t like the “incomplete” look that would result from a 240mm being situated there in this chassis. We could install three 120mm fans there instead, to add extra air intake, but we’d lose out on a significant chunk of surface area gained from that 360mm rad, and although our GPU and CPU aren’t super-hot contenders, every little helps.