AirflowFans

3X CORSAIR LL120 WHITE $83

StaticPressureFans

3X CORSAIR SP RGB ELITE 120MM $65

FanController

CORSAIR COMMANDER CORE $40

Our cooling setup involves nine 120mm fans: three SP fans from Corsair, three LL fans from Corsair, and three RGB Aer fans from NZXT. The Corsair units run via a Commander Core fan and RGB controller, the remaining NZXT fans via the motherboard for fan speeds, and the Kraken cooler for the RGB.Thanks to the multiple fan-mounting locations, it’s given us flexibility for placement. www.corsair.com,www.nzxt.com

Case

NZXT H9 FLOW ATX MID TOWER BLACK

For the price of that graphics card, you could buy ten of these cases.

The NZXT H9 Flow is a fine chassis, and follows in the long line of ‘fish-tank’ cases that seem to be all the rage. The Lian Li PC O11

Dynamic may have popularized this, but everyone’s jumping on the bandwagon these days, and with good reason. It’s a highly versatile, yet somewhat chunky, style of chassis with some significant cooling and build potential.

Take the H9 Flow. With two glass panels on the front and side, you get fantastic visibility of all of your expensive hardware, but NZXT hasn’t forsaken cooling. You’ve got 1.5 inches of ground clearance for those triple 120mm bottom-mounted fans, support for three 120mm fans in the side, space in the roof for exhausts, 120mm in the rear, extensive cable routing space, some exceptional capacity for vertical GPUs, and more. This is a great case for those looking to really minimize their cable management efforts. $160,www.nzxt.com

PSU

1200W CORSAIR RMX SHIFT 80+ GOLD

Another Corsair part comes in the form of the RMx Shift PSU. The connectors have been shifted to the side of the power supply, giving you easier access for cable routing. Corsair’s managed this by developing a super-small form factor cable (the Type 5) that’s found on its latest SFX PSUs as well.

More importantly, this complies with Intel’s ATX 3.0 certification, so it’s highly efficient. It also comes with a PCIe 5.0 12VHPWR600 cable as standard. We’re not talking about any funky adapters; this is a fleshed-out direct PCIe to 12VHPWR cable, reducing potential failure points that might occur from overheating or cable installation mishaps. $230,www.corsair.com

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© CORSAIR, PC PARTS PICKER

LENGTH OF TIME: 1-2 hours DIFFICULTY: Easy

Building your own system has come a long, long way in the last few years, and it’s something we highly recommend. Yes, you could buy a prebuilt rig from the likes of Origin, iBuyPower, or any of the other reputable manufacturers out there, and you can customize that too, but there’s just something about getting your hands dirty and building your own machine that is just so rewarding.

There’s more to it than that, of course. Over time, you’ll discover that those same components (as ridiculous as this may sound) have a personality, like that old car that you love, or a padlock that you have to shake acertain way to get it to budge. These processors and parts are unique. Pushing them to their limits will give you a better understanding of them, and a better insight into how they perform. We can thank the silicon lottery for that, and it’s why for many, this writer included, we have parts that hold a special place in our hearts. A Core i5-2500K that broke 5.4 GHz, an 8086K that smashed 6 GHz, a Ryzen 7 1700 that clocked as high as an 1800X, a GTX 660 that could eek out 12 percent performance boosts, a liquid-cooled Fury X, a 6700K that would run at 42 C under coolant with the voltage set super low. Will the 14900K join those ranks?

When it came to this build, we wanted to keep it straightforward and make it an everyman’s rig, with simple parts, plenty of cable management, multitudes of convenience picks, and hardware you could swap out on the fly to really finetune it for exactly what you need it to do.

Don’t get us wrong, building a liquidcooled, bespoke, one-off, all-singingand-dancing system definitely has its merits for a main-stream product launch like this. But this was less about building the ultimate gaming PC, and seeing how low we could get the fan speeds, and more about identifying how Intel’s latest generation of processors compares to the last gen—really getting into the weeds, and putting that potent Core i9-14900K under the microscope. We’ll have a bit more of a breakdown on what we’d swap out later on, but just keep in mind that this is more of a template, rather than a ‘build this’ kind of build. In fact, that’s always something we’d recommend with any system we write about here.