Building the perfect home office PC (with a touch of 4K gaming)

LENGTH OF TIME: 1-2 HOURS

LEVEL OF DIFFICULTY: MEDIUM

THE CONCEPT

HELLO! Well first off let me welcome you to our first ever build-it seen through the eyes of the person who actually does the building. Oh this feels good. Too many years have we toed and froed over whether or not to commit to this literary device, and yet here we are. The logic is simple: There’s a picture at the top denoting who built the rig (today, me), but in this section the builder still refers to themselves exclusively in the plural (our, us, we). Well today I’ve had enough, and have used my limited executive Editor power to decide that build-it can and will be experienced through the builder’s personal perspective. It sounds trivial, but it’s time for a fresh lick of paint for these wistful articles of ours. Anyway enough of that waffle and on to the good stuff. Namely the build.

Now for the last few months I’ve been teasing the fact I’ve wanted to piece together a new system for myself. I’ve long had the 4K gaming monster as my home working machine, but as I game less and less, and can’t justify the 12-core processor sitting at its heart, coupled with those twin heat-producing RTX 2080 Supers, it’s become more of a burden than a boon in my office. The heat produced by those components and then exuded so efficiently by the cooling system effectively turns my WFH life into a sweatbox (I’m not so fortunate to have AC at home). So to that end, and because I’m trying to reduce the number of hours I spend in game (sort of), I’ve decided to go for something quite radically different to what’s usual here in the mag. And if I’m honest, the result is incredible.

PACKING HEAT

THE BIG THING with this build is the case-the Hydra Mini in black. This is a bespoke chassis made by a small company in Italy and constructed from a single sheet of stainless steel, which is then powder-coated in matt black, white, or clear-coated with a satin finish. It’s then perched on top of four aluminum feet. It looks sublime: It’s simple, elegant, and open-air, meaning I can swap out parts as and when I need to for testing, and as far as cooling is concerned, there’s certainly enough access to airflow.

That said, it does have drawbacks: It’s made in Italy, so shipping takes a long time; you are going to have to clean it more; and there’s no front I/O outside of the DimasTech power switch. On top of that, it has a flipped design, with a PCIe riser cable, so the GPU is situated in the back, and everything else is in the front. That leads to some cable-management issues, both during the build and after.

For other components, I’ve gone with an Intel Core i5-10600K, 16GB of Corsair Dominator Platinum RGB memory with a C16 latency (if you go for C18, it drops the price by $70, by the way), a 2TB Samsung 970 Evo Plus for storage, a Zotac GeForce RTX 2080 Super AMP Extreme, a 750W Corsair SFX PSU, complete with a mix of stock and pro cables, and perhaps the most controversial pick of the lot, a Noctua NH-L9i Chromax Black CPU cooler.