This was the sixth version of of my main rig, Orion. I use my main rigs for a lot of productivity work like video, audio and image editing as well as a lot of encoding. I also used it for gaming.

For the case I decided on the Phanteks Enthoo Pro M TG. I needed a case that had good airflow, had a 5 1/4" bay and didn't look hideous and this was one of the few cases that fit the bill. I would have kept using it had it been able to keep the optical drive and accommodate a 360mm rad at the same time.

The processor was the i7 6800K and I put that in the Asus X99A/USB3.1. Still not sure if I lost the silicon lottery, the lower end board just didn't have the best power delivery, or a little of both... but I could only manage to get it to 4.1GHz stable @ 1.35v. The microcode to address meltdown and spectre really tanked it. The memory was just some run of the mill Crucial Ballistix Sport LT. RGB RAM wasn't as big at the time, besides I needed something that could fit under the heat sink.

For cooling I went with air with the Noctua NH-D15s. Still one of the best air coolers on the market. The D15s only comes with 1 fan and I'm a stickler for matching fans, and as good as Noctua fans are they remind me too much of a hospital hallway so I put on a couple of white Corsair ML 120 Pro's and I used blue ML 140 Pro's for the case as well. Two at the front for intake and one at the back for exhaust. It always idled at between 25° and 30° C and never hit over 60° C under full load.

I went through several GPU's in this build. It started out with the XFX Radeon 7970 as a place holder since I was "waiting" for Vega, and the 7970 was what I had from the previous build. I eventually decided to grab an XFX Radeon RX 480 since I decided I wanted to install under UEFI. Eventually, AMD showed off Vega at Computex or CEX and I immediately went out and bought an EVGA 1080 Ti SC2. Now I could finally push past my ultrawide's refresh rate. Not long before I started building a new main rig, I wound up taking advantage of a deal that landed me an EVGA 1080 Ti FTW3 Elite and I was able to sell the SC2 and make a little money at the same time.

For the power supply I used the Corsair HX850i and the cables were custom length and individually sleeved using Ultimate Personal Computer's Telios sleeve. Went with white, black and a light blue to match the theme.

For storage I originally went with a 256 GB Samsung 950 Pro m.2 NVMe SSD for the boot drive but eventually moved to a 256 GB Samsung PM961 m.2 NVMe SSD, that's essentially the OEM version of the 960 Evo. I was able to sell the 950 Pro for more than I paid for the PM961 and the 961 is a faster drive. The game drive was originally a 2 TB Western Digital Red 3.5" HDD, but I like to have all my games installed and ready to go, and I ran out of space so I had to upgrade to 4 TB HGST 3.5" HDD. Later I added another 500 GB PM961 as a scratch drive on a PCIe m.2 card.

I tore everything down and parted out most of the parts in December of 2018