This is the seventh generation of my main rig, Orion. I use this system primarily as a work horse. I use it to edit video, pictures, and audio as well as encode audio and video. I also use it for gaming, primarily for games that lend themselves to a keyboard and a mouse.

The case is the Lian Li 011 Dynamic. I'm really digging the dual chamber designs lately. I loved the layout for mounting rads and fans, plus being able to move the PSU and hard drives to the backside. I also really like the front glass that gives you a nice view of the internals. My only complaint in building in this is that it's a tight fit between any fans mounted at the bottom and any cables you have to plug into the bottom of the motherboard.

I went with the Threadripper 2950X because I edit in DaVinci Resolve and it can actually utilize Threadripper. Also, straight video encoding in Handbrake is quite a bit faster than the 6800K it's replacing. If the clock speed and IPC improvements are to be believed then I plan to upgrade to Zen 2 Threadripper later this year. The motherboard is the MSi X399 Gaming Pro Carbon AC. After doing my research it seemed to make the most sense from a cost standpoint and the the layout worked best with the 011 Dynamic. For memory I went with Corsair Vengeance RGB Pro. I was going with RGB fans... so what the hell, why not. I decided on 32GB of 3,200 MHz. That's how much I used in the last system and it was more than adequate for my workload and with Zen I felt like 3,200 MHz was the sweet spot for performance vs. cost. I'm also using Corsair's Vengeance Pro lighting kit. Yes... I know, this makes me a ricer, but I felt like that ship had already sailed at this point.

The GPU I'm using is the EVGA GTX 1080 Ti FTW3 Elite because I carried it over from my last build and I also use this on an Acer Predator X34P 21:9 3440x1440 G-Sync monitor with a 120 Hz refresh rate. The fan shroud was originally red, but I painted it black since red wouldn't really fit with the purple theme. The vertical bracket is the Lian Li bracket, but I'm not using the bottom as it would interfere with the fans. I tried to use the Cable Mod and the Cooler Master brackets but neither would fit with the FTW3 as it was too tall and hit the bottom of the DIMM's. Both could have worked without bottom fans. I didn't originally want to go with a vertical GPU, but as you can see in the pictures, the FTW3 is rather tall and I didn't have enough clearance between the GPU and the glass side for the sleeved cables.

The Cooler is an Enermax Liqtech TR4 II 360. Went with this because, at the time, it was the only CLC that had a full coverage cold plate for TR4. I decided to re-sleeve the pump cable as the factory job wasn't very good. Considering moving up to an open loop in the future. The fans aren't that great and they all have to match, for me anyways, so along with the case fans, I replaced them with Corsair LL 120's. Rather than going with the beloved unicorn puke, I decided to go with purple outer rings with the fan hub being white. The first batch had a couple of bad fans, as you can see in the pics. I will say that working with Corsair's RGB system is kinda' a headache and I'm not sure it was worth the hassle.

I will post thermals and noise at a later date.

The power supply is a Corsair HX1000i. Is 1000 watts overkill, even for this setup? Sure. However, the head room is nice in case I want to overclock and besides, a good PSU can last you several builds. I used the HX850i in the last build and the HXi is one of the best cable sets to sleeve having only one double wire on the 24-pin. I made the power supply cables using Ultimate Personal Computers Ageis sleeve. It's a PET style sleeve like MDPC-X, which I would have preferred, but acid purple isn't an option as of right now. The theme is purple/black/gray. This was my first time making a cable set to exact length and accounting for bends. It's at least three times as frustrating as making a standard set.

I used the Samsung PM961 m.2 NVMe SSD, which is essentially the OEM version of the 960 Evo, for the main O/S drive (256 GB) and one for the scratch drive (512 GB). They are great performing drives for the money. Granted, they have ugly green PCB's but nothing you can't solve with some E.K. m.2 Heat Sinks. I also used a 2 TB Intel 660P m.2 NVMe SSD for the higher priority games and I'm also using a 4 TB HGST 3.5" HDD for the lower priority stuff. The 660p is probably one of the best values in m.2 drives right now. Don't let the QLC NAND throw you off. It has a 400TBW rating. I wouldn't suggest it for scratch drive if you're doing a lot of video editing, but it's perfect for a game drive. Also, the only other drives in it's price range are SATA based and are substantially slower.

I will post performance and power draw figures later as well.