I built this PC as a game room rig for games that lend themselves more to a couch and a controller than an office chair, keyboard and mouse. I also have this as a backup to my main rig if it's down for whatever reason.

The case is the Loque Ghost S1 MkII. It's so small, it's the size of a shoe box... of some really small shoes. It's replacing the Fractal Node 202. Mainly because the Node 202 has terrible airflow in the horizontal configuration, which was how I wanted it setup in an entertainment center. The Ghost looked as though it would solve that issue and I really like the footprint of the case, even though it doesn't really look like your standard console.

I went with an i5 8600K since it wouldn't be terrible at the productivity work I do on my main rig, all while being able to be cooled by a smaller air cooler. I put it in an MSi Z370i Gaming Pro Carbon AC since it makes no sense to buy a K SKU processor and put it in a board that can't overclock. I promise I'm not a shill since I used the X399 variant in my main rig, it was available at a decent price at the time and it ended up costing me a little over $100. I used G.Skill Trident Z RGB for the RAM and I hadn't intended to use RGB RAM, but it was only a few bucks more than some of the cheaper DDR4 on black Friday.

Originally this had a GTX 1070 SC, but I had an EVGA GTX 1080 Ti SC fall into my lap, and I sold the 1070 and made another cable to accommodate the 1080 Ti. Now, this system is being used on a 1080p TV. Is a 1080 Ti overkill for this? Yep. However, the TV is a 120Hz native panel and it will be nice to be able to max any game I want to play on it and not worry about the frame rate dropping. Also, a nice bonus it that since the card isn't really working that hard means it's also super quiet. Lastly, it would be nice to be able to move up to a 4K TV that can do 1440p in the future. Hopefully we starting seeing more and more TV's that can do 1440p with adaptive sync and lower input lag.

The Cooler is a Cryorig C7 Cu. It's all copper and I removed the original fan and had a 120mm fan bracket printed and used it to put on a Corsair ML 120 Pro with a custom length sleeved cable. You can find files for the adapter here:

Cryorig C7 Cu 120mm Fan Adapter @ Thing Verse

It is the offset type A/B which are just mirrors of each other.

Thermals & Noise:

Idle temps were measured after full load runs allowing the system to cool and the temps to normalize. Full load temps were measure on the CPU using with Prime 95 AVX and the GPU with Furmark. Noise levels tested at a distance at 1 foot.

Ambient: 20° C @ 20dB
CPU Idle: 41° C @ 20dB
CPU Full Load: 69° C @ 32dB
CPU Gaming: 64° C @ 31dB
GPU Idle: 45° C @ 20dB
GPU Full Load: 73° C @ 35dB
GPU Gaming (1080p): 65° C @ 31dB

The power supply is the Corsair SF600. The previous build had the SF450, but I wanted to make sure I had proper headroom in case I decided to overclock. The power supply cables were made by MB Custom Sleeving using MDPC-X sleeve, save for the SATA power cable that I forgot to order and the second PCIe cable that I had to make for a GPU upgrade. The colors used are Carbon BTI, B-Magic and White Carbon.

Power Draw

Measured at the outlet (max reading).

System Idle: 41 watts
CPU Full Load: 106 watts
GPU Full Load: 314 watts
GPU/CPU Full Load: 367 watts
Gaming (1080p): 276 watts

The main drive is a 512GB Samsung PM961 m.2 NVMe SSD which is the OEM version of the 960 Evo. I went with this to save on room so I only had to deal with one drive for games storage. For that I recently upgraded to a 2TB Samsung 850 Evo from the 1TB 860 QVO as SSD prices are dropping like a rock.

Performance

All benchmarking performed at factory clock speeds.

Cinebench R15:
Multi-Core: 1038
Single Core: 186

Cinebench R20:
Multi-Core: 2480
Single Core: 446

Heaven: 1920x1080/Extreme Tessellation/8x AA: 3680

Doom: 1920x1080/Max Settings/Open GL

Average FPS: 191.38
1% Lows: 116.54
.1% Lows: 97.30

Forza Horizon 4: 1920x1080/Max Settings/DX12

Average FPS: 108.8
Minimum FPS: 88.62
Maximum FPS: 136.34

Rise Of The Tomb Raider: 1920x1080/Max Settings/DX12:

Average FPS: 118.64
1% Lows: 62.56
.1% Lows: 60.32

Battlefield V: 1920x1080/Max Settings/DX12:

Average FPS: 165.52
1% Lows: 109.34
.1% Lows: 80.60