The $3,333 Pink Pariah

There’s nothing quite like overkill for a living-room gaming PC

- ZAK STOREY

THE CONCEPT

LET’S BE REAL HERE: This is overkill. Massively. We’d pitch this as a “console killer,” but if we’re being honest, with a price tag this large, you could probably buy eight PS4 Pros and still have enough cash left for six crates of beer and 20 packs of chips. In fact, this build is nothing short of gluttony. So, what was the aim of it? What did we set out to achieve with this rig? It was all about building something that could act not only as a big showpiece or ornament for the living room, but also as a system that could comfortably and quietly game at 4K on the big screen. And, of course, all from the comfort of your couch.

Our case of choice for this build is the Phanteks Evolv Shift X chassis. It’s a long, monolithic ITX case, with an expressive internal structure and layout. It supports a hefty amount of hardware internally, including liquid-cooling radiators—but there are some limitations, thanks to clearance. In fact, most builds using the Shift X typically incorporate a single 240mm radiator and then call it a day. We knew, though, that this just wasn’t going to be enough for the hardware we had in mind, so we opted to slot in an additional 120mm radiator at the bottom. That gives us a total of 360mm of cooling potential to play with. Not a lot, by any means, and it certainly meant we’d be running this thing at stock, but it’s still plenty enough to cater for a 4K gaming GPU and a good CPU, too.

THERMAL WOES