Reconfiguring the Pink PC Our consolekiller needs some love to get it ready for testing
LENGTH OF TIME: 2–3 HOURS
LEVEL OF DIFFICULTY: COMPLEX
OUR $3,333 PINK PARIAH has had its fair share of knocks and scrapes since we built it pre-lockdown, and it’s in dire need of a renovation and some key component adjustments before we can inject any new coolant into the thing.
At its heart this machine has an AMD Ryzen 5 2600X six-core, 12-thread processor, an Asus ROG Strix GeForce RTX 2080 OC Edition graphics card, 16GB (2x 8GB) of Corsair Dominator Platinum RGB DDR4 @ 3,200MT/s, and a 1TB WD Black PCIe 3.0 M.2 SSD with heatsink, all inside a Phanteks Evolv Shift X (sadly no longer for sale), and powered via a 750W Corsair SF750 80+ Platinum PSU.
Back in its heyday, it was no slouch in the performance department (especially for living-room gaming), but with the advent of the RTX 3000 series, Intel’s 10 series CPUs, and AMD’s Ryzen 3000 series, it’s now somewhat long in the tooth. However, the thing it has always done really well is produce heat. And that’s something we absolutely need to test out here. With the panels on and dust filters in place, this tiny system often hit 85 C on the GPU alone during long-term intense gaming sessions at 4K.
When this editor’s future spouse got fed up of it being in the living room and told him to move it upstairs, we removed one of the rear glass panels and pulled off the dust filters from the sides with the radiators attached to improve airflow, and this dramatically affected temperatures—under-load GPU temps topped out at a meager 59 C compared
