
Although I've seen NZXT's Phantom featured here and elsewhere a number of times, I've never actually used one in a build until today. It's a very accommodating and spacious enclosure to work in, and easy on the eyes (particularly after the bargains I'm used to rooting out for this series). I'm not a fan of the overcomplicated hard drive mounting pegs. Also, the rubber grommets that hide cable routing are too loose, and are easily dislodged during the build process. Those are minor inconveniences, though.
My build process went smoothly, and I don't really have any solid complaints to register. Everything fit nicely, and I'm bereft of horror stories to tell about fitment, scraped knuckles, or mysterious boot issues. That makes for boring reading, but it's good in the end.

Overclocking
Like most Haswell-based CPUs, this one capped out in the 4.5 GHz range. My maximum stable overclock ended up being 4.4 GHz at 1.2 V before I started running into thermal throttling. Compared to last quarter's Core i5-4670K, that's an extra 100 MHz.
Despite my high-performance memory, the system defaulted to 1333 MT/s at 9-9-9-24 1T timings, which really hurt some of the stock benchmark results. As usual, I triggered the XMP setting to hit 1866 MT/s at 9-10-9-27 2T for my overclocked results, choosing not to pursue more aggressive data rates.
The budget-oriented ASRock board stepped up to deliver the functionality expected from pricier Z87-based options. It was perfectly stable, also.

Galaxy's GeForce GTX 780 Ti was limited by its power envelope, not by stability issues. Therefore, I maintained voltage at its stock setting and dialed back my memory overclock to yield as much headroom as possible to the GPU. This helped a little in the benchmark results. I set MSI's Afterburner tool to its maximum 106% power setting, and then dialed in 150 MHz core and 100 MHz (400 MT/s) memory overclocks. The fan speed was also ramped up just to be sure thermals were limiting the performance ceiling.

- Taking The SBM Down A Different Road
- CPU, Motherboard, And Cooler
- Video Card, Power Supply, And Case
- Memory, Hard Drives, And Optical Storage
- System Assembly And Overclocking
- Test System And Benchmarks
- Results: Synthetics
- Results: Media Transcoding
- Results: Rendering And Productivity
- Results: Adobe Creative Suite
- Results: Compression Tools
- Results: Battlefield 4 And Arma 3
- Results: Grid 2 And Far Cry 3
- Power And Temperature
- A Core i7 And Flagship GPU Impress, Naturally
(1) You could include temperatures and acoustics performance in the overall assessment, given I think that is a big part of the case buying decision, and
(2) A way to factor in the intangibles (i.e. blu ray vs dvd, choice of SSD/HDD, etc), you could include a separate vote between this quarter's and last quarter's to see what the readers would choose for the best build given all the performance factors, aesthetics, and other components that do not contribute directly to performance. The reader's vote of this quarter vs. last quarter and/or an overall value winner for this quarter could be included in the final write-up.
I would also 2nd the vote for starting 4K testing. And also, why not 1440p? It seems those two resolutions are more relevant now in 2014 at the level of this competition than 1600x900 and 4800x900 resolutions.
Hmm.... What percentage of the performance measures in this article are for gaming?
I'm thinking a selection of CPUs as a fixed starting point, and GPU decisions based on remaining budget. Maybe an i7, i5, FX-8, and an APU.
Would be really interesting to see the performance differences across workloads by allocating budget between CPU and other components.
Already done for ITX. See here:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/build-your-own-haswell-overclocking,3608.html
I'd second the uATX. In fact, I'd really like to see Crash attempt a uATX dual-gpu setup.
Frankly, it was the cheapest available card when the systems were ordered.
Nope.
The purpose is to have a resolution that the low-budget PC can operate at for the comparison article at the end of the week.