The first thing I like to do when starting a build is drop the CPU into its socket. It takes just a few seconds, and with the CPU installed, the socket is no longer susceptible to damage. Of course, sockets do come with a plastic cover, but they come off easily, and with how notoriously delicate LGA sockets are, I prefer to drop the CPU in early while I still have space to work.
While prepping the motherboard, I also drop in the memory, ensuring the correct slots are used. Check your motherboard manual if you aren’t sure which slots should be populated first if you’re only using.
And the SSD is installed. Remember to take the film off the thermal pads included with the motherboard so that the SSD can properly transfer its heat into the heatsink. Heat never used to be an issue with older SSDs and typical workloads, but PCIe 5.0 drives can generate quite a bit of heat under sustained load and will suffer from thermal throttling without proper cooling.
With that done, it’s time to install the motherboard in the case.
Fractal Design’s Epoch RGB comes with three RGB fans installed in the front. Because we’re using a 360mm cooler with Phanteks’ D30 fans, these need to be moved.
We move them into the top and rear exhaust positions.
We then install the Glacier One D30 X2’s radiator into position, connect up the three D30 fans with the included bridging connectors for tidy “wireless” cable management.
I quite like that these fans come with this system, as three fans each with their own RGB and PWM connectors leads to a lot more cables to manage.
We then install the Cold plate/pump combo unit. One downside to this choice of parts is that the cooler’s hoses connect to the radiator at the highest point in the loop. This means that at higher pump speeds, the small air bubble in the loop can get dragged into the coolant flow, making a bit of noise.
However, the pump is still below the tallest point in the loop, so as far as cooling performance goes, it’s a non-issue. If you don’t mind charming bubble noises occasionally, this works just fine. But if you prefer your system whisper-quiet you may be better off picking a chunky 280mm AIO for mounting at the top.
To keep this build on a reasonable budget, we opted not to buy a custom cable set, so we have to live with the black power cables. A cheap option to at least somewhat hide the black cables would be to opt for some white cable wrap.
With that done, it was time to move on to cable management.
Thankfully, that’s a breeze in a system like this. In all of about 10 minutes, all the connectors were done up, and the system was ready for its first bootup!
On to performance testing on the next page.
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