System Assembly And Overclocking
Although Antec's military styling might look a little gimmicky, it's a solid case with lots of room, great cable management, and good airflow thanks to three bundled fans. Those included blowers are controlled by a variable switch under the jet fighter-inspired safety cover up top. It's more for show than functionality, but it's not garishly obnoxious, either. Practically, we can't help but think it would have made more sense to put the power and reset buttons behind a cover. The metal reinforcement bracket surrounding the USB ports was probably put there for style, but we like the idea.
Really, the only bad thing I can say about this chassis is that the authentic-looking clip system that covers the 5.25" drive bays seems too robust for the covers themselves, which pop into the case fairly easily if you bump them. Otherwise, we're very impressed with the spacious GX 700.
Because Corsair's H50 comes with an exhaust fan, we relocated the case's rear fan to function as an intake in the bottom-front position. Aside from that minor modification, there's little else to say about the install process. It was both smooth and easy, just like Paul's $650 PC from yesterday.
Overclocking
My strategy for overclocking the Haswell-based Core i5-4670K was similar to what I've done with Sandy and Ivy Bridge-based CPUs: add a little voltage and see how high the multiplier goes. I tried 1.3 V and found that I couldn't make it past 4.3 GHz. So, I settled on a stable 4.3 GHz at 1.25 V. That's certainly not an exceptional result, but we know that getting the most out of Haswell is largely luck of the draw, even if certain samples are capable of higher frequencies. On the plus side, 4.3 GHz is what our Core i5-3570K achieved last time around, so we're happy to have a comparison at the same clock rate.
The memory, which defaulted to 1333 MT/s at 9-9-9-24 1T timings, was much more cooperative. We achieved 1800 MT/s at 9-11-11-1T by bumping voltage up to 1.535 V.
As for the graphics card, Gigabyte's GeForce GTX 770 comes with a 1037 MHz core clock that we were able to push to 1187 MHz. I pushed the memory 250 MHz beyond its stock specification for a 1879 MHz (7516 MT/s) overclocked speed.
