HotHardware Summer Gaming System Giveaway PC Build Video

It took a lot longer than I had originally planned, but I was finally able to assemble and ship off the rig we gave away during our Summer Gaming System Giveaway. If you recall, we teamed up with the good folks at EVGA, Kingston, Thermaltake, and Intel to build a powerful gaming PC featuring an Intel Core i7-4960X processor, an EVGA X79 Dark motherboard, 16GB of RAM, a GeForce GTX 770, fast SSD, a 1000 watt PSU, and much more. The complete parts list and breakdown for the rig was as follows:

CPU: Intel Core i7-4960X GPU: EVGA GeForce GTX 770 Motherboard: EVGA X79 Dark PSU: EVGA 1000W

Case: Thermaltake Core V71 Cooler: Thermaltake Water 3.0 Memory: 16GB Kingston HyperX Fury Storage: 240GB Kingston HyperX 3K SSD

There was some killer hardware in this one, that’s for sure! And since we love to show off killer hardware around here, we thought we’d capture the parts on video and document the assembly process.


Overall, I’m pretty pleased with the results. The Thermaltake Core V71 is really roomy, and a pleasure to work with. There were plenty of nooks and crannies to snake and hide wires. And there was a ton of space (relatively speaking) behind the motherboard tray too. The Core V71 also complemented the Water 3.0 cooling system very well. The top-mounted case fan was positioned directly over the Water 3.0’s cooler, and as a result, when fully assembled the radiator’s fans and the top case fan worked in a push-pull configuration, so CPU temps were nice and low at all times. The EVGA and Kingston parts looked great together as well. I dig the black the red on the EVGA X79 Dark and think EVGA’s ACX cooler looks (and works) great too.

You don’t have to take my word for it, though. Check out the video above and see for yourself. This machine turned out really well—big, beautiful, and beastly.