Of course something this monumental wouldn't slip by the guys at Facebook's "Kawaii Life", so to that end please welcome Alphonso, Ziggy and Eric, proudly modelling the hardware line-up, complete with the promised case reveal! Yes, it was always going to be a tempered glass affair, but which was a mystery even to me for the longest time. It came down to a three horse race - the NZXT S340 Elite, the Fractal Design Meshify C and the Corsair 460X RGB. On paper the Corsair was set to be more expensive than the other two, except that I had settled on Corsair SP120 fans as my preferred flavour for cooling. With those in the bag it then equalised the deal, given that the former two cases would require the triple pack factoring into the cost. The Corsair comes with a set of three SP120's pre-fitted, but did require a rear fan - an odd omission for a case of this price and yet so typical of the idiosyncrasies which plague computer projects. In fairness the other two cases do each come with exhaust fans, but as this build does have some aesthetic quality to its consideration then a replacement SP120 fan would likely have been an adaptation somewhere down the line anyway. Since this is an air cooled PC the comparatively restricted air flow of the NZXT eventually pushed it out of the running, leaving the Fractal Design vs the Corsair. Included fans aside I really did have a soft spot for the Fractal Design case but the biggest problem actually became availability. For reasons unknown at time of purchasing I could not land one under a £30 premium on its RRP, which tipped the balance. Also was the (admittedly) fickle but undeniable matter of convenient lighting control, which the Corsair is set to handle up front with the provided top panel controls. When implemented in the Fractal Design case the controller would sit inconveniently behind a panel - not a dealbreaker, but certainly something else which didn't help its corner. So after more time, a forced purchase in the form of the bargain CPU (which set the clock ticking on buying all the parts for reasons of RMA) and an uncertain future for the fractal Design entry, the Corsair eventually took the win.
Of course every PC has to have a sense of character to it, and I settled with the name which has haunted the project since its inception some four years ago - Lain Dark, a fitting description for the sought after monochromatic case and motherboard look, unified with Lain Iwakura, the protagonist of one of the more provocative and haunting anime series ever to cross my collection.
So how did building Lain go? To be honest even though it was my first build, all came together surprisingly well. This is of course only the physical build - the BIOS, drivers, OS.. all that is yet to come, but the actual nuts and bolts happened without incident and to the best of my knowledge she's fine. Out of the box we had a successful POST test, which didn't even take as nail-bitingly long to complete as I expected (it seems that you can expect a few tense silent reboots when you first kick a Ryzen system into life). With that milestone out of the way (and I really am eternally grateful that I have no RMA issues at time of writing) it was on to full assembly.
After soaking up Dmitry's review of this case on Hardware Canucks, I decided to expect a moderate challenge. Whilst I can understand his concerns, and it's true that I did encounter some quirks, I needn't have felt any concerns. The grommets holding the tempered glass seem to have been refined since his review, appearing now to be much better - perhaps Corsair listened to his words? It'd be nice to think so. The quirkiest part was probably the PSU shroud, which is an overlapping, combined bolt and slot-sliding affair - a little cumbersome to be honest, and I'm still not convinced it's completely back together as it should be, but it feels settled.. Perhaps the worst I encountered was the lack of cable pass through between the back of the PSU shroud and the underside of the fitted mainboard, for all those fiddly connections. I think if I'd passed any such cabling through before installing the mainboard then it would've worked out. As it was with the mainboard already fitted there was no way the audio and fan splitter cables were going to make it, and so I elected to send all cables through the pass through in the PSU shroud.
All the main components were a breeze to deal with. The CPU cooler screws took a bit of fettling to get to bite into the mounting bracket, but I suspect that was me being a tad more delicate than I needed to be, such is the light touch of a noob - I can live with that thought better than finding myself the owner of broken components. Even cable management seems to have been relatively easy, although I think I was spoiled by this to be honest, having only four cables to tidy (the ubiquitous 24 pin connector, the CPU cable, the GPU cable and one SATA cable feeding both the 2Tb HDD and the pre-fitted fan LED connector). Still for a first build I feel quite happy with the job done.
So, how did she look after that first, tentative power-up?
All in all I think she's a real beauty. Be not concerned by the absence of a mouse. It was totally my fault that I don't have a single USB mouse about my person but this will obviously be remedied! You can certainly get around in the BIOS without one but it'll be easier with one, especially if you're going to be spoiled with a real UEFI, so no worries for now.. Anything else? I was slightly disturbed by the front panel USB 3.0 cable connector into the mainboard, which felt a tad flimsy - are they all like that? Maybe so. Still it's in and one would presume working at this point - all of this and more will be tested properly over the coming couple of evenings. I have plenty more fettling to do before we're finished (is such a point in time ever reached?), but for a first boot I found it a glorious thing to behold - CPU, memory, spinning fans, Nvme SSD and hard drive.. all recognised.
Finally after all this time I would seem to have a PC which will do some justice for a good while and there's plenty of life left in the blog yet as I follow up with said tweaks, on a build up to her full time installation. To that end I would like to say thank you for following the project thus far, and here's to the first step!
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