Silverstone TJ11B-W Water Cooled - Extreme Buyer's Guide NCIX Tech Tips
**Extreme Buyer’s Guide: The Ultimate PC Build for 2011**
It’s that time again, guys! It’s Extreme Buyers Guide time. Today, we’re showcasing a brand new, updated extreme build for 2011. While it’s true that socket 2011 is right around the corner and we’ll be updating this machine with a 2011 build in the future, this particular build is as extreme as it gets—right now.
### How Extreme Is This Machine?
To give you an idea of just how impressive this build is, let me tell you this: I had to stand on this box edge-on just to avoid being dwarfed by the sheer magnitude of the hardware surrounding me. And yes, I apologize for not noticing you earlier—I was too distracted by the awesomeness of the Battlefield 3 gaming experience running on this beast. With frame rates at an impressive 150 FPS on all high presets in 1080p, this is quad SLI at its best.
### The Case: Where It All Begins
In any extreme buyer’s guide, the case is where it all begins. We’re using the Silverstone TJ11 case here—a full XL ATX case that can accommodate motherboards with up to n PCI expansion slots. This case is also fully optimized for both liquid cooling and air cooling, giving you flexibility depending on your preference.
#### Air Cooling Optimization
For those who prefer air cooling, let’s take a look at how this motherboard is mounted at a 90° offset. This configuration ensures that your graphics cards are properly cooled by the air penetrator fans blowing directly at them. The heat is then exhausted out the top of the case, aided by natural convection. At the top, you’ll find all the IO ports and cable management, with a 120 mm radiator exhausting heat using the top piece.
#### Liquid Cooling Optimization
For water cooling enthusiasts, the TJ11 offers a huge basement—complete with space for up to a quadruple 140 mm radiator. This ensures that no matter how extreme your hardware is, you’ll be able to cool it effectively. Both sides of the case have ventilation slots, allowing heat to be blown in one side and exhausted out the other without affecting internal temperatures.
### Storage Solutions
Instead of using 3.5-inch hard drive caddies at the bottom, we opted for mounting our 2.5-inch SSDs on the back of the motherboard tray. This creative use of space allows us to fit up to four drives before running into any difficulties. We’re using Patriot Wildfire drives here—some of the fastest SATA 3/6 GB per second drives available, thanks to their toggle NAND flash technology.
### Power Supply
For power delivery, we went with the Antec High Current Pro 1200W—a modular, 80+ Gold power supply. Known for pulling more than 1,500 watts in extreme overclocking scenarios, this PSU is both reliable and quiet, even under heavy load.
### Graphics Cards
The heart of this machine lies in its dual NVIDIA GTX 590s—running in quad SLI configuration. This setup pushes frame rates to 150 FPS on 1080p Battlefield 3, as you can see here. While some might wonder about the possibility of running three-way SLI with six GPUs, that’s currently unsupported by NVIDIA drivers. However, with two GTX 590s in quad SLI, we’re already pushing the boundaries of gaming performance.
### RAM: The Sweet Heat Spreader
For memory, we’ve gone all out—with 12GB of Mushkin Enhanced Copperhead modules. These DDR3 RAM sticks come with a golden-black heat spreader and are water-cooled for maximum performance. While it might seem excessive to cool memory, this is an extreme build, after all.
### Motherboard: G1 Assassin
The backbone of this system is the G1 Assassin motherboard—featuring a Killer Network to reduce ping times in online games and an onboard amplified audio solution that outperforms many dedicated sound cards. This means we didn’t need to include a separate sound card, even with plenty of expansion slots left for future upgrades.
### CPU: Intel Core i7 Extreme
At the core of this build is the Intel Core i7-990X—overclocked to 4.66 GHz and running within reasonable temperatures. It’s paired with EVGA classified water blocks for both the CPU and GTX 590s, ensuring optimal cooling.
### Peripherals: The Finishing Touch
To complete this ultimate gaming setup, we’ve included a few peripherals that take your gaming experience to the next level:
1. **Corsair K90 Mechanical Keyboard**: With 18 programmable G-keys, individually back-lit laser-etched keys, and Cherry MX red switches for optimal typing and gaming.
2. **Corsair M90 MMO Mouse**: Featuring 12 buttons on the left hand side, an additional button, and a dead space in the middle for resting without accidentally pressing buttons.
3. **Vengeance 1300 Headset**: Designed to work with the amplified audio out port on our motherboard.
### Conclusion
This Extreme Buyer’s Guide has covered just about everything you need to know to build your own ultimate gaming machine. From the case and cooling systems to the GPU, CPU, RAM, and peripherals, this build pushes the limits of what a PC can do. Don’t forget to subscribe to NC Tech Tips for more reviews, tutorials, and product showcases.
Until next time, keep those builds extreme!
"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enit's that time again you guys it is Extreme buyers guide time we have a brand new updated extreme build for 2011 but that's not to say that it's using socket 2011 yes I know socket 2011 is right around the corner and we will be updating this machine with a 2011 build but this is an extreme buyer guide that other than the CPU and the motherboard is pretty much as Extreme as it gets so how extreme is this machine well to give you guys some idea just to look like a normalized person next to this case and all this Hardware I was standing on this box yes I was standing on it edgewise so I had to give myself an extra foot of height to not be dwarfed by the magnitude of the hardware I'm surrounded by right now oh sorry guys I didn't see you there I got uh I got distracted by the awesomeness of the Battlefield 3 gaming experience to be had on this particular Beast of a machine you can see my frame rates up in the top we're running on all high presets 1080p 150 FPS because yeah this is quad SLI at its best I'm going go hide now but the first thing in any extreme buyer's guide is the case because from my perspective that is where an extreme machine starts from so we have the sil Silverstone tj11 case here this is an XL ATX case which means you can fit motherboards with up to n PCI expansion slots it is also fully liquid cooling optimized and air cooling optimized so first I'll show you the air cooling optimizations because not everybody wants to liquid cool even if they are building an extreme machine so check this out this motherboard is actually mounted in here at a 90° offset what that means is that your graphics cards are going to be properly cooled by the air penetrator fans behind it here I'm just going to remove this by the air penetrator fans that are blowing up at the card and then you are going to be able to exhaust directly out the top of the case so this is going to be aided by the natural convection process that exists heat rises uh as they say so here you can see at the top that is where all of my IO is and where all the cables come out the back we've also got a 120 mil here that is exhausting heat using a radiator and we just cover the whole thing up with that top piece and no one is the wiser about the orientation of our board another thing that the tj11 offers for the water cooling Enthusiast is a huge basement so we've got a quadruple 120 mm radiator down here and you can even fit up to a quadruple 140 mm Radiator in the bottom of this case which means that no matter what kind of crazy Hardware you put in here you are going to be able to adequately cool it because both sides of the case have ventilation slots so that you can blow all of the heat away so you're using the water to carry the heat down to the radiator you can blow it in one side out the other side without any of it affecting the internal case temperatures you can also fit up to 3 4 5 6 7 8 n 5 and 1/4 in expansion slots you could throw another radiator up there you could replace the front uh covers and put you know mesh covers on there you can do whatever you want that way it's got front USB 3 front USB 2 front audio and it's got these two 180 mm air penetrator fans so I talked a little bit about how that is going to help you air cool your graphics card should you need to do that and then this one is also going to blow fresh air at your memory slots as well as your vrm where it will then be exhausted by this guy up here now the case comes with six three and a half inch hot swappable Baye down in the bottom but we took that out because we're doing water cooling and that's basically your own call if you're doing air cooling then it's great to have those hot swappable caddies and that is very convenient but we opted for ssds and for a full liquid cooling setup in here which was actually very easy and required no modification to the case to get it going now on this side of the machine we're going to find the solution that we used instead of the 3 and 1/2 in hard drive caddies that were on the bottom and that is to mount our 2 and 1/2 in ssds on the back of the motherboard tray in space that is normally reserved for cable routing and putting the inverters for our cathode lights and all of that other good stuff well now we're mounting drives there and I think with some creativity we could probably Mount as much as sort of one two three four we could probably get about four or so drives on the back before we ran into any difficult ulties whatsoever also from this angle we're going to see some of the water cooling Hardware so this is a predominantly swifttech setup here and we're also going to see the power supply so we went with the high current Pro 1200 watt from antec this is a power supply that has actually been known to pull an excess of 1,500 Watts from the wall in extreme overclocking you can check that out and some of the release coverage of this power supply without exploding so to speak it's an 80 plus gold modular power supply and I'm personally a big fan of it in spite of the 80 mil fan speaking of fans it is very quiet even with the kind of load that we're drawing from it with a system like this so This CPU is overclocked to 4.66 GHz and we've got dual GTX 590s in there and it's not even breaking a sweat now while I talked about the mounting of the ssds I didn't talk about the ssds themselves much these are Patriot Wildfire drives these are using the latest San for sata 3 6 GB per second controller and while this drive the Intel controller or this drive this motherboard the Intel controller on board does not support SATA 36 gbit per second the one we're going to upgrade it to with LGA 2011 will now these drives use toggle nand flash which means that out of all the sata 3 6 GB per second drives out there these wildfires are among the very fastest so we've got two of these in raid zero for the maximum performance that can be achieved oh sorry guys I was uh just using this extreme gaming machine for its intended purpose which is gaming although this isn't very extreme no let's get back on track here and let's start going through some of the other Hardware that was included with the ultimate guide so you see all these boxes next to me here and they they do have some meaning to them so first of all we've got the power supply we already talked about the high current Pro 1200 which I think is uh a bit of a stretch to call it a 1200 wat power supply since we've seen real world examples of it pulling more than 1200 watts and then we have our NVIDIA GTX 590s I don't know if you guys have watched my Linus Tech tips blog videos but that's the box that my GTX 590s came in and then we've gone with EVGA classified water blocks to make these essentially EVGA classified water cooled G GTX 590s two of them in Quad SLI now remember two GTX 590s in Quad SLI is the most you can have because you can either have three-way SLI with three single cards or you can have four-way SLI with two dual GPU cards or you can have four-way s with four individual cards a lot of people say to me whenever they see me running 590s in SLI oh what if you ran in three-way SLI that would be six gpus right now that's not supported by the Nvidia driver but who knows what's coming in the future right so we've got our dual 59 I talked about the ssds already and now we've got the ram I want to talk about the ram in this build a little bit because I think it is pretty baller we've got our mushkin enhanced Copperhead modules I'm going to go ahead I'm going to tip the system a little bit so you guys can have a look at the sweet heat spreader it's a golden black spreader that comes on it you got a good angle of that there you go can I move this tubing out of the way can you see it you can see it okay and then the copperhead kit actually comes with so this is 12 gigs of DDR3 RAM and you can install the copperhead water block and you can check out how to do that in my water cooling guide to get the basically coolest running Ram experience possible so it's totally unnecessary to water cool memory I'll be the first to tell you guys that but this is an extreme buyer's guide and if you are extreme enough then you even water cool your memory so we have the copperhead modules from m another extreme thing about this particular build is the G1 assassin motherboard so the G1 assassin uses a killer neck in order to give you lower ping times in online games it also uses an onboard Amplified audio solution so that means that even compared to many addin sound cards the sound included on the G1 sniper the G1 Sniper 2 and the G1 assassin which are the only G1 boards at the time of filming are worlds better than pretty much anything else you can get on a motherboard and a lot of the things you can get on a dedicated sound card so it's for that reason that in this extreme guide we haven't included a sound card even though we have plenty of expansion slots left so even though we've installed two 590s we still have two pcie 1X slots for expansion and two pcie 8X slots for expansion for the future what else do we have here I think that pretty much covers it the obvious choice is an Intel Core i7 extreme so we've gone with a core i7 extreme 990x and we've overclocked it to 4.66 GHz staying within reasonable temperatures and finally oh yeah the water cooling by swifttech so we've got our quadruple radiator here we've got our apple G Series water block on the CPU itself and then these GTX 590s the EVGA classified 590s are actually using water blocks that I'm not sure if you're going to be able to even see this but down here in that corner do you have an angle at that designed by swifttech built by swifttech those are swifttech blocks so they are the water cooling go-to guys for my extreme building needs now what I didn't do for my original ultimate PC showcase and guide was include peripherals now there's a few peripheral that I do want to showcase here and that is the Corsair k90 which has 18 by3 programmable G keys on the left hand side so great for MMO gaming the k60 is the FPS optimized one with the handr right here next to WD it is also a mechanical keyboard using cherry red switches which Corsair has determined is ideal both for typing as well as for gaming use now one of the some of the other cool features of this keyboard are the individually back lit laser Ed Keys which means these characters are never going to come off of them ever as well as the volume wheel media buttons and brightness adjustments so you got three levels as well as off and you can disable the Windows key should you so desire the build quality is phenomenal and the pricing for a mechanical keyboard is actually very competitive the other thing I have here next to me today is the M90 so this is the MMO version of their Mouse which has a ton of buttons as you can clearly see see it's got 12 buttons over here on the left hand side it's got an additional button here and then your standard left and right click what makes this mouse special is the fact that you have a dead space in the Middle where you can actually rest your mouse without accidentally pressing the buttons when you're trying to lift it off the surface and the fact that you can very easily tactilely I know it's not a word feel which buttons you're pressing without accidentally pressing the wrong thing and you know casting Fireball when you meant to cast group heel or whatever the case may be we've also got a headset here so this is the Vengeance 1300 I went with the 1300 for my ultimate build because my ultimate motherboard has an amplified headphone outport so I opted to go with what I can get the most of that onboard sound card with versus the USB Vengeance 1500 which is also a good choice if your ultimate build doesn't include a motherboard that has Amplified audio out for a mous pad steel series is still my weapon of choice and I think at this point I'm just going to thank you guys for checking out our ultimate PC showcase and don't forget to subscribe to NC Tech tips for more reviews tutorials product showcases and other great stuff from your favorite online retailer nc.comit's that time again you guys it is Extreme buyers guide time we have a brand new updated extreme build for 2011 but that's not to say that it's using socket 2011 yes I know socket 2011 is right around the corner and we will be updating this machine with a 2011 build but this is an extreme buyer guide that other than the CPU and the motherboard is pretty much as Extreme as it gets so how extreme is this machine well to give you guys some idea just to look like a normalized person next to this case and all this Hardware I was standing on this box yes I was standing on it edgewise so I had to give myself an extra foot of height to not be dwarfed by the magnitude of the hardware I'm surrounded by right now oh sorry guys I didn't see you there I got uh I got distracted by the awesomeness of the Battlefield 3 gaming experience to be had on this particular Beast of a machine you can see my frame rates up in the top we're running on all high presets 1080p 150 FPS because yeah this is quad SLI at its best I'm going go hide now but the first thing in any extreme buyer's guide is the case because from my perspective that is where an extreme machine starts from so we have the sil Silverstone tj11 case here this is an XL ATX case which means you can fit motherboards with up to n PCI expansion slots it is also fully liquid cooling optimized and air cooling optimized so first I'll show you the air cooling optimizations because not everybody wants to liquid cool even if they are building an extreme machine so check this out this motherboard is actually mounted in here at a 90° offset what that means is that your graphics cards are going to be properly cooled by the air penetrator fans behind it here I'm just going to remove this by the air penetrator fans that are blowing up at the card and then you are going to be able to exhaust directly out the top of the case so this is going to be aided by the natural convection process that exists heat rises uh as they say so here you can see at the top that is where all of my IO is and where all the cables come out the back we've also got a 120 mil here that is exhausting heat using a radiator and we just cover the whole thing up with that top piece and no one is the wiser about the orientation of our board another thing that the tj11 offers for the water cooling Enthusiast is a huge basement so we've got a quadruple 120 mm radiator down here and you can even fit up to a quadruple 140 mm Radiator in the bottom of this case which means that no matter what kind of crazy Hardware you put in here you are going to be able to adequately cool it because both sides of the case have ventilation slots so that you can blow all of the heat away so you're using the water to carry the heat down to the radiator you can blow it in one side out the other side without any of it affecting the internal case temperatures you can also fit up to 3 4 5 6 7 8 n 5 and 1/4 in expansion slots you could throw another radiator up there you could replace the front uh covers and put you know mesh covers on there you can do whatever you want that way it's got front USB 3 front USB 2 front audio and it's got these two 180 mm air penetrator fans so I talked a little bit about how that is going to help you air cool your graphics card should you need to do that and then this one is also going to blow fresh air at your memory slots as well as your vrm where it will then be exhausted by this guy up here now the case comes with six three and a half inch hot swappable Baye down in the bottom but we took that out because we're doing water cooling and that's basically your own call if you're doing air cooling then it's great to have those hot swappable caddies and that is very convenient but we opted for ssds and for a full liquid cooling setup in here which was actually very easy and required no modification to the case to get it going now on this side of the machine we're going to find the solution that we used instead of the 3 and 1/2 in hard drive caddies that were on the bottom and that is to mount our 2 and 1/2 in ssds on the back of the motherboard tray in space that is normally reserved for cable routing and putting the inverters for our cathode lights and all of that other good stuff well now we're mounting drives there and I think with some creativity we could probably Mount as much as sort of one two three four we could probably get about four or so drives on the back before we ran into any difficult ulties whatsoever also from this angle we're going to see some of the water cooling Hardware so this is a predominantly swifttech setup here and we're also going to see the power supply so we went with the high current Pro 1200 watt from antec this is a power supply that has actually been known to pull an excess of 1,500 Watts from the wall in extreme overclocking you can check that out and some of the release coverage of this power supply without exploding so to speak it's an 80 plus gold modular power supply and I'm personally a big fan of it in spite of the 80 mil fan speaking of fans it is very quiet even with the kind of load that we're drawing from it with a system like this so This CPU is overclocked to 4.66 GHz and we've got dual GTX 590s in there and it's not even breaking a sweat now while I talked about the mounting of the ssds I didn't talk about the ssds themselves much these are Patriot Wildfire drives these are using the latest San for sata 3 6 GB per second controller and while this drive the Intel controller or this drive this motherboard the Intel controller on board does not support SATA 36 gbit per second the one we're going to upgrade it to with LGA 2011 will now these drives use toggle nand flash which means that out of all the sata 3 6 GB per second drives out there these wildfires are among the very fastest so we've got two of these in raid zero for the maximum performance that can be achieved oh sorry guys I was uh just using this extreme gaming machine for its intended purpose which is gaming although this isn't very extreme no let's get back on track here and let's start going through some of the other Hardware that was included with the ultimate guide so you see all these boxes next to me here and they they do have some meaning to them so first of all we've got the power supply we already talked about the high current Pro 1200 which I think is uh a bit of a stretch to call it a 1200 wat power supply since we've seen real world examples of it pulling more than 1200 watts and then we have our NVIDIA GTX 590s I don't know if you guys have watched my Linus Tech tips blog videos but that's the box that my GTX 590s came in and then we've gone with EVGA classified water blocks to make these essentially EVGA classified water cooled G GTX 590s two of them in Quad SLI now remember two GTX 590s in Quad SLI is the most you can have because you can either have three-way SLI with three single cards or you can have four-way SLI with two dual GPU cards or you can have four-way s with four individual cards a lot of people say to me whenever they see me running 590s in SLI oh what if you ran in three-way SLI that would be six gpus right now that's not supported by the Nvidia driver but who knows what's coming in the future right so we've got our dual 59 I talked about the ssds already and now we've got the ram I want to talk about the ram in this build a little bit because I think it is pretty baller we've got our mushkin enhanced Copperhead modules I'm going to go ahead I'm going to tip the system a little bit so you guys can have a look at the sweet heat spreader it's a golden black spreader that comes on it you got a good angle of that there you go can I move this tubing out of the way can you see it you can see it okay and then the copperhead kit actually comes with so this is 12 gigs of DDR3 RAM and you can install the copperhead water block and you can check out how to do that in my water cooling guide to get the basically coolest running Ram experience possible so it's totally unnecessary to water cool memory I'll be the first to tell you guys that but this is an extreme buyer's guide and if you are extreme enough then you even water cool your memory so we have the copperhead modules from m another extreme thing about this particular build is the G1 assassin motherboard so the G1 assassin uses a killer neck in order to give you lower ping times in online games it also uses an onboard Amplified audio solution so that means that even compared to many addin sound cards the sound included on the G1 sniper the G1 Sniper 2 and the G1 assassin which are the only G1 boards at the time of filming are worlds better than pretty much anything else you can get on a motherboard and a lot of the things you can get on a dedicated sound card so it's for that reason that in this extreme guide we haven't included a sound card even though we have plenty of expansion slots left so even though we've installed two 590s we still have two pcie 1X slots for expansion and two pcie 8X slots for expansion for the future what else do we have here I think that pretty much covers it the obvious choice is an Intel Core i7 extreme so we've gone with a core i7 extreme 990x and we've overclocked it to 4.66 GHz staying within reasonable temperatures and finally oh yeah the water cooling by swifttech so we've got our quadruple radiator here we've got our apple G Series water block on the CPU itself and then these GTX 590s the EVGA classified 590s are actually using water blocks that I'm not sure if you're going to be able to even see this but down here in that corner do you have an angle at that designed by swifttech built by swifttech those are swifttech blocks so they are the water cooling go-to guys for my extreme building needs now what I didn't do for my original ultimate PC showcase and guide was include peripherals now there's a few peripheral that I do want to showcase here and that is the Corsair k90 which has 18 by3 programmable G keys on the left hand side so great for MMO gaming the k60 is the FPS optimized one with the handr right here next to WD it is also a mechanical keyboard using cherry red switches which Corsair has determined is ideal both for typing as well as for gaming use now one of the some of the other cool features of this keyboard are the individually back lit laser Ed Keys which means these characters are never going to come off of them ever as well as the volume wheel media buttons and brightness adjustments so you got three levels as well as off and you can disable the Windows key should you so desire the build quality is phenomenal and the pricing for a mechanical keyboard is actually very competitive the other thing I have here next to me today is the M90 so this is the MMO version of their Mouse which has a ton of buttons as you can clearly see see it's got 12 buttons over here on the left hand side it's got an additional button here and then your standard left and right click what makes this mouse special is the fact that you have a dead space in the Middle where you can actually rest your mouse without accidentally pressing the buttons when you're trying to lift it off the surface and the fact that you can very easily tactilely I know it's not a word feel which buttons you're pressing without accidentally pressing the wrong thing and you know casting Fireball when you meant to cast group heel or whatever the case may be we've also got a headset here so this is the Vengeance 1300 I went with the 1300 for my ultimate build because my ultimate motherboard has an amplified headphone outport so I opted to go with what I can get the most of that onboard sound card with versus the USB Vengeance 1500 which is also a good choice if your ultimate build doesn't include a motherboard that has Amplified audio out for a mous pad steel series is still my weapon of choice and I think at this point I'm just going to thank you guys for checking out our ultimate PC showcase and don't forget to subscribe to NC Tech tips for more reviews tutorials product showcases and other great stuff from your favorite online retailer nc.com\n"