On this day, Sleepy will be complete: first, I assemble the mainboard and co. Then the custom water cooling is installed and last but not least, Windows is installed and benchmarked.
It's finally time: time to install the components into Sleepy, the Sleeper PC I'm going to raffle. I'm especially looking forward to the custom water cooling. I won't keep blabbing on and will instead let these pictures do the talking. I took these snapshots while bringing everything together.
Blood, sweat and tears
It wasn't easy. As always, I struggled with cable management. Did I mention I hate wires? Modern cases are designed so that cables can be laid cleanly. Sleepy on the other hand isn't – not even after all my adjustments. I made the recess for the PSU cables a bit too small. To be honest, I had to curse a bit more than I'd like to admit in order to push through the cables. What I didn't consider when planning the back wall: the distro plate and the pump are fixed to the back of the wall with nuts This robs almost any space for me to attach the fan controller and SSD. Add to that all the other cables.
That's why I decided to do without the fan controller and connect the four Ventis directly to the mainboard. Bad news for all RGB fans: I haven't even connected the RGB cables for the fans. The fans remain white and do not flash. Still, at least the SSD has space on the other side of the back wall.
Otherwise the assembly process was relatively simple.
Benches
I won't review Sleepy like a modern PC – any comparison would be unfair, as my build isn't optimised for airflow. Still, I run some tests. First I perform 3DMark's Time Spy benchmark. I do this with both open and closed front panels. The results differ only minimally. With open panels, I achieve a score of 10,520 points. Closed it's 10,453.
The temperature difference is slightly greater. With the panels closed, I reached maximum CPU temperatures of almost 75° Celsius, with open apertures it was around 67° Celsius. The GPU ran at a maximum of 70° Celsius open and at 71° Celsius closed. It was therefore a good idea to build the panels in such a way that they could be removed quickly.
To get to the bottom of the temperature problem, I perform Ungine's Heaven-Benchmark. First, I run the benchmark for 20 minutes and then inspect how hot the CPU and GPU are. With the aperture open, the CPU is around 40° Celsius after 20 minutes and the GPU reaches 75° Celsius. When the aperture is closed, the CPU is ten degrees warmer and the GPU has the same temperature after the same amount of time.
Last but not least I play «Final Fantasy XV». The game runs stable with an average of 60 FPS in 1080p. It's really fun to play a AAA title with maximum settings on Sleepy. At 1440p, the game even runs at 70 to 80 FPS. This is because at this resolution, the GPU takes over more computing power. The GPU runs at a maximum of 60° Celsius and the CPU at 50° Celsius – with closed apertures at that.
After Time Spy, I figured Sleepy might warm up a bit. But playing «Final Fantasy XV» has shown me once again that synthetic benchmarks are unrealistic. A PC is almost never run that intensely for such a long period of time. You can expect similar temperatures while gaming as I achieve during this JRPG. 50° Celsius for the CPU and 60° for the GPU are perfectly okay.
And now?
Sleepy is ready! You have until August 1st to take part in the competition. But until then, you won't have to survive without retro history around Sleeper PCs. On Thursday, Tuesday and the following Thursday, there will be more editorials about Sleepy – simply without questions regarding the raffle. In these articles, you'll learn what I'll do with the 14 Super Disks that came with the case, as well as the Floppy and DVD drives.
You can win like this: Over the coming weeks you can read about the sleeper PC project on Tuesdays and Thursdays. At the end of the articles I'll ask you a question with three possible answers. You can find the correct answer in the article itself. You get one point for every correct answer. Answer as many of the questions as possible correctly and you will make it into the final draw. The draw will decide who wins the PC.
How many DVD panels are there on the front of Sleepy?
