Technology X Tomorrow's Technology Today!
With our CES trip gone past, what better way to kick off the new year then with a new system build. Follow along as we unbox, build, and benchmark one of our new test systems.
Thermaltake was kind enough to help us build the majority of this new rig. Starting with an open concept Core P5 Chassis. This is no ordinary P5 though, we have the snow edition, featuring a snow-white frame. You may recognize the P5 from early last year when we did an initial review on the Core P5.
We are quite excited to see how it has evolved in the past year and if some of the issues we had have been addressed.
Components
Now why did we decide to go with the Core P5 for our new build. We overall loved the experience of our review last year. Moving this build towards component reviews, this chassis will allow us to easily accomplish these reviews, promoting the visual attributes to the fullest extent while not sacrificing any performance.
The Core P5 is a extremely diverse case as customizing of the P5 is only limited to the users resources and creativity. The Snow Edition is a great look for the P5 and we are excited to work with it. For a full break down of the P5 chassis be sure to check out our review of the case. Today, we want to note the improvements or changes since then. One of our biggest issues with our original review of the P5 was the lack of compatibility for AiO coolers in excess of 120/140mm. This incompatibility was due to length of the AiO cables. 
Thermaltake has fixed this problem with their Core P5 AiO Bracket. These brackets support the AiO coolers by effectively moving the mounting point of the AiO about 120mm closer to the CPU allowing much more room for AiO setups.
The addition of the secondary panels is great as well as it will help fight dust build up.
The foundation of our build will pulse through a ASRock Z170M Extreme 4 motherboard. Supporting dual channel DDR4 memory, 3 x PCIe Gen 3.0 x16 slots and a single Gen 3.0 x1 slot. Accessorizing this board with USB 3.1 Type-A + C and an Ultra M.2 slot we will assume that transfer speeds aren’t going to be a huge issue.
The Extreme 4‘s I/O area is shielded with a plastic cover to house the 4 USB 3.0 ports, LAN port, HDMI Port, and the rest of your standard board ports. 6 x SATA 3.0 Gb/s Connectors leave us with plenty of storage options.
At the heart of the Extreme 4 will be an Intel i5-6600K CPU. This i5 has a base operating frequency of 3.5GHz and 6MB smart cache.
Other features of this CPU are the Intel Turbo Boost Technology 2.0 and 4 Cores/4 Way Multitask Processing.
Cooling the i5 will be Thermaltake’s Water 3.0 240 Riing RGB Edition. This AiO cooler is beautifully lit with RGB fans; we don’t expect the performance to be anything less then outstanding.
This cooler also comes with a controller for RGB performance and fan speed regulation. Dual 120mm fans pushing through a 240mm radiator are sure to keep the temperature in check.
Patriot has provided us with the 16GB of ram we will be using in our build in the form of Viper DDR4 8Gb sticks.
If you recall we included Viper DDR4 in a test bench we built last year reaching writes of 47901mb/s and reads of 46896mb/s. Numbers we are more than happy with too include in our new setup.
Powering the Core P5 Test Bench will be Thermaltake Toughpower RGB 850W PSU. This power house Gold certified component contains a ultra quiet smart zero fan which with less than a 20% load will have zero noise and a max of 26.2 dB at max load.
This fan will also be rocking out some beautiful RGB colours which will compliment the visual aesthetics of this build along side the Water 3.0 AiO Cooler.
The final component to our Core P5 will be our PNY Geforce GTX 980 which will make a very nice addition to the visual aesthetics of this build. A beautiful aluminum construction for ultimate heat dissipation and performance backed with 4GB will serve this test bench well.
A Samsung V-NAND 950 Pro M.2 will be on board our 170’s Ultra M.2 Slot and will run our OS and test bench programs.
If you recall back to our previous review of this drive, it put up some pretty impressive numbers and earned out Editors choice award.
That should do it for the shout outs now stick with us as we take some time and put this puzzle together.