NZXT Phantom 820 Review: Building a Supercomputer

The Computer: Meet the BrightRender
Having said all of this, we set up on building our supercomputer. From the last page, you could see that our new render rig is set to first supplement and then replace a 15 system cluster that barely exceeds one TFLOPS of compute power (100% CPU).

Rendering videos on that cluster can take with up to six hours per single frame, meaning that rendering a 120 second video can take up to 750 days, which is the reason why you have to call in the cavalry and render it on an external location.

The system we'll be using in today's build is consisted out of following components:

• Intel Core i7-3770, 3.5GHz Core, 3.9 GHz Turbo (provided by Intel)
• Intel Stock Heatsink (provided by Intel)
• 32GB Kingston HyperX DDR3-1600 CL9 memory (provided by Kingston)
• EVGA Z77 FTW Motherboard (provided by EVGA)
• EVGA GTX 680 2GB SC+ (provided by EVGA)
• EVGA GTX 680 2GB SC+ (provided by EVGA)
• EVGA GTX 680 2GB Superclocked (provided by EVGA)
• EVGA GTX 680 2GB Superclocked (provided by EVGA)
• EVGA SuperNOVA NEX1500 Classified Power Supply (provided by EVGA)
• 120GB Kingston HyperX 3K SSD (provided by Kingston)
• 120GB Kingston HyperX 3K SSD (provided by Kingston)
• 2TB Seagate Constellation CS (provided by Seagate)
• 2TB Seagate Constellation CS (provided by Seagate)
• Corsair K90 Keyboard (provided by Corsair)
• Corsair M60 Mouse (provided by Corsair)

We want to thank to Dan from Intel, David from Kingston, Jacob and Joe from EVGA, Jon from Seagate and Robert from Corsair for making this build possible.

The system will be configured with one SSD being the system drive, one serving as scratch memory, with 2TB of redundant storage (RAID1). Future upgrades will add two more 2TB Drives and a RAID5 configuration, but for now we'll rely on our 8TB Seagate Black Armor 440 NAS.

Our main operating system is Windows 7 Service Pack 1 with all updates. Even though Windows 8 arrived with much fanfare, the fact of the matter is that production machines need to run stable and not all of software was certified to work on Windows 8 at the time of the build (this review was finished on Nov 8th, and several applications still did not show compliancy).

We started our build with mounting the solid state drives, and as stated - we encountered a problem with short screws. Luckily, we have a sizeable library of different screws and had no issues in mounting the drives.
We continued the installation process with putting the power supply in. The idea to put stands on the power supply mount is simply great - regardless of what power supply you select, the built in fan will have maximum access to fresh air. Some of case designs we encountered were geared towards 120mm fans, which doesn't help the PSU airflow if the power supply comes with a 135 or 140mm fan.


Power supply, motherboard installed... we have to state that the anti-vibration stands for PSU really stand out - kudos to NZXT for this solution.

After that, we assembled the motherboard, processor, heatsink and the memory and the said assembly was installed in the case without a hitch. Once the cabling was laid out, we proceeded with installing the graphics cards. Remember - if you're building a rendering machine, the first graphics card (that you will plug the display into) actually goes to the bottom slot, and then you mount cards on top of each other.


Full configuration. It would be ideal if you could replace the top hard drive cage for complete access to air flow from that 140mm front fan, instead of using an additional 120mm fan.

After two hours of playing with the ideal cabling setup, the system was near-perfect in terms of neatness and we proceeded with turning the system on.

Does it work?
One of primary concerns that we had was whether the heat produced by the graphics cards would cause issues. Luckily, the decision to install the bottom 120mm vent and having a 200mm fan in the side panel proved invaluable, as the graphics cards were producing less heat than in our original no-case testbed setup (which was bound to bend the motherboard, due to excessive weight). We conducted the test of loading the GPUs for 40 minutes of rendering a 1080p scene using Octane Render and V-Ray render. Ultimately, we set on V-Ray render on and measured temperatures, which were higher than you might expect from a GTX 680 card. Bear in mind that the boards were loaded 100%. The GPU temperatures were as such:

• GPU0 Testbed - 89°C
• GPU0 in Phantom 820 - 86°C
• GPU1 Testbed - 90°C
• GPU1 in Phantom 820 - 88°C
• GPU2 Testbed - 92°C
• GPU2 in Phantom 820 - 88°C
• GPU3 Testbed - 94°C
• GPU3 in Phantom 820 - 91°C

Even though the GPUs are now stacked one on top of each other, it is more efficient to put them in the case, instead of running them as a testbed configuration.