After tinkering and running into complications for over two months the Ultra Boxy Fox rig is completed. The specs of the system is a Intel Core Ultra 7 265KF, RTX 4080 Super, 48gb of DDR5, and 8TB m.2 storage built on an MSI Carbon WIFI in a Hyte Y70 case. Mind you, all of the stuff was bought before prices of ram and memory more than tripled. Yea you can get extremely good bargains on things like cases, fans, PSUs, Motherboards, and even CPUs because they are sitting collecting dust on warehouse shelves. If you know anything about retail, the more inventory that one has, the more interest that they have to pay.

I was curious about the Core Ultra series, because you have all of these Youtubers basically trashing them. I went with the Core Ultra 7 because the price was right for a new chip, and it was the version that Intel was kind of trying to hide in the corner because it was the middle brother who is almost as powerful as its bigger Ultra 9 brother. Same number of performance cores, but with four less efficiency cores. In gaming bench marks, there was maybe a couple of frames per second difference between the two but then again games are going to take more advantage of the performance cores.

I do have all the stuff for the Death Claw Box, but it’s going to be quite a while before I play with that build then after that it probably will be quits, except for maybe minor up grades.

Building using the Hyte Y70 was a bit of a challenge, and I still ran into problems after watching several videos. I decided to leave the touch screen panel off that is designed for the case because I felt it made it look too busy, and that it also took up one of the video outputs. I might add it later, but right now I like the way that the system looks.

The first challenge that I ran into was with the three basement intake fans. I saw on videos that it could take three, but I was using Asian Horse fans that daisy chain to each other.l. I don't remember if it showed them taking the bottom off but I was finally able to make it work by hook two up first, and then the third after maneuvering the third by linking them up in that small space. Then came the issue of mounting them to the case, but after getting two of the mounting screws I was able to secure the rest that it would let me. Because of the case design, I wasn't able to use four of the 12 fan screws. The rest of the seven fans went in smoothly. I am having a little minor issue of the PSU fan not sinking with the rest of the RGB lighting, but for the most part it’s no big deal.

The next issue I ran into was with the Asian Horse radiator CPU cooler. It looks nice but it wasn't like anything that I used before, and I probably won't use it again. My first issue is more of a concern is the dual pump design. One that sits on the CPU which is usual, but it has a second one right before it goes into the radiator, but I think it has something to do with a trademark. The shitty part was the documentation was pretty poor, but I found the missing splitter that hooked the pump header. The other thing that I didn’t like about the design is the way the cooler hooks up to the CPU. I guess I would feel more comfortable if it had tension springs on it like the rest off the coolers that I have ever hooked up. This design also makes it harder to swap out CPUs if you wanted to upgrade, or swap CPUs for testing, but I doubt most users wouldn’t be that whitetail and nerdy.

Then I ran into a real annoying problem that is mainly a MSI thing. The main drive slot on their MPG motherboards has the weird heat sink that is supposed to clip into place that is really nearly impossible to do. I was able to hook it up to my AMD Buckenstein, but even then I couldn’t get it to line up right when it comes to that little RGB connector but that wasn’t really that important. As for the Boxy build, it turned out to be a complete nightmare. I tried my best to get the clip to line up right but no matter what I did the stock heatsink kept on falling off. I set the case upright, and it didn’t take long before hearing a clank of the heatsink falling onto the GPU risercard. I finally gave up, and put an RGB heatsink that I got for about $15 off of Amazon which I originally bought for the future build, DeathClawBox.

My cable management gets a big fat “F”. From the side where it can be seen, it’s not bad, and yes I did expose an 8 pin cable in case I wanted to swap in the 5060, or a Radeon Card. I know the Radeon takes two cables so I kept the other one hidden in the case back space. Now if one were to open the back panel up, it would look like a boiling pot of black spaghetti noodles. Even with the pre planning things just didn’t work out the way I wish and a lot of it has to do with the RGB/fan hub. I was just glad that it worked. I am going to see if I can clean it up some.

Then there was the lovely MSI d6 error code I kept on getting when trying to power it up for the first time. I looked it up and found that there was no video output. One of the first tips I got was to hook it up straight to the motherboard, but since the CPU that used has no integrated graphics, that was a no-go. The next step I did was to receive the GPU, and risercard, but that error never went away, and I even tried a different GPU. I then swapped on a binary ram kit which didn’t help. For nearly an hour I fought with it till I opened the back up to check the cables on the PSU and discovered that I forgot to replug in the 12 pin GPU cable. OK that was a major brainfart.

I updated the bios to something that wasn’t from 2024, but no matter the system, doing that always makes me a bit nervous. Installing Windows 11 seemed to take a little longer than usual, but I didn’t run into the butt loads of Windows updates that usually follow after a new install. Maybe Microsponge finally got it right, or maybe it’s an Intel thing. MSI makes it easy to install and update all of the chipset drivers compared to other motherboards that I have built on.

So far the system is running great, and so far I’m not noticing any of the horror stories of using a Core Ultra CPU. I didn’t see much of a difference between that and one of my X3d chips. I’m happy with the outcome. I personally think that the X3D CPUs might be a little over hyped.