What is it like to build in the Kolink Rocket Complex case, and can the former flagship 2080Ti still hang tough as we enter space year 2026? Let’s find out.
Welcome to Esk Computers, I’m Scott and today on the desk of Esk, I am rebuilding a system I’d put together months ago, then somehow bricked the motherboard when turning secure boot on. Attempting to fix that will be a subject of another video, probably, here I’m just replacing it with another of the JGINYUE B350i ITX motherboards that will be familiar to viewers of the first video of this channel.
I named this Nervous Rocket, in no small part because the case is a Kolink Rocket Complex, a stunning looking 20 litre steel, anodised aluminium and tempered glass ITX case with a tiny footprint of 215 x 213mm, although it somewhat makes up for that in its 450mm height and 4.5kg weight. GPUs can be up to 2.8 slots thick and 330mm in length, housed on the other side of the spine and fed by an included PCIe gen 4 riser cable.
I think this looks amazing. It’s primary drawback is that it ships with screws on the PSU and radiator brackets that will strip their heads off as soon as you look at them, so be careful unless you enjoy drilling out screws around sensitive electrical components. The other downside of, well, pretty much every small case is that cable management is difficult as there’s no space in which to perform said cable management. The sensible way around this is to minimise the amount of cables used, but we’re including two SATA SSDs and ARGB here, because I’m a glutton for punishment. Well, let’s see how we get on.
I’m fairly sure it’s just the old motherboard that was bricked, but it always makes sense to check that the main components are working before building it up. The JGINYUE B350i is an AM4 motherboard, with two four pin ARGB headers, two PWM fan connectors and two three-pin fan headers. I’ll be using two of the four SATA 3.0 ports and the full PCIe3 x4 speed NVME slot on the front. There’s another NVME slot on the backside of the board, but puzzlingly it’s only been given a PCIe 2.0 x2 interface, so it’s going unused.
Into this goes a Ryzen 7 5700X, an 8 core, 16 thread part that’s a few generations old but certainly still hanging in there with more modern parts. This is cooled by a Thermalright AQUA ELITE 240 ARGB Liquid CPU cooler. I really need to get a test cooler, but it I suppose it has to be installed at some point even if it’s a bit of a mess on the desk. When in the case, overclocked and battering out a full CPU and GPU load, this CPU can get up to the high eighties but that’s still within spec, while drawing 500W from the wall.
I’m adding two 8GB sticks of Teamgroup 8pack DDR4 memory, which is rated at 4000MHz, but I can only get this booting reliably at 3600MHz on this board. A slight performance hit I imagine, but still plenty fast. All this is fed by a 600W Metalfish SFX PSU.
The graphics card for this is the 2080 Ti – this is the EVGA Black Edition although the more observant amongst you will see that this did not come with the fans and shroud, requiring a few creative modifications with some 120mm ARGB fans and cable ties. It somehow performs better than the stock cooler from what I can find, so a victory for function over form. Stressing it out in Furmark balanced out at around 75 degrees C after ten minutes.
Speaking of storage, there’s a fast 512GB CUSU NVME SSD for the operating system, and out of curiosity I’ve taken two common or garden 1TB Silicon Power A55 SATA SSDs and combined them into a 2TB striped storage pool in Windows. Speeds are pretty good at 1078 MB/s read and 979 MB/s write, although this will get slower as it fills up, and of course the NVME drive blows it out of the water at 3059 MB/s read and 1296 MB/s write.
Right, let’s get this installed. This would be a little easier if I could remove the radiator carrier, but that’s how I know how easily these screw destroy themselves. However, once you figure out the best way to get at the various screws, and realise that some really require a longer shafted screwdriver than is usual it’s reasonably straightforward. This bendy screwdriver extension also comes in clutch.
I’d left the SSDs and the PCIe riser cable installed from the last ride of this case. I don’t think either caused huge issues as long as the riser cable goes in before the motherboard, it’s a bit tight to fit otherwise.
Cable management is hampered by there being essentially no provision for it at all. If these SSDs weren’t installed that would provide some holes to cable tie and tidy, but with them installed it’s just tension and good vibes keeping the power and SATA cables and the AIO tubing out of the way of the radiator fans. This is as good as I could do, not my finest hour but I challenge you to do better.
Here’s one motherboard oddity I forgot to mention during the previous coverage – Windows 11 refuses to properly install to any NVME drive I have access to on this system. Windows 10? Fine. Ubuntu? No issues. Windows 11? Weird driver errors and no boot. It can, however, install fine to a SATA drive and then be cloned over to the NVME drive so we get there in the end, but very strange. I’m using Windows 11 IoT Enterprise edition for a debloated experience, with OpenRGB installed for lighting control, along with Ryzen Master and the NVidia App for automated overclocking on the CPU and GPU.
There’s a lot of screws involved in getting the aluminium panels back on. So much so that my camera ran out of battery juice, and I’d finished before realising. But I think you’ve seen quite enough screwing, ooo-er, so let’s see how this performs in our usual test suite.
Either the cooler or the silicon lottery has let this Ryzen chip spread its wings, with a single core Cinebench 2024 score of 94 and the Multi-core score of 835 showing great performance.
Synthetics on the 2080Ti are also coming in with some pretty strong results. 3DMark’s Fire Strike gets us 31085 points, Time Spy 13997 points, and Unigine’s Superposition 19637 points at 1080p High. Seeing as this is ray tracing capable, I’ve also thrown 3DMark’s Port Royal at it where is came back with 8974 points.
On to the proper games now. I suppose it’s a bit of a formality pitting this former flagship against the older games, so it’s no surprise that Shadow of the Tomb Raider gets us 174 average fps at 1080p High settings, and Counter-Strike 2 gets 253 average fps at 1080p Very High settings. So, it’s still absolutely smashing older games and e-sports titles, and will of course obliterate your Minecrafts, DOTAs, Robloxes, PUBGs and Fortnights.
Let’s crank up the difficulty levels with Cyberpunk 2077. Without any raytracing, using the 1080p Ultra settings this gives us a tremendous 119 average fps. If you’d rather increase the eyecandy, with the 1080p RayTraced Ultra settings the benchmark run gives an average of 62 fps. There’s still life in the old dog yet.
I always come back to Unreal Engine 5 games as the litmus test of whether a GPU’s going to have legs, The Black Myth Wukong benchmark gives 77 average fps at 1080p High settings, with No Framegen, and Marvel Rivals give us 103 average fps at 1080p Medium settings, without any upscaling or frame generation. So, happily the 2080Ti is still giving playable results, albeit very similar scores to a modern RTX 5060.
Horizon Zero Dawn is normally my representative sample of a bad PlayStation port, but at least it usually functions. For reasons I could not fathom it was tripping out my cheapo capture card with this psychedelic display, and crashing when changing the graphics settings. It did make a run through it’s default, mostly Ultra settings at 1080p with 121 average fps, but obviously bugging out for some probably fixable reason, but we have to move on.
The engine used for the Assassin’s Creed games is actually pretty competent and scales well as far as I’ve tested it. We are looking at Mirage here, where it’s casually knocking out 129 average fps at 1080p High settings, and cranking that up to Ultra settings still gives 99 average fps.
Forza Horizon 5 uses an even better engine, so no surprise that it’s also running really well here, it defaulting to the Extreme settings at 1080p where it gives a 84 fps average.
Red Dead Redemption 2 is also not presenting much of a problem at 1080p, with settings on the low end of Balanced giving 114 average fps, and pushing the slider up into the Quality settings gives 91 average fps, so still plenty of headroom for higher resolutions if you desire.
I’m think I’m going to send Call of Duty Warzone testing to the Gulag. From tests on the previous version of this machine before it broke, I’d expect to get between 80 and 100 fps at 1080p Extreme settings, depending on what you’re doing. This seemed about right on this recorded play session, although the NVidia app wasn’t counting frames at all. Then it decided that it couldn’t be bothered loading textures halfway through a match, and the controls soon started glitching out, continually swapping weapons, jumping and parachuting all over the place. I have no idea how I managed to get a kill with this going on, but I think it will likely be my last. Certainly on this build, as it’s now degraded from starting extremely slowly to not starting at all, giving a similar DirectX error to the 580 build of a few weeks ago that fixed itself after a few weeks. Frankly, this game is a buggy mess, and even when it does reliably start it seems to continually want to install multi-gigabyte updates. For a game this mid, it’s more trouble than it’s worth. Still for the purposes of this test, yes, when it does properly launch and not fall apart it can play it pretty well, Why you’d want to at this stage is another question.
Actually, I couldn’t resist trying again just before posting this video, it looked to be working well again after another multi-gigabyte update, before crashing out half way through. Get in the bin, Warzone.
So, thoughts on the Rocket Complex case. You are welcome to disagree, but I think it’s a really great looking case, and it is a proper statement piece. It can hold powerful hardware, albeit only in ITX form, but as it can hold all but the beefiest graphics cards there’s plenty of scope for this being relevant well into the future. I can’t really test airflow, but this configuration is not having any problems being kept cool.
The downsides are that the motherboard and GPU ports all wind up being on the bottom of the case and are practically inaccessible in normal use, ameliorated by the USB 3 A and C ports up top. A more serious concern is the simply not fit for purpose screws that are used on the internal mounts that cannot stand up to normal use, let alone abuse. If I do another build in this I’d be looking to replace them.
I can forgive this, in the main because this case with the riser cable included cost me £20 on clearance, which is an absolute steal. I don’t think you’ll be able to get as good a deal these days, but it’s worth that for the riser cable alone. At it’s list price of £90, or the current eBay price of £110 it would be a harder sell, but I’ve occasionally seen this appear new from eBay resellers at around £40 which is a price I would be happy with.
As for the 2080Ti, at the 1080p resolutions I’ve been testing at to compare it with the more budget oriented builds I’ve been looking at of late, it’s still knocking it out of the park, no qualifications. If anything I’ve not been asking enough of it in these tests, with results like this I should be looking at 4K for the older games and 1440p with newer ones. Of course, newer, faster cards are available, if you have pockets deep enough, but unless you’re fixated on pushing the newest, most demanding games at the highest resolutions and framerates there’s little need to upgrade yet.
It will be interesting to see if this is as long-lived as its legendary predecessor, the 1080Ti, or if more reliance on ray tracing will bring about it’s early demise, if you can say such a thing about a card released seven years ago. At the £200 I picked this up for, it’s hard to argue with the value. While you’ll get similar results from the 5060 or Intel’s B580 if you are buying new, you’ll be paying about an extra £50. That might be worth it for the warranty, but if you’re happy with used parts, well, this will make you happy.
If you have any thoughts on this please post a comment down below, and if you enjoyed this videotronic missive then consider subscribing. Until next time, take care of yourself, and each other.