PC Gamer have gone mad. Building a new rig for reviews and testing, they didn’t settle on components that meet today’s “recommended” specs. They went for components that meet “Thor’s Mighty Mjölnir” standards, and the results are terrifying.
Using the very best gear throughout, the foundation of the rig are four GTX Titans. Four. Good lord.
And yes, I know, it’s part-commercial. Mr. Digital Storm there doesn’t seem as impressed as he should be that his company’s logo is all over the clip.
But I don’t care. This is PC hardware porn at its finest
The results? Check ’em out below. That’s ArmA III running on 2560×1440. As a warm-up. They’ll be kicking the tyres over the next few weeks, ramping games up to 4k and 5k resolutions.
In other words, it’ll be like Dead End Thrills, only instead of sacrificing melted cards in the name of screenshots, they’ll be playing games.
Introducing the Large Pixel Collider, a computer of uncomfortable power [PC Gamer]
Comments
52 responses to “A Gaming PC So Powerful It Will Make You Weep”
Seriously wtf. I remember when the joke was that all asians look alike. I watched the whole thing not 60 seconds ago and remember nothing because I couldnt get past this……
Haha so good
The burning question is – can it play solitare? 🙂
Nah man, all the cool kidz use minesweeper to benchmark now.
The Solitare Installed On That Monster Gained A Conscience, Weeped It’s Own Pathetic-ness, And Fried Itself With Next-Gen Power.
Now microwave it.
If I may quote Imgur:
“Put… put your dick in it”
GTX Titans are so last year.
I’m just off to get a second and third job so I can afford this as my next PC.
Yeah…but…does it blend?
But will it blend?
hotness
I’m not actually all that impressed, since there are a few obvious optimisations.
Only two hard drives, both using SATA and without RAID? If they were serious, they should have built a RAID-0 from eight of those SSDs (assuming that they’ve chosen a fast SSD). They’ve used all their PCIe slots on the video cards, leaving no room for a hardware RAID card. (Quite possibly you can’t get a 5x or 6x PCIe motherboard, but they don’t even seem to have tried.) Even if you don’t want to spare a slot for a RAID controller, get multiple enterprise-grade SSDs so you can spread the I/O load around.
I would look into server motherboards supporting use of multiple sockets, to increase the number of cores available.
In other words, they’ve optimised video output and RAM and have barely tweaked everything else.
Bare minimum, ditch the drives they have suggested and install 8x enterprise SSDs. They will pay through the nose for them, but there is a reason those drives cost more. I would prefer a proper RAM drive, but the shortage of PCIe slots is the limiting factor.
It’s interesting to compare with PC Powerplay’s “Beast” setup. They’ve gone for the same graphics card with 3x SLI, and the other slot used by a PCIe-based SSD.
Note: I am not a PC hardware guru and make no claim to be; most of my PC hardware experience has been with server hardware. I would be *very* surprised if their suggested rig is the best possible however. It’s just… lazy.
it’s got a great name though.
Agreed. Maybe they don’t need something as crazy as that 24xSSD RAID –
But even something substantially less crazy would yield significant performance gains.
What’s everyone’s obsession with RAID-0? It adds nothing to gaming. A standard SSD or even high speed SATA3 HDD is more than enough. A hardware RAID card is even more of waste.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a situation where storage transfer rates are a bottleneck.
Obviously they will impact how long it takes to copy data but for gaming it has zero impact save for loading times, and even then, it will vary from game to game.
Or better yet SSD caching. I use this setup and it’s brilliant for gaming, I get the cheap storage from the HDD but with near SSD loading times (I say near because I don’t think it’s quite as fast as a pure SSD setup but it’s still bloody fast).
Agreed about RAID setups though, they’re cool and all but unnecessary for gaming.
You ignore the fact that this was built as a powerful *gaming* machine. A RAID-0 setup of SSD’s adds little to nothing to gaming for the cost it has. A single SSD for OS, and favourite games to increase map-load times (if that is that important over the speed of a HDD) is all that is ever needed to maximise a gaming rig’s performance. The few FPS you get from a 4th GPU would be more benefitial in overall performance for gaming then a RAID-0 SSD setup.
Yes, but ignoring RAID, they’re planning to put the actual games on a spindle drive.
Multiple SSDs, RAID or no RAID, would give better performance. This is supposed to be the ultimate gaming rig (read the whiteboard…).
I don’t use RAID on my home gaming PC. What I *do* do is install those games which are performance-critical on an SSD.
And you’ll find read/write speeds have little effect on gaming. It will literally be the difference of a few seconds in a loading screen, if even that.
You’re going to raid SSDs???
Why not?
You’re answering my question with a question???
It’s question-ception. I don’t see why if you have the money, you wouldn’t raid SSDs. It’s like overclocking really, completely pointless most of the time but utterly enjoyable to see those magic numbers go up.
Having said that, it’s really not that necessary for gaming. Not right now anyway. Though it would increase the lifespan of the SSDs (barring the obvious random failures).
Depends on the raid whether it would increase the lifespan or not. With raid 0 it’s increasing your risk, as if either drive goes, your data is gone. IMO it’s not worth the time it would take to raid them, for the performance increase you’d see.
I’ve got my rig OC’d 20% over stock. I definitely notice the speed difference. Raid’ing your SSDs doesn’t seem to get you anywhere near that, at least not in this review.
http://techreport.com/review/16291/a-look-at-four-x25-e-extreme-ssds-in-raid/5
But you’re right. If you want to do it, then do it. I’m lazy. OC’ing I can do over a week or two just in the course or turning my PC on (jump into bios, increase one thing by 5%, run P95 whilst normally using computer. Repeat until failure reached. Pull back by 10%. Done.)
Raiding seems like it requires much more effort, and requires specialised hardware for best results. Effort. Pfffffffffft! Screw that.
isn’t raiding SSD’s slower? i remember a couple years ago when getting mine it was pointless to raid because you lost some speed enhancer the SSD uses or some shit (don’t quote me) but yeah unless they have changed something in the last couple years hten raifing SSd’s is wank and pointless
Absolutely pointless to do that. This is a gaming rig not a server. I’m pretty sure most if not all games a not optimised for multi CPU set ups. As for PCIe storage why? once again gaming rig. A regular SSD is more than enough to load maps quickly when playing.
It’s being pushed as the most powerful possible server and it clearly isn’t. They have 8 drive slots and their setup has two drives, one SSD and the other a 2TB spindle drive. Why bother with the spindle drive at all? It’s clearly a cost saving measure.
As for “why RAID 0” as others have asked – parallel access. RAID 0 – or at least the use of multiple SSDs – means you can do two disk fetches simultaneously. Your game may not care, but the OS hits the hard drive too. Two drives = twice the chance than an OS fetch won’t impact your drive activity. Or Steam can run updates while you play a non-Steam game.
Modern games are increasingly using multiple cores effectively. Just a few years ago all games used one core. With the PS4 & XBox One having 8-core CPUs there will be more games optimised for parallel processing. It doesn’t matter too much now, but it does matter and will matter more with time.
At the very, VERY least they should have used multiple SSDs. Their stated goal is to build the most powerful gaming PC known to mankind, and they clearly have done no such thing.
NO watch the video again. Most powerful GAMING PC! not server. Key word is gaming. as for PS4/ Xbox one with 8 core cpus they use AMD cpus which seriously underperform. An intel i7 quad core still pumps them for gaming.
maybe in a few years they will be properly optimised for multi cpus but they aren’t yet. BF4 barely uses all cores in a quad core. Multi SSD is just a plain old waste for PC gaming at this stage. I don;t need to update steam while im playing a game plus the amount of data that you are drawing from you hard drive/ ssd is minimal once the game is up and running. only time really is when you load new maps otherwise its all stored in your RAM.
My 2 cents. RAID cards are generally irrelevant for gaming computers as the higher end mobos generally support RAID on board.
Feel free to make your own PC with more refined Uranium and raw Evil than this, and post it up so we can all see it 🙂
Why not use one of the new gigabyte boards that also supports 2 cpu’s?
need a noise meter sample to see how noisy all those fans are.
edit – no fps/fraps for the arma 3 play example?
Urgh… I know it’s unrelated to how awesome that PC is but:
Asus is pronounced A-sus! (as in suspect) not A-seuss! (as in Dr Seuss)
How do you pronounce ‘suspect’, if you’re not Canadian then you’re not saying ‘seuss-pect’
Also some research will show that Asus is named after pegASUS (the flying horsie).
How do you pronounce Pegasus? Not Pegaseuss (unless you’re Canadian).
This is how you pronounce it.
Directly from “A-seuss”.
http://www.engadget.com/2010/12/17/how-to-pronounce-asus-video/
Pegasus is correctly pronounced with an ‘oo’ sound, actually. It should end with the same sound ‘octopus’ ends with.
ASUS is a brand. You can’t define how to pronounce a proper noun by using words from a dictionary.
ASUS the company itself can define how their name is pronounced, and just like any word or name, it will be pronounced differently by different people. I personally say ASUS like you suggested. But i have been told im incorrect. I know A-seus is pronounced that way, but I naturally don’t say it that way.
TL;DR-who gives a damn its a brand name.
Ahhhh no.
http://www.engadget.com/2010/12/17/how-to-pronounce-asus-video/
They have another one for $39K. Includes 4x titans and 3x Telsla GPUs. Pretty lol.
People that have just learnt about Raid often tend to over use the phrase in every day communication
Just like ‘cloud’.
Look; I hate to piss on your parade but I’m afraid your comment might degrade those new to PCs.
The tradeoffs for a raid upgrade are too small to ignore!
I agree I like Raid, it’s great to have but sometimes people just think they need to use it for every single application.
Like the guy above dissing the build ( like 3 paragraphs of it) because it does not have raid. My god it’s a good build that is all that needs to be said.
Lol fuck the cloud!
(my comment was a joke in reference to overusing the word raid)
pa-raid.
af-raid.
deg-raid.
t-raid-offs.
raid
upg-raid.
haha I see now
I use raid in my nas not for speed but for the fact its easier to configure for 1 large drive than multiple drives.
The problem with the build is not that it doesn’t have RAID. The problem is that it only has two drives, and one of them is a spindle drive. (I only mention RAID in one paragraph.)
When you’re messing with SSDs, RAID gives only a minimal performance advantage, but NOT having your game on a spinning bit of rusty iron gives a MUCH bigger boost.
Good I/O performance = lots of (fast) hard drives. It’s as true for gamer rigs as it is for servers. I/O does not matter as much for gamer rigs as it does for servers, but it does matter – every time you see a “please loading” screen the game is probably hitting the drive.
The reason I was complaining about their drive setup is their rig uses exactly ONE SSD, and they won’t even be putting their games on that drive. For a self-described ultimate gaming PC, that’s a copout. The only things they’ve optimised are graphics and RAM. They could have done better.
I bet even this rig would play X:Rebirth at no more than 30fps
What about Ghosts? Around 10?
Anyone know how much a rig like this would cost?
4x GTX Titans – $4000
i-7 4960x – around $1400
64GB of RAM – about $1700 (for the brand they’ve selected)
ASUS Rampage IV Extreme – about $450
PSU – around $350
480GB SSD – around $700
4TB HDD – $350
Water Block – about $100 each (they have 4 I think) and 3 radiators at $75 each
Not too sure about the case but just those components by themselves come to a shade under $10k or 17.5 PS4s or just under 16 Xbox Ones 😛
Should have used some GTX 780ti’s instead of Titans. While Titan is more expensive, 780ti outperform it in games.
Yeah I was wondering as to why they chose Titans over 780ti’s. Especially considering the 780tis are also cheaper? Maybe they were aiming to spend as much as they could.
Ah, yes. The “TotalBiscuit Standard” at it’s finest.