You Are Nothing Compared To This $30,000 PC

You Are Nothing Compared To This $30,000 PC

However good you think your gaming PC or setup is, it will not come anywhere close to matching the enormity of this $30,000-plus build done for one Aussie gamer.

This piece originally ran on Kotaku Australia on May 3, 2021. It has been republished as a weekend read.

The build was put together by Aftershock PC, a Melbourne based retailer that specialises in custom PCs, builds and high-end laptops. Ali Kaos reached out to the company and said, hey, here’s $30,000, build the best possible PC you can.

So that’s what exactly what Aftershock did. Want the most expensive GPU on the planet? How about two of them. Like RGB? The whole thing has more lights than a shopping mall. You like water cooling? Then let’s pump the Snowy Hydro into the CPU block.

This article has been updated since its original publication.

The PC, Aftershock told Kotaku Australia over email, started with the best parts. There’s an AMD 3990X Threadripper CPU inside, dual ASUS ROG Strix RTX 3090 cards, 128GB G.Skill NEO RAM, 4TB of storage from Gigabyte Aorus Gen 4 SSDs, the fastest drives on the market today.

The case is a heavily modified Corsair 1000D, which reportedly took a full week of retooling to fit all the parts inside. “It took four people just to carry the beast down the stairs,” Aftershock said.

All of the water cooling effort added a ton of weight to the build. The distribution plate for the EK water blocks — the EK Quantum Reflection 1000D, which costs almost a grand in Australia — weighs 6 kilos by itself.

There’s even a neat little bronze plaque for Kaos, sitting towards the bottom of the machine. It’s real classy.

“It features 18 Corsair fans, dual loops and top of the line components with EK water blocks throughout and 3 x EK D5 pumps to ensure reliability. It has two flow meters, two temperature monitors and the motherboard has an LED screen that also shows temps – you’d struggle to not know the temperature,” Aftershock added.

The 7-inch LED screen can even be used as a second monitor, and when I asked if the custom builders had any footage of this, they sent over this video of them playing Cyberpunk 2077 on the mini-screen.

There’s something beautiful about gaming on a $30,000 PC with such a budget mouse, but anyway.

The PC is actually still in Aftershock’s showroom for display, because the PC’s owner is in the middle of building a new house with a room just for the gaming PC. For what it’s worth, Aftershock’s efforts in cooling and overclocking pushed the rig into the top 25 PCs worldwide in 3D Mark scores, which is pretty impressive.

Kaos explained over email that the room for this PC / production workhorse will be quite special. “[It’s] built complete with bioscan deadbolts, finger print door handle, with a solid reinforced door and security system, it’s own aircon even,” they told Kotaku Australia.

With a PC so powerful, I wondered whether its new owner would ultimately just end up playing Call of Duty or Counter-Strike at some hilariously low resolution. According to Aftershock, two of the main priorities for the new owner? Battlefield 6 later this year, and after a bunch of updates, Cyberpunk 2077. Kaos added that they will also be using the PC for 3D scanning, CAD programs and manufacturing.

What a build. If you’re after something similarly flashy that doesn’t need an AFL team to move it from room to room, there’s some smaller custom builds on Aftershock’s website. I’m really partial to the neon blue/red dual coolant, myself.

Update 7:00pm AEDT: This story has been updated with additional information.


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