THERE ARE RENDERING STATIONS, THEN THERE’S THIS.
Hindsight is a wonderful thing. When it comes to building your own rig, it’s a vital tool for helping you improve your technique and knowledge for next time. Forethought and planning — that’s what’s key. For this Build It project, it was all about cable management and studying how the chassis worked.
Take the X99-A II motherboard, for instance. It’s a swell update on ASUS’s last iteration, but there’s one problem: the position of the CPU power. As it’s direct centre, at the top, it makes it difficult to route your EPS eight-pin, especially in combination with the Corsair 400C, as it lacks a third rubber grommet in that central area. So you end up trailing CPU power from the top-left of the chassis, right across the bottom of your fans. This also manages to cut off access to the three CPU PWM fan headers in the process. It’s an immensely tight squeeze to get that EPS power connected when you have two additional 140mm fans, as well.
Even for us, these are problems we couldn’t predict. Adapting and overcoming those predicaments — in our eyes, at least — is what makes being a PC enthusiast and building your own system so gratifying.
So what do 10 cores, 20 threads, 64GB of DDR4, a 16nm FinFET GTX 1080 and over 13TB of storage gain you? One gnarly machine.
Overclocking the Core i7-6950X was a doddle. We dropped in the 2,400MT/s XMP settings, switched off SpeedStep, enabled full power phase control, and started upping the multiplier and voltage until we reached a stable point for thermals and system stability. We managed 4.3GHz with a cushy 1.285V on the CPU core. And this is where that deca-core monster shone, racking up an astonishing 2,208 points in Cinebench R15. To put that into perspective, a mainstream Core i7 6700K @ 4.9GHz only manages 1,074, and the last-gen i7-5960X eight-core processor can only hit 1,387 points at stock. Mind blowing.
Other than that, we saw an impressive 8,400 points in PC Mark 8’s Creative benchmark, and 3D Mark’s Fire Strike scored well over 18,000 points — that’s a thousand points higher than just utilising an i7-6700K with the GTX 1080, which goes to show how much those additional cores benefit advanced physics simulation.
This machine is overkill, no doubt about it. It’s $7,900-plus of grade-A red meat rammed into a sleek, clean chassis. The perfect 4K render workstation, that also excels at gaming. There’s only a few things we’d change: a custom cable kit to make this build look incredibly clean, and perhaps another GTX 1080 Founders Edition, with one of those swanky new SLI bridges Nvidia has developed. That would have capped it off as one of the best consumer workstations in the world.