TAMING THE BEAST

Upgrade Australia 5.0 featured a little something extra not seen at previous Upgrade events. During the show, tech guru Josh Collins built a version of The Beast based around the recently released Ryzen CPU to give away to one lucky attendee.

THE BEAST IS RYZEN Thanks to AMD, Gigabyte, MSI, CoolerMaster, In Win, Samsung, Seagate, Microsoft, G.Skill, ESET and Razer the Ryzen Beast is packed with top of the line gear. The core of the machine is a Ryzen 7 1800X CPU in a Gigabyte AX370 Gaming K7 mobo, sporting 32GB of G.Skill Trident Z RGB DDR4 3200 and an MSI GTX 1080Ti. The CPU is cooled with a CoolerMaster Master Liquid Pro 240. On the storage front, the Beast is no slouch, with a blisteringly fast 2TB Samsung 960 Pro serving as the boot and games drive, with a further two 2TB Seagate Barracuda drives for storage. For a case and power supply with gone with simple and elegant, with an In Win 909 Black case and In Win C 900W power supply. The excellent Razer BlackWidow Chroma V2 and Deathadder Elite round out the package. That’s a $6745 PC right there.

THE WINNER

The winner on the night was Alex Chong. We asked Alex a few questions about his win.

Tell us a little about yourself

I’m currently in my final year of an Electrical and Electronics Engineering degree, and I’m working on a VR based teleoperation system of “Baxter the robot” for my final year project. I’m also an avid gamer, and I’m particularly interested in racing sim games.

Tell us about the PC you had before winning the Beast.

I only had a couple of laptops before winning the Beast, the main one I used is an older Clevo P150SM. It has at i7-4000mq, 8gb ram and a GTX 765m, so the Beast is a huge upgrade.

What’s the first thing you are going to/have played on the Beast?

The first thing I did was to setup the Oculus Rift and then try out DIRT Rally on the headset. It works awesomely!

Has owning the Beast changed your gaming habits in any way?

I’ll definitely be looking for more VR titles, since I can now use the latest runtimes for the oculus rift that I’m using for my engineering project, instead of being stuck on an ancient runtime version that I have to use to get it to work with my Optimus enabled laptop.

What are your plans moving forward?

I’ll be using the beast to finish my VR teleoperation project. I’ll be setting up virtualisation with GPU passthrough using an older graphics card, since some parts of my project require a Linux environment. I’ll be able integrate the whole project onto a single machine if the passthrough works. I’ll also be looking for a good quality 120hz+ monitor over the semester break, and probably organise a LAN session with some friends as well.