AVA DIRECT AVANT GARDE
A tower of power
THE TERM “AVANT GARDE” is used to describe new, experimental, and often challenging ideas and techniques in the world of art. When we apply this term to a PC, one would expect something along the same lines. The AVADirect Avant Garde doesn’t live up to its name, but that’s not to say there’s a lot to dislike about it. In fact, the name is about the only overstated thing about the rig.
The Avant Garde came to us packaged in a box within a box. That’s no big surprise, given the PC is built into a Corsair 500R. The 500R is a great case, but it’s not much to look at. It’s design features don’t look terribly sexy, and the layout is rather runof-the-mill. But the thing stays cool, and offers plenty of space. AVADirect made sure to accent the case with LED lighting (controllable with an included remote), and mounted a big 200mm fan on the side panel to keep the video cards fed with cool air.
AVADirect has filled the 500R with toptier components. A pair of GeForce GTX Titan X cards in SLI work together to push pixels for 4K gaming, while the beating heart is Intel’s Core i7-6700K Skylake CPU. The pricey core components were rounded out by 32GB of Kingston HyperX 2,400MHz DDR4 RAM, a 1TB Samsung 850 Evo 2.5-inch SATA SSD, and a 4TB Seagate Barracuda 7,200rpm 3.5-inch HDD. They all found their home on the stunning Asus ROG Maximus VIII Formula mobo, and a 1,200W EVGA 80 Plus Platinum-rated PSU provided ample power.
It’s worth noting that AVADirect chose to cool the Core i7-6700K with a Corsair H100i v2. There’s a good reason for this: The PC we reviewed came overclocked to 4.8GHz. That’s a full 20 percent overclock from the CPU’s 4GHz stock clock, which AVADirect offers for a $106 premium. That’s on par with our findings in terms of what Skylake can do. When we first reviewed Skylake K-model CPUs last August, we were able to get to 4.7GHz with a Core i7-6700K using an air cooler.
There’s no such thing as a guaranteed stable overclock, as every piece of silicon differs slightly. While the 6700K held stable for our game and single-threaded benchmarks, it choked when it was time for our multithreaded x264 benchmark. We attempted to run the benchmark several times, and H.264 Encoder would crash whenever it came to the second pass of encoding. That’s with the H100i’s fans cranked up to maximum, too. At the end of the day, we had to drop the overclock to 4.7GHz for the encoder to remain stable.
We didn’t encounter this problem with ProShow Producer 5, which also encodes video. However, ProShow Producer limits scaling with CPU cores, and doesn’t seem to ever use more than four at a time. (With Hyper-Threading, the Core i7-6700K has eight logical cores.) Since graphics benchmarks aren’t that CPU intensive, the graphics tests completed without incident.
As for how those tests scored, well, a pair of Titan Xs is nothing to sneer at. The Avant Garde scored an impressive 8,073 in 3DMark’s Fire Strike Ultra 4K graphics test. That (just) beat our zero-point’s 8,016, derived from three GTX 980s in SLI, and a Core i7-5960X. Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor and Tomb Raider are our other 4K tests, and the Avant Garde cranked out 90fps and 97fps respectively in each. In Batman: Arkham City, the PC provided 237fps on average at 1440p.
Those scores represent quite an achievement, but not without caveats. At the time of writing, there aren’t any 4K monitors with G-Sync and refresh rates over 60Hz that we’ve seen—display port is holding us back here. Unless you pay for a 4K G-Sync monitor, chances are you’re running 4K at 60Hz with VSync, or you’re running a 144Hz 1440p monitor. Either way, the Titans in this rig are pushing way more pixels than you’ll ever see. For this reason, a model that sports a pair of GTX 980 Tis would be more than sufficient, and cost significantly less ($1,137 less, to be exact).
Most of us could call that a waste of power, but some may prefer the term “future-proofing.” After all, games are just going to keep asking for more and more power to make their world more and more believable—particularly now that virtual reality is definitely a thing again. The fact that the Avant Garde is way beyond the minimum bar for either the HTC Vive or the Oculus Rift doesn’t hurt. You’ll be able to step into VR without worry.