Digital Storm Aventum 3
A big, badass, blue box
WHEN WE FIRST TALKED to Digital Storm about its new Aventum 3 desktop, we were excited to see what sort of performance the company’s flagship PC could offer. Unfortunately, we were forced to wait. The original spec called for GTX Titan X video cards, but Digital Storm held off to put a pair of the new GeForce GTX 1080 cards in place of the Titans. We have to say, it was worth the wait.
The Aventum 3 is a massive machine. It’s big enough that the term “desktop” is something of a misnomer. This PC will most likely make its home on your floor, unless you have a very sturdy, large desk, and a friend with a strong back to help you lift it. And there’s a reason it’s heavy: This PC has lots of cooling running every which way, complete with custom acrylic interchanges, and EKWB water blocks for the CPU and GPUs.
The machine sports Intel’s new enthusiast flagship CPU, the 10-core Core i7-6950X. With a stock base clock of 3GHz and a turbo of 4GHz, the 6950X in this PC came clocked at 4.3GHz. That’s a respectable overclock, and is right in line with what we’ve found to be stable in our own testing. It’s not as high an overclock as we’ve seen with the Haswell-E i7-5960X (which can get to 4.5GHz from a turbo of 3.5GHz), but Intel’s “Extreme Edition” CPUs are really more about the cores, PCIe lanes, and cache than the clocks. Speaking of cores and cache, the 6950X sports 10 cores with Hyper-Threading, for a total of 20 threads. The CPU has 25MB of cache, which preserves the allotment of 2.5MB per core that we’ve seen on the 5960X (which has eight cores and 20MB of cache). WHEN ONE GPU ISN’T ENOUGH For pixel-pushing, the Aventum 3 doesn’t pull any punches. This monster has two GTX 1080 Founders Edition graphics cards fitted with EK waterblocks. The pair is joined together with Nvidia’s high-bandwidth (HB) SLI bridge. This makes use of both the SLI connectors on each card (vanilla SLI only uses one). This is part of the reason Nvidia recommends that builders limit SLI to twoway. (You can use three-way SLI, but you have to contact Nvidia for a code to unlock the cards.) Digital Storm had to remove the plastic cover for the SLI bridge, as it won’t fit with EK’s waterblocks. That’s no big deal, and the hit to aesthetics is minimal.
Digital Storm took these badass components and mounted them on an Asus X99 Deluxe II mobo, along with 32GB of Corsair’s Vengeance LPX DDR4-3000 RAM. Storage needs are met by a 512GB Samsung 950 Pro and a 6TB Seagate Barracuda. The rig is topped off with beautifully clean cable management. There are also pre-wired connections for 3.5-inch HDDs, making hard drive installation as plug-’n’-play as possible. The hard tubing of the watercooling loop is gorgeous. The white coolant reminds us of Bishop’s blood from Aliens.
The 1080s delivered in gaming, and made the Aventum 3 a shining example of what Nvidia’s new GPU can do. In our 1080p tests, the Aventum 3 barely broke a sweat, scoring 26,853 points in Fire Strike. For games, the rig pumped out 116.7fps overall in Riseof the TombRaider (154.48fps in Peak, 105.15 in Syria, and 88.67 in Geo), with max settings at 1080p. In FarCry Primal, it managed 86fps, and Brooklyn was rendered at 163.3fps in TheDivision.
Not satisfied with the 1080p results, we tested higher resolutions as well. In Fire Strike Ultra, the rig scored 10,467. Lara Croft graced our screen at 87.1fps at 1440p, 43.25fps at 4K (2160p). While frame rates did drop during the test, they didn’t drop below 30fps in Fraps during the 4K test.
When it came to computing, the Aventum 3 crushed the rigs we’ve tested before. With 10 cores and 20 threads, the PC managed 10,303 in PCMark 8, and nearly 2,200 in Cinebench 15. In x264—where more threads are always better—the Aventum 3 pushed a whopping 45.87fps. Yowza!
When it comes down to it, the Aventum 3 is one kick-ass rig. But as the rig we tested comes with a sticker price of $8,573, it had better perform. And perform it did. Besides the fact you’ll have to rearrange some furniture and use a hand truck to move it, we can’t find much to complain about. Bigger isn’t always better, but in this case, it absolutely is.