4K GAMING ACHIEVED
THE IDEA was to build a system capable of gaming at 4K, that you could fit on your desk, and keep out of the way of pesky ungrown humans and furry animals. It’s an admirable pursuit. Over the next two or three years, it’s likely we’ll see 4K gaming becoming more prevalent, certainly with the advent of DisplayPort 1.3 and 1.4, and 120Hz-plus monitors bounding toward us at breakneck speed. Hopefully, 60Hz panels will drop to 1080p levels—at least, that’s the dream— enabling us to appreciate the glory of those high pixel density displays.
Did we achieve our goal? Sort of. Two GTX 1080s in SLI certainly make 4K gaming a reality, but it comes with its caveats. Power draw is the first issue. Even though Nvidia utilizes the 16nm FinFET process, the overall draw of both these cards is still significantly higher than the pinnacle of Maxwell, aka the GTX 980. Then there’s the SLI profiles. Not all games support multiple GPUs, as it’s mostly down to the devs to code that in, and even those that eventually do, most don’t support it at launch. After all, the devs want to get their games out on time, and with the vast majority of gamers not taking advantage of two-way SLI or CrossFire, it’s not a priority.
Then we have to deal with temperatures. Although we kept them within reasonable parameters (only three degrees higher than our recorded maximum on our test bed) with a tweak of the fan settings and some ingenious cooling layouts, it may not have worked as well with open-air-style coolers.
As for performance, this little beauty did admirably. At 4K, we saw an average of 71fps in FarCryPrimal, 64fps in TheDivision, and 35fps in Riseof the TombRaider, all on the absolute cutting edge of graphical settings at 4K. One thing to note, however, is that with SLI enabled, FarCryPrimal at 1080p scored 20fps less than with it disabled, proving once more that SLI is not perfect. In computational benchmarks, the Intel Core i7-6950X didn’t disappoint, scoring an impressive 2,155 points in Cinebench, and 8,758 in PCMark 8 Creative.
Regarding the build process, there’s no denying it was a nightmare. But that’s always going to be the case with the vast majority of microATX and ITX systems. There’s little room to move in such a small chassis, and cable management is a problem. In hindsight, it would have been much nicer to work inside the Corsair Carbide Air 240, as it is compartmentalized, which allows for cable management and better airflow. However, the Carbide Air 240 is relatively new, while the Phenom is less so, so hopefully, in the future, we’ll see BitFenix produce something of a similar caliber, if not better.