Lucid Dream Machine?

Good things come to those who wait… and wait

IT’S TIME FOR US to have a chat about that fabled prodigal son of MaximumPC, aka the Dream Machine. For those who don’t know, every year we take the very best PC parts, and meld them together in a system that warps and pushes the very limits of our combined expertise. Each generation of Dream Machine packs more processing punch, features a bigger price tag, and often tries to break our resident master builder (this fella right here) in even more extreme and varied ways than the last.

It’s a tricky task, but a mainstay annual event in the mag that we’re keen to continue. That said, we have a problem, and it revolves around hardware. Last year’s big-ass build featured dual Titan Xp GPUs, the 10-core, 20-thread Intel Core i9-7900X, 128GB of DDR4, and all manner of weird and wonderful storage solutions. Fast-forward 12 months, and the game hasn’t really changed. We’re stuck with the same GPU architectures, the same memory limitations, and very similar storage performance; the only noticeable difference would be on the processor front, going from 10-core to 18-core at most.

Where do we go from here? Unfortunately, there’s no easy answer. We will definitely feature a new Dream Machine at some point, but we’re waiting on the hardware. A combo of Threadripper 2 and Nvidia’s latest GTX 1100-series might fit the bill, but with neither seemingly on the horizon right now, we’re going to have to sit tight. Even after they launch, getting our hands on the samples, acquiring water blocks, and gathering all the hardware together could take some time. We are going to do it, hopefully before the end of this season of MaximumPC, but we’re not quite sure when.