POWER TO SPARE
WE MAY NOT have been concerned about the cost of this rig when we were piecing it together, but now it’s whirring away, that $3,400 certainly makes its presence felt. At nearly 10 times the price of this month’s cover build, an obvious question would be: Are you getting 10 times the performance? The short answer is yes, the longer answer is that it depends on what you’re doing. Or more importantly, how you’re doing it. We’ve benchmarked our budget star at 1080p, and played games at 720p to see if it can actually game, while this machine struts its stuff at full 4K, with everything turned up as high as it will go. It’s hardly a fair comparison.
Some more relevant figures are born out of comparing this machine to the 4K zeropoint, which we built just over a year ago. The zero-point cost a bit more than this rig when it was pieced together, but you may be able to pick up the parts for less today. Still, it’s stood the test of time well—something that tends to be true at the top of the hardware pile (far more than at the budget end).
The key takeaway is that while we’ve had plenty of impressive advances over the last year, the same sort of money still nets you the kind of kick-ass machine that dreams are made of. You’re looking at a machine that can handle the best games around with ease, and produce the kind of experiences that games developers want you to enjoy. It isn’t all flawless, though, and TomClancy’sGhost
Recon:Wildlands continues to be a thorn in the 2080 Ti’s side, keeping it off the magical 60fps mark at the highest settings—if you want silky smooth performance, you have to fiddle with settings. That’s also true if you want to strut your stuff with any ray-tracing titles. They still look better than anything you could produce with a more mainstream machine, but it’s a bit galling to drop this much cash on a rig and not just be able to play it smoothly at the highest settings.
As ever at this stage in the build, we have to ask if there’s anything we would change if we were to embark on such a system again, and the answer is more emphatic than it usually is: No, not really. The case was a challenge to work with, but this was partly due to the fact that we didn’t remove the PSU shroud at the beginning; if we had, the chassis would have felt much more open to work in. It would have been nice to have a few more options with the cable management in the rear, but not enough to make us want to use another case. Ultimately, we were happy with the build and how the final machine looked. It’s not a bad performer either.