WHEN TASKED WITH THE IMPOSSIBLE…
SYNERGY IS THE CREATION of a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. It’s the defining principle behind all things computational: bringing different pieces of hardware together to create a force of synthetic reckoning. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the Dream Machine, a system without limits. Does the 2016 Dream Machine deliver? We think so.
The Intel Core i7-6950X is no slouch, and it drives this monstrosity forward on a wave of its own perpetual motion, drawing scores of well over 2,000 in Cinebench. Yes, the single-core performance doesn’t compete with the more consumer-friendly Skylake, but it’s designed for heavy workloads and multithreaded tasks, rather than gaming— not that lacks capability in that regard….
Coupled with two massively overclocked GTX 1080s, that’s a point proven well enough. Although SLI is still a bit flaky in some games, with developers often ignoring it entirely, the power unleashed by having two of these Pascal powerhouses is enough to make you weep. Thanks to some aggressive cooling from that massive triple 120mm fan rad and isolated loop, maintaining a 60fps average in most modern titles at 4K is definitely possible.
Then there’s the storage. Four 10TB helium-filled hard drives line the roof of this phantom. In RAID 0, they thrash SSDs in both capacity and sequential speed. Were we irresponsible placing them in RAID 0? If this was an everyday machine, it would have been a simple RAID 1+0, allowing for speeds comparable to an SSD, except with 20TB of storage, and 20TB of redundancy— talk about an onboard NAS or what, huh?
Up against our new zero-point, this year’s Dream Machine leaves it in a corner crying itself to sleep. Two water-cooled giants have butted heads—one big, one little— and, unsurprisingly, the biggest one. Only a select few benchmarks were less than a 100 percent increase in performance, and those tended to be due to the Core i76700K’s insane single-core performance.
So, what is this machine? It’s a do-all, be-all system. Capable of gaming at 4K 60fps, while simultaneously rendering video, ready for upload later in the day. Is it practical? No. But if we’ve noticed anything from this year’s build, it’s how much money we’ve saved, and how much performance we’ve gained. We’ll give you a hint: it’s close to $4,000, for twice as much storage, twice as much RAM, similar graphical performance, and some serious heft in the motherboard and CPU department.