THE CONCEPT

IF YOU’VE HAD A GANDER at our Dream Machine feature on page 24, you’ll be well aware of the concept behind that strapping system: pushing the maximum amount of hardware we can muster into a machine that’s viable, practical, and a little extreme. This time around, however, a lot has changed in the world of graphical fidelity. With Nvidia dropping SLI support above two cards, and the Titan X harboring little competition between it and any offerings from AMD, it gave us real pause for thought about how we were going to spec this year’s monster. In the end, we opted for a combination of processing power, storage, and motherboard superiority, as opposed to maximum graphical fidelity. Because the Titan X is rather thin on the ground, and impractically expensive, we opted to go for the far better value-for-money GTX 1080s— namely, two of MSI’s GeForce GTX 1080 Gaming X 8Gs. MSI has produced some fantastic cards this time around, and we’re yet to see a card we can’t overclock like crazy. Having two of these in SLI is more than enough to satisfy all of our 4K gaming needs—at least until those 120Hz panels drop early next year.

So, what’s so special about the storage? Well, apart from the 1.2TB Intel U.2 750 PCIe SSD, we also garnered four of Hitachi’s helium-filled 10TB drives, weighing in at an astronomical $750 apiece. These drives are enterprise grade by design, and provide some phenomenal performance for spinning platters. Throw four of them into RAID 0 or RAID 10, and you’re looking at some serious speed, comparable to SSD sequentials, with plenty of redundancy to back it up. But we’ve already waxed lyrical about all the hardware in the main feature, so let’s take a look at how we put this water-cooled wonder together.