EXTREME HARDWARE
IF MONEY’S NO OBJECT, what would your Dream Machine look like? It’s a question we consider a lot, not least because of our annual quest. Are they reasonable systems? Of course not. But that’s not what it’s about. We don’t aim to ramp the price up, just piece together the best system we can. This year, we went for sleek, subtle, and clean. It’s all about maximizing potential. So, without further ado, let’s see what went into this monster rig.
1 GPUs Two MSI GeForce GTX 1080s inhabit this year’s Dream Machine. We know: no Titans. But, at twice the cost and less than a 20 percent performance increase, we couldn’t justify it. So, we grabbed these, slapped on some waterblocks, and overclocked the hell out of them: 2,100MHz-plus, and 11GHz on memory.
2 WATER COOLINGWe mixed it up a little and went for a dual loop. One for the GPUs, and one for the CPU. We even managed to passively cool the CPU without fans, and keep the overclock at 4.2GHz.
3 STORAGE The real showpiece is those four 10TB hard drives. We slapped all four of them into RAID 0 (yep), enabling sequential reads and writes up to 1GB/s—twice as fast as the best SATA SSDs.
4 CASE The In Win 909 is a real show-stopper. It’s lean, mean, and constructed entirely from aluminum. There’s nothing not to like about this highly versatile case.
5 CPU Who could forget that CPU? The Core i7-6950X is Intel’s greatest consumer processor to date. Featuring 10 cores, 20 threads, and almost passively cooled by our funky setup, this monster cruises along at 4.2GHz, obliterating benchmarks left, right, and center. The only complication is how far your jaw drops when you see those rendering times.