TRULY TITANIC

THE ONE THING WE REALLY ENJOY about speccing systems like this is just how much they change over the course of the planning stage. First, we were going to use the 12-core Threadripper, and we decided the Asus Zenith Extreme was our motherboard of choice. NZXT promised us a swanky new chassis exclusive (which, unfortunately, didn’t arrive in time), so we swapped to the Fractal Design Meshify, but that wouldn’t support the Asus Prime X399-A we eventually went with, so we finally settled on our old favorite, the Evolv ATX, instead. Couple that with the drop in effective memory frequency from 3,200 to 2,933, and that’s one hell of a lot of different tweaks and changes to how this system was originally going to shape up.

It’s a monstrous beast, with a price tag to match. It may not quite reach the heady heights of our Dream Machine from two issues ago (about $4K down on it on a pure system-to-system comparison), but it’s still an outlandish amount of money to invest in any build.

The problem, as is often the case with these builds, lies with the storage and memory. As core counts have increased, and graphical prowess has accelerated headlong into the clouds, maximum memory capacity and hard drive prices have faltered. Look back two years, and the rate of improvement pales in comparison. That said, if you want to make this build more affordable, you could shave a good $2,000 off just by lopping off some of that excess storage. Even cutting down the memory to 64GB at 2,933 would save you nearly $700.