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Introduction, CPU and motherboard
The following article is from The Ultimate PC Building Handbook, published by Future, which contains 180 pages of PC upgrading advice from the experts at PC Format and Maximum PC.
There's really nothing wrong with excess. Who would complain, after all, of having an excess of money, an excess of holidays, or an excess of hugs? We say the same for our dream machine, which makes absolutely no apologies for having an excessive amount of hardware – and an excessive amount of power.
When we sat down to sketch out our dream machine, we decided that rather than the normal King Solomon decisions between this CPU or that CPU, this GPU or that GPU, it would be easier (and more entertaining) to just have it all.
Yes, we'd have our own cake, and we'd eat the damned thing, too. We'd actually take it with us and, yes, we'd actually get what we want. Thus, we built a dream machine that has the best GPUs available from AMD and Nvidia. We have both Haswell and Ivy Bridge-E. So, sit down and prepare to feast your eyes on the most excessive PC in the universe.
CPU number one: Intel Core i7-4790K
It's hard to believe, but after decades of making CPUs, Intel has finally broken the 4GHz barrier with its Devil's Canyon – which isn't really all that new, of course. It's essentially an Intel Core i7-4770K but made to overclock like a mother. To do that, Intel beefed up the CPU's power delivery with additional capacitors and used a "next-generation polythermal interface material" that's supposed to be far better than current thermal paste or goo in 4770K parts. This adds up to a chip that starts at 4GHz and has a turbo boost of 4.4GHz.
Other than that, it's still the same Haswell micro-architecture we've come to love. The 22nm question, though, is how far could we overclock this chip that was built explicitly for overclocking? A duplicate part hit 4.7GHz on a CLC. We're expecting more – but not much more – because few have taken Devil's Canyon's parts above the best Haswell chips. In many ways, the best way to think of Devil's Canyon is that every chip is good, while it was a gamble with the original Core i7-4770K parts.
CPU number two: Intel Core i7-4960X
In CPU technology, the Core i7-4960X has some grey hair, but it has a couple of big advantages over its Haswell sibling. The first is core count. Ivy Bridge-E offers up to 12 threads with six physical cores over the quad-limited Haswell part. Sure, Haswell may be more efficient clock-for-clock, but when the workload requires more CPU threads, Ivy Bridge-E is king.
The other big advantage Ivy Bridge-E has over Haswell is in PCIe lanes. Even on the newest Z97 boards, you get 16 PCIe Gen 3.0 lanes to share among the GPUs, with another eight weak-sauce PCIe Gen 2.0 lanes from the Z97 chipset. Ivy Bridge-E gives you a fat 40 lanes of PCIe Gen 3.0, plus another eight PCIe Gen 2.0 in the X79 chipset.
So, despite its age, Ivy Bridge-E is the current king of CPUs for those who need the core and thread count. If you were feeling extra-excessive, you might want to replace this with the latest Haswell-E chips – and indeed you could – but we were unable to get our hands on them when we set to building this monster.
Motherboard number one: Gigabyte GA-Z97X-Gaming G1 WIFI-BK
Anyone who has built enough rigs has had a DOA board. That's what Gigabyte should all but eliminate with its Black Edition series. While most motherboards are batch tested or fired up briefly to prevent shipping DOA boards, few are put through any real testing. With Black Edition boards, Gigabyte takes every single motherboard, installs it in a rack with CPU and RAM, and stress-tests it for one week before sending it on its merry way.
The GA-Z97X-Gaming G1 WIFI-BK is also dream-worthy in that it supports just about every item on the check list of things you need or want from an LGA1150 mobo. With its PLX chip, you could run four GPUs from Nvidia or AMD. If you can't decide between a Killer NIC or Intel NIC, no worries, it has both. The audio path is separated on the board to reduce interference, and it even has Creative's SoundCore and a TI Burr Brown OPA2134 op amp. The only thing not to like is the price, but this is our dream machine, so that's not going to stop us.
Motherboard number two: Asus Rampage IV Black Edition
That other board may have a 168-hour "server-grade" burn-in test and sport the Black Edition moniker, but Asus knows that when you call something Black Edition, you actually make it all black. The Rampage IV BE is, of course, based on LGA2011, which has been kicking butt and texting names for years now. The board is decked out with all the bling you'd want today, from four-way GPU support to a separated audio path, CirrusLogic DACs, headphone amp, and that awesome sonic radar (cheater) mode.
More importantly, combined with our Core i7-4960X, the Rampage IV Black Edition gives us 40 PCIe lanes in Gen 3.0 mode. While you can run two Radeon 295X2 cards in a Z97 board, it's not actually recommended by AMD. Instead, the company says, if you want big-boy GPUs, you need the big-boy chipset and CPU, too.
If you thought our Z97 was pricey, you're not going to be any happier with the price tag on this, because the Rampage IV Black Edition is slightly dearer, making it one of the most expensive non-workstation-grade motherboards around. That's a good thing, because our dream machine demands nothing less.
GPU, monitor, RAM
GPU pair number one: AMD Radeon R9 295X4
There's no doubt that in this round of the dual-GPU wars, AMD has out-manoeuvred its competitors wearing green. And few will disagree that the Radeon R9 295X2 is the winner on gaming performance and also price. At £1,100, the Radeon R9 295X2 is half the price of the Titan Z and edges it in a lot of tests.
So when we specced out our rig, we just knew we'd have to have a Radeon R9 295X2 on our dream machine team. But what could make a Radeon R9 295X2 even better? How about a Radeon R9 295X4? OK, there's no actual such beast, but if you take two Radeon R9 295X2 cards, that's actually X4 based on the rules of marketing.
The R9 295X2 itself is basically a pair of Radeon R9 290X cards, but uses an Asetek custom-designed CLC to keep the GPUs from incinerating your PC. The CLC amazingly keeps the GPU cool and quiet without sounding like a vacuum cleaner. How would CLC X2s do against a pair of Titan Zs with custom cooling? We don't care. Again, both are on the same dream machine team.
GPU pair number two: EVGA GeForce Titan Z
We know, anyone who uses a Titan Z in a full-sized desktop rig is nuttier than a fruit cake that's been passed around for four Christmases. To a crew trying to build a PC designed to shock and awe readers, that's like waving a red flag – or should we say green flag? – of insanity.
So, to annoy those practical folk already typing "Dear editor" emails, we didn't use just one, we used two EVGA GeForce GTX Titan Z Hydro Copper cards in Quad SLI. With its factory liquid-cooling jacket, the card features a higher boost clock than the stock Titan Z, and even higher than the Superclocked unit on air. Even better, on liquid, the card is now a dual-slot card GPU, unlike the three-slot air-cooled version, so it'll fit in more boards.
So, which card wins this grudge match? We don't care. That's because in our dream machine, both cards are fighting for us, not against us. Think of it as an issue where the X-Men and Brotherhood of Evil Mutants fight on the same side against the evil of low frame rates and inadequate computing.
Monitor: Asus PQ321QE
Was the CPU the hardest choice this year, or the GPU? Perhaps the PSU or keyboard? Nope. The monitor choice was the most hotly contested item in our dream machine because there were simply so many directions to go. Surround 4K? Surround G-Sync? A Cinerama Dome of monitors, perhaps?
In the end, we decided that our desk space (literally) and the reality of 4K surround today (it's a pain) meant that we'd tap on an old friend: the Asus PQ321QE. The PQ321QE really impressed us when it appeared in 2013. Of course, one isn't enough for us, so we brought along a friend: a second PQ321QE panel. Both 31.5-inch panels pretty much take all the space available on our Red Harbinger Cross Desk.
This panel is still the king of the 4K panels in terms of readability. It's just big enough that you can actually use it without squinting. The panel isn't a basic TN part, either. It uses a Sharp IGZO panel that's glorious to witness.
RAM: Corsair Dominator Platinum
We've adopted the military mantra of "no slot left behind" – and we've done it in this machine by not leaving a single RAM slot available. For our Ivy Bridge-E box, that means we used 64GB of Corsair Dominator Platinum DDR3/2400 modules. Another 32GB of DDR3/2400 Dominator Platinum modules goes into the Devil's Canyon box. That gives us a grand total of 96GB of RAM in our dream machine.
To spiff them up, we used a set of Corsair's brand new classy-looking RAM coolers, too. Although we're normally dismissive of dedicated RAM coolers, we actually found our RAM getting to uncomfortable levels on our IVB-E box before we installed the Corsair Dominator Airflow Platinum.
SSD, HDD, cooling and audio
SSDs: 1TB Samsung Evo
SSDs have been a life-changing affair since their modern iterations hit the streets back in 2007 or so. If you're reading this and you're not running one, drop this book on the bathroom floor and run – don't walk – to the shop to buy one. Since, frankly, SSDs have been performance-gated by the SATA 6Gb/s connection for some time now, we decided to go for capacity with a pair of 1TB Samsung EVO drives in RAID 0. That gives each machine 2TB of super-wicked-fast SSD, but without the capacity limits that usually have us throwing out ISO and MPEG files well before they deserve to be tossed overboard.
Although it's not SLC or even MLC NAND, Samsung gets around the performance limits with its TLC by buffering writes to a 36GB SLC NAND buffer. And, yes, we know some will fear TLC's lower life span but, honestly, you will not wear out the TLC memory in an SSD any time before you pull it from your system and laugh the same way you would at an 80GB hard drive. "What, a 1TB SSD? I have a 10TB USB flash drive!"
HDDs: Hitachi 6TB Ultrastar He6
Few of us would argue that hard drives are dead but we agree that in order to even be useful, they need to keep getting bigger. Well, it doesn't get any bigger than Hitachi's Ultrastar He6 HDD. As the name implies, each drive can store 6TB on its seven platters.
If you're floored that Hitachi has stuffed seven platters into one unit when five has usually been the limit, know that the company did this through sealing each drive and filling them with helium, which is used to reduce resistance. Since each drive is sealed, it's actually possible to dunk the unit into a non-conductive substance, such as mineral oil, for enhanced cooling – if you're so inclined. Mineral oil wasn't in the cards this time, but a nice, fat 24TB of storage was.
To think that just a few years ago, we would have had to stuff four drives into a machine to get to 2TB is mind boggling. So let the downloading begin in earnest and never, ever erase anything again!
Cooling: custom cooling
How badass is our dream machine? The bill for our cooling costs more than most people's entire builds.
With three XSPC AX360 rads, a pair of Swiftech MCP655 pumps, Bitspower quick disconnects, and Bay Reservoirs, Phobya compression fittings, plus two EK Supremacy blocks and an assortment of lights and doodads, we easily cracked the £995 mark just in cooling parts.
As with any plumbing job, it didn't go as smoothly as we hoped. In rushing to get our PC ready for photography, we plumbed up the Titan Zs incorrectly, which required a 10-minute fix and the reward of hands dyed green for a day. In hindsight, we're also not sure we'd make our picks of the rectangular Bay Reservoirs again. We originally made the choice based on shape, because we thought they would look just right on the tray of the Cross Desk. Unfortunately, the reservoirs were smaller than we expected.
In hindsight, a pair or four of tube reservoirs might have made a better choice. Still, we're happy with the choices we made. With liquid cooling, it's more expression of art than plumbing, so there is no real wrong answer.
Audio: Yamaha NS-PA40 5.1 Speakers and RX-V477 Receiver
If you're going to be sitting at your desk, bathing in the glory of a rig this ambitious, you're not going to prop up a tiny set of 2.1 speakers and call it a day. No, for something like this, you're going to want a surround-sound system. When casting our eye about for options, we ended up turning to Yamaha for a set of relatively affordable 5.1 speakers that would not only rock our ears, but also manage to remain discreet and not distract from the visual sweetness of our dream machine.
The NS-PA40 fits the bill with its sleek front tower speakers, a compact centre, and a subwoofer that fits perfectly under our desk. We definitely suggest following the recommended configuration and putting the towers in front and the satellites at the back (though they fit neatly on our desktop). Paired with the feature-laden RX-V477 receiver, we're able to switch back and forth between systems (as well as music services and auxiliary devices) in a flash.
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