Digital Storm Releases Hailstorm II Gaming Rig

[blazorthon]

The guys who buy this will be pi$$ed when the 800 series is released soon after and beats their last gen Titans.

Even 800 series won't be able to touch the Titan. This card is miles away from anything that will come out in the next 2-3 years. The only cards that will come close will be those based on Volta platform. So you are looking at exactly 2-4 years from now since we are nowhere close to seeing Maxwell yet.

I'd bet on Titan being touched within two generations, so I'm inclined to mostly agree with you.

 

[BulkZerker]

For that kinda money those titan's should be in the LC loop as well!

 

[ibjeepr]

[citation][nom]ibjeepr[/nom]And in only a year, maybe two, it's going to be out of date tech.And In only three years, maybe 4, it's will only be a mid-range gaming system.Plus you lose out on the fun of picking out the parts and building your own system.All for only $8k. Not that someone that can afford $8k for a gaming computer cares about any of that.[/citation]

I doubt it. Titan is ahead of the curve for graphics card improvement, so it;ll probably still be a very high end system even three or four years down the road. It might only be comparable to a like $2000 to $4000 gaming system of the time by then, but that's still high-end nonetheless.

I'll stick to my answer. I don't think in 3 or 4 card generations that the Titan is going to look very impressive and while 3 in SLI may still have the horsepower to push decent FPS, it'll be lacking in features and only peform as well as a maybe a single high end card at that time. And I'm leaving CPU and RAM advances out of it at this point.
How often do you recommend adding a second card for XFire after the card has been out for 2 years, much less 3 or 4? Rarely, because at that time it makes more sence to spend slightly more for a current gen card that will perform almost as well for a fraction more with current features and support. 2 years is really the max of a computer component technology wise, IMHO. The tech is good for 4 or longer ,but really, it's out of date after 2 compatablity and feature wise and matched in performance by lower end products, relatively speaking, of the current gen.

 

[christop]

No thanks!!

 

[blazorthon]

[citation][nom]ibjeepr[/nom]
I'll stick to my answer. I don't think in 3 or 4 card generations that the Titan is going to look very impressive and while 3 in SLI may still have the horsepower to push decent FPS, it'll be lacking in features and only peform as well as a maybe a single high end card at that time. And I'm leaving CPU and RAM advances out of it at this point.
How often do you recommend adding a second card for XFire after the card has been out for 2 years, much less 3 or 4? Rarely, because at that time it makes more sence to spend slightly more for a current gen card that will perform almost as well for a fraction more with current features and support. 2 years is really the max of a computer component technology wise, IMHO. The tech is good for 4 or longer ,but really, it's out of date after 2 compatablity and feature wise and matched in performance by lower end products, relatively speaking, of the current gen.[/citation]

Let's try looking back on this. Treat the GTX 480 as Titan, the GTX 560 Ti as the Geforce 500's GTX 780, and the GTX 660 as the GTX 880 (assuming that Nvidia went on to a Geforce 700 and 800 series in their naming schemes for the next two graphics card generations). Performance-wise, it'd take another two generations to roughly meet the *Titan* in the top-end x80 card. So, even two generations later, performance is still high-end about three or four years later.

Even yet another two generations later, it'll still be high-end, even if starting to get behind in features (which I doubt will be an issue seeing as new important feature support coming out has been slowing down and RAM capacity certainly won't be an issue for Titan at any point in time for gaming) because it'll still meet or beat at least a single GPU high-end card, granted it will start to show it's age either at this point or in the next generation (now five generations later).

A great example of this would be the Radeon 4870X2. Even now, it's still a decent mid-ranged card and three Radeon 4870s in Crossfire, should they scale as well as Titan does and have as minimal other issues like Titan, would still be high-end even today. Sure, it'd only run in DX10.1, but that's really not a big deal. Having models with 2GB of RAM per GPU would mean that there'd also be no VRAM capacity issue.

The main issue at that point would mostly be much, much lower power efficiency than comparably performing stuff three to five generations later, but that doesn't stop performance from being high-end or not.

I agree that I wouldn't do this because the money saved from power consumption alone by upgrading more often can literally pay for itself in these time frames, but I don't agree that it would not be still high-end performance if left like that.

Looking back on my example with the GTX 480, two generations after it, three of them still beat any single GPU card except maybe Titan in performance despite a single 480 consuming more power than Titan does IIRC. The next generation will still be DX11.1 AFAIK and it seems that three 480s would at worst be comparable to the high-end single GPU cards of that generation and at best, they'd still be comparable to the high-end cards of the generation after it. Again, I repeat that I wouldn't recommend doing this over say GTX 670 SLI which is better while consuming much less power and probably having a not too far off cost if you look for the right deals or you can go for two Radeon 7870 LE/XT cards and sure, alone, the 480 would be far from high-end at that point, but three of them would still count as having high-end performance 😉

 

[JOSHSKORN]

[citation][nom]wanderer11[/nom]$8000 for a gaming computer? Who's gonna buy that?[/citation]
Or build your own for half the price. I think I'd be motivated enough to learn how to build my own for $4k.

 

[blazorthon]

[citation][nom]wanderer11[/nom]$8000 for a gaming computer? Who's gonna buy that?[/citation]
Or build your own for half the price. I think I'd be motivated enough to learn how to build my own for $4k.

That, I agree with wholeheartedly The price on this thing is far too high to consider. It's somewhat understandable since there needs to be room for profit, especially to make up for there probably only being a few sales of this system, but it just doesn't make sense from a buyer's point of view IMO.

 

[ibjeepr]

[citation][nom]ibjeepr[/nom]And in only a year, maybe two, it's going to be out of date tech.And In only three years, maybe 4, it's will only be a mid-range gaming system.Plus you lose out on the fun of picking out the parts and building your own system.All for only $8k. Not that someone that can afford $8k for a gaming computer cares about any of that.[/citation]

I doubt it. Titan is ahead of the curve for graphics card improvement, so it;ll probably still be a very high end system even three or four years down the road. It might only be comparable to a like $2000 to $4000 gaming system of the time by then, but that's still high-end nonetheless.

I'll stick to my answer. I don't think in 3 or 4 card generations that the Titan is going to look very impressive and while 3 in SLI may still have the horsepower to push decent FPS, it'll be lacking in features and only peform as well as a maybe a single high end card at that time. And I'm leaving CPU and RAM advances out of it at this point.
How often do you recommend adding a second card for XFire after the card has been out for 2 years, much less 3 or 4? Rarely, because at that time it makes more sence to spend slightly more for a current gen card that will perform almost as well for a fraction more with current features and support. 2 years is really the max of a computer component technology wise, IMHO. The tech is good for 4 or longer ,but really, it's out of date after 2 compatablity and feature wise and matched in performance by lower end products, relatively speaking, of the current gen.

Let's try looking back on this. Treat the GTX 480 as Titan, the GTX 560 Ti as the Geforce 500's GTX 780, and the GTX 660 as the GTX 880 (assuming that Nvidia went on to a Geforce 700 and 800 series in their naming schemes for the next two graphics card generations). Performance-wise, it'd take another two generations to roughly meet the *Titan* in the top-end x80 card. So, even two generations later, performance is still high-end about three or four years later.

Even yet another two generations later, it'll still be high-end, even if starting to get behind in features (which I doubt will be an issue seeing as new important feature support coming out has been slowing down and RAM capacity certainly won't be an issue for Titan at any point in time for gaming) because it'll still meet or beat at least a single GPU high-end card, granted it will start to show it's age either at this point or in the next generation (now five generations later).

A great example of this would be the Radeon 4870X2. Even now, it's still a decent mid-ranged card and three Radeon 4870s in Crossfire, should they scale as well as Titan does and have as minimal other issues like Titan, would still be high-end even today. Sure, it'd only run in DX10.1, but that's really not a big deal. Having models with 2GB of RAM per GPU would mean that there'd also be no VRAM capacity issue.

The main issue at that point would mostly be much, much lower power efficiency than comparably performing stuff three to five generations later, but that doesn't stop performance from being high-end or not.

I agree that I wouldn't do this because the money saved from power consumption alone by upgrading more often can literally pay for itself in these time frames, but I don't agree that it would not be still high-end performance if left like that.

Looking back on my example with the GTX 480, two generations after it, three of them still beat any single GPU card except maybe Titan in performance despite a single 480 consuming more power than Titan does IIRC. The next generation will still be DX11.1 AFAIK and it seems that three 480s would at worst be comparable to the high-end single GPU cards of that generation and at best, they'd still be comparable to the high-end cards of the generation after it. Again, I repeat that I wouldn't recommend doing this over say GTX 670 SLI which is better while consuming much less power and probably having a not too far off cost if you look for the right deals or you can go for two Radeon 7870 LE/XT cards and sure, alone, the 480 would be far from high-end at that point, but three of them would still count as having high-end performance 😉

You're continuing to focus on just the video cards instead of the whole system, which is what I commented on.
Second, go back 4 years to late 2008, early 2009 and see what video cards where out and tell me which ones you would recommend over a 660 ti or HD 7950 now. Even in SLI or Xfire. Then do it for processors and ram, then find a current motherboard they'll even fit in.
Third I said in my post that 3 Titans would still push enough FPS to be useful but a poor value compared to a new gen midlevel card so I'm not sure what you are debating there.
To say this system will be highend in 4 years is just silly. As I said, usable still, yes, high end, no, worth 8k now, no.
I'm still going with my original post.

 

[blazorthon]

You're continuing to focus on just the video cards instead of the whole system, which is what I commented on.
Second, go back 4 years to late 2008, early 2009 and see what video cards where out and tell me which ones you would recommend over a 660 ti or HD 7950 now. Even in SLI or Xfire. Then do it for processors and ram, then find a current motherboard they'll even fit in.
Third I said in my post that 3 Titans would still push enough FPS to be useful but a poor value compared to a new gen midlevel card so I'm not sure what you are debating there.
To say this system will be highend in 4 years is just silly. As I said, usable still, yes, high end, no, worth 8k now, no.
I'm still going with my original post.

Even including the CPU and RAM won't change much. The RAM isn't an issue whatsoever since the capacity will be plenty for many years to come and the RAM performance at DDR3-1066 and DDR3-1333 is already not really a bottle-neck at all, so the faster memory in such as system as this won't have any issues at all. For example, we could have 12GB of triple channel DDR3-1333 memory or at least triple channel DDR3-1066 memory with the early X58 systems and that's far more than necessary for today's high-end gaming systems.

As for the CPU, even going back and looking at say a quad-core i7-9xx CPU that's overclocked to about 4GHz, it still has high-end gaming CPU performance today and that's more than four years old from late 2008. CPU performance improvement has been slowing down as Intel focuses more on reducing power consumption and BOM than on performance improvement, so it stands to reason that the i7-3970X in this system won't have any trouble for a long time, especially since games are getting better and better able to use it's huge number of threads effectively as time goes on. Even a highly overclocked Core 2 Quad/Extreme in a DDR3 motherboard with say 8GB of decent DDR3 memory can have high-end CPU performance and plenty of RAM capacity and RAM performance for any current game.

Furthermore, again, whether or not I'd recommend say three GTX 480s over say two GTX 670s is irrelevant as far as this matters because the three 480s still have high-end performance. The same will be even more true for Titan which is much further ahead of the performance generation curve than the 480 was. Considering Titan's curve, it'd be like a single GPU card from the GTX 200 series with performance comparable to the dual-GPU GTX 295, aka similar performance also, to, you probably guessed it, the GTX 480.

What I'm saying is that even around four years later, this article's computer will still be a high-end gaming rig. No mid-ranged graphics card, even two generations down the road, will be anywhere near as fast as three Titans. The same is probably true for three generations down the road. Maybe four generations later, there will be a mid-ranged card that can touch three Titans. However, I wouldn't even put much faith in that. None of those cards will beat three Titans in price/performance at the time because you'd already have the three Titans whereas replacing them will cost money.

I'm not even saying that the article's computer is really worth the $8K price tag, although the CPU and graphics are easily worth $4000 alone even if you buy the four parts themselves. The rest of the system is undoubtedly similar great, so it might actually not be all too badly priced for an OEM system compared to a similar homebuilt system. Price/performance, Titan still sucks and so does the i7-3970X. However, that's pretty much irrelevant because there is currently no alternative for the Titans and going down to say an i7-3930K won't change much since the budget is already so huge.

So, yes, even the CPU and RAM will be fine. The CPU and graphics will still be high end for a very long time and the RAM won't be an issue either. There, I didn't focus just on graphics 😉

 

[ibjeepr]

You're continuing to focus on just the video cards instead of the whole system, which is what I commented on.
Second, go back 4 years to late 2008, early 2009 and see what video cards where out and tell me which ones you would recommend over a 660 ti or HD 7950 now. Even in SLI or Xfire. Then do it for processors and ram, then find a current motherboard they'll even fit in.
Third I said in my post that 3 Titans would still push enough FPS to be useful but a poor value compared to a new gen midlevel card so I'm not sure what you are debating there.
To say this system will be highend in 4 years is just silly. As I said, usable still, yes, high end, no, worth 8k now, no.
I'm still going with my original post.

Even including the CPU and RAM won't change much. The RAM isn't an issue whatsoever since the capacity will be plenty for many years to come and the RAM performance at DDR3-1066 and DDR3-1333 is already not really a bottle-neck at all, so the faster memory in such as system as this won't have any issues at all. For example, we could have 12GB of triple channel DDR3-1333 memory or at least triple channel DDR3-1066 memory with the early X58 systems and that's far more than necessary for today's high-end gaming systems.

As for the CPU, even going back and looking at say a quad-core i7-9xx CPU that's overclocked to about 4GHz, it still has high-end gaming CPU performance today and that's more than four years old from late 2008. CPU performance improvement has been slowing down as Intel focuses more on reducing power consumption and BOM than on performance improvement, so it stands to reason that the i7-3970X in this system won't have any trouble for a long time, especially since games are getting better and better able to use it's huge number of threads effectively as time goes on. Even a highly overclocked Core 2 Quad/Extreme in a DDR3 motherboard with say 8GB of decent DDR3 memory can have high-end CPU performance and plenty of RAM capacity and RAM performance for any current game.

Furthermore, again, whether or not I'd recommend say three GTX 480s over say two GTX 670s is irrelevant as far as this matters because the three 480s still have high-end performance. The same will be even more true for Titan which is much further ahead of the performance generation curve than the 480 was. Considering Titan's curve, it'd be like a single GPU card from the GTX 200 series with performance comparable to the dual-GPU GTX 295, aka similar performance also, to, you probably guessed it, the GTX 480.

What I'm saying is that even around four years later, this article's computer will still be a high-end gaming rig. No mid-ranged graphics card, even two generations down the road, will be anywhere near as fast as three Titans. The same is probably true for three generations down the road. Maybe four generations later, there will be a mid-ranged card that can touch three Titans. However, I wouldn't even put much faith in that. None of those cards will beat three Titans in price/performance at the time because you'd already have the three Titans whereas replacing them will cost money.

I'm not even saying that the article's computer is really worth the $8K price tag, although the CPU and graphics are easily worth $4000 alone even if you buy the four parts themselves. The rest of the system is undoubtedly similar great, so it might actually not be all too badly priced for an OEM system compared to a similar homebuilt system. Price/performance, Titan still sucks and so does the i7-3970X. However, that's pretty much irrelevant because there is currently no alternative for the Titans and going down to say an i7-3930K won't change much since the budget is already so huge.

So, yes, even the CPU and RAM will be fine. The CPU and graphics will still be high end for a very long time and the RAM won't be an issue either. There, I didn't focus just on graphics 😉

LOL, no, you didn't just focus on the graphics
We'll have to wait and see in 4 years if you are right.

 

[dalethepcman]

wow so many posts that are tldr....

To sum up, many people think that a system like this will still be "high end" performance in 4 years. Sorry to disappoint, but this is highly improbable. Just sticking to the green camp, look back one generation to the GTX 590(dual GPU), it is roughly on par with the GTX 680. The GTX 295 (dual GPU) is on par with the GTX 480 or 660ti, and the 9800X2 is roughly on par with the GTX285 or 460. Every dual GPU flagship card has been on par with a single generation leap single gpu flagship card or two generation leap mid range card. What makes you think this trend will stop now?

Crossfire / SLI give especially diminishing returns on a card that is already "two" cards with an internal bridge. Even with three(six) GPU's in this beast, I see this being on par with a high end single GPU card configuration in two generations. Which is fully supported by the history of performance in the charts readily available from this very site.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gaming-graphics-card-review,3107-7.html

 

[blazorthon]

wow so many posts that are tldr....

To sum up, many people think that a system like this will still be "high end" performance in 4 years. Sorry to disappoint, but this is highly improbable. Just sticking to the green camp, look back one generation to the GTX 590(dual GPU), it is roughly on par with the GTX 680. The GTX 295 (dual GPU) is on par with the GTX 480 or 660ti, and the 9800X2 is roughly on par with the GTX285 or 460. Every dual GPU flagship card has been on par with a single generation leap single gpu flagship card or two generation leap mid range card. What makes you think this trend will stop now?

Crossfire / SLI give especially diminishing returns on a card that is already "two" cards with an internal bridge. Even with three(six) GPU's in this beast, I see this being on par with a high end single GPU card configuration in two generations. Which is fully supported by the history of performance in the charts readily available from this very site.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gaming-graphics-card-review,3107-7.html

I disagree completely and since I've already explained my reasoning excellently, I won't repeat myself.

 

[sanilmahambre]

That is a MONSTER of gaming rig spitting fire