System Builder Marathon: The $5,000 Extreme PC

[rangers641]

I'm not a big fan of limiting the price. I'd like to see benchmarks from a state-of-the-art build. I think this is what we should be comparing our systems to, not a $5,000 price limited PC. I'd like to see benchmarks on 64GB of RAM (RAM is sooo cheap nowadays). What does this do to gaming and productivity compared to a common everyday PC?

 

[WheelsOfConfusion]

[citation][nom]rangers641[/nom]I'd like to see benchmarks on 64GB of RAM (RAM is sooo cheap nowadays). [/citation]
Good luck finding a motherboard with that many slots.

 

[Guest]

Larrabee processors seem to be for integrated graphics, so I don't understand the comment from "spathi" about waiting for them(hadn't heard of them, so I googled it).

Thanks for the thoughtful comments from all the readers; I appreciate the education!

 

[Crashman]

[citation][nom]gorilla_cooch[/nom]That case is crap, the best one by far is the Xclio Windtunnel. 2x 250mm fans on the side, one that covers the entire motherboard, pci cards, ram, chipsets, cpu etc.. and the other covers the harddrives and optical drives. Also get rid of that seagate because that thing has a high failure rate not to mention random slow downs that last a minute or two, loud, and output lots of heat. Stick with western digital 1 TB or their 2 TB. Also 2 gtx 295s in sli have been proven in many tests to run slower then a single one. Would probably be better just to run one. Also sound card wise, forget X-fi seeing as how eax 5 is obsolete in vista. Asus Xonar D2X is a much better card or even the latest one they released which is the STX or something. Their software forces EAX 5 to work in vista. The Cooler master powersupply although very good should be switched with a PC Power and Cooling, Silverstone, or a CORSAIR. Corsair is amazing. SSDs have problems with writing multiple things at one time, so probably better to use 2 velociraptors RAID 0 and a western digital 2 tb. I'd probably switch that mushkin with some Corsair Dominator stuff and get 12 gigs then turn off paging file index in vista 64 bit, you get a significant boost in performance. Although the Sflex fans are good but the ENERMAX UC-MA12 120mm are even better. Forget watercooling, with this case you wont need water cooling, and with a good cooler master hyper tx or artic cooling fan, your set. Quient fast and gorgeous. Also the motherboard is a waste of money. You would be better off with the gigabye board, they have the perfect PCI layout. No company has nailed the pci slot layout like gigabyte has. If you see that they start with a pci express 1x slot, then pci express 4x slot then start with the 16x slots and pci, 16x, pci, 16x. That is the best layout. Also get a Hanns-g 28" LCD monitor or a Panasonic Viera 1080p 42" plasma tv for $900 bucks and your set. Or even a digital project with a 100" screen and you can use nvidia 3d glasses with that. Now that would be the ultimate setup.[/citation]

Every thing you said is the opposite of the truth...are you trying to be funny?
1.) XClio Wintunnel doesn't hold the radiator and feels flimsier
2.) Seagate did have a drive problem, but it was a different (similar) drive
3.) Tom's Hardware's recent Quad SLI article showed the advantage of 2x 295's in many games, the only one where two were slower than one was Crysis. And nobody plays Crysis.
4.) One of the power supplies you recommended is the one that they actually used to begin with. IT FAILED, which is why the Cooler Master was quickly shoved in as a substitute.
5.) Try looking up the X25-M specifically before commenting on SSD write performance. And then remember that reads are more important to overall performance feel. And then look at the PCMark benchmark results from this review.
6.) Corsair Dominator failed to impress in the recent 6GB high-speed kit round-up. Mushkin was much faster and half the price. Why pay twice as much for slow crap?
7.) Gigabyte's slot layout is crap too, you'll see a motherboard comparison this week that shows why. Basically, the top slot is useless and the second slot is only good for holding a short card, so you end up with a layout that resembles the one this article used.

 

[Crashman]

[citation][nom]Hothr[/nom]Why do you use awful color schemes like this in your graphs? Yesterday's $1,250 machine benchmark graphs were the first I had actually been able to easily read. Light/Dark + Blue/Green/Red makes SO much sense. I can easily tell which system is which, and which bar is the overclocked bar. Blue, Green, Red, Purple shows no information on whether it is overclocked or not, and does not provide an easy way to tell which system is which.To make things worse, the key at the bottom of every graph (that I have to look at every time) is always in a different order.Can we please have more graphs like the $1,250 build?[/citation]

The key "is always in a different order" because it's in the same order as the bars. The charts are organised by the winner of each benchmark, so the order changes. Since the key order changes with the chart order, a really persistent person could read it even on a monochrome display.

 

[flavussnow]

Isn't the goal of this $5k computer performance? I don't see how you can justify spending hundreds of dollars on upgrades to a water cooling system and $400 on a single socket motherboard when you could increase performance by at least 60% easily by going to a 2P system. If you're thrifty, you might even be able to go to a 4P system while staying under the $5k limit. FYI buying a pretty case does not increase performance.

 

[Crashman]

[citation][nom]flavussnow[/nom]Isn't the goal of this $5k computer performance? I don't see how you can justify spending hundreds of dollars on upgrades to a water cooling system and $400 on a single socket motherboard when you could increase performance by at least 60% easily by going to a 2P system. If you're thrifty, you might even be able to go to a 4P system while staying under the $5k limit. FYI buying a pretty case does not increase performance.[/citation]

The only problem with your idea is, everything you said is wrong. Look at the benchmarks used and tell me which ones can use more than 4 cores?

 

[tryceo]

No idea why they aren't doing Liquid cooling... With a $5000 build you have to water cooling... And get 3 GTX 285s... Because Quad SLI scaling sucks.... I have tried it. IMO this build really sucks... the builder does not know the the Seagate 7200.12 1.5 TB uses the old .11 platters, making it about 20MB/s slower... They need to get the 500GB .12s as they are doing an avg of 109MB/s for me...

 

[Crashman]

[citation][nom]tryceo[/nom]No idea why they aren't doing Liquid cooling... With a $5000 build you have to water cooling... And get 3 GTX 285s... Because Quad SLI scaling sucks.... I have tried it. IMO this build really sucks... the builder does not know the the Seagate 7200.12 1.5 TB uses the old .11 platters, making it about 20MB/s slower... They need to get the 500GB .12s as they are doing an avg of 109MB/s for me...[/citation]

Uh, d00d, this was water cooled, you just reworded your response to the MicroATX SBM, where 3x GTX 285 was impossible because it was MicroATX. Quit trolling.

 

[Onus]

This wasn't the microATX article, so I'm not sure what "rules" are being referenced, but this machine IS water cooled; and the system drive was a pair of Intel SSDs, no 7200.12 in sight here. Did I miss something too, or did these two posting to a thread from months ago forget their glasses this morning?

 

[tryceo]

Lol Crashman is just trolling.... He copied and pasted this to like 4 other posts... I hate trolls

 

[Crashman]

Lol Crashman is just trolling.... He copied and pasted this to like 4 other posts... I hate trolls

Show me the four other posts, and I'll show you a troll.