Xotic PC's New Exodus PC Costs $6,700

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All parts priced out on PcPartPicker come to $3400....not counting water cooling.

So they are charging $3300 extra for this joke of a computer.

3 500GB SSDs in Raid 0???

6700k with 980ti's in SLI?

Where is the super nice 4k monitor?
 
Yes, they do not pay retail like we would, and furthermore, the custom water cooling, will not be very custom as with a mass production style process, they will have all lengths of tubing and other components premade.

With a custom liquid cooling setup, most of the time is spent measuring, planning and cutting, if you will do multiple of the same system, then it is easily to just duplicate each part.

If it is cheaper for us to build a system like that when each component we pick, has its own retail markup, then we can be sure that they have an astronomically high profit margin.

when doing an initial build on pcpartpicker, I tried to match their price with a super high end system, but I couldn't come up with anything practical at the price. At the $6000 mark, I was already losing practicality and well into the realm of diminishing returns. I literally could not get $6700 without effectively turning the system into a gaming PC/ NAS/.
 
3 SSD in RAID 0?? And they call themselves professional builder? Ha!

Should be at least RAID 5 to get most benefit from it. Otherwise just do a dual setup like most people. SSD for OS only and really fast mechanical for data. So if SSD takes a dump no big deal. Your data is still intact.

RAID 0 for any SSD is just asking for problems.

Maybe 4 SSD in RAID10 would be ok to provide redundancy and speed but no matter how you slice it any kind of RAID will always add latency due to overhead.

 
You only need 1 SSD unless you work with video editing (specially 4k). If you got a raid0 SSD you will only see the speed within the same drive and totally nerfed by the other mechanical drive (120MB/s max for a 5900rpm) or need another raid0 setup to copy/write.

A realistic gaming machine (ignoring the X99 platform)
6700K
2x8GB DDR4 3000 (you don't need more)
2x980ti 6GB
1-2TB SSD 850 Pro (higher endurance)
2x6TB Western Digital Black (data/video/games that perform pretty much the same on mechanical/ssd)

Remember people used to raid0 mechanicals because they were SLOW so they cut the latency by by 40% and improve the read/writes by another 40%. It really made a difference.

Now SSD's have 100x less latency, 4-5 times the avrg copy/write speeds. But the games don't load 3-4-5x faster, the most demanding hard drive wise will at most reduce loading to 50-60% then ingame minor improvement (probably ARMA 3).

So what's the point of raid 0 when its damn obvious that bruteforcing performance on the disk part will not add any more benefit. The games are not coded to take advantage of the huge latency drop from HDD-->SSD, the huge improve in 4k/random or raw copy/write.
 
A quick stop by PCPartsPicker.com shows that all these components (minus the water cooling) add up to 3454$ , whichs makes this build almost 3300$ overpriced. You could literally buy 2 of those sytems for their price.
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Right, but the water cooling loop will cost about $1000 to install and configure correctly on your own. Plus, you aren't paying for parts only - you're paying for some other people to assemble, overclock, test, and benchmark it. That company has to pay their employees, and that can't happen if they only charge for parts. In other words, you're paying for labor and convenience.

Good business is never done at cost, moron.

That said, I would NEVER pay that much for this computer (which has a poor SSD config, and definitely not optimal hardware for the price), but this idea among online entitled brats who talk tough behind a computer that everything should be done at cost is what's wrong with socioeconomics.
 
They went with 3 lower end SSDs for their RAID setup. This shows a great deal of stupidity. They could have simply gone with 2TB of NVMe SSD storage (more performance, without the unreliability of the RAID0 setup.

For their price overall, they could have used these parts and still make a profit by charging $6000

They could have gone with a technically better case

http://pcpartpicker.com/p/CPdfqs

I had very bad experiences with cases from Corsair, their quality control is poor. I have an 920D, tops of the line, and it's not worth the money.. The HDD/SSS trays have flimsy pins to hold the drives, and I had to replace them with rubber screws. I had to add strong magnets to the lower doors because they kept on falling open.

Look at NZXT, Fractal Designs, and CaseLabs. For the price of ~6500 you could get a custom water loop using quality materials. The SSDs should never be used for boot drives, there are a number of add on in the motherboards that will give you faster speeds.
I make custom computers and I would never dream of putting out a computer like the one they are selling. Quality is king, so they are not going to be in business for long.

$5482.77

The custom liquid cooling loop can be skipped. With the 980ti, it does not offer much of a benefit, and a decent closed loop cooler can easily handle a CPU overclock to 4.8GHz with no problems.

CPU: Intel Core i7-6700K 4.0GHz Quad-Core Processor ($419.99 @ Newegg)
CPU Cooler: Corsair H100i GTX 70.7 CFM Liquid CPU Cooler ($99.99 @ Micro Center)
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-Z170X-Gaming GT ATX LGA1151 Motherboard ($308.94 @ Newegg)
Memory: G.Skill Ripjaws V Series 64GB (4 x 16GB) DDR4-2800 Memory ($419.99 @ Newegg)
Storage: Intel DC P3500 2TB PCI-E Solid State Drive ($2214.98 @ Newegg)
Storage: Western Digital Red 4TB 3.5" 5900RPM Internal Hard Drive ($148.98 @ OutletPC)
Video Card: MSI GeForce GTX 980 Ti 6GB Video Card (2-Way SLI) ($609.99 @ Micro Center)
Video Card: MSI GeForce GTX 980 Ti 6GB Video Card (2-Way SLI) ($609.99 @ Micro Center)
Case: Corsair 900D ATX Full Tower Case ($299.99 @ Amazon)
Power Supply: EVGA SuperNOVA 1300 G2 1300W 80+ Gold Certified Fully-Modular ATX Power Supply ($159.99 @ Newegg)
Operating System: Microsoft Windows 10 Home OEM (64-bit) ($89.88 @ OutletPC)
Total: $5352.71

This system would offer a far better storage experience with an enterprise level SSD, as well at 4TB of hard drive space (2TB of which can be used for backup of the SSD, and the other 2TB for anime.


Remember, for prebuilds, you do not do custom liquid cooling loops. Most people who buy prebuilds, will never service their liquid cooling system, and thus it will eventually end up with gunked up waterblocks and a host of other issues. Furthermore, most will not know how to modify the loop when upgrading components (e.g., removing a waterblock for an older GPU from the loop so that a new aircooled one can be added, or redoing a portion of the system to get the loo to fig a new videocard with a different waterblock design.

It is overall more trouble than it is worth for those who are not into regular maintenance. For the money saved, you could still do a very high end loop, but it is not worth it.
Click to expand...

Pretty sure you need 10 pro to see all that ram
Click to expand...
 
I think the practical reason for doing RAID0 on 3 SSDs is just for the sake of having all three SSDs as one large volume. RAID1 could accomplish this, but RAID0 would provide some wear leveling. All the SSDs would see an equal amount of wear in RAID0, as opposed to the second and third SSDs doing literally nothing while the first SSD does all the work until you finally do fill up the volume with enough data to utilize the additional SSDs in the array.
Click to expand...

RAID1 is mirroring, so 3x500GB RAID1 is 500GB usable. It wears evenly since every byte you write to the array gets written to each drive (so, 3 actual bytes written).

To achieve what you are describing of a large pool of drives where the first one is used while the second and third remain inactive until the first is full would be done with JBOD - Just a Bunch of Disks. It's not a RAID level at all though most RAID controllers offer the option. It's typically used to merge mismatched disks into a single pool. Though with Linux, LVM accomplishes the same thing.
 


Why do I buy a $6500+ gaming system to do virtual machine?

I can spend $2000 for a game system and the rest for a REAL server to do virtual machine....
 


The actual question is:
"Why do I buy a $6500+ gaming system ?"
 


Because you're really really wealthy.
 


You don't get to be 'wealthy' by spending money stupidly.
 


If someone has millions of dollars, what's a mere $6700?
 
Drake:

Agreed it should have a 5960X but disagree about SSDs in raid 0 being useless.

I run 2 X TB Samsung SSDs in raid 0 for a 4TB steam/Origin/UPlay gaming "drive". It's simpler to have a single volume for all your games rather than a D:, an E:, etc drive.
 
Cutting and bending rigid tubing is extremely labor intensive. I spent most of a 3 week vacation building my custom water loop ... granted most of that was spent measuring everything up and trying various alternatives. A 2nd build would take 1/4th the time but as this is something every self builder would have to do, $6700 for that type of labor effort is by no means unreasonable, at least if you figure your time as worth anything.. As to the components:

1. "Switching to the Haswell-E platform would have likely increased the price a little, but if you're willing to drop thousands on a gaming PC, you would probably be willing to shell out an extra $200-300 for Haswell-E if it meant you would have better performance."

Show me. I see no advantage to the X99 platform on a gaming box with just 2 GFX cards....workstation yes, gaming no, at least from what I have seen to date. Here the 4790k wins more than it loses in 2 x SLI and the 6700k is faster than a 4790k
http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/1260?vs=1320

2. SSD's in RAID 0 - impressive benchmarks but that's it .... unless you're doing video editing / production or something similar, it's useless. Single 1 TB SSD would have been a better choice.

3. If you are going to include a mechanical HD,make it at least a 2TB and spend $20 extra and at least make it an SSHD.
 
@JackNaylor: I agree, I don't think they realize that custom loops really are quite time consuming (especially the rigid), nor do they understand the costs of a worker's wage, property tax, electricity bills, water bills, and all the costs that go with a facility, and the need to make money. Those custom loops alone are usually very expensive as is.
 
What I was getting at is, a reasonable informed home builder will usually knock off a build in 2-3 hours on average which involves struggling a bit with Case manual, MoBo manual, Cooler manual, some minor troubleshooting and OS install. When doing the same in a production environment, you'll get that down to less than an hour. Those costs you mention, plus 3 years of user support offset those 2 hours and then some.

But doing that build for the 1st time involves a massive amount of time figuring out what will fit not to mention the amount of time spent and material lost "practicing" how to bend the tubing. I spent hours researching the length of the GFX cards once the heat sink and shroud were removed (never did find an answer) and finally bought a card just to measure it. I made a cardboard mockup of the GFX card and other components in order to measure what would fit in the case when in SLI.... as it turned out the top card cleared the reservoir by about 1.5mm. The 2nd card cleared the bracket by 2mm to bracket on a 45 degree angle that the the card was 1/4" lower, it would have hit. The other parts is, you wind up purchasing in parts bunches buying the next round of parts only when you have confirmed fit. Then you also have to buy all the tools and learn how to use them.

So once you have a prototype in this instance, cutting their build time from > 100 hours to maybe 4 has a lot more impact than going from 3 hours to 1. Saving $300 for 2 hours effort is a very different question than spending $3,000 to save 96.

Bitspower came along and started making their Crystal Link kits which precut tubing between cards in SLI / CF. MoBo companies are now standardizing Motherboard layouts and EK is now making MonoBlocks that fit a wide range of motherboards; Cablemod and others offer custom cable sets, other outfits are making custom backplates. I think at some point we'll see shops offering MoBo kits that link all MoBo mounted components with rigid tubing.

 


And this thing is merely a flagship...an advertisement.
I'd be surprised if they sell more than 3 like this.
 
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