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

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Yes but you keep seeming to ignore the fact that the people who buy these things don't really know anything about computer hardware.

And haven't they been in this business for a while? They must be selling these expensive gaming machines.
 


Yes, they've been in business for quite a while.
Yes, they sell a lot of PC's.
Very few are at that price level.

Many companies have some sort of flagship advertising model. Car companies, PC companies, furniture companies.
It generates buzz, traffic, and interest in the company.

So what?
 


I don't expect them to sell a lot at this price level, but I'm just saying that it is priced as any prebuilt of these specs would be priced at by any other company.
 
Perception can be everything .... in the late 90's every exec on a commuter train carried an IBM laptop. Without fail, the IBM A20p was the one that made the magazine covers of the Laptop Roundup. It had the fastest PSU, fastest RAM, fastest GFX ... everything in it was the best that was available and it kicked tail. It was also at a price (> $3k) that made it practical for few but those using CAD on the job site, doing Graphics production on the road or those w/ enough disposable to have a portable gaming platform.

But when those exces were reading those puter mags on the train, they were also logging in their heads that IBM was best and that's all that thy bought fro themselves and all they purchased when they authorized buying 2500 units for their staff. They were getting much cheaper models, but they all had an IBM logo on it. So these is a lot of truth to having a something the grabs the eye so that press and consumers at trade shows and looking at ads are drawn to your brand name.

I don't like liquid cooling with flexible tubing; the lack of right angles and straight lines offends my sense of order. Rigid is aesthetically pleasing. And while some are drawn to CLCs as they want to step up and join the elite ... even when the gains are imaginary, they will spend extra to go there.

And while I agree that a flagship model's purchase is primarily to bring name recognition, I think they have something more in mind here. Folks like Bill Owen and Singularity have way more orders than they can handle and they are charging well into 5 figures for their builds. So if Singularity can sell 70 "one of's" a year and make money, I think these guys will sell more than a few of these. The main focus of sites like THG is that any average Joe can build a high end box and save a ton of money doing it.

However, most of your average Joes will not have the time, knowledge, persistence, confidence and tooling to undertake a rigid tubing build. These builds requires a substantial investment in tooling. And with many folks, especially young folks working 55-60 hour weeks and bringing home a decent salary, many will feel that their free time is worth more than $30 an hour. So yes, I do see an outfit like this having a better chane of selling a $6k rigid tubing build than a $3.5k air cooled build.
 
For less than this price CyberpowerPC will build you a vastly superior computer.
- 1.2TB Intel 750 series PCI-e SSD
- 3x4TB hard drives which you could set in RAID 5 for 8TB redundant Storage
- Top of the line ASROCK motherboard because you are wasting money so why not
- 64GB DDR4 2800mhz RAM (with room for another 64GB)
- Intel i7 5930K
- Phantek Enthoo Pro Case
- 1,500W 80 plus Titanium fully modular PSU

Then depending on your preferences you could choose one of these VGA plus cooling options.
Option 1
- Dual Titan X 12GB SLI
- Top of the line air cooling for low maintenance
- $6500

Option 2
- Dual Titan X hybrid 12GB SLI
- 240mm Liquid cooled CPU
- That's three separate liquid cooling systems which need Maintenance (but hey it is Titan X and liquid cooled)
- $6900

Option 3
- As described in the article 360mm closed loop liquid cooling system
- 2 Way SLI GTX 980 TI Hydro
- $6100

Option 4
- As described in the article 360mm closed loop liquid cooling system
- 3 Way SLI GTX 980 TI hydro
- $6964

As stated before this is with a vastly superior motherboard, RAM, CPU, PSU, SSD, Case and Hard Drive.

If I was willing to waste this much money on a gaming PC and wanted a boutique brand. This company offers closer to top of the line tech for less. For $4,800 they'll build the same system in this article except with 4x512GB Samsung Evo SSD. They don't have a 3x512GB RAID 0 option. Although I'm sure you could call and save $250.
 


But there's water everywhere. If you yank the tube out of the fitting, water would spill everywhere...
 


Not if you designed the loop properly. When ya change ya radiator hoses on ya car, do ya just just yank off the bottom hose, or use the drain valve on the radiator to empty the system first ?

Same deal ... that's the radiator before installation ....rotating elbow, 40mm extension, quick-disconnect fitting
700


That's the QD fitting with system completed
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So in the above image, where's the pump, resorvoir?

Something's not adding up in my mind. For one thing, how thick is that radiator! So anyway, when you drain it, how can you ensure it's fully drained? Wouldn't there still be water in the CPU block, and drops of water inside the tubing?

Oh, so what you're saying is that you don't actually remove the CPU block, pump, resorvoir, and radiator, you simply disconnect the tubes attatched to all those, correct?
 


I think you will find that w/o the custom water loop, Xotic PC is not that far out of line as compared to Cyberpower or anyone else where air / CLC / hybrid type cooling is involved.

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/xotic-pc-havoc-intel-z170m,30840.html

You can do your builds here w/ the same results as in your builds but like many sites, you will likely find Asus, Gigabyte and MSI high end boards, Asrock options are more typically associated with more budget oriented builds, tho that mindset is much less deserved of late than it has been in previous generations.

http://www.xoticpc.com/havoc-intel-x99-wellsburg-p-6626.html?startcustomization=1

Even going further foe more premium components than those 4 builds with Twin KINGPIN Ti's and 2 TB SSD, the cost is just $4750 .... it's adding the custom water cooling that adds the big premium .... $1,015.00, using acrylic tubing adds another $400. There's the $1500 cost premium...adding premium TIM adds $130 or so and braided cables adds $100. This all goes away with a cheap CLC / hybrid solutions which provides no performance advantage over well designed and much cheaper air cooling solutions.

The reason this unit costs what it does is because any custom shop or self builder will need to spend in excess of 100 hours to do the custom cooling loop with rigid tubing as a "one of". Yes, you can buy similar or better component builds for much cheaper but they will not include custom fabricated rigid tubing.

I can't see paying Cyberpower or Xotic to build any of your 4 or my $4500 build on Xotic site as any average Joe could do it and save considerably w/o investing an inordinate amount of time. Let's say, they are making $800 on the build and saving me 3 hours of my time.... I'll invest my time for $300 an hour. But doing a rigid acrylic loop requires hundred of dollars in tools, and unless you follow someone else's build who has already prototyped all the components and insured fit for all of them, you are going to spend 100+ hours doing rigid acrylic. Those with adequate disposable income will be less likely to invest there limited free time when all they are saving is $30 per hour.

Other considerations:

1. I wouldn't recommend 4 TB drives have a very high failure rate, whereas the same model 2TB units do just fine.
http://www.hardware.fr/articles/927-6/disques-durs.html

- 4,76% WD Black WD4001FAEX
- 4,24% WD Black WD3001FAEX
- 0,70% WD Black WD2003FZEX
- 0,56% WD Black WD2002FAEX

If you want better performing Hard Drives, I'd recommend SSHDs which are 50% faster in gaming than the WD Black and have failure rates about 1/4th of the 4 TB units

2. Based upon comparison testing by Anandtech, Skylake, Devil's Canyon and even Haswell are, more often than not depending on the game, faster than X99 / 5930kin gaming with 1 or 2 GFX cards, X99 only surges ahead after adding the 3rd 9and 4th) cards. If used for both Gaming and Video editing / encoding, then I think X99 / RAID 0 merits consideration.

3. The system even water cooled and heavily overclocked has no need for anything more than 1050 watts. The 980 Ti in SLI, overclocked draws the less power than my SLI build (16 fans, 2 water pumps and 5 x 140mm of rad) and I'm seeing 745 watts peak under Furmark at the wall. At 90% efficiency, that's about 708 watts of PSU output.... sizing for 50% of max load, would be 1062 watts.

4. Titans are slower than 980 Tis when both are overclocked.

5. The Hybrid cooling lowers the GPU temp but not the VRM and it's the VRM if anything that will usually limit 9xx series overclocking.

6. 240mm Corsair Series CLC's are 12 times louder and do not cool as well as less expensive air coolers like the R1 (3C advantage) and D15 (2C advantage).
b2.jpg


7. Again, RAID 0 offers 0 benefit in Gaming

8. If one is picking the best GFX cards, the ones on top of the list would normally be the Classified and Lightning. EK declined this round to make a block for the Lightning. OTOH, the value of those two cards has diminished in recent generations as they barely have a return on investment outside of LN2 and DICE configurations. Out of the more commonly purchased "gaming" models, tested overclock results are as follows:

Model / test fps / % over stock settings

Gigabyte G1 134.8 131.4%
Palit Jetstream 133.1 129.7%
Asus Strix 131.7 128.4%
MSI Gaming 130.5 127.2%
Zotac Amp 130.4 127.1%
EVGA SC 126.8 123.6%

One could always self build or have someone custom build a box that's better. ONLY thing that is attractive here is that someone else bought all the tools, did all the measuring up, test fit the various components and then did the final install.
 


Do you really need to spend $2,000 for an enterprise level SSD on a consumer grade PC? Let's think about this here. And no, you won't find anything superior at Cyberpower, either. :lol:

But $6700 and it doesn't have at least an M2 drive is blasphemy. I'd much rather have a high end M2 drive than RAID 0.

This is what I would do for that kind of cash:

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant

CPU: Intel Core i7-6700K 4.0GHz Quad-Core Processor ($419.99 @ Amazon)
Motherboard: Asus MAXIMUS VIII EXTREME EATX LGA1151 Motherboard ($460.99 @ NCIX US)
Memory: Corsair Vengeance LPX 32GB (4 x 8GB) DDR4-2400 Memory ($189.99 @ Amazon)
Storage: Samsung 950 PRO 512GB M.2-2280 Solid State Drive ($329.99 @ Amazon)
Storage: Western Digital BLACK SERIES 2TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive ($117.10 @ Amazon)
Video Card: MSI GeForce GTX 980 Ti 6GB Video Card (2-Way SLI) ($649.99 @ B&H)
Video Card: MSI GeForce GTX 980 Ti 6GB Video Card (2-Way SLI) ($649.99 @ B&H)
Case: Inwin 909 SILVER ATX Full Tower Case ($449.99 @ Newegg)
Power Supply: EVGA SuperNOVA 1000 P2 1000W 80+ Platinum Certified Fully-Modular ATX Power Supply ($186.99 @ SuperBiiz)
Total: $3455.02
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2016-01-03 18:06 EST-0500

And then that $2K would go toward a custom liquid cooling CPU - GPU solution.
 


1000


Numbers correspond to the (X) I added to ya post

1. The image you were looking at shows only the bottom 3" of a 25" tall case. See above pic. The 2 pumps are hidden behind the interior case plate below the HD cages to the right of the bottom radiator. I wanted to isolate the rigid tubing from pump vibration so I used 2 short lengths of flexible tubing that I didn't want to be visible (see pump pic below) . That's an early pic above, before the pull fans were added. And no, I still haven't finished making the custom (red / white / black) cables :)

700


2. The bottom radiator is 60mm thick, 110mm with the push / pull fans, Model is Alphacool XT60-280...the top is an XT45-420

3. Gravity. As you can see in the 2nd pic in previous post, the QD fitting is about a half inch below the lowest point on the system. This gets 95% of the coolant out.

4. Much depends on what your reason for draining is.... say you want to flush the top rad. Partially drain the system tilt it by lifting the front of the case so that all water drains out of the rad. Let sit overnight. Place some paper towels under the fittings. Place another PT in your hand and wrap it around the fitting and pull apart. Unscrew the 90 degree fittings and replace with plugs. Now take off the plugs on the top of the rad, connect the fittings to the top, connect some flex hose and flush the rad. Rinse w/ distilled water, reconnect everything and replace coolant. The drop of 2 that might shake out will be absorbed in the PT in ya hand. The ones you laid below will catch it if you do it improperly.

Now if you want to rip the whole system down you'd follow the same procedure as you did to bleed the system, that is after getting 95% of the fluid out by gravity tilting the machine this way and that so as to get any trapped water out of the blocks and other confined volumes . If you have ever filled a water bed, drained a garden hose or cleaned a fish tank using a water vacuum, you have lifted one end higher than the other and then gradually walked the high point to the other end fully draining the hose / tube.... same principal. After connecting the drain tube

5. Depends on what ya wanna do. If I wanna clean out any particles that may have accumulated in the CPU Block for example, I would drain the system flush with DW and stress test the system with fans at fixed low rpm with the idea of getting the coolant well above it's normal 33-35C temperature. After inspecting the block visually thru the clear acrylic block, if warranted, I'd take the cover off and toothbrush clean the jetplate and micro-channels.

 


And you do get to have "special" stuff

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-fRuoMIfpw




That will cover the parts and tools perhaps.... but not the 100+ hours labor a "one of" bent rigid acrylic tubing build w/ custom cables typically entails.

The THG build is one of many among Xotic's customized builds. Xotic does offer the same components or similar options to what you have listed, many of which come at reduced prices .... MSI / Asus MoBo alternative, EVGA G2 1000 PSU alternative, Corsair Dominator Alternative, Asus, EVGA and MSI 980 Ti alternatives, various M2 alternatives up to 512 GB, etc.
 


Guy, I think that they are crazy. That tower case is an accident waiting to happen. It's totally impractical.
If you want a really good case, look at CaseLabs, their stuff is very high quality and not as expensive as that monster would be.
 


Most water cooling loops include a drain plug at the bottom of the reservoir, you open a plug in the top radiator, that lets air in, then you put the drain hose in a bucket and open the plug, gravity will drain the liquid from the loop. After that you can put the case in a horizontal position so the water from the pump is also drained. Done once a year for maintenance.
If you sell a computer with a water loop, then you have to educate the user about it. The user can always send it back to the seller for the routine maintenance.
It depends very much on how bad a user wants to go very fast.
Finally, I am a businessman and an engineer. You cannot just add the price of the parts and then assume that is what the computer should sell for. There is overhead for the place where the computer is being build. The salaries for the techs assembling the computers. Time spent on testing, overclocking, and most important, burning the computer for 72 hours while under heavy load to make sure that you are giving the customer a quality product. There is a percentage of failures that the company has to eat because the product is being overstressed. But it is better to catch the problem before it goes to the customer.
Success depends veery much on the quality that you put in the parts you use, how you use it, and how you test it.
I would not touch a Dell or an HP with a ten foot pole.
 


1. In my case, as with most dual rad systems w/ rads at top and bottom, the bottom of the reservoir is impractical for several reasons:

a) it's not the low point. That bottom rad holds a substantial amount of water. the drain port under the rad has a valve and is lower than any point in the system.
b) It's very hard to get at, the fittings under the res; requires removing the pump or radiator.
c) While it's feasible to turn the system on front, back, sides, turning it up side down to get the water to go from bottom rad to the res would also allow the water to escape thru the air inlet on the top of the reservoir.

2. While the Alphacool rads have 7 ports allowing one to use am air inlet at the top ports, most brands don't offer this feature. I installed two 40mm extensions and plugs to bring the ports (see pick below) up to just 2mm below the case grille which allows one top remove the plugs and use one as a fill port and one as a bleed port. If you use a fill tube on your res, feeding from the top, you need a 2nd bleed valve on the reservoir.

3. I don't think anyone doubts that a markup is necessary for a company to stay in business to cover labor, overhead and profit.. A certain % should be applied to a build. Some apply this in a reasonable manner, some do not. Charging $2,000 for a build with a component cost of $1,750 is certainly reasonable (15%) as in addition to the $250, they are making additional monies do to quantity discounts. It's also reasonable to the customer as he / she would spend about 3 hours time assembling their build for the 1st time, while the seller is going to knock this off in less than an hour due to component familiarity, not having to read manuals and using HDs w/ preinstalled OS for their hardware configurations. Upgrades can cost money if the driver set varies significantly from the vendor's standard offerings.

What is not reasonable however is charging $500 for a GFX card upgrade that cost them $300... that's a 67% markup. You'll see this immediately when, for example, buying custom laptops.... purchase discounts might start at $50 for an $1150 purchase, grow to $100 at $1,750 and hit $150 at $2250. The vendor needs to cover their labor and overhead but those numbers are covered when you make that $1150 purchase.... if you elect to upgrade the GPU, it still cost the same in labor to build the machine an support the machine, it costs the same to process the order, handle the billing, ship it and load the OS / drivers.

What I am saying is that those who buy pre-built machines, don't have a problem paying that $250 for the service being provided and the 3 years of continuing support. Those who build their own machines figure that investing 3 hours of their time is worth keeping that $250 in their pocket.

Here's the interesting part.... on Xotic's air cooled havoc system, the upgrade from an EVGA 970 to 980 is a price bump from $339 to $679. That's $5 less than the price difference on newegg. So why eat $5 on one build and add $160 premium on another for the same upgrade ? Because they can.

If you add these kinds of upgrade premiums on all the upgrades, then that guy who was willing to spend $250 ... might suddenly be unwilling to spend a $750 premium. But now, add a fancy custom cooling loop, that the buyer does not have the knowledge, tooling, experience and confidence to build, factor in the fact that the 2nd build by an experienced tech would likely reduce that build time to 6-7 hours whereas the buyer would be looking at close to 100, and now you have something to offset those outrageous component upgrade costs.




 


If you have various QD fittings, yes. See EK predator 360

http://www.xtremerigs.net/2015/10/02/ek-predator-review/

But this gets harder the greater number of components involved. if you have multiple rads, MoBo Blocks, RAM Blocks, etc.... it's gonna be hard to take them all out at the same time.



 


Caselabs stuff may be ultra high quality, but it comes at an enormous price premium. Some of their cases retail for $300 - $500+. And that's not even including accessories and spare parts. For an OEM looking to make money on their systems it would be completely impractical.
 
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