This section sounds like a dichotomy, but really it's not. One can spend a lot for a gaming rig and get a really poor return on the investment. I'm all for spending money if you have it to spend, but only if it makes sense. A lot of high-end systems seem determined just to spend money for the sake of spending money. This section will spend money .. lots of it, but will still try to be smart about it. Yeah, that $1000 hand-painted case looks cool, but it doesn't help you frag that poor sod who greatly deserves it. That triple monitor panoramic view just might though.
As mentioned in the introduction, all prices are from Newegg unless otherwise specified. No special prices (e.g., after mail-in-rebate prices or combo prices are used if that can be avoided. You should be able to load these items in your cart and get them at or near the prices quoted.
CPU - A change! For the first time in over a year, my CPU recommendation for this build is not the Intel Core i7 920 (or the 930 that is replacing the 920). I consistently recommended the 920 over the costlier 950, 960 and 975 models because of the 920's fine overclocking ability, which allowed it to be clocked higher than the costlier models. That said, it doesn't matter how much the 920 can be overclocked since it can't be overclocked to have two more cores. This month, Intel unveiled the six-core (twelve thread) Intel Core i7-980X (Extreme Edition), which is based on the Gulftown core. As much as I cringe at paying the ridiculously large amount of extra money for an unlocked multiplier, there's no denying that the Intel Core i7-980X is the fastest desktop CPU on the planet today. Undoubtedly, there will be cheaper (i.e., clocked slower) versions of this architecture, but the 980X is what's available today.
The move from 45nm to 32nm die size allowed two more cores to be added while maintaining the same TDP of 130W. That's nothing sort of incredible. They added roughly 50% more transistors and kept the same power dissipation. Benchmarks show that the two new cores give a nearly linear increase in processing throughput for those applications that can make use of multiple cores. As games have started to use multiple cores as a standard, this is important to a gaming build. Clocked at 3.33 GHz per core and with Intel's Turboboost technology allowing selected cores to go to 3.6GHz, it comes somewhat overclocked from the 920's speeds to start with. Early benchmarks from the Guru of 3D, Overclocker's Club, and bit-tech show that reaching overclock speeds of 4.3 - 4.7GHz is possible (with water cooling in most cases). NewEgg offers an OEM edition of this CPU (without any heatsink/fan included), but I've opted to go with the retail version in order to get the 3-year warranty. Unfortunately, NewEgg has some idiotic "only with certain Asus motherboards" promotion going on, so this time, I turn to MWave. It's a bit cheaper there anyway though you do have to join their free "mclub."
CPU Cooler - Since the plan is to support overclocking the CPU, a good aftermarket cooler is in order. I've finally decided that it's worth taking the plunge for a water-cooled solution for the CPU. The numbers I saw in overclocking with water-based coolers convinced me. I gave serious thought to going with water cooling for the whole system, but here's a lot of extra work involved with water cooling all the devices in the case (CPU, GPUs, northbridge, power phasing MOSFETs, memory, hard drives, etc). The self-contained CPU-only water cooling solutions aren't that messy. Since I plan on using the Corsair Obsidian 800D, I may as well use their pre-packaged solution, the CORSAIR Cooling Hydro Series CWCH50-1. There is a video made by Corsair that shows how to install the CWCH50-1 in this case. Astonishingly, at $80, it's only $5 more than the air-cooled solution used in the last build.
Before I discount the stock cooler completely, however, I do want to send some kudos Intel's way. The stock cooler on the Core i7 920 et al series was barely adequate to the point of being laughable. It worked, but overclocking with it was really not an option. Intel has responded with a serious cooling solution for the 980X, the DBX-B, which can be seen at the bottom of this article at the Overclocker's Club. This cooler includes a backplate, so it must be mounted to the motherboard while it is outside the case, but hallelujah we don't have to worry about those terrible stock posts popping out of the motherboard. Thank you, Intel.
Motherboard - The new Intel 980X doesn't require that I pick a new motherboard, but I've decided to kick it up a notch anyway. I'm sticking with Gigabyte on this build since they're my favorite motherboard maker at the moment, but for this build, I've chosen the top-of-the-line GA-X58A-UD7. At $350, it's not cheap, but Supports triple SLI or Crossfire (at x16,x16,x8), has the wonderful 2 oz copper PCB, 24+2+2 power phase design, DDR3 2200 memory support up to 24GB, 10 SATA ports - two of which are SATA3 (6.0 Gb/s), 6 USB 2.0 ports on the back (two of which are combo USB/ESATA2 ports), 2 USB 3.0 ports and headers for 4 USB 2.0 ports, which can be used to run USB 2.0 to the front panel of the case. The rear panel also has a switch for clearing the CMOS, which can be very handing when testing overclocking setups. The motherboard has onboard switches for power and reset to aid in building the system and LEDs all over for monitoring northbridge voltage, southbridge voltage, northbridge temperature, northbridge power phase, system power phase, CPU voltage and CPU temperature. These are very nice while building, and with a case with a window, allow for a quick visual check of the system at any time. A unique addition to this motherboard is the passive cooling of the X-58 chipset that also sports built-in water block connections. More information on this motherboard can be found at Gigabyte's web site. The manual can be downloaded here. In my last build, I used the GA-EX58-UD5. The GA-X58A-UD7 is very much that board on steroids.
Memory - In this component, I'm going with 6 GB of very fast Mushkin Enhanced Redline 6GB (3 x 2GB) DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) Model 998691 memory. This memory is made specifically for the X58 chipset and has some of the lowest factory timing settings I've seen to date - 6-7-6-18. Depending on the overclocking, we may have to relax the timing, but those are great starting numbers. Even with this speed, the memory does not exceed the 1.65V maximum for memory. You can find out more about this memory from mushkin's web site. This is essentially the same memory I chose last time, but with narrower heat sinks. The problem with the Redline memory with Ascent heatsinks was pointed out in this article at Hardware Canucks. That is that the memory heat spreader/heatsink is so wide that it's not possible or very tight to put in two sets of these in adjacent banks.
Graphics Card - With the release (finally) of the Nvidia Fermi architecture cards, the GTX 470 and GTX 480, I thought we might have something to replace the ATI Radeon HD 5970 as the fastest graphics card on the market. As it turns out, the Nvidia GTX 480 is no match for the dual-GPU goodness of the 5970. Heck, it barely beats out the 5870, which is basically the 5970's single-CPU brother. It's fairly certain that Nvidia will come up with something like a GTX 495 that will be their own dual-GPU card (a la the GTX 295), but until then, the ATI HD 5970 is still the king of graphics cards. Actually, even if the GTX 480 blew the doors off of the 5970, we'd still have to go with the 5970 this build because you can actually buy one of them. The Nvidia GTX 480s aren't expected to hit store shelves - and in limited quantity even then - until mid-April at best.
The ATI Radeon HD 5970 has a pair of GPUs in Crossfire mode on a single card. While the motherboard for this rig handles up to three matched graphics cards using either Nvidia SLI or ATI 3-Way Crossfire, we're going to go with a pair of ATI Radeon HD 5970s, the Diamond 5970PE52G Radeon HD 5970 (Hemlock) 2GB GDDR5 video card w/ Eyefinity. Can you say, "triple-monitor goodness?" The monitors themselves are not going to be figured into the cost. Just set aside money for a few 30" monitors. Can you say 7680x1600 resolution? Yum. You would need to get the latest Catalyst drivers, but then you know to always get the latest drivers for all your new hardware, right? I was mulling over whether two 5970s - even with Eyefinity across three 30" monitors was a bit frivolous. Then I saw the numbers coming in from new DirectX11 games like Metro 2033. With all graphics effects on high settings, even the 5970 cries out in pain and stuttering.
Sound - In my own machine, I have a Creative X-Fi Fatal1ty Champion Series sound system. This is the one with the separate breakout box for headphones and various audio/midi inputs and outputs. I'm not an audiophile by any means, but I can tell the difference in the sound quality between this card and the onboard sound of the various motherboards it's been in. I keep moving this from build to build because I like it so much. Vista-64 support is solid and Windows 7 (32 and 64-bit) drivers are available. With that in mind, I've chosen the Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Titanium Fatal1ty Professional 70SB088600002 Sound Card. This is a repeat from the two build recommendations. Because of the layout of the motherboard, a standard PCI card won't work. Therefore, we go with a PCI-Express (x1) card that can fit in the slot "behind" or "above" the first graphics card. With this card, there's no need for a separate box for front panel audio since the card has support for such on it. (Previous X-Fi cards often did not support front panel audio short of having the break out box.) There is more info about this card at Creative's web site.
Case - While I still like the Antec Twelve Hundred full tower computer case, but there's another case that's caught my eye. That case is the Corsair Obsidian Series 800D CC800DW full tower case. At $300 (which is $20 more than in the last build), it's not cheap, but it has some incredible features. First off, it's just dead sexy -- if a computer case can be sexy -- with a black brushed finish and tight fit. It has three separate heating/airflow zones. It has four hot-swappable SATA bays for drives. It has superior cable management. We will add three additional 120mm fans along the tops of the case to suck air out of the case. The size of this case is very large, but the graphics cards we have chosen are very long and get quite warm. This case allows for the airflow needed to keep them cool. The manual for this case is at Corsair's site and more general information can be found as well.
Power Supply - No beating around the bush with this power supply. Wimpy PSUs need not apply. Go to the Nvidia's SLI Zone web site and specifically go to the certified power supplies section. Check out the PSUs listed under dual GeForce GTX 295 GPU's, you'll see none are less than 1200W. Those graphics cards are powerful and they require real power. The CPU is a decent little hand warmer, too. For this, I'm only looking at my top tier manufacturers. I'd like to have gone with PC Power & Cooling, but at $500 for their 1200W unit, I'll have to pass. (Come on, now, PC Power & Cooling.) Instead, I'm going with another of my favorites, Enermax and their Galaxy EVO EGX1250EWT 1250W 80 Plus Bronze Certified Power Supply. It has active Power Factor Correction (PFC) (as do all PSUs I recommend nowadays), it's modular, and the 80-Plus Bronze certification means the unit is at least 85% efficient at 50% loading (although we'll be loading it beyond 50% which makes it less so).
Hard Drive - I debated about going hog wild here and going with only Solid State Disks (SSDs) in a RAID 0 or 0 + 1 array, but they are still prohibitively too expensive to get "enough" storage space. RAID controllers also don't pass the TRIM command through to the SSDs, so that's an issue. The TRIM command causes the SSD to do garbage cleanup to keep themselves tuned up. There have also been some benchmarks that seem to indicate that RAID cards for these drives may even hinder their throughput. For this build, I'm going away from my usual Intel recommendation to a single new OCZ Vertex LE 200GB drive that uses the new Sandforce controller. Unfortunately, this relatively small size means jockying files and apps around, but the speed of SSDs is too amazing to ignore. The SSD drive will be for booting the OS and for your most-used apps and games. All other files like video, pictures, lesser used applications and games on a standard hard disk RAID array. The case being used here is plenty big enough, so we could put in the SSD and still have room for a RAID 0 or RAID 0+1 array. I'd been a big proponent of Western Digital's Velociraptor drives, but, with one or two exceptions, they can't even run in the same races as the new SSD drives.
The new market leader seems to be the OCZ Vertex LE (Limited Edition), but they are only available in sizes up to 200GB, and that size is very expensive currently. Of course, the purpose of this build is to ignore price so long as the hardware makes sense. Compared to a standard hard drive (whether in a RAID configuration or not), any of these latest SSDs are lightning fast. This new OCZ drive excels in both reads and writes. Last month's SSD choice, the Intel X25-M Mainstream SSDSA2M160G2XXX, actually beats the OCZ Vertex LE in reads, but every other SSD including the Intel model pales when it comes to writes. The Vertex LE also seems to not suffer speed degradation over time nearly as badly as other models. It still supports the TRIM operation to clean up the drive, but doesn't need have it performed nearly as often. PC Perspective has a nice comparison chart of the current SSDs.
Many cases will require an adapter to allow (up to two) 2.5" SSD drives to fit in a 3.5" drive bay. However, the Corsair Obsidian 800D case's removable drive bays include screw holes to hold 2.5" SSD drives in the correct location. Another item to keep in mind is that once the SSD is up and running, we will want to shut off any Windows automatic defragmentation of the disks. SSDs don't defragment like a hard disk and the extra writes just serve to shorten the SSDs life. Windows 7, which we are using as our OS for this build, has native support for SSDs. (Look up the TRIM command.)
We still need a bit more storage than just one 200GB drive, so I'm going with my current favorite hard disk vendor, Western Digital, the Western Digital Caviar Black WD1001FALS 1TB SATA hard drives. I've added not one, not two, but four drives to be used in a 0+1 RAID array. RAID 0+1 is my preferred RAID type in that it provides the security of a mirrored RAID 1 array with the speed of a striped RAID 0 array. Having lost not one, not two, but three disks (not at the same time, however) in my current RAID 0+1 array recently, I vouch for it. I replaced the failed disk and rebuilt the array with no data loss all three times. That's the point. This setup then is a 2TB array made from 4TB of disk drives. It might sound wasteful, but if you crave speed, but require security, this is the ticket. We certainly have room in the case, and we're not trying to conserve money here; we're just not trying to waste it. Additionally, a smart person might set up automatic backup of the key files on the SSD RAID 0 array to the traditional hard drive RAID 0+1 array. (Hint, hint.) Newegg has these back in stock again, so I'm going with a pair from them and another pair from TigerDirect. (We get them from different sources in order to try to avoid getting four from the same [potentially bad] batch [if that were to happen].)
DVD-RW - While DVD-RW drives are a commodity, Plextor quality is still the best. For this component, I've selected the Plextor 24X DVD/CD Writer Black SATA Model PX-880SA with LightScribe support & 2MB Cache, SATA interface, Retail version. The price has dropped $10 since October's build to $43. That's still a tad on the expensive side, but I've loved every Plextor burner I've had (since their SCSI-only days even).
Operating System - Here we go with Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit OEM version for $105. This particular version is for system builders, which means you get to do your own product support. I'm not sure how that's any different than the retail version when it comes right down to it. I always end up tracking down my software issues myself. There's just so much info available on the web I've never found the need to use the Microsoft telephone support system.
Miscellaneous - There are a few miscellaneous items with this build. The first is three 120mm case fans. The only other item is a tube of Arctic Silver 5 to be used as the thermal compound between the Intel i7 980X and the CPU water cooler.
There are no explicit cost limits here, which makes designing this build a lot of fun. That said, wasting money is stupid, so I've tried to be outrageous without being frivolous. This machine should be lightning fast at booting, playing games, sorting out your life, curing cancer, or any task you put it to. This build, the cost of the system went from $4,546 for this build to $5,434. Most of the increase in this build was in the (outrageous) cost of the new Intel Core i7 980X. Some of the components in this build simply had price increases, which seems to be a trend in the last few months. Just add 3-6 monitors for Eyefinity and a good set of surround sound speakers. The monitors will be expensive, too - being 24" or larger & most likely 30." Just imagine though being surrounded by the panoramic views.
If you build this system (or one based off of it), I love to hear from you with any tips, problems, praises or jeers you have by emailing me.
January 2010
October 2009
August 2009