Best Submit Onlywire!: Dream machine 2014: The Buddy System

ALL THiS HArDWArE WouLDn’Tmean diddly without the benchmarks to back them up, so this is
truly where the rubber meets the road for every Dream Machine. We aim to be the fastest—or at
least rub shoulders with the fastest production PCs we see. So, did we make it this year?
First, the Dream Machine is a regular reminder of the magic of water cooling. For example,
the air-cooled stock version of a GTX Titan Z has a 705MHz core clock speed. We ran the watercooled version at about 900MHz, which means that we hit nearly 1,100MHz when the card hit its
“boost” clock. We also bumped the memory from 1,750MHz to 1,950MHz. Pair that with a Devil’s
Canyon CPU overclocked to 4.8GHz, throw in 32GB of RAM clocked at 2,133MHz, and baby, you
got a stew going.
We were able to hit nearly 200fps in Batman: Arkham City, running at 2560x1600 with 8xAA
and every effect besides PhysX maxed out. At 3840x2160, we brought it down to 2xAA, since
more than that would be virtually undetectable at that point. Still got 180fps. Our 295X2s got over
15,000 points in 3DMark’s “Fire Strike Extreme” test.
The Devil’s Canyon system did much better with Batmanthan last year’s Dream Machine,
despite reliable reports that a single Titan Z doesn’t have the oomph of two GTX Titans. How?
In short, we ran out of extra power for overclocking last time. The new system had hundreds
of bonus watts, so the only limit was our ingenuity. Devil’s Canyon is also much newer, so it offers more efficient instructions per clock efficiency. Batmandoesn’t use a lot of CPU processing
threads anyway, so Sandy Bridge-E’s two additional cores go largely unused here.
Ultimately, if you wanted to be predictable, four Titan Blacks would have been the best choice
for pure performance, but we liked the symmetry of two dual-GPU cards in each system—and
we couldn’t pass up the opportunity to play with $6,700 in GPUs. Would you?
The other system ran Intel’s newer Ivy Bridge-E chip, but physical changes to the chip have
lowered the overclock ceiling over last year’s Sandy Bridge-E part. Asus tested 45 Core i7-4960X
Ivy Bridge-E chips, and only one hit 4.8GHz. Another 20 percent hit 4.7GHz. Our chip binned in at
4.6GHz. Despite its reputation as a beast—and it is—we did hit an overclock limit. The best we
could see was a 50MHz overclock on the X2 cards. But remember: the X2 cards could belt out
enough frame rates that they could hang with the Titan Zs in gaming. And you can buy both X2s
for the price of a single Titan Z.
The 64-bit question is if we stood with the badass PCs we’ve see in the last few months, or if
we got melted by them. The good news is that our scores are competitive, but we’ll be honest, the
Digital Storm Aventum II we reviewed in January with its overclocked Core i7-4960X was still out
of reach by a couple of percent in the CPU tests. Likewise, Origin PC’s Genesis from the August
issue was tough to beat too, with its four-way liquid-cooled GeForce GTX 780 Ti cards. Dream
Machine doesn’t get spanked, but those burly rigs are not to be dismissed.
If there’s any drawback to this dual-computer system, it’s that you can’t put a full load on both
PCs at the same time, unless their power supplies are plugged into two completely separate circuits. Overall, we’d say that we’re pretty satisfied with this year’s Dream Machine. We’ll probably
have to build next year’s Dream Machine on the moon to surpass it.

Thursday 14 August 2014

Dream machine 2014: The Buddy System

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