Most of the tiMe, our mission with the annual Dream Machine PC is to make an indisputable leap beyond last year’s model. It’s
a challenge in itself, but things were made
much easier by the introduction of Red Harbinger’s Cross desk, thecavernous innards
of which promised enough space for two
high-performance computers.
Still, I forgot to hook up the Titan Z
water cooling correctly because I’m a
pinhead, and they idled at about 68 degrees
Celsius—way out of spec. I switched the
connecting tube to the other side, but it
was too late for another photo shoot. So the
error of my ways is on permanent display.
On the bright side, we brought the idle temp
down a whopping 40C, and I was able to get
a stable overclock of 4.8GHz on the Devil’s
Canyon CPU that powered that system. The
chip even got close to the performance of a
stock hex-core Sandy Bridge-E CPU.
Things were a bit rockier for the Ivy
Bridge-E system with the Radeon cards.
For example, Asus tested 45 of these
CPUs, and only one of them was stable at
4.8GHz, and just 20 percent of the batch
could handle 4.7GHz. We had to settle for
4.6GHz. That’s just how it goes sometimes.
It’s still a ton of performance, albeit disappointing after hitting 5GHz with the Sandy
Bridge-E chip in last year’s Dream Machine;
we ended up with roughly the same CPU
performance. AMD’s R9 295X2 also didn’t
overclock much, possibly due to its locked
voltage. Ultimately, water cooling and
voltage tweakability on the Titan Z GPUs
allowed them to surpass the R9 295X2—but
don’t stare too long at the Titan Z’s price
tag, as the abyss may stare back into you.
As for the case, its drive-bay covers attach to the drive cage itself, so removing a
bay created a hole that we had to cover with
Kydex. More space underneath the motherboard trays also would have been welcome.
It’s still great overall, for a first-gen design.
The Cross desk gave us the X-factor we
needed to elevate the Dream Machine
above our previous ambitions.
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