We’re taking a quick trip to that magical world where price is no object and bragging rights are more critical than reason. Yes, that’s you guessed it — the high-end Rig, that drool-causing selection of the latest components and the effortless benchmark-destroying that comes with.
If we were sensible, we’d hold out merely a few months longer, as the big providers unquestionably have some serious products up their sleeves for the crucial holiday period. But then again, if we were sensible we’d be giving you one more “recommended Pc system for $1000″ (or $1500, or $500, or any cost bracket we’ve decided is the agenda for this week).
What we are looking for now is the extreme in performance, cost be damned (say we had been lucky at online casinos accepting USA players (http://www.onlinegambling.eu/casino/best-us-casinos)or whatever). So naturally we are going to be starting with ATi’s ludicrously-powerful 5970 — but make that a double. Nope, we’re going all out: the 4GB XFX Black edition, with 2 GPUs onboard. And since we’re reaching for the stars, let’s go Crossfire crazy and putting ANOTHER card right next to it, creating a 4-GPU extreme graphics array?
Sure, we might instead go with nVidia’s high-end alternative, the 1536MB 480GTX. This adds PhysX and 3-Way SLI into the mix, the preferable option for many graphics card enthusiasts and may well provide less driver troubles as compared with the Radeon. Three of the nVidia cards will set you back around $450 – $750 less than two ATi cards (even though expense, like we’ve explained, is not an issue this time around) and provide you with a marginal boost (at best) in a few games. However, if you’re looking for fractional increases (and you’re not bothered by increased heat and power considerations), then feel free to go that route.
Doing a multi-GPU build, we would be foolish if we didn’t opt for a 1366 (X58) chipset, and not only because it’s state-of-the-art and consequently more costly. To meet tomorrow’s features today (or something like that), one can find more and more X58 mobos to choose from with third-generation USB and (even more importantly) SATA III, so our ridiculously-costly rig can be brag-worthy for nearly a year, and then at least useful (for example, we should still enjoy play online slots (www.casinos.org/slots) just fine) for one or two years after that.
The most pricey mobo which we’ve seen for our needs is the GA-X58A-UD9 by Gigabyte, and it practically seems worth the money. Especially when the other options are the ASUS “Supercomputer” and EVGA “Classified”, but neither of them deliver 6.0 Gb/s SATA support or third-generation USB…sure, you can plug in support if you have to, but why use up critical board space? Alternatively, the ROG Rampage III Extreme from ASUS and EVGA’s 141-GT-E770-A1 are either rather feature-packed, and fit all of our other criteria, but at about $350 they may be beginning to be a relatively cost-effective solution…violating the rules of our build – after all, we’re imagining that we’re freshly affluent via online casinos accepting Webmoney (www.casinos.org/deposit-methods/webmoney)…
Keep reading for part 2 of our challenge, during which we will examine RAM possibilities and storage (i.e., solid-state drives vs. spinning disc drives. Hint: not much of a contest). If you’re keeping count, we’re presently upwards of a grand total of about three G’s…and that’s before we add the CPU, optical drives, case, power supply, input devices, and monitor(s)…