Serious question: $20000 PC system

[Tim]

I've a serious question here: If you had a $20,000 budget to build yourself a massive gaming rig, what exactly would you include in it? If you consider yourself a gaming PC enthusiast, please post your ideas!

Some notes:

• The budget would be $20k, no more and no less. As in, you have to spend $20k, not a dime more or dime less.
• This would be completely self built. No ordering of systems from prebuilt manufacturers (eg, dell, ibuypower, etc).
• This would include everything, PC, case, internals, etc.
• The OS must be Windows 7.
• The PC case can and is recommended to be custom fabricated.
• Please link all parts from US companies such as Newegg, MWave, etc
• The system must have max RAM (as in, 64G+)
• Everything must be economical. A $20k budget does not mean anything gets wasted.
• Must have sexy RAID
• Please no discussions of "well a $3k system is enough blahblah". F that. We are going for obscene speed and capabilities.
• Overclocking is a must, obviously. The goal is ultra high end.
• Liquid Cooling will probably be a must
• System MUST be low maintenance and very user friendly. Yes, this will probably be a bit of work, but it is a goal.
• Everything must be cutting edge basically.
• Must be able to be built and assembled without myself having to need any tools other than screwdrivers/etc. So no desk milling machine and the like.
• Multiple CPUs is a bonus!
• Sexyness is a bonus!
• Goal: Fastest gaming rig ever!

Please keep thread comments on topic. Off topic comments will be removed just so we can keep this thread perfectly clean and constructive! Thanks

Initial questions:

AMD vs Intel
Nvidia vs ATI
Types of RAM
SSDs in RAID for gaming speed?
Platter HD in RAID for general storage?
Actual hardware raid controller?

PS: I'm calling you out Xartin, give us input!

EDIT #1: Included peripherals such as keyboard, monitors, etc in the $20k.

[Tim]

My first question: Can you dual or quad CPU these: Newegg.com - Intel Core i7-3960X Extreme Edition Sandy Bridge-E 3.3GHz (3.9GHz Turbo) LGA 2011 130W Six-Core Desktop Processor BX80619i73960X

Googling it now....


Also, this seems to be the fastest Intel processor now: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16819117272

But do they overclock?

[Prepared]

Given your conditions of purchasing all components and building yourself, I'd go with making the purchases from newegg.com as you've indicated. For the other considerations, I'd recommend:

Intel over AMD. Main points: Intel has more history, larger company and is more reputable.
nVidia over ATI who is now AMD. Main points: More history, larger company and has the current best performing GPU: GeForce GTX 690 dual GPU. Two of these in Quad-SLI configuration is the most powerful graphics cards you can buy right now.

For RAM, I'd go with 2133MHz 32gb or 48gb.
Definitely SSDs in RAID for gaming. I think the highest is at 480gb right now.
A 3tb platter drive would suffice for general storage. Since you've got $20k to spend, might as well go with 2 of them in raid. You'd have 4 drives in total.


Personally, I've heard really good stories about performance machines from this web site (down side is that it appears you can't go higher than the i7 Extreme Edition 3960X 3.3GHz (Six-Core):
Digital Storm Aventum

This is what I'd go with if $20k were the budget. Although the system is not purchased separately, there is added bonus for support for the complete system instead of separate components.

I'd go with Windows 7 Professional instead of Home addition. Professional 64bit accesses the most ram available from what I've read.

From my personal experience with a six-core system, the most effective performance with all graphics turned down is nine copies of WoW in extreme PvP environments. Although a six-core system with a two GTX 590s (quad-SLI) can login more accounts, at about thirteen accounts or so, there is degradation in graphics performance in heavy PvP battles.

If you go with the Xeon eight-core system, you may be able to run 16 accounts in heavy PvP areas. I'm not talking about logging in and playing in a PvE environment here. You may be able to run up to 40 or 50 accounts in a PvE environment. It's PvP against many different players that causes slow down on a single system. Even with all graphics options turned down the graphics lag is greatly increased with more players around.

With the massive system I purchased late last year, I thought I could run 27 accounts on a single 48gb system that had quad-SLI 590's, SSD, six-core system. The 27 accounts had no problem logging in and moving around in an area without many other players. But in PvP, the graphics lag was so bad, I couldn't move at all on any of the characters when faced with more than 30 or 40 players against me.

This is why I use different computers on a LAN for multiboxing 40 accounts. I've got 7 computers with different hardware configurations but no graphics lag against 50 players in PvP. If I upgraded one of the computers, I could use 5 computers and still no graphics lag, but just not gotten around to upgrading that computer yet. No matter how much power you put into one computer, you will get graphics lag to make the game unplayable if you go with more than 18 accounts for that one computer in a heavy PvP battle. With the 5 computer configuration I'm going to set up soon, I'm going with 9 accounts for each of four computers and 4 accounts for one of the computers. This gives 40 accounts in total. 9 accounts runs fine with a computer that has a six-core CPU and a GTX 690 with an SSD.

Another thing it appears as a general rule that you'd want 1mpbs Internet speed for each character multiboxed. However, with WoW, the more players you're against in PvP, the more speed you need to respond to the data arriving to your computer(s). I use the Comcast Extreme 50 plan and don't have any network lag issues with 40 accounts. However, if I go against 70 to 80 players, there will be network lag. It really shouldn't be that way, but for some reason the network implementation of WoW has increased network traffic with more players against you in PvP. It seems to be that the more players casting and attacking you, the more network bandwidth being taken up. If you exceed a threshold, you get disconnected from the WoW servers if you're not able to keep up with responding to the traffic being sent to your system(s). In other words, it doesn't appear to be a network connectivity issue with the more characters being multiboxed as it is the number of other players in the area casting and attacking at the same time.

One thing contrary to a lot of people and one that you're probably not going to want to hear, but I'd strongly recommend NO OVERCLOCKING. Reason being: overclocking involves making things run faster than they're normally intended to run, however system crashes can and will happen over time. Even though you may buy components that support overclocking options, it's always best not to activate overclocking. After 20 years of buying many different systems, analyzing web forums about different peoples experiences with overclocking options, it is with absolute experience and observation that I do not recommend overclocking. Your performance may vary, but the odds are against you with overclocking. It's akin to making a bet on horses. Sure the faster horse in training may win the race, but likely another horse at the moment of the race will win. There is a higher chance that you will have issues with overclocking than with not doing it. Is it better to run consistently without any crashes or crash occasionally and have a higher performing machine? That's really the question when it comes to overclocking. Many people may not agree with this. Another note about this, I've purchased systems that have been set to overclock, but I've never put together a system and did the overclocking myself. I have always left that to the professionals that have done the overclocking settings many times. Still have had system crashes due to overclocking, not power supply nor anything else.

[xartin]

Likely the only quad socket processor motherboards i would ever recommend are made by supermicro. That monster server i build two years ago for one of my clients used one. They also have a 512GB ecc reg ram limit ^_^

One of those with dual or quad 2011 xeons, EK HF waterblocks in a mountain mods or Danger Den double wide chassis ( a standard tower would never fit enough radiators to be practical ) you have the start of a hell of a nice build.

Eye candy for you to lust over.

http://www.dangerden.com/Post-your-R...-Work-log.html

I wouldn't even bother touching the entire Ivy bridge cpu family. they have serious problems intel has so far refused to fix.

If you want to pin down which motherboard would be a good match for a workstation you can use this matrix or find out which board supermicro uses in the barebones DP socket workstations they list on their website. Just be absolutely certain the motherboard you pick has an E-ATX footprint for the standoffs.

http://www.supermicro.com/products/m...Xeon1333/#2011

With regards to raid the king is still LSI MegaRAID SAS 9265-8i. one of those with the SSD caching feature addon you can easily expect 2GB+/s transfer rates with raid 5. Enough to make norse gods weep.

http://thessdreview.com/our-reviews/...ron-c300-ssds/

I'm of the opinion a dual socket 2011 xeon system would just destroy anything sandy bridge performance wise due to the quad channel ram.

The only potential setbacks of choosing a supermicro motherboard would possibly be lacking overclocking potential but that really depends on the motherboard you choose.

An evga Classified build would be another possibility and if i recall EK also makes full cover chipset watercooling blocks for evga classified motherboards but the socket 2011 evga classified board is only a single socket.

http://www.evga.com/products/moreInf...herboards&sw=5

I see evga has also released an E3 Ivy bridge classified xeon motherboard but before i would touch that I would definitely check if the E3 xeons have the same thermal compound issues the desktop Ivy bridge processors currently have.

http://www.overclockers.com/ivy-bridge-temperatures

[Tim]

I think the specs you quoted would probably be closer to $3k versus $20k

Good point on the graphic cards. I wonder if you can do 4x of GTX 690s, which would in effect, be 8x GPU processors. You should be able to I believe.

Right now my current specs are leaning towards:

The Intel E5-2687Ws don't OC like the i7-3960X does. So would 2x E-2687W be faster than a super OC'd i7-3960?

So with that said, I'm thinking:

2x E5-2687W ($1900 each)

Mobo for this: EVGA SRX

-or-

1x i7-3960X ($1030 each)

The dual E5 can have 96GB of RAM, which is preferred. The i7-3960 can do 64GB max I believe.

For drives, I'm thinking that I would do 2 types of setups:

Gaming SSD RAID0 (speed) (or even RAID10 for speed and reliability)

12x OCZ Vertex4 $240 each, 550 MB/s READ, 465 MB/s WRITE

In RAID0 I would estimate that 12 of these would probably be right around the absolute peak limit of SATA6g. These drives would probably be around 5,500-6,000 MB/s.


4x Storage HD RAID10 (speed and reliability)

4x of whatever brand of 3TB in RAID10, giving a total of 6TB usable.

2x OS BOOT SSD HD RAID1 (reliability mirror)
2x of 128G OCZ SSD.

Here is a question. What about the RevoDrives, those things that single drives sport 2GB/sec speeds?

Now as far as RAM goes, I've no idea here. Whatever top in ram supports ultra, ULTRA high end OC?

For liquid cooling, no idea here as well. We would be shooting for 5ghz+.

For PSU, probably 1500watt minimum.

For GPU, I'm thinking Nvidia as well. The question is can you do 4x dual GPU, or is 4 gpu the limit (so 2x dual gpu, or 4x single gpu)?

[Tim]

Originally Posted by xartin

Eye candy for you to lust over.

LISA 2 - Double Wide 29 Monster (Work log) - Danger Den Forums

I wouldn't even bother touching the entire Ivy bridge cpu family. they have serious problems intel has so far refused to fix

That case is BADASS!

What issues does intel have with Ivy bridge?

Here is an idea Xartin: Dual system system. As in, a big ass case like that one you linked, but imagine have 1x super OC'd system, and 1x another normal system, both in the case? So the back of the case has mobo plugins of two mobos, so you could connect 4x monitors, and it would actually be 2x systems?

[Tim]

Also, those DangerDen cases are pretty damn badass. I was thinking that perhaps getting a custom built one would be the way to go, but they have some really baller ones.

Edit: I just read that DD does custom order cases as well. This might be an option for our little theorycrafting event!

[Tim]

Prepared, I've done a lot of testing on massive numbers of WoWs on a single PC as well. My record is 77 logged in WoWs on my PC. Moving them around in a useful fashion is another thing.

I've seen the same thing you see in PVP. I've narrowed it down to disk IO and latency in that IO as it moves from disk<->generalized system bus<->RAM<->GPU generalized bus<->GPU RAM.

I've been working on something that can pull near 10GB/sec hard drive access, and those IO issues don't exist in any fashion. So yea, definitely HD access, at least in my experience.

Also another note that helped me out. Isolate a GPU per monitor and don't cross over multi-GPUs. In essence, if you have 1 monitor with 10x WoWs, make sure that monitor is driven by a single GPU, not a dual. So 20x WoWs, 10 on each monitor, with each monitor having its own GPU.

My system btw is:

Intel i7 980X OC'd to 4.8ghz
24G RAM (had 48g peak for testing)
Lots of SSD and HD in RAID. Like, lots.
Custom secret thing pushing >8,000MB/sec to test disk io.


But back to the OP....

The system wouldn't be for multiboxing really. More just for everything. Like a massive dream system with no dime spared. Then give it away.

[xartin]

The primary reason for the doublewide design is one half of the chassis is used for mounting storage space and housing watercooling kit aswell as power supplies.

When your planning to use multiple quad 120MM radiators you must use a doublewide chassis or it just wont all fit.

I'm off to work for a few hours but i'd definitely recommend checking out this gent's youtube channel for some build ideas. He's likely one of the few master's in building high end watercooled rigs I often use for reference.

https://www.youtube.com/user/SingularityComputers

Here's a video of his own system he build over the last several months.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0hMrXH4NPlY

[cnicol]

If I was building a cutting edge 20k computer I would put a PCIe SSD drive in.

OCZ Z-Drive R4 PCIe SSD Performance Preview - HotHardware

Performance Specifications:

Max Read: 2800 MB/s
Max Write: 2800 MB/s
4KB Random Write: 440,000 IOPS (QD:128, 4K Aligned, 8GB LBA)
Available in 800GB, 1.6TB, and 3.2TB configurations

800 GB SSD for 4-5k


or Intel's PCI-E 910-Series SSD
Intel SSD 910 PCI Express SSD Performance Review - HotHardware

Bandwidth Performance
-Sustained sequential read : Up to 2 GB/s
-Sustained sequential write: Up to 1 GB/s

A bit cheaper at $3859 for 800GB