If you had an unlimited budget to build a supremely powerful PC , what components would you choose? Expert PC builder Adrian Rundle builds a green machine that kicks butt.
Adrian (ss-rotel) Rundle is APC's Live Builds editor for general and perfomance PCs. In his other job, he does everything from building computers to setting up Windows Server and Linux -based network ecosystems. Most of all, Adrian loves to build PCs and push them beyond their recommended “safe” factory limits. Here, he builds an extreme PC, one that for purists who want all out power and have the budget to back it up. All prices are in Australian dollars.
CORE SYSTEM [updated May 14, 2011]
CPU: Intel Core i7 990x - $1,199
The Intel i7 990x is the fastest CPU available today. With its 12 logical cores and unlocked multiplier, you should be able to push 4.8GHz out of this puppy just with air-cooling. In fact there's a video of one running a stable 7GHz with liquid nitrogen cooling. Crazy!
COOLER: EK-KIT H3O Supreme LT 240 - $219
To overclock this monster, you need some pretty decent cooling. The EK-HIT H30 is one of the most comprehensive kits I’ve come across. The only way to get a better cooling setup would be with liquid nitrogen or state change.
MOTHERBOARD: GIGABYTE G1-Assassin XL-ATX - $569
It truly was a tough choice between this board and the ASUS Rampage III Black. Both have the Killer N2100 gaming network card and high-end sound. What made me go with the G1-Assassin was that it has XFi sound while the Killer NIC is onboard (on a separate card on the Rampage). This would limit your SLI or Crossfire setups. The GIGABYTE is also almost $100 cheaper. And it also looks awesome.
GRAPHICS: GIGABYTE GTX 590 x2 in SLI - $1,998 ($999 each)
By itself, the AMD 6990 is the better card (due to it being that little bit cheaper), but run a pair of cards and the NVIDIA GTX 590 cards are so much faster. They need 375W to run and your system will draw over 800W under load if you run a pair. That’s before you start overclocking. Make sure you take this kind of power consumption into account when building your system.
RAM: Corsair CMT12GX3M3A2000C9 12GB kits x 2 - $638 ($319 EACH)
With 12 gigs of super fast memory, this setup will let you overclock like a charm. Low latency 8-8-8-24 timings keep things flexible, and games, video editing or whatever you choose to do will be smoother with the large amounts of RAM available.
HARD DRIVE 1: OCZ Agility 3 120GB x2 - $598 ($299 each)
With single drive write speeds of 500MB/s, and reads of 525MB/s this is a phenomenally fast solid state drive. A pair in RAID Stripe should really be able to let your SATA3 controller stretch its legs.
HARD DRIVE 2: Western Digital Caviar Black 2TB - $179
You need something on which to store all your data, and Western Digital has always been known for reliability on its higher end drives. The other option would be to run three of these RAID 5 and forgo the SSD setup. Your choice.
OPTICAL DRIVE: Liteon IHBS212 12x Blu-ray writer - $129
Blu-ray drives have got faster and dropped in price substantially in the last 6-8 months. That said, with the tsunami disaster in Japan you can expect to see prices rise slightly. But even if they become more expensive, all computers should have one.
PSU: Cooler Master Silent Pro Gold 1200w - $299
If you're running two GTX590s that require 375w each, plus an awesome g1-Assassin board that will draw its own share of watts,
and planning to overclock the CPU, you'll need a hefty power supply. This is one of the few I’ve seen that is more than 90% efficient, and even at full load manages to stay above 90%. This means at 900W you’re really drawing 990w out of the grid. If you ran a PSU that was 70%, you’d actually draw 1,170W off the grid. So the more efficient the PSU, the less it actually costs to run your machine.
CASE: Cooler Master HAF X NVIDIA Edition - $275
The G1-Assassin and Rampage III Black boards are both very
large, actually bigger than the E-ATX standard (XL-ATX). This means there are very few cases either will fit into. The Cooler Master HAF X, Corsair Obsidian 800D, Aerocool Xpredator and the Bitfenix Colossus cases come to mind, but we've gone with with Cooler Master's green case. Why? Because when you add the G1-Assassin mobo - with its green accents and broken down M4 Assault rifle look - and an EK-KIT cooling system with green water, you'll get something that looks trick.
CORE SYSTEM COST - AUD $6,103
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