You always hear, “It’s what’s inside that counts,” but does anyone really believe that? We’ve never bought into that load of nonsense, you shouldn’t either. Components matter most, but you’re not going to put top-of-the-line parts in a bargain-bin midtower. Are you?

Every September, when we set out to build the year’s Dream Machine, we have one simple goal in mind: Create the very best machine money can buy—inside and out. We build the fastest, most powerful, most authoritative rig in the world. Demolishing performance records set by lesser machines is just a happy side effect.

Sometimes, we cheat. We get prerelease hardware that’s unavailable to common folk. In the past, we’ve tested dozens of CPUs, looking for the perfect overclocking candidate. This year, we didn’t have any crutches—no prerelease hardware or fancy-pants paint jobs. This year, we relied on good ol’ American muscle.

While past Dream Machines have been hand-built Formula One cars with custom hardware exclusive to the magazine, DM ’07 is a supercharged stock car. It’s equipped with factory parts anyone can buy, but, as always, our Dream Machine is overclocked and ready to burn!

One peek inside and you know that DM '07 means business (click for larger pic).

CPU: Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6850

1,333MHz front-side bus finally arrives in the new 3GHz chip.

When it came time to choose our CPU, Intel made us an offer we couldn’t refuse. OK, so Luca Brasi didn’t hold a .38 to our temple, but when you compare the 3GHz quad-core Core 2 Extreme QX6850 ($1,000, www.intel.com) to every other publicly available CPU, the choice is obvious. It mows down the benchmarks and the competition—including AMD’s vaunted quadfather—like it’s the St. Valentine’s Day massacre.

Although our Dream Machine’s CPU is new, it’s similar to what you’ve seen before. It has the same 8MB of L2 cache, the same Core microarchitecture, and the same socket support as the Core 2 QX6800. The main difference is the front-side bus, which runs natively at 1,333MHz instead of a mere 1,066MHz. Remember, the cores communicate via the FSB, so that added bandwidth is welcome.

For DM ’07, we overclocked the stock 3GHz chip to 3.66GHz. Although the QX6850 doesn’t clock up like its lesser siblings (low-end chips tend to overclock farther than top-bin chips), we’re still talking about speeds well in excess of 3GHz. That’s some blazingly fast number crunching.

Memory: Corsair Dominator 10000

A controversial RAM decision: Is 2GB dreamy?

Dream Machine is all about going hog wild, but we do show some restraint when excess has no bearing on performance. Case in point: We could have easily slotted 4GB of RAM into this year’s Dream rig, but why? We’re not convinced that having 4GB of main system RAM with a 32-bit OS is even useful, as you won’t be able to access all of it. The 2GB we do use comes from Corsair’s award-winning Dominator series ($610, www.corsair.com). It gives us the Corsair reputation in addition to a couple of wicked black heat spreaders.

Motherboard: EVGA nForce 680i SLI

Overclockability means more to us than bling.

We were faced with a tough decision when choosing a board for this year’s Dream Machine. We could have gone with the flashy features of the Asus Striker Extreme or the all-out overclocking potential of EVGA’s nForce 680i SLI board (reviewed January 2007, $250, www.evga.com). In the end, we decided to go for broke with EVGA’s offering. A good thing, too, as overclocking a quad core can be a bitch. Luckily, the nForce 680i SLI didn’t let us down. We successfully pushed our quad past its 3GHz stock speed to 3.66GHz fairly easily. We couldn’t get past 3.5GHz with the Striker without blowing chunks. Why not Intel boards? Going nForce gives us SLI support—something you certainly can’t get on Intel’s new P35 boards.

Cooling: Custom Water-Cooling Craziness!

The heck with kits. With Dream Machine, it's BYOC: Bring Your Own Cooling.

You can buy a complete water-cooling kit from your favorite online retailer, but we’ve found that the best way to approach the oh-so-finicky combination of liquids and electronics is to fashion a custom system using the best parts from several manufacturers. Like a child before his birthday, we assembled a dream list of cooling parts from two of our favorite suppliers, Danger Den and Swiftech.

While we were tempted to cool every single hotspot on the mobo, we decided that the disadvantages of running an elaborate multi-radiator cooling rig outweighed the meager benefits. Instead, we settled on a traditional CPU/GPU loop using a Swiftech Apogee GTX water block ($75, www.swiftnets.com) for the former and two of the company’s stealth VGA water blocks ($110 each) for the latter. The blocks get the difficult cooling job done, but more than that, installation is absurdly easy.

Laing’s D5 pump, Danger Den part number DD12V-D5, ($90, www.dangerden.com) is our Dream Machine’s workhorse. It’s a beastly fellow that spits fluid at a maximum rate of approximately 315 gallons per hour, pushing our coolant around with nary a sound. We rounded out the loop with generic 1/2-inch tubing, a Danger Den reservoir filled with custom black coolant, and a Swiftech radiator.

Videocard: XFX GeForce 8800 Ultra XXX Edition

Over the top? Of course! This is the Dream Machine, dude.

As much as we hate being predictable, we had to go with an Nvidia-based videocard for this year’s Dream Machine—for the third year in a row. Yes, we’re talking about GeForce 8800 Ultras in SLI. But we’re sure you saw this one coming, since AMD’s ATI brand managers have decided not to play in the high end of the market this product cycle. (Wimps!)

The Dream Machine is all about being the best, so not just any 8800 Ultra cards would do. We picked a pair of XFX’s XXX Edition boards (reviewed August 2007, $875 each, www.xfxforce.com) because they run at blistering speeds: The core is clocked at 612MHz, the shader units spin at 1.67GHz, and the 768MB frame buffer hums along at an amazing 1.15GHz.

Power Supply: PC Power and Cooling Silencer 750 Quad

Our 750 is like other people's 1,000-watt PSUs.

What, you thought we needed a kilowatt PSU to run this year’s Dream Machine? Maybe if we had selected units from lesser manufacturers, but this SLI/CrossFire-ready PSU delivers more than enough juice. Even better, the unit uses a single-rail design to power all components. While other PSU-makers sport multiple rails, which don’t make efficient use of resources, the Silencer 750 Quad ($190, www.pcpower.com) puts the power where you need it. Since we’ve never had a PC Power and Cooling unit fail in our Lab (aside from the one we dropped), we’re confident that this one won’t cough up a capacitor and drop dead the first time a brownout or power surge strikes. To seal the deal, PC Power and Cooling built this PSU with custom cable lengths, just for DM ’07. Now, if a PSU company would just do that for everybody….

Storage: Four Hitachi 7k1000 Terabyte Drives

If they came any bigger we'd need a corral, not a case.

So why did we go with Hitachi’s mighty 7K1000 drives (reviewed July 2007, $400 each, www.hgst.com) for the Dream Machine? For the answer, we need but a word: terabyte. At the time of our rig’s construction, Hitachi was the only player to have a fully functioning terabyte drive on the market. And once you’ve enjoyed the sweet taste of 1,000 gigs, you just can’t eat elsewhere.

More than that, the 7K1000’s performance is almost as impressive as its size. Its speeds stomp that of every competitor, save Western Digital’s 10,000RPM Raptor drive. Still, the Hitachi 7K1000 holds its own against that tiny roadrunner. We’re rocking two of them in a RAID 0 configuration for maximum performance, with the other two floating as independent drives—perfect for backups, or approximately 3 billion lolcat pictures.

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dream machine, 2007, september 2007, build a pc, rigs

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