A Dream Machine graced the inaugural issue of Maximum PC back in 1998, and the tradition of building an annual no-holds-barred PC beast has continued unabated since then. True to form, this year’s rig is the most audacious, most powerful dream rig to date. Equipped with no fewer than eight processing cores, four graphics cores, and five hard drives, DM2008 is probably also our most controversial build. But as Lando said, it’s not our fault.
In the old days, we would just pick the very best hardware available. But those were simpler times, when parts vendors all got along and their sole mission was to provide you with badass gear. Sadly, the stakes are so high today that politics has an undue influence on hardware configurations.
The most obvious evidence of this is the ongoing war between Intel and Nvidia. Both companies try to downplay the tension, but this war of words, drivers, and marketing puts hardware enthusiasts in a pickle. We originally had our sights set on Nvidia’s hot new GPU for this year’s Dream Machine and even prepared ourselves with an “SLI-ready” motherboard. But the two GeForce GTX 280 cards wouldn’t pair up in SLI on our Intel board, despite its Nvidia nForce chips.
That doesn’t mean Maximum PC’s 10th anniversary Dream Machine is compromised. Far from it. If anything, sidestepping the political and technological land mines has made this machine even better. Even more powerful. And, well, even more intriguing, as our graphics cards are so new that you haven’t even heard of them.
Interested? Read on to find out what’s inside the world’s best PC.
Comments are closed on this article
Sebastianem
August 27, 2008 at 9:29am
I always look forward to September for this reason. I have to agree with Haipyng, this is one bad ass beast and I would love to see a comparison (today's prices, performance) done with DM '08 and it predecessors.
There have been some detractors to the assemblage of parts for this years DM, however, as stated in the article, the DM is all about the performance of the machine as a whole, not as a glorified gaming console.
Makes me wonder what next year will bring...
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