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Dream Machine 2009: How To Build the Best PC For Any Budget!

The Maximum PC Staff — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 10:30:00 -0500

Dreams Within Reach

Why we built three kick-ass rigs priced for any budget

Sometimes, you just have to keep things real. Last year, our Dream Machine was a paean to excess, a chrome-plated $17,000 wünder-rig. While we’re still quite fond of that machine, this year we decided to take a different tack and see if we could build a more reasonably priced, but still lust-worthy Dream Machine. Well, actually, we built three of them. While the combined cost of these three machines is about half the price of last year’s rig, we packed a lot of awesome into our relatively tight budgets. The lesson is simple: Dream Machine isn’t about spending a ludicrous amount of cash on a PC, it’s about getting the best rig you can for the money you spend. I think you’ll agree that these three machines pack a ton of power and are all great values.

Without further ado, we give you this year’s crop of Dream Machines.

The Recession Special -- $690

A blue-light bargain doesn't always mean clearance performance

The number-one complaint console weenies have about PC gaming is the cost. We’re here to tell you that you can build an entry-level gaming rig that still kicks ass for less than $700. So, while we advocate saving your ducats when the economy is in the toilet, you needn’t suffer a slow PC.

Our goal with the Recession Special was to build a machine designed for one thing and one thing only—gaming. There’s no terabyte hard drive or fancy quad-core CPU in here, just a honking videocard and enough memory and CPU to support the GPU. That’s it. What we built is a machine that shreds at most games, from World of Warcraft to Team Fortress 2.

So, there you go. Take your severance, put together our $700 wonder, and subscribe to WoW. After all, where else can you get hundreds of hours of entertainment for $15 a month?

Motherboard

A good low-cost alternative to the high-flying 790FX chipset, boards such as MSI’s DKA790GX use ATI’s integrated graphics chipset. We just switched the onboard GPU off and still got access to the advanced chipset special sauce that ATI and AMD have developed for the Phenom II. And made before DDR3, it’ll run well on regular DDR2.

CPU

Scoffed at initially, AMD’s tri-core procs will still whip the snot out of any dual-core. Even better, the 45nm Phenom II overclocks like hell. We took our 2.8GHz Phenom II X3 720 to 3.6GHz without breaking a sweat.

Cooling

This is actually a stock AVC heatsink that AMD includes with its retail processor in box. For what it’s worth, we were able to get our 2.8GHz proc up to 3.7GHz with stability, so there’s something to be said for stock heatsinks.

RAM

Yeah, DDR3 is cheaper today but it still ain’t as cheap as DDR2, which you’re practically paid to use. OK, not really, but it’s wickedly affordable. We paired our 64-bit OS with 4GB of Kingston HyperX DDR2/800.

Videocard

Dayum, it feels good to be a gamer. Especially when you can get an HIS Radeon HD 4870 for such a good price. Just a couple years ago, a hunred and fiddy bucks would get you a pathetic single-slot graphics card that didn’t even need power. And now we have a $700 PC with a truly stupendous card.

PSU

One of the tricks to getting a sub-$700 machine to work with a good GPU is to find a low-cost power supply that will actually give you two six-pin graphic connectors. The Rosewill RP550V2-S-SL did that for us and it’s quiet, to boot. It helps that our graphics card is actually pretty lean on power consumption despite its dual six-pin connectors.

Optical Drive

Take Samsung’s burnalicious SH-S223 and add LightScribe capabilities and you have one the best burners available for next to nothing. Really. At $25 each, we were tempted to put three in the box just because we could.

Case

Antec’s 900 may be dated but it’s no less effective. You get awesome air flow and a sharp design that doesn’t belie the low budget of the machine. Even better, the case’s vintage status means many stores will have it marked down to a very reasonable price. When you consider that you’re getting a case that revolutionized the category, it’s yet another plus.

Hard Drive

The SSD in our Stimulus machine costs almost as much as this whole PC, so an HDD was clearly called for. Western Digital’s 500GB Caviar Black features a 32MB buffer, 7,200rpm, and dual processors for high performance at a pretty low price. Sure, we could have gained a few hundred more megabytes by going with a slower drive, but we opted for as much drive performance as we could get on a budget.

Operating System

With that OS X-ass-stomping Windows 7 just around corner, it would be pretty hard to load Windows Vista on our Dream Machines. Instead, we went with the Release Candidate version of Win 7 Ultimate in 64-bit flavor. Stuff that in your hat and eat it, Justin Long.

The Parts List

Category	Name	Price	URL
CPU	AMD Phenom II X3 720	$139	amd.com
Motherboard	MSI DKA790GX	$122	msicomputer.com
RAM	Kingston HyperX 4GB	$55	kingston.com
Videocard	HIS Radeon 4870 512MB	$153	hisdigital.com
Hard Drive	Western Digital Caviar 500 Black	$69	westerndigital.com
Optical Drive	Samsung SH-S223F	$25	samsungodd.com
PSU	Rosewill RP550V2-S-SL	$52	rosewill.com
Case	Antec 900	$77	antec.com
OS	Windows 7 Ultimate RC1	$0	microsoft.com
Total		$692

The Budget Surplus -- $1,420

Whoever said Core i7 is out of reach for the average Jane or Joe was flat-out wrong

Sticking to a budget can be hard, but it doesn’t have to be painful. Our mid-priced rig, the Budget Surplus, is remarkably similar to the computers that most Maximum PC editors run at home—$1,500-ish rigs that are adept at many tasks. Whether you’re browsing the web, playing games, ripping DVDs, or editing video, the Budget Surplus delivers.

When building a $1,500 rig, it’s easy to get your priorities out of whack. We love the power of a Core i7 CPU when we’re encoding video, but we couldn’t sacrifice GPU to get it. Likewise, we wanted more performance than a single GPU could deliver, but couldn’t skimp on CPU to find the cash for SLI or CrossFire. Luckily, we found a great compromise in the form of an inexpensive Core i7 920 CPU and a dual-GPU Radeon 4870 X2.

The result is a machine that’s only about 20 percent slower than our highest-end configuration, but costs half as much. That’s a surplus we can get excited about.

Motherboard

Gigabyte’s X58-based GA-EX58-UDR3R balances features with price. You get CrossFire plus SLI capability (something most budget boards don’t include), and it’s overclocker friendly. The bad news is that instead of the typical six RAM slots, you get just four. You still get tri-channel, but if you ever intend to add additional RAM later on, you’ll take a memory-bandwidth hit.

CPU

It’s no wonder Intel’s 2.66GHz Core i7-920 stole the show when introduced. It’s incredibly low-priced and gives you more computing than you’ll probably need for the foreseeable future—and that’s at its stock clocks. There’s actually a state law that says a 920 has to be overclocked, so we obliged—all the way to 3.66GHz.

Cooling

Thermalright’s Ultra 120E-1366 isn’t fun to install but the payoff is well worth it. This tower-of-power heatsink is the most effective air cooler we’ve ever tested. Pushing our 2.66GHz Core i7-920 to 3.66GHz was child’s play for this bad mother of a cooler. And to top it off, it’s actually fairly quiet for the performance that it offers.

RAM

If you think we’re hypocrites for dissing DDR3 in our budget box but using it in our midrange machine, you’re wrong. You choose the right tool for the right job. DDR3 is the only option for Core i7 and it’s actually pretty damned affordable itself. We got 6GB of Patriot’s Viper DDR3/1600 for just $79.

Videocard

You know how good ATI’s Radeon HD 4870 X2 card is? It’s so good that this is the first time we’ve ever used a videocard from a previous-generation Dream Machine. That’s just a testament to the legs that the Diamond Radeon HD 4870 X2 has.

PSU

Corsair’s 850TX lacks the modular cables of its big brother, but it gives us a reliable 850 watts without breaking the bank. Simply put, the 850TX gives us a lot of bang for the buck. It doesn’t hurt that Corsair’s PSUs are garnering high praise from reviewers and customers for solid reliability. Did we mention that it’s just $135?

Optical Drive

Do you really need Blu-ray in your mainstream PC? That one is easy to answer: nope. Thus, we used the same $25 hella-fast DVD burner that we used in our Recession Special, for all the same reasons.

Case

It may not feature exotic materials, lights, or a built-in minibar, but the Element S is truly marvelous to build in and easy to keep neat. For example, getting a tight and tidy appearance inside the Antec 900 takes serious imagination, but thanks to the forethought that went into the Element S’s construction, a ship-shape interior requires minimal work.

Hard Drive

SSD prices have plummeted in recent months, but they’re still too rich for our blood. Instead, we tapped Seagate’s superfast 1.5TB Barracuda 7200.11 for storage duties. It’s damn-near as fast as a 10K VelociRaptor, and with 1.5TB of space, you’d be downloading for months before you could fill it.

OS

Windows 7 is like a new topical cream: It will ease the burning and itching sensation that PC users have suffered with Windows Vista and at the same time make it easy to crow about how the PC is better than the Mac once again.

The Parts List

Category	Name	Price	URL
CPU	Intel 2.66GHz Core i7-920	$280	intel.com
Motherboard	Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD3R	$189	gigabyte.us
RAM	Patriot 6GB Viper DDR3/1600	$79	patriotmemory.com
Videocard	Diamond Radeon HD 4870 X2	$389	diamondmm.com
Hard Drive	Seagate 1.5TB 7200.11 Barracuda	$130	seagate.com
Optical Drive	Samsung SH-S223F	$25	samsungodd.com
Cooling	Thermalright Ultra 120E-1366	$70	thermalright.com
PSU	Corsair 850TX	$135	corsair.com
Case	Thermaltake Element S	$120	thermaltakeusa.com
OS	Windows 7 Ultimate RC1	$0	microsoft.com
Total		$1,417

The Stimulus Package -- $3,525

It costs just a fraction of last year's Dream Machine, but does everything an enthusiast PC should

Usually, we outfit our annual Dream Machine with more than just the fastest PC hardware the world has ever seen. Oh yes, usually the Dream Machine is pimped out with luxuries like a fancy paint job and rich Corinthian leather. This year, we made our challenge harder by stripping out all the excess, leaving just the lean ‘n’ mean hardware to send the message that this is a take-no-prisoners PC.

And it does that loud and clear. The Stimulus Package—named for the effect purchasing it has on the local economy and not the way the government spends your tax dollars—is an all-workflows powerhouse.

Motherboard

Asus’s P6T Deluxe V2 is the follow-up to the company’s enthusiast X58 board and supports up to 24GB of RAM at up to 2GHz and does away with the much-maligned SAS controller that was in the original board. It’s also a bit cheaper than the original and has a great reputation as a solid overclocking board.

CPU

Clearly, the most luxurious item we put in our top-tier rig is Intel’s new 3.33GHz Core i7-975 Extreme Edition. At $999, it may seem like eating caviar while using the bill collector’s notice as a plate, but it does give you more Turbo Mode control, an unlocked multiplier, and the enhanced overclockability that’s characteristic of Intel’s new D0 step of the core. We cranked ours to a cool 4GHz on air cooling alone.

Cooling

That’s no moon, it’s Thermalright’s Ultra 120E-1366 cooler with an optional second fan clipped to it. Yeah, it all but eclipses everything on our motherboard, but it’s actually a somewhat quiet and very effective cooler. Running our proc at a conservative 4GHz, we hammered the CPU overnight with Prime95 and didn’t see one hiccup.

Videocards

EVGA’s GeForce GTX 285 cards are the fastest single-GPU cards available. Period. We tapped two of them in SLI for truly kick-ass performance in all games at high resolutions.

PSU

It’s amazing that PC Power and Cooling’s Silencer 910 approaches the kilowatt range without the noise usually associated with 1K units. The unit is, of course, a single-rail design with up to 74 amps on the all-important 12-volt rail. What the specs don’t show you is the PSU’s heritage of reliability. While other brands have experienced failures in long-term use, we’ve never had a PC Power and Cooling unit give up the ghost.

Optical Drive

The vast number of people will watch Blu-ray movies yet never need to burn a Blu-ray disc. LG’s GGC-H20L gives us Blu-ray ROM support and acts as a 16x DVD and 40x CD-R burner, as well. This combo drive even reads HD-DVD discs, for those folks who need that kind of thing.

Case

Spending $200 on a case may seem extravagant until you consider how much life you’ll get out of it. When the Core i7 and GTX 295 cards have been jettisoned as scrap in five years, you’ll still be using this Cooler Masters ATCS 840. In 10 years, when you’ve had to replace your car, you’ll still be using this case.

SSD/Hard Drive

Corsair’s P256 SSD gives you the best of both worlds: With its 256GB of storage, it’s actually large enough to use as a primary drive while still being blazingly fast. With read speeds greater than 200MB/s and write speeds in the 150MB/s range, you’ll wonder how you could ever go back to an HDD as your boot partition. Of course, 256GB isn’t enough capacity for us, so we pair the SSD with a fast 1.5GB Seagate Barracuda drive.

OS

Think of Windows 7 as a hybrid OS: It has the performance feel of Windows XP and the bling of Windows Vista. When pitting our troika of Dream Machines against our zero-point PC, we were stunned by the performance differences between our Windows Vista 64-bit zero-point and the three rigs running Windows 7. Just installing Windows 7 on the zero-point gave it a significant performance boost.

The Parts List

Category	Name	Price	URL
CPU	Intel Core i7-975 Extreme Edition	$999	intel.com
Motherboard	Asus P6T Deluxe 2.0	$280	asus.com
RAM	Corsair Dominator 1600 C8	$166	corsair.com
Videocard	EVGA GeForce GTX 285	$700	evga.com
Solid State Drive	Corsair P256	$700	corsair.com
Hard Drive	Seagate 1.5TB 7200.11 Barracuda	$130	seagate.com
Optical Drive	LG GGC-H20L	$100	lge.com
Cooling	Thermalright Ultra 120E-1366	$70	thermalright.com
PSU	PC Power & Cooling Silencer 910	$185	pcpower.com
Case	Cooler Master ATCS 840	$195	coolermaster.com
OS	Windows 7 Ultimate RC1	$0	microsoft.com
Total		$3,525

Read on for the benchmarks!

The Benchmarks

Let's face it, the proof is in the performance

The Zero Point

As a point of comparison, we ran all three Dream Machines against our current zero-point test bed. The zero point is admittedly elderly, but it’s actually still faster than 90 percent of people’s PCs, with its 2.66GHz Core 2 Quad Q6700, SLI GeForce 8800 GTX cards, 4GB of DDR2/800, and Western Digital 150GB Raptor. It was probably about $2,000 in hardware when new and today it still couldn’t be built for less than $1,100.

The Recession Special

You shouldn’t expect miracles, but it’s truly amazing the amount of horsepower you can get for $700 today. As we said previously, the tri-core will thrash dual-cores, but even overclocked, three of a kind can’t beat four of a kind when you’re dealing with multithreaded apps. Thus, even at 3.6GHz, the tri gets a little drubbed by the quad-core 2.66GHz zero-point box. And even though they’re older, two GeForce 8800 GTX cards in SLI are faster than one newer card. Still, you have to consider that the $700 rig is about 30 percent cheaper than even the depreciated value of our zero-point system. We call that a win.

The Budget Surplus

This is truly the everyman’s machine. For a tad more than $1,400, you get one hell of a fast box. It helps that we pushed our ultra-budget 2.66GHz Core i7-920 to a conservative 3.66GHz. Should we have gone further? Yes, we could have squeaked a little bit more out of it, but we decided stability was more important than it working most of the time. And this still lets our Budget Surplus box run circles around our zero-point and our Recession Special—and frankly, it will make a lot of people wonder if it’s worth even stepping up to the Stimulus Package. The Budget Surplus’s weak point is in high-resolution DirectX 10 gaming. As good as the 4870 X2 is, it’s still a year-old card. Of course, might you not combine portions of the Stimulus Package with the Budget Surplus to make the best compromise of performance and power? Something to think about.

The Stimulus Package

The Stimulus Package was not built without controversy. Would it not make sense, for example, to just use the i7-920 CPU and pocket the cash? You could say the same of the Corsair P256 SSD, one of the GeForce GTX 295 cards, and the Cooler Master 840 case, too, for that matter. Eventually, you can whittle the machine down to the point where it won’t stimulate anything.

In the end, even in down times, some people want the ultimate performance and the Stimulus Package does that for just $3,500. That gets you the fastest rig of the pack and rock-solid stability at a conservative 4GHz. All machines here were stress-tested, but the Stimulus Package was stress-tested the most—and it came out with flying colors.

Benchmarks

	Zero Point	Recession Special	Budget Surplus	Stimulus Package
Unreal Tournament 3 (fps)	106	111	198	263
Crysis (fps)	29	22	37	65
MainConcept (fps)	2054	1755	977	880
ProShow (sec)	1229	1258	513	480
Photoshop CS3 (sec)	143	150	94	81
Premiere Pro CS3 (sec)	1026	1103	496	438

(click to enlarge)

Build Your Own Dream Machine

We show you how to assemble your own $3,500 Stimulus Package rig

We’ve come a hell of a long way since the days when you had to set 15 jumpers and cross your fingers in hopes that your newly built PC would actually run. Today, anyone short of a klutz can build an incredibly powerful PC and have it boot on the first throw of the switch.

For our build-it how-to, we used the Stimulus Package PC from our triumvirate of Dream Machines to illustrate how anyone can construct their own rig. As always, you should read through all of the steps before starting your build and research any questions about the process that arise—but you certainly shouldn’t feel daunted by the task. Even the most elite of our machines can be built in an hour or two, even if you’re going at a very leisurely pace.

To get started, gather up all the parts you’ll need (pictured above) and set up your work area in a static-free environment. Before you touch any electrically sensitive components, you should discharge built-up static electricity by touching the case or another large metal object. For tools, you can get by with a basic Phillips screwdriver and a pair of pliers, but that’s about all you need to build your very own dream PC.

So, let’s get cracking!

1. Remove the Motherboard Tray

Not all cases feature removable motherboard trays, but when they do, it can make your life far easier. We start by unfastening the four screws holding our mobo tray in place. It’s important to make sure there will be adequate clearance once your uber-big heatsink is in place. Some heatsinks are so tall that they prevent you from reinstalling the tray in the case. Fortunately, the Cooler Master ATCS 840 has a massive cavity that accommodates just about anything.

2. Mount Up

Remove your mobo from its packaging and take a quick look at where it mounts to the case. Now add a mount in the tray for each mounting point on your motherboard (image A). Make sure you tighten the mounts in the tray enough so they don’t back out when it comes time to remove the motherboard in the future.

(image A)

The I/O shield prevents your kids from jamming Cheerios into the case. You can hammer it in place with the back of a screwdriver (image B). This shield doesn’t have the cheap metal fingers that can poke into the network ports, but if yours does, bend the fingers inward and upward as far as they can go. Once the I/O shield is in, drop the board in place and screw it down. Remember, if you screwed nine mounts into your tray, you need to use nine screws to hold the board down. If you only have eight places for screws, you messed up. Remove the board and try again.

(image B)

3. Install the CPU

With the board in place, you’re now ready to drop in your new Core i7 CPU. Simply unlock the locking arm and swing it out of the way. This will let you lift the metal load plate (image A). Now gently remove the plastic plate that protects the delicate pins of the processor socket (image B). Do not ever touch these with your fingers or any object as you may bend a pin and then it would be adios, muchacho. Next, remove the plastic plate on the CPU that protects the round contact points and then carefully use two fingers to hold the processor parallel to the socket and slowly lower the proc in place (image C). Do not drop one side in and slide the CPU around in the socket—this will kill your motherboard. With the CPU in the socket, lower the load plate and lock the arm in place.

(image A)

(image B)

(image C)

4. Install the Heatsink

(image A)

First, prep the massive Thermalright Ultra-120 by inserting the correct LGA1366 bracket in the base of the heatsink. The arms of this X-shaped bracket can be adjusted to match the backing plate that will go on the underside of the mobo. Now add a large-BB-size gob of thermal paste to the CPU’s center (image A). We prefer Dow Corning’s TC-5600 paste, as it’s been known to give us about a five degree Celsius shift from the stock paste. You can be ultra careful and spread the paste evenly all over the CPU surface using a plastic bag, but we’ve been hearing from PC builders that the lazy-man’s large-BB-size gob in the middle of the proc may actually yield better results with Core i7, where flex in the socket design can produce a gap in the center, which is thus filled by the gob.

(image B)

(image C)

Now, flip the mobo tray on its side and place the cooler’s backing plate on the back of the motherboard (image B). With one hand holding the backing plate in place, flip the tray back down so it’s hanging partially off the table, allowing you to continue to hold the backing plate in place. It’s tricky, but you must now place the heatsink with the X-shaped bracket in place (image C). Take one of the spring screws and hand-tightenit, connecting the bracket to the backing plate. Once you have one screw in, you can let go of the backing plate, as the single screw will hold it mostly in place. Now install the other three screws by hand. Once they’re in, use a screwdriver to tighten the screws until each bottoms out (image D).

(image D)

(image E)

We sandwiched two fans on our Thermalright. Install each by simply sliding the fingers of the fan bracket along the same axis as the heatsink blades (image E). Make sure both fans are blowing air in the same direction. Now plug in both fans. Note: Many high-end fans use only three-pin connectors for power. These are compatible with the four-pin PWM connectors except that one pin is not used (image F).

(image F)

5. Install RAM

Core i7 features a tri-channel memory mode that requires the RAM to be installed in three individual memory channels. For this mobo, it’s the orange slots (image A). Unlike with previous Intel or AMD CPUs, you want to populate the set of slots farthest from the CPU. Fail to do this and the PC may not boot. Before you install the RAM, spread the arms of the memory slots. Now, line up the notch in the RAM with the notch in the slot. Carefully insert the RAM directly into each slot and put slight pressure on the outer ends until it locks into place (image B). If it isn’t locking into place, you may have it in backwards. Recheck the notch so that it matches and slide the RAM in again. Do this for all three pieces of RAM. When you’re done, snap closed the unused arms for the empty slots.

(image A)

(image B)

6. Install the GPU Numero Uno

Now, grab one of your graphics cards. Since they’re both the same, it doesn’t matter which one. Line it up horizontally above the first x16 PCI Express slot in the system, then carefully insert it. The card should lock into place. If it doesn’t, remove the card by pressing the card release and try reinserting it. We’ve seen people install cards and somehow have the contacts on the outside of the slot, so make sure the card is properly in place. Screw the card in place with two screws. One will suffice, but you should use two if you plan to transport the machine. We’ll install the second card a bit later.

7. Slide in the Mobo

You’re now ready to slide the motherboard tray assembly into place and screw it down. Again, you can see the advantage of using a case that features a removable tray.

8. Hook up the Umbilicals

If you’re wondering why we didn’t have you install the second GPU when the tray was outside of the case, it’s because it would have blocked your access to the USB and FireWire headers. So, with easy access to the headers, carefully plug in the USB and FireWire connectors that hook up to the front of your case (image A). Generally, they are keyed so they cannot be plugged in backwards. If your case has the old-fashioned individual connectors, you’ll need to get out the motherboard manual and follow the map to plug each tiny one in place.

(image A)

Now is also a good time to plug in the front-panel eSATA connector, as well as the three loose SATA cables for the hard drive, optical drive, and SSD. These don’t have to be plugged into the drives yet, but it is easier to plug them into the board before you install the second GPU. Finally, you should hunt through your motherboard box for the quick-connect block. This lets you plug in your power and reset switch as well as the hard drive and power LED to the block, which then connects to the motherboard’s front-panel connectors (image B). You don’t have to use the block, but it makes it easier if you have to pull out the motherboard tray—you won’t have to worry about rewiring the front-panel connectors.

(image B)

9. Double the Graphics

Most modern performance boards will have multiple PCI-E slots. For SLI, however, you’ll need to use the very top long x16 PCI-E slot and the very bottom black PCI-E slot. Install the second videocard as you did the first one and screw it in place. Now grab the SLI bridge connector that should have come with your motherboard. There are two pairs of connectors on the cards—you’ll use only one for standard SLI. You can plug into either set. Simply line the bridge up over the slots and gently but firmly push the bridge in place. Voila! You’ve got SLI going now.

10. Install Your Drives

Our fast and fat Corsair SSD unfortunately does not fit into the standard 3.5-inch drive slots, so we dropped it into an aluminum shell scavenged from the lab. If you don’t have that luxury, the typical (albeit ugly) 2.5-to-3.5-inch converter
from Frozencpu.com will set you back about $8 (http://frozencpu.com/products/8898...).

(image A)

We simply mounted the 256GB Corsair drive in the VelociRaptor tray (image A), put that into one of the case’s drive trays, and inserted it into the case. We did the same with our 1.5GB Seagate Barracuda drive, carefully spreading the tray apart and placing the drive in it. Again, insert the drive tray back into the Cooler Master case with the black locking arm open (image B). Push the tray in and lock the arm in place.

(image B)

To install the optical drive in the Cooler Master, find a spot where you want the drive to reside. Since our case will be under a desk, we opted for the uppermost slot. Now, push the button located alongside the drive bay to unlock the bay, and slide your drive in until the front of the drive is flush with the front of the case (image C). Press the button again and the drive should be locked in place. Try to push the drive out of the case from the back; it should not move. If the drive continues to slide around, push the button again to lock it in place and then check the drive for movement again. Now, take the three SATA cables you previously plugged into the motherboard and hook up the SSD, HDD, and optical drive. The actual SATA port will not matter as all three are on the same controller.

(image C)

11. Power Up

(image A)

The last part we’re going to install is the PC Power and Cooling Silencer 910. Installation has not changed; simply put the PSU in the case and screw it down in back (image A). With the PSU secured, it’s time to plug in your power cords. For this particular configuration, you’ll need to plug in the large 24-pin main power connector (image B), the supplemental eight-pin ATX12V/EPS connector, plus all six-pin GPU plugs as well as power to the HDD, SSD, and optical drive. All of the connectors are keyed to prevent reverse insertion, so long as you don’t force it. The motherboard power should lock into place. A very common cause of a failure-to-boot is neglecting to plug in the ATX12V/EPS plug. A loose main power connector can also lead to flaky boots. Your final step is to connect the case’s auxiliary fans to the proper Molexes on the PSU.

(image B)

Congratulations, you’ve just built your very first Core i7 computer! Wasn’t that easy?

Troubleshooting Checklist

So, your new system won’t start or you don’t get an image on the monitor? Here are the most common failure points we’ve run into, from easy to hard:

Check that the PSU is switched on and plugged into a hot outlet

Check and/or reseat the EPS12V/ATX12V connector and the main power connector

Check that the RAM is in the correct slots for an i7 system

Check the power-switch wiring for the front-panel connector or use the power-on switch on the motherboard

Is the monitor on?

Check the DVI/VGA cable connection to the monitor

Reset the CMOS (with the system unplugged)

Reseat the videocard (with system unplugged)

Reseat the RAM (with the system unplugged)

Reseat the CPU (with the system unplugged)

Remove and reseat the motherboard and check the mounting points

September 2008: Dream Machine 2008!

The Maximum PC Staff — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 13:06:51 -0500

In the PDF archive of the September 2008 issue, you can find:

2008 Dream Machine!
Maximum PC's 10th-Anniversary Retrospective
ATI vs. Nvidia
How To: Slipstream Windows XP SP3 and Vista SP1
Awesome Product Reviews, including the BFG GeForce GTX 280
Ask the Doctor
Rig of the Month
The Watchdog
And a whole lot more!

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Dream Machine '08

The Maximum PC Staff — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 12:30:00 -0500

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.

Next: The Guts and the Glory! >

No Guts, No Glory

Click to see how we built a better monster

Processors: Two Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9775 CPU

One is the bomb, two are bombastic

Quad core? Nerd, puhlease—that’s so 2008. Next year will be all about CPUs with eight threads. Fortunately, we’re already there with a pair of Intel 3.2GHz Core 2 Extreme QX9775s. Between these most insane of Intel’s Core 2 chips, we get eight cores available to the operating system at a nice round 4GHz. Is that overkill? Perhaps, as you probably won’t find more than a couple dozen apps that will use all of these cores today. But let’s not forget multitasking—you know, like encoding an H.264 video in the background while playing a game and also compiling some code and running a few Folding@Home sessions. You can have all that and your cake, too, with the QX9775s. It’s even possible—dare we say it—that applications optimized for more than quad cores would benefit more from a pair of QX9775s than they would from Intel’s upcoming Nehalem. Time will tell.

Memory: 8GB Corsair FB-DIMM

So much RAM your applications won’t know what to do with it

Most consumers have never been exposed to “fully buffered” DIMMs, as the memory is strictly intended for workstations. To sum it up, it’s a hybrid of serial and parallel interfaces that uses an advanced memory buffer in the module to let machines run in excess of 128GB of RAM. The penalty is latency and tremendous heat from the AMB, so we had to use a Corsair Dominator fan to keep the modules from spontaneously igniting.

PSU: PC Power and Cooling Turbo Cool 1200

A true 1,200W PSU that makes a mockery of many ‘1,000-watt’ units

Most 1,000-watt PSUs would crumple under the strain of our Dream Machine’s loadout, so we turned to our old standby: PC Power and Cooling. Its custom-wired Turbo Cool 1200 gives us more than enough power to run all of our hardware, and with the PC Power and Cooling name behind it, we know the unit won’t quit on us.

Motherboard: Intel D5400XS

The mother of all, um, motherboards

Intel’s original V8 S5000XVN motherboard was essentially a relabeled dual-Xeon board pitched as an enthusiast board, which it wasn’t. Intel took the lessons it learned from the V8 and created the much improved Skulltrail D5400XS board. Gone are the eight FB-DIMM slots and SAS features. In are CrossFire support, overclocking features, and a more traditional, more capable (for most folks) Intel ICH9R south bridge. The cherry on top is the D5400XS’s added support for SLI via the board’s two nForce 100 chips. That makes it the only platform that will run either CrossFire or SLI out of the box with public drivers. Awesome, right? It was until Nvidia decided to not support its latest generation of cards on Skulltrail. Why? It’s this damned war between Nvidia and Intel. And frankly, the situation sucks. If the parties involved ever get their heads out of their butts, the D5400XS will rightly take its place as the holy grail of platforms.

Cooling: A Custom Water-Cooling Extravaganza!

Our home-brewed cooling kit offers maximum performance and minimum noise

The dimensions of the Blackbird chassis limited our options for water cooling this year’s Dream Machine. We opted for a Black Ice Pro2 Xflow radiator, as it’s one of the slimmer two-fan radiators we’ve tested. The reservoir is the same model from last year’s Dream Machine, Danger Den’s single-bay tank.

The entire assembly is outfitted with half-inch tubing and fittings. A super-powerful DD12V-D5 pump ensures a speedy flow rate for our fluid, Feser One clear UV-reactive coolant. This, in addition to our two D-TEK FuZion v2 CPU blocks, ensures that the processors will stay well within a healthy thermal range as we push this machine to its outer limits. Two silent Enermax Everest 12cm fans maintain low coolant temperatures.

Next: GPUs, Sound, Optical, and Storage! >

Videocards: Two ATI Radeon 4870 X2s

Double the performance you’d get from a GeForce GTX 280 on Skulltrail

Nvidia’s decision to not support Skulltrail with its brand-new GeForce GTX 280 left us with the option of using a single GeForce GTX 280 or switching to a single-proc system that would let us use SLI. Instead, we chose option three. And that was to talk to ATI. The timing couldn’t have been better because ATI was willing to share a card so secret it didn’t even have a name yet. We kid you not. These dual-GPU cards were so fresh off the fab that ATI was still deciding whether to dub them Radeon HD 4870 X2 or 4970 X2. (The company settled on 4870 X2.) We only cared that we got ’em. And they’re fast. In fact, on Skulltrail, they’re more than twice as fast in 3DMark Vantage as a single GeForce GTX 280.

Soundcard: Creative Labs Sound Blaster X-Fi Titanium

Discrete audio is making a comeback, but as far as we’re concerned, it never left

Onboard audio has grown by leaps and bounds, but we’re still suckers for clean, pristine-sounding discrete audio. It doesn’t hurt if you get hardware acceleration as well, but even we’ll admit that we have plenty of CPU cycles to spare. Creative’s brand-spanking-new Sound Blaster X-Fi Titanium Fatal1ty features a redesigned DSP to natively support PCI Express. Also new is Dolby Digital encoding (finally) and a pair of optical SPDIFs.

Optical Drive: LG Super Multi Blue GBW-H20L

A jack of all optical trades

With LG’s GBW-H20L Blu-ray burner, we don’t need a separate drive to get decent DVD write speeds—as we did in last year’s Dream Machine. Back then, the top Blu-ray burner was rated at a pathetic 8x for DVD+R. The GBW-H20L not only boasts the fastest BD-R speeds currently available (6x), but it’s 16x DVD+R rating is also quite respectable. To get the full rundown on this drive’s abilities, see the review on page 89.

Speakers: Axiom Audio Audiobyte

Because audio is every bit as important as video

Speaker manufacturers have all but abandoned the PC market when it comes to surround sound, but that’s not why we chose to pair Axiom Audio’s Audiobyte self-powered speakers and EPZero passive subwoofer with this year’s Dream Machine.

This 2.1-channel system sounds absolutely divine with games, movies, and music, delivering the sonic clarity and high resolution our ears crave. High-end audio products are never cheap, but the Audiobyte’s $530 price tag is fully justified. Reviewed July 2008.

Storage: Two Western Digital Velociraptors + Three Samsung D103UJs

This is the ultimate combination of performance and capacity, period

High-performance storage has split along two distinct lines: speed and size. On the one hand, there’s Western Digital’s Velociraptor (reviewed on page 86). It’s the fastest drive we’ve ever tested, but it offers just 300GB of storage space. And then there’s Samsung’s HD103UJ (reviewed May 2008), which combines a terabyte of storage with top-of-the-line performance for its size.

It breaks our hearts to have to choose between the two… so we picked both. We’re running two Revision B Velociraptors in a RAID 0 array. There’s our speed. For our capacity needs, we’re going with three HD103UJ drives in a RAID 5 setup. This gives us two terabytes of combined storage while offering some level of data protection should one drive fail.

Next: Operating Systems, Case, Monitor, and Peripherals! >

Operating Systems: Windows Vista Ultimate x64 Edition + Windows XP Professional

Between the two OSes, we're covering all our bases

We’ve come down pretty hard on Windows Vista over the last 18 months, but the OS has shown major improvements in stability, reliability, and performance, especially since the launch of SP1. While we’re infinitely more confident in Vista now than we were in 2007, we’re still not quite ready to roll solo with the OS. That said, XP isn’t perfect. Since 32-bit XP caps out at 4GB of usable memory, fully half of our Dream Machine’s RAM is useless. We’ll take the best of both worlds, thank you.

Case: HP Blackbird 002

Why throw the baby out with the bathwater?

We were lukewarm on the HP Blackbird PC we reviewed in our Holiday 2007 issue, but we’re big fans of its one-of-a-kind chassis. The heavy aluminum case is well constructed and much of the electrical wiring for its features—such as front-panel USB and FireWire connections, a pop-up 15-in-1 card reader, and external LED lighting—is kept hidden from sight.

The hot-swap drive bays on the case’s interior are a treat to work with. A 9.2cm fan runs air across all five hard drive slots. This nod to thermal management is replicated on the case’s ceiling, where two 12cm fans churn the air overtop your heated motherboard components.

HP will sell 25 of its Blackbird cases on a first come, first serve basis beginning September 1. The cost is $1,000 (plus tax and shipping). To order, call 877-776-4752.

Chroming the Blackbird

The Dream Machine is all about going the extra mile—in parts and aesthetics. To give HP’s Blackbird case our own unique stamp, we had the whole thing nickel plated. Computer Choppers does all the hard work and offers a selection of more than 70 plating and finish options, from chrome to copper to platinum. We chose smoked nickel for our rig, which looks a lot like chrome, only smokier and more awesome.

Before the plating is applied, the case is disassembled. Then the parts to be plated are stripped with nitric acid and immersed in a zincate solution so the metal sticks. It’s a complex process that can be made more difficult depending on the quality and/or porosity of the material being plated. Waiting on the finished case was the most nail-biting aspect of building this year’s Dream Machine— we didn’t receive it until the day the feature was scheduled to be photographed! Luckily, HP had sent us another case, which we used to work out all the building issues in the interim.

The cost of having an entire rig plated runs from $5,000 to $10,000, depending on the plating metal.

Mouse and Keyboard: Microsoft Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000 + Logitech G5 Rev. 2

This input duo adorns the desktop of many a PC power user.

When you spend as much time at a keyboard as we do, you need a plank that’s as comfy as it is durable. That’s why we chose the Natural Ergonomic 4000 from Microsoft for this year’s Dream Machine. Likewise, your mouse needs to deliver pixel-accurate gaming performance and comfort to last through those marathon WoW sessions. The G5 does that and then some.

Keyboard reviewed March 2006. G5 mouse reviewed Holiday 2005.

Monitor: Gateway XHD3000

You won't find a better-looking, better-performing or better-connecting 30-inch LCD

We’ve seen a number of 30-inch monitors suffer from splotchy backlighting, color-tracking issues, and poor presets that introduce problems to the picture. But not the Gateway XHD3000, our big monitor of choice for nearly a year. This 2560x1600 display does it all. Its picture is vibrant, its grayscale range is impressive, and its bevy of connection options coupled with touch-sensitive interface buttons make swapping between your inputs quick and easy. Trust us, you’ll want to hook up every device you have to this rock-star display. Reviewed December 2007.

Next: The Numbers Don't Lie! >

The Numbers Don't Lie

In the end, all this hardware amounts to one hell of a fast machine. And not just in theory—as in, next year when such and such comes out, this rig’s power will be evident (although we do admit that some software optimizations will be needed).
In the here and now, we routinely saw performance benefits with many of today’s applications.

For comparison, we put Dream Machine against our standard zero-point 2.67GHz Core 2 Quad Q6700, GeForce 8800 GTX box—and DM pretty much flattened it with double- and triple-digit spreads. While a sub-3GHz quad-core box might sound quaint today, we’ll remind you that our zero-point PC actually gave a new 3.5GHz Core 2 Duo gaming PC that we reviewed in August a pretty good drubbing. So it’s not exactly a slouch.

Still, perhaps that machine’s not the most telling measure of the Dream Machine’s fury. For a more worthy contender, we turned to the CyberPower Gamer Ultimate SLI Quad PC that we reviewed in July. With its 4GHz Core 2 Extreme QX9770 CPU, 4GB of DDR3, and a pair of GeForce 9800 GX2 cards, the system rocked all those that came before it and we knew this mean machine would be difficult to overcome.

But DM did it. At least in some tests. We saw Dream Machine rip past the CyberPower box in both Premiere Pro CS3 and ProShow Producer by 23 and 36 percent, respectively. That’s nothing to turn your nose up at. In other tests, Dream Machine did well, but not spectacularly. In Photoshop CS3— not exactly the most threaded application in the world—Dream Machine scored a near tie with CyberPower, taking just two more seconds to complete our test. Since Photoshop doesn’t exploit our second proc, and honestly, barely pushes a single quad-core CPU to the edge, this is about what we’d expect from PCs that operate at the same clock speed.

In our MainConcept benchmark, DreamMachine was about 10 percent slower. Why? The encoder that’s used in MainConcept Reference is license-limited to single-processor support. Multi-processor support is available only with the professional version, which on the Dream Machine cut the encode time in half, by the way.

In our Unreal Tournament 3 Direct X 10 benchmark, DM’s pair of Radeons didn’t disappoint, cranking out 145 fps. Mind you, our normal benchmarks are designed to measure system-level performance. They’re not meant for pure GPU analysis—thus, we don’t run with antialiasing or massive amounts of filtering enabled. Still, we saw almost double the numbers that a pair of GeForce 8800 GTX cards could produce and 12 percent more than quad SLI cards mustered. With AA and aniso cranked up, the Radeons really start to strut their stuff. When we were still deciding what cards to use in DM, we also ran a GeForce GTX 280 in 3DMark Vantage. A single GTX 280 belts out 9,668 in the GPU tests—very impressive. But not as impressive as the 19,014 that our two Radeons put out. For all you 3D Vantage fans, Dream Machine’s overall score was 20,539. Not bad.

Of course, this leads us to our most heartbreaking test: Crytek’s Crysis. We expected the Radeons to crush everything in this one benchmark, but they just didn’t perform. Why? First, as we mentioned earlier, our system benchmarks are designed to reflect normal system use, not act as GPU tests—AA is not enabled nor is tons of filtering. However, we do run at an all-out 1920x1200 resolution. That’s enough to make most systems whimper. While CyberPower’s Quad SLI rig spit out 55 fps, DM was chugging along at 26 fps—about the same performance we got from two GeForce 8800 GTX cards. What the frak? We got ATI on the horn and learned that the likely culprits were driver and OS optimizations—or rather, lack thereof. ATI didn’t expect to make the cards public for several more months. The company has done some optimization for the X48 chipset, but Skulltrail’s 5400 chipset wasn’t on the top of the list. The company is still sorting out some issues with how Windows Vista handles ATI’s AFR rendering. So this is what we’re talking about when we say future performance will come through improved drivers.

But what choice did we have? We sure as hell weren’t going to participate in this silly battle between the CPU and GPU camps. As true believers in pure PC power, we weren’t going to betray that mission statement in our 10th anniversary issue—thus, this machine marks our commitment to having it all.

Vista 64-Bit Benchmarks

	Zero Point	Dream Machine 2008
Premiere Pro CS3	1,260 sec	547 sec
Photoshop CS3	150 sec	80 sec
ProShow	1,415 sec	577 sec
MainConcept	1,872 sec	1,353 sec
Crysis	26 fps	26 fps
Unreal Tournament 3	83 fps	145 fps

Best scores bolded. Our current desktop test bed consists of a quad-core 2.66GHz Intel Core 2 Quad Q6700, 2GB of Corsair DDR2/800 RAM on an EVGA 680 SLI motherboard, two EVGA GeForce 8800 GTX cards in SLI mode, a Western Digital 150GB Raptor and 500GB Caviar hard drives, an LG GGC-H20L optical drive, a Sound Blaster X-Fi soundcard, a PC Power and Cooling Silencer 750 Quad PSU, and Windows Vista Home Premium 64 bit.

Behind-the-Scenes: How We Built the 2008 Dream Machine!

David Murphy — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 12:00:00 -0500

Dream Machine 2008 Revealed: Part One, Part Two, and Part Three

We've given you the gear. Now take a trip into the Maximum PC Lab with an exclusive Web-only look at how we constructed this year's Dream Machine 2008--the fastest PC you can buy, hands-down. Be there for all the heart-wrenching fluid leaks! The painstaking storage decisions! The bits and pieces we had to break just to achieve our Dream Machine...dreams!

If you have yet to check out what we packed into this rig, be sure to catch up on our first, second, and third looks at the actual parts of this over-customized rig. Speaking of, we know that we promised to reveal the fancy secret hard drives we used, shown below:

Unfortunately, the non-disclosure date for these drives has been bumped back by two weeks as the request of the manufacturer. Feel free to speculate in the comments as much as you'd like: we've seen plenty of back-and-forth about whether these Photoshop-blurry drives are standard magnetic drives, SSDs, nuclear-powered, et cetera. Are they Western Digital's rumored 20,000 RPM Velociraptor drives? Have we added some Photoshop trickery to make them look like a number of drives we could be using? Find out in two weeks!

Behind-the-Scenes

Left: Gordon looks happy as a clam as he prepares to open the box containing the custom-chromed chassis of the Dream Machine 2008. You'll note the box is on the floor. That's because the HP Blackbird 002 case weighs close to a metric ton as-is, and chroming it seemed to pack on the poundage to absurd levels. Rather than risk a broken back, Gordon wisely decided to chop the box from a safer height.

Right: We had to snap off the case's optical-drive rail locking tabs just to be able to fit our water cooling reservoir into the chassis. In doing so, we broke the entire mechanism. But all the optical drive needed was some way to wedge into the five and one-fourth-inch bay. It didn't matter that the rails didn't exactly lock into the chassis as they used to just as long as the entire contraption of optical drive, drive rails, and mounting guides created enough of a wedge to lock the optical drive in place--which it did. We were happy.

Left: Nothing fancy to report on this one. It's just a beautiful shot of our glimmering chassis. Had we shot it horizontally, you could have turned it into a jaw-dropping desktop wallpaper. But we didn't. Sorry.

Right: Dave and Gordon carefully move the preassembled water-cooling loop to the Lab bench. We opted to test the entire plumbed system prior to attaching it to actual electronics. This was a lesson learned from last year's Dream Machine, when we killed an entire motherboard the first time we fired up the rig. Word to the wise: no matter how tightly you have those fixtures screwed into place, it's well worth your time to test the entire system when it's not near thousands of dollars of expensive equipment.

Left: This backplane of SATA connections would prove to be our undoing at first. If you recall, the positioning of Western Digital's Velociraptor hard drive doesn't fit with any standard hot-swap configuration. Unfortunately, this meant that we were unable to use these speedy drives for the Dream Machine 2008. And believe us, we tried every possible situation--even contemplating the removal of this backplane entirely--just to get the drives the work. But at the end of the day, we opted for ease-of-use over speed. The backplane stayed and we went looking for a new pair of speedy hard drives...

Right: As noted earlier, Dave is attaching the HP Blackbird's drive rails to a new optical drive. It took both him and Gordon approximately 20 minutes to figure out the exact orientation of the rails that would match case's internal mounting. As it turns out, they were right with their first configuration--the drive just needed a bit of wedging to get inside the case. We don't often recommend elbow grease treatment when building a machine, but it was just what The Doctor ordered this time around.

Left: Gordon takes a look at the Skultrail motherboard we used on this year's machine. That's not an apprehensive look on his face. He's just contemplating the raw power that two Intel QX9775 processors will bring to this year's mega-rig. You'd also be correct in suggesting that he's considering just how the EATX motherboard will fit inside of this chassis.

Right: Gordon struggles to wedge this oversized motherboard into the Dream Machine's chromed case. It was a tight fit, but we were barely able to make this motherboard work. We didn't end up blocking any critical ports, although we did make for some tough cable management situations later when we attempted to route the case backplane's SATA cables to the side-facing inputs on the EATX motherboard.

Left: The Corsair FB-DIMM memory we chose didn't come with much passive cooling, so this ended up being one of the few times we ever saw the top of the memory without a huge fan accessory on top of it. Take our word (and burnt fingers) for it: these little guys get H-O-T hot. That's twice as hot as normal hot, for those keeping score at home.

Right: We're unsure of what calculations Gordon was writing at the time of this picture. Are they the secrets to his 4 GHz overclocking success? Something having to do with cable management? A mental layout of the case's front-panel connections? A quick game of Lab Soduku? We might never know.

Left: With the motherboard in-place, Dave slaps the water-cooling configuration back into the dream machine and attaches the D-TEK FuZion v2 blocks to the CPUs. Even given the smaller room to work with in the HP Blackbird 002 case, the water cooling was a lot easier to configure than last year's monstrosity. You might recall that we ended up cooling both the videocards and the CPU on the Dream Machine 2007. Next year, Dave suggests we just dunk the entire thing in oil and call it a day.

Right: Gordon rests his hand on the heart of the beast, a custom power supply from PC Power and Cooling. Before we built the Dream Machine for-reals, we measured out the exact cable lengths we'd need to be able to connect all of our devices without having too much extra. The company then shortened or lengthened the leads depending on our specifications--just one way we killed extra case clutter without having to resort to twist ties.

Check out 12 more pictures on Page Two!

Behind-the-Scenes (Page Two)

Left: A perfect example of the "too many chefs in the kitchen" problem that plagues geeks and their friends. Gordon and Dave were just super-excited to get their respective sections of the Dream Machine up and running. When time's an issue, sometimes you just have to work like a pit crew on a rig.

Right: This is an artsy picture of the hard drive holders. There's no back story behind this one--just simple, easy-to-use hard drive holders We packed the Dream Machine full of five drives, and while we don't anticipate removing them anytime soon, it's nice to know that we could do so in mere seconds.

Left: If you look super-closely, you'll note the secret hard drives we promised we wouldn't reveal until two weeks from today. Just kidding. You can't see squat. Dave is holding over three terabytes of raw storage power in his oversized hands, however. Jealous?

Right: Gordon slides the first of the Dream Machine 2008's many PCI-based devices into place. We would end up swapping the configuration multiple times before we achieved the best aesthetic combination of two videocards and one soundcard. Luckily for us, the case fit our two giant ATI 4870x2 cards while still leaving a little bit of room for cable management.

Left: Gordon carefully slides the power supply into place. Given the tight fit between it and the location of the Dream Machine's coolant pump, we actually decided to use the mess of cables themselves to secure the pump into place. Once we slid the power supply all the way in, there was absolutely no way that pump was going to move, period. We'd normally recommend using some kind of adhesive or screws to attach the pump to the case.

Right: Speaking of cables, here's the rat's nest on the dream machine's right side. Gordon would eventually use a lot of tape and twist-ties to get this secured, but the formidable task only grew worse and worse as we continued to add, tweak, and connect various new electronics to the rig.

Left: We fired up the machine and, curse our luck, found a leak in the water cooling setup. Or rather, a leak found us. We immediately powered down the machine once we noticed the drip-drip-drip of coolant onto the rig's sensitive internal electronics. As is typical with custom PC building, Dave is starting to disassemble his hard work to troubleshoot the leaky problem.

Right: We were pretty sure we had the leak nailed down, but we wanted to triple-check that we had fixed the culprit. We came prepared with various paper towels and napkins to prevent any stray fluid from hitting the case's expensive internals this time around. "Be prepared" -- sage advice for the Boy Scouts, Scar the Lion, and water-cooling enthusiasts.

Left: As luck would have it, we fixed the first leak only to create a second. Gordon busted out the flashlight so Dave could get a closer look at the source of the dripping. A CPU waterblock was to blame this time. And given the closeness of the tube clamps to the base of the block, we had no choice but to remove that portion of the loop if we were to have any chance of sealing the leak.

Right: Gordon gives Dave a helping hand. While we don't recommend clamping your tubes too tightly to the nozzles of your water block, we know that it's difficult to tell exactly when your hose is properly fitted. We decided to push, and push, and push some more until we were confident that a tighter seal would be absolutely impossible. But our macho arm strength paid off. This was the last leak we would ever see on the Dream Machine 2008.

Left: With the rig up and running, the scope of what we had built finally began to come together. The blue LED fans attached to the radiator give the rig's internals a lovely blue glow. We still decided to install three blacklight cold-cathode tubes to accentuate the effect towards the rig's lower half. The difference of the lights is subtle, but we love having the clear fluid transitioning in and out of a glowing blue state. It looks neat even though you'll never see these differences unless you actually pop open the case's side door. We're sticklers for detail.

Right: Gordon seals the right side of the Dream Machine 2008 with a loving embrace. Unlike typical cases, the HP Blackbird 002 chassis comes with a number of screws for keeping the right side panel attached and in-place. This makes sense, as HP does a fantastic job with its own cable management. Unless something breaks--or unless you're chroming and customizing a case of your very own--you'd likely have no reason to pop open the cable-hiding side of your rig.

The Dream Machine Revealed--Part Three of Three!

David Murphy — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 02:10:00 -0500

The Dream Machine 2008 Part One

The Dream Machine 2008 Part Two

And thus, the grand conclusion of the Dream Machine 2008 unveiling comes to its final edition. And do we have a reveal for you! We're going to show you the ultra-secret case that encloses the mighty guts of our speedy Skulltrail machine. We're also giving you a first-look at the not-quite-as-secret videocards powering the graphics of this hefty rig. Before it catches ablaze, we'll also show you the cooling setup, and what we used to rock out whilst checking the cooler for leaks.

That's right. Today, you're getting the case, the graphics, the cooling and the sound--an epic conclusion to the most powerful rig we've ever built. If you're just joining us, you'll want to check out the first two editions of the Dream Machine saga, where we officially showed off this machine's spankin'-fast processors.

Without further ado, we'll begin with the craziest and most expensive part of the dream machine...

The Case

Before:

After:

We challenged readers to guess what case we were planning on using in the last edition of the Dream Machine Reveal series, and only one of you got it right. And we were pretty amazed at that. So congratulations bholstege. You correctly pinned it down. For this year's Dream Machine, we're using the case of the HP Blackbird 002.

Before all the naysayers start blasting the comment thread, here's why we made this decision. For starters, we like to use cases in the Dream Machine that have never been featured previously. So while all the top case manufacturers do indeed make awesome EATX cases (a necessity for our Skulltrail motherboard), a scant few had cases in the works that would have been able to house our rig in the necessary timeframe.

The HP Blackbird 002 case isn't without its faults. Modifying the case in any fashion is extremely difficult, given that every little nuance has been crafted and locked to HP's proprietary design. But we didn't see this as a hindrance so much as a challenge. We joked in its review that the HP Blackbird 002 was a mediocre machine trapped inside an awesome chassis. How appropriate, then, for us to rip out the boring guts of the Blackbird and rebuild a Kick Ass machine inside of its heavy black frame.

But that's not to say that we didn't make subtle modifications to the case as a whole. And by subtle, we mean outlandish. Because it's not enough for the Dream Machine to have a sweet case: it has to have an amazing customized case. We've done painting. That's old-and-busted compared to our mega-tweak this year: chroming the entire case.

The Videocard(s)

Due to Nvidia's decision to not suppot SLI on Skulltrail platforms, we turned to AMD to power the graphics of the Dream Machine 2008. But with four GPUs spread across two cards, we think we made the right decision. As it stands, two dual-GPU Radeon HD 4870 X2 cards stomp on one of Nvidia's top-of-the-line Geforce GTX 280 cards. The performance is nearly doubled in our 3DMark Vantage graphical test, and that's just using engineering samples of these AMD powerhouses. Look for a full review of these cards as soon as we can get our hands on final versions!

The Cooling

We've assembled a custom water cooling kit using parts from a number of top manufacturers for this year's Dream Machine. The internal constraints of the HP Blackbird 002 case forced us to go with a smaller two-fan reservoir than we would have preferred to use. Using Danger Den's Black Ice Pro2 Xflow radiator allowed us to connect our half-inch Tygon tubing to at opposing ends of the radiator, giving us a better chance to improve the case's inner aesthetics. We're using the same reservoir as last year's Dream Machine, Danger Den's single-bay variant.

Our pump also remains the same as last year's. Seeing that the Danger Den DD12V-D5 is one of the fastest, beefiest, quietest pumps we've seen, we see no need to switch out our top-of-the-line water pusher. As for the CPU blocks, we've opted for two of D-TEK's FuZion v2s. Not only is their performance impeccable, but we absolutely love the blocks' quick-lock Intel mounting mechanism. We didn't have to remove the motherboard at all to install this year's cooling setup, and that alone makes us thrilled to bits.

The Soundcard

The latest X-Fi card out of Creative's Lab (tee-hee) is packed into a smaller form-factor than its predecessors. And once again, as if we couldn't stress the issue enough, Creative has slapped support for front-panel connections onto this new card, the X-Fi Titanium. Since we aren't opting for a triple-videocard setup, this gives us plenty of room to stash the Titanium in one of the Dream Machine's empty PCI Express slots. A pair of optical SPDIFs and included Dolby Digital encoding round out the mix of this awesome upgrade in soundcards.

Coming Next Week:

And there you have it! But we're not done with the Dream Machine 2008 just yet. Check back next Monday for an exclusive look at the all the behind-the-scenes construction for this year's rig, including all the heartaches, drills, and coolant leaks. And we haven't forgotten about those two mysterious hard drives from the first Dream Machine Unveiled article. We'll have the full details of those come July 21--see you then!

The Dream Machine Revealed--Part Two of Three!

David Murphy — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 11:45:48 -0500

Dream Machine 2008 Revealed! For Part One of Three, Click Here

Here we go again! It's time for our second look at what's going into the Maximum PC Dream Machine 2008! If you're just joining us, here's the skinny: once a year, the Maximum PC staff descends to its underground lair. After a number of bizarre and dark technological rituals (we sacrifice an iMac), the team emerges with a gift blessed by the Gods of Technology themselves: the Dream Machine. It is, hands-down, the single-greatest computer you could ever hope to assemble based on the year's best (and sometimes unreleased) products!

This is an epic three-part series, and you're on step number two. If you want to start from the beginning, check out our unveiling of the rig's keyboard, mouse, display and hard drive(s). If you're ready for more Dream Machine action, we're taking a look at the system's CPU(s), motherboard, optical drive, and memory this time around.

The CPU(s)

We're gluttons for speed, so we've opted to slap two of Intel's high-end Core 2 Extreme QX9775 processors in our system. You read that correctly. Two. That's 3.2 GHz of processing power split over eight cores, or at least, it would be. Did we mention we're gluttons for speed? Thanks to an awesome custom water-cooling setup (to be unveiled in the third edition of this article), we've kicked this pair of processors up to 4.0 GHz apiece.

And where will we use this power? Well, there aren't that many applications optimized for eight-cores. But there are plenty of applications that could make full use of our setup. We'd just have to run them at the same time: gaming, video encoding, disk defragmenting, a Folding@home session, a Photoshop script. The sky is the proverbial limit for what our souped-up rig will be able to handle.

The Motherboard

Astute PC enthusiasts will be able to guess this one just by the processors we used. Since we're rocking two quad-cores, it only makes sense for us to slap these on an Intel Skulltrail motherboard. Our winner in this category is Intel's D5400XS. It gives us a ton of overclocking options which we liberally sprinkled across our two steaming processors. But more than that, it's the only motherboard we've found that will run both Nvidia SLI and AMD Crossfire setups. It's an awesome way to future-proof a rig, but more than that, it allowed us to choose our video card configuration based on speeds alone.

The motherboard also comes with the typical accouterments we've come to expect and love: support for 7.1 audio, Gigabit LAN, six external USB ports, two eSATA ports, and four PCI Express 1.1 x16 slots--a perfect fit for the video cards we'll might use...

The RAM

We've opted for 8GB of Corsair FB-DIMM memory for our mighty Dream Machine. At four sticks of 2GB apiece, these 800 MHz speed-demons are primarily geared for workstation environments. Their key difference from normal DDR2 or DDR3 RAM lies in their advanced memory buffer. This gives us a serial interface between the memory controller and the memory module, allowing the RAM to use fewer wires and more memory channels than a typical parallel architecture. This, and the fact that FB-DIMM memory processes read and write requests concurrently, allows us to tap into unmatched speeds for our memory. The downside? These little sticks are more prone to latency and heat. We solve the latter by attaching a Dominator fan accessory to the hot little sticks.

The Optical Drive

HD-DVD is dead. Done. Buried. We have eschewed the combo drive route for this very fact, opting instead for the fastest possible Blu-ray burner we can get our hands on. LG's GBW-H20L allows you to read and burn your Blu-ray discs at a speedy 6x, burn your DVD titles at 16x, and burn your standard CDs at 40x. No matter your optical media of choice, you'll be in speedy hands with this awesome SATA-based optical drive.

Check back next Monday for the final unveiling of the 2008 Dream Machine's guts!

The Dream Machine Revealed--Part One of Three!

David Murphy — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 12:36:25 -0500

Are you ready? Every year, Maximum PC builds the de-facto, pants-shattering, best-system-ever. We crown this stunning achievement of manufacturing gusto the Dream Machine. This is its eleventh incarnation, and perhaps its most controversial: the equipment, the enclosure, the build--not a single part of this year's rig was without debate.

In this epic three-part series, we're going to give you a first-look at exactly what's going in this holiest of rigs. And we're also going to walk you through its actual construction--coolant leaks and all--in one of the most demanding chassis we've ever slapped a machine into. Let's begin.

The Keyboard

Microsoft's Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000 is our typing instrument of choice for the many games we'll be playing on said awesome Dream Machine 2008. It feels as great as it looks, the ergonomic split of the keys soothing our fingertips for hours upon hours' worth of crazy Team Fortress 2 action. But don't take our word for it--take our official word for it by checking out the March 2006 review of this little beast.

The Mouse

Logitech's G5 Revision 2 mouse is as good-looking as it is good-using. Good to use. Whatever. This mouse rocks. It's supreme comfort is matched by its slick gliding action, which you're free to set to your leisure. You can customize the on-screen translation of the mouse's speedy movements by using the two sensitivity buttons below the scroll wheel. These, along with two back/forward thumb-toggle buttons, are as helpful for fragging your friends as they are useful for advanced application work, like Photoshop painting. And if that wasn't enough, you can even stick weights into the G5's guts to better match your real-world movement sensitivities to your on-screen performance. Now move your mouse over to our full review of this awesome accessory.

The Display

If you've been following Maximum PC for any length of time, this should be a no-brainer. We have yet to review a monitor as delightful as Gateway's 30-inch XHD3000. It's picture is clear, vivid, and glitch-free: the trifecta of achievements that separates lesser monitors from the upper-echelon Dream Machine contenders. The display has enough connection options to fit right in your living room, although we'd think that you would want this touch-button display smack-dab in the middle of your desk. If you have room, that is. Multitask by reading our full review of the display while you shuffle your papers and trinkets around.

The Hard Drive(s)

For the speediest, largest-capacity performance you can get your hands on, look no further than Samsung's HD103UJ terabyte hard drive. This is the fastest terabyte drive we've reviewed, so it only makes perfect sense to lock three of them in a RAID 5 array for a maximum combination of redundancy, speed, and storage. We were tempted to go for the gusto with RAID 0, but given the sheer amount of data we'll be slapping on these three beauties, the last thing we want to happen is for one drive oopsie to nuke the array. We'll trade away one terabyte of storage for two protected terabytes any day of the week.

As for the HD103UJ's little friend. Well. How to put this delicately. The other drives we're using in the Dream Machine are so new, so fresh, so undisclosed... that we can't talk about them yet. Nope. It took many vows of silence, the sacrifice of one intern, and limitless amounts of begging for us to be able to get our hands on these models. Check back with us mid-July for a full review of this big secret, but feel free to speculate what we're up to until then: solid-state storage? An enterprise-class drive? A tiberium-powered disk?

Check back next Monday for the second part of our Dream Machine reveal. Until then, post your thoughts and predictions in the comments section below!

Dream Machine Unveiling Begins on Monday! Sign Up For Our Newsletter to Receive an Exclusive Sneak Peek

Norman Chan — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 16:14:48 -0500

As the magazine turns 10-years old next month, we’re celebrating by building our most stunning Dream Machine ever. And the perfectly timed launch of our new website is a great opportunity to share with you the details of our sacred tradition. Sign up for our newsletter to get an early glimpse of this year’s Dream Machine, in addition to other behind-the-scenes peeks of Maximum PC. The newsletter will also include lab notes from our editors with insightful commentary about the stories they’ve written for the magazine and website, along with original tips and tricks for the PC enthusiast. Consider it a golden ticket to discover the wonders within MaxPC headquarters*, delivered straight to your inbox every two weeks. Make sure you sign up as soon as possible!

*The newsletter cannot actually be redeemed for tours of the Maximum PC chocolate factory.