Puget Systems Deluge: Revisiting the Art of Custom With X79
by Dustin Sklavos on November 24, 2011 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Systems
- Gaming
- Intel
- Puget Systems
- mid-tower
- Water Cooling
- NVIDIA
Conclusion: Too Much in Every Way
I've spoken with a couple of boutiques about Sandy Bridge-E and the general consensus is a feeling of being underwhelmed. Gulftown this isn't; when Gulftown came out there was a very clear reason to go for it, but Sandy Bridge-E has a harder time making a case for itself when good old fashioned 95W Sandy Bridge has been getting the job done and done well for almost a year now. It's also clear that Sandy Bridge never really suffered in multi-GPU rigs from low bandwidth as a result of splitting the PCI Express 2.0 x16 lanes. I even had one boutique cancel on sending me a Sandy Bridge-E rig in favor of one with an i7-2700K, and that one's due in house soon. I don't blame them.
The fact is, a hex-core processor is overkill for gaming. The system we have on hand from Puget Systems is clearly able to do far more, and would probably rule the school at some heavy duty tasks, but video editors are likely going to want a RAIDed storage system and potentially a Quadro or FireGL GPU, and that takes the Deluge, at least in this configuration, out of contention. Bottom line: the Deluge L2, based on Sandy Bridge-E, is grossly overpriced and the final performance fails to impress. That's before we even take into account the fixed voltage overclock that causes it to put off an uncomfortable amount of heat. It's a beautiful build with a beautiful liquid-cooling system, but I have a very hard time justifying its existence.
Puget Systems does offer a Deluge A2 based on mainstream Sandy Bridge, but you sacrifice the fancy custom liquid-cooling that tags the video cards in favor of a single closed loop CPU cooler: more than a little disappointing. On the flipside, though, the stock Deluge A2 starts $2,000 under the L2, and when you configure it into a fairly comparable build, it winds up being nearly $3,000 less. That's not an insignificant difference. You lose the multi-threaded performance that benefits from having six cores, but it's not like any gamers have been crying that a 4GHz+ i7-2600K isn't enough.
Unfortunately, as we noted in our launch article, we think Sandy Bridge-E is more or less a bust for the majority of enthusiasts. If you need the performance a hex-core CPU can offer, there's a good chance you're already running Gulftown anyway, in which case SNB-E doesn't offer a huge upgrade. There are also several areas where the platform as a whole feels rushed (e.g. NVIDIA's Surround Gaming not working at launch, the chipset lacking native support for USB 3.0, and only a coulple native SATA 6.0Gbps ports). As such, the Puget Deluge L2 winds up being a "more money than sense" kind of investment. While I would happily continue to recommend Puget Systems as a boutique and the build quality here is stellar, this Deluge is so far beyond the pale and so excessive in its configuration that I can't in good conscience recommend it.
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Dustin Sklavos - Thursday, November 24, 2011 - link
If I could keep it, why would I give it to you? ;)vol7ron - Thursday, November 24, 2011 - link
Umm, possibly a prize give away to the more active readers/forum participators/commenters?Onslaught2k3 - Thursday, November 24, 2011 - link
"We start at the top with Intel's shiny new top-of-the-line Core i7-3960X. Built on a 32nm process, the new chip features eight hyper-threaded Sandy Bridge cores and 20MB of L3 cache, although in this chip 5MB of L3 and two of the cores are disabled."to this
"We start at the top with Intel's shiny new top-of-the-line Core i7-3960X. Built on a 32nm process, the new chip features SIX hyper-threaded Sandy Bridge cores and 20MB of L3 cache, although in this chip 5MB of L3 and two of the cores are disabled."
Can't anyone willing buy the same system AND build it themselves at less than half that cost? Nice review though, Dustin.
Death666Angel - Thursday, November 24, 2011 - link
Read the SNB-E review:"If you look carefully at the die shot above, you'll notice that there are actually eight Sandy Bridge cores. The Xeon version will have all eight enabled, but the last two are fused off for SNB-E."
This version is a hexacore, not a quad-core as you say. But the chip it is built on actually has 8 cores.
Onslaught2k3 - Thursday, November 24, 2011 - link
Ok, no corrections are needed. I wonder if at some point a BIOS-based unlock would be available for this chip exclusively... since... you know... it's over $1k in price...JarredWalton - Thursday, November 24, 2011 - link
Pretty sure they're fused off; AMD has allowed core unlocking on some chips in the past, but I don't recall that from Intel any time in recent history.mfenn - Thursday, November 24, 2011 - link
Anybody want to take bets on whether or not Dustin can make it through an entire article without using the word "dire"?Dustin Sklavos - Thursday, November 24, 2011 - link
Outlook...dire. ;)ckryan - Thursday, November 24, 2011 - link
When will the Dustin Sklavos Review kit become available for purchase?You get a case with dire cable management, a laptop with a dire TN panel, and an AIO with dire thermals AND a dire TN!! It's a can't-win proposition.
I don't have a beef with boutique builders putting boutique prices on boutique builds. I do have a problem with laying out that much feddy and not getting an Asus Xonar Essence STX, but instead receiving the DX. If I using someone else's money to buy this system I could easily massage it into the system is could be. I could adjust the overclock my damn self.
FWIW, I think it's hard to really make a high end X79 build, when you get most of the actual features from a P67/Z68 chipset.
wickman - Thursday, November 24, 2011 - link
1920x1080 is a pretty low resolution to be using for a system powered by dual GTX 580, 590s, 6990s, and so forth. I don't think anyone running this type of gpu subsystem would possibly be running such a low resolution when the cards themselves are capable of running games at 2560x1400, 2560x1600, or higher when used with multiple panels.Would be nice to see what these systems were able to do at much higher resolutions.