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.

Build, Heat, and Power Consumption
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  • Sabresiberian - Friday, November 25, 2011 - link

    Okay' there aren't a lot of people that multibox, based on percentage of gamers (but there are probably more people that multibox than would actually spend $8000 for a computer), but if you are really going to talk about the gaming performance of a 6-core hyperthreaded CPU, shouldn't you be playing to it's strengths instead of just running single or dual core apps on it and saying "it's not any better"?

    Try running 5 WoW accounts at the same time and see what happens on rigs like this. Use a 2560x1600 monitor (at least). Turn the settings up to max - on all the accounts. You might see more of a spread in performance under those circumstances.

    (If you did that, you would probably want to adjust the core affinities of the different accounts so they would be running on different cores).

    (Not complaining about the article, just trying to look at it from a different viewpoint.)

    ;)
  • DigitalFreak - Friday, November 25, 2011 - link

    Leeloo Multibox
  • prophet001 - Sunday, November 27, 2011 - link

    I don't understand why people say that Sandybridge is bust? I've seen a lot of benchmarks on it and it seems to perform really well. While it has been noted that the x79 chipset is holding it back, I don't see why one wouldn't want to build a system with it? What am I missing?
  • Menetlaus - Sunday, November 27, 2011 - link

    Gaming people are saying it is bust because they were expecting bigger improvements with the additional PCI-e lanes, the 6X series chipsets are limited to 1-16x or 2-8x for graphics and there has been a lot of talk that 2-16x (a la x79, or gulftown the SB-E predecessor) would offer big improvements due to the extra PCI-e lanes.

    Sadly it was known that there is not a huge difference between 2-16x and 2-8x AND that more than 3 or 4 CPU cores does not offer much improvement in gaming, so it should not have been a surprise that the gaming people came away unimpressed by SB-E after the past year of SB goodness.

    As you say there are places where SB-E works better than a quad core (rendering or other 100% usage scenarios), but this is a completely different usage from gaming, and the gaming group is a lot bigger and more vocal than the rendering shop guys.
  • Oldie - Sunday, November 27, 2011 - link

    All of that money, all of that build quality, and they leave those ugly braided wires going right across the window?
  • Toughbook - Monday, November 28, 2011 - link

    It's a shame the interior shows of bare metal. How much could it actually have added to the production cost of each unit to have them painted, perhaps to the buyer's choice of color?
    Bare wires going thru holes in the chassis with no protection?

    I would think the buyers of these units have a never ending amount of discretionary income. They see the price and think it's got to be the best because it's the most expensive. Or a business man tells his or her assistant to get the best desktop money can buy. Bingo! Do you think he might care or realize the short comings?

    Thanks for the interesting review!
  • sedluk - Monday, November 28, 2011 - link

    What the author of this review mixes up is what Puget Systems built vs. what Intel build. The X79/LGA2011 platform is expensive and does not add much value over much less expensive platforms. We can all agree on this. You still might want to pay a lot of money and have a X79 system, and if you do then the Puget Systems build is top notch. I have never owned a Puget Systems, but I respect the job they had done. It is not fair to fault them for something them for something Intel is responsible for.
  • Beenthere - Tuesday, November 29, 2011 - link

    While it's true the X79/SB-E is a poor POS hacked server system, $7K for this mess is obscene. For $3K I can build a better performing system so why would I spend $7K for this POS?

    Puke-It PCs must be good if they can actually sell these at $7K.
  • METALMORPHASIS - Wednesday, November 30, 2011 - link

    For that price,you should be able to drive it down the street and back again as well as play games.
  • BellFamily7 - Thursday, December 1, 2011 - link

    A columnist from PC Mag (I forget who - not Dvorak) commented in ~1982 that "the computer you REALLY want always seems to cost $3,500."

    Adjusting for inflation (bls.gov has a good inflation 'calculator') $3,500 in 1982 is - ta-da! - $8,200 dollars in 2011.

    Amazing - the "$3,500 Rule" still holds true.

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