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
Gaming Performance
Things should get interesting with gaming performance, but unfortunately we hit a snag when testing the Puget Systems Deluge, and it's a snag that you'll uncover if you start checking out other forums: as of this writing, surround gaming in SLI doesn't work on X79 and Sandy Bridge-E. I'm not sure exactly where to place the blame; it's hard to argue that Sandy Bridge-E didn't feel rushed (especially with how disappointing X79 turned out to be), but shouldn't this also have been something NVIDIA was on top of? It's tough to tell. NVIDIA has confirmed that a driver which enables surround on this platform will be available soon, so at least we know they're working on it, but it really should've been working when Sandy Bridge-E launched. That leaves us with 1080p testing for now, which is something of a joke when you're packing this much hardware.
Update 11-30-2011: With the NVIDIA 290 series beta drivers, we've now added surround testing.
In most cases on our soon-to-be-retired "high" testbed, we find the systems essentially CPU-limited, producing results that are academic at best. At these settings even the GeForce GTX 460 768MB in the budget WarFactory Sentinel is able to produce a playable experience. Let's see how things work out when we start to shift more of the load to the graphics subsystem.
From the looks of things, our testbed is definitely a bit long in the tooth. Performance is excellent across the board, though, right where it should be, although the extra 100MHz (and perhaps better platform optimizations) on the i7-2600K in the DigitalStorm Enix seems to be paying off in StarCraft II. Hey Blizzard, you think maybe someday you'll release a game that scales beyond two threads? Guess we'll know when the next chapter in the StarCraft II saga comes out.
Once we get to our surround testing, we unfortunately see just how much Sandy Bridge-E and its 40 dedicated PCI Express 2.0 lanes bring to the table: not a whole lot. I don't want to say this is conclusive, but our results here mirror those of other sites; eight PCIe lanes per card seem to be enough for at least a pair of GPUs.
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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.