Building a $30,000 gaming system - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: Artlav
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: February 27, 2016, 11:24:10 pm
content: Considering that games are mostly computed on GPUs these days, it's essentially a cluster of 7 computers and a control node.Hm. Water cooling must be a nightmare in such a setup.SSDs taped with a GoPro double-sided sticky tape?! How the heck would he put it apart later?

author: crispy_tofu
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 27, 2016, 11:30:24 pm
content: More relevant videos:

author: AlessandroAU
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: February 28, 2016, 07:20:44 am
content: Quote from: Artlav on February 27, 2016, 11:24:10 pmI have an old machine just for my electronics desk from 2009 I installed a few games and a newish graphics card on. The GPU never got above 10% graphics load because the cpu couldn't pipe data fast enough to it.Overclocking the CPU got pretty linear results of FPS vs Clock freq. So I would say it was definitely cpu limited in my case.

author: Mechanical Menace
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 28, 2016, 08:19:45 am
content: Quote from: AlessandroAU on February 28, 2016, 07:20:44 amWhich games? Which GPU, CPU, MoBo? You may just be a fan of the certain niche of games that rely more on the CPU. A lot of RTSs fall into that, as does Minecraft. But there are other things that could make your PC not perform as well here as it should. Some MoBos don't even supply 8 PCIE lanes to their 16x connectors for example, or some GPUs don't do PCIE backward compatibility very well leading to transfer rates been even slower than they have to be in that setup. Overclocking the CPU via the FSB frequency would help there as it would also up the PCIE frequency and improve throughput*, so the faster CPU isn't actually always responsible for the increase in FPS due to an overclock.*Until you start to get stability issues with the bus, hence the option on some MoBos to lock the PCIE frequency.

author: AlessandroAU
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: February 28, 2016, 09:03:26 am
content: Quote from: Mechanical Menace on February 28, 2016, 08:19:45 amMainly Source engine games, DOTA2 and CSS I did most of the testing on. Which I admit are fairly CPU heavy. The CPU was a Athlon 64 X2 5050e and a R9 280x was the GPU.I did a lot of testing, The GPU was running properly at 16x which I verified and it was throttled up to the correct speed. It was just processing data much faster than the CPU could throw at it. I got a marked improvement when I increased the CPU and/or RAM frequencies.

author: Mechanical Menace
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 28, 2016, 10:11:41 am
content: Quote from: AlessandroAU on February 28, 2016, 09:03:26 amSource isn't very demanding on modern GPUs, Valve put a lot of work into having their games playable and still decent looking on lower end and older systems. They also do all the physics on the CPU if I remember rightly. On my C2D system with an 8800GT they worked very well with all the settings maxed. In the same system with a GTX690 they fly. But I've got to admit I always have sync to vsync enabled. I think you'd be surprised at how many modern games you could throw at that system and them run at decent framerates with decent settings.

author: German_EE
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 28, 2016, 01:08:46 pm
content: I normally avoid the computer gaming stuff but this is impressive. Thirty thousand USD now purchases an amazing amount of computing power and at 1500 watts it will run from a single wall socket.

author: StuUK
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: February 28, 2016, 01:38:50 pm
content: Quote from: German_EE on February 28, 2016, 01:08:46 pmThat's what I was thinking, very impressive for the cost.

author: tjeulink
author_rank: Contributor
timestamp: March 01, 2016, 10:07:42 am
content: this stuff always reminds me of the internet-cafe and arcade area. would be cool if it made a comeback with stuff like this since ive never seen one.