Three Big Boards.
The “Investment” in Order of No Significance.
• Motherboard: EVGA’s sumptuous yet infamous SR-X. An alternative was Asus’s Z9 PE-D8, which all save a handful appeared to favour. Unfortunately, its PCI-E resources had been designated in a fashion which, whilst more effective in maximizing the bandwidth each processor could supply peripherals, made it impossible to exploit more than two video cards in a triple screen “surround” setup. I know, sounds crazy but I had the opportunity to test first hand. There it is, a still from my original post and the experience of a second ill-fated user to substantiate.
The anomaly was manifest in all Dual Xeon hostels sheltering C6XX chipsets, and would have afflicted the SRX had the latter not enjoined a PLX chip to extract all its PCI-E bandwidth from one processor, arguably the board’s most reviled accoutrement, Oh the irony.
The Z9 was built for renderers and research, unless you were a gamer who gernered their pleasures from a 4k paradise and relegated additional displays to 2d duties. Actually, as I write that’s what I am. My personal segue into “3 way surround” promoted nothing but pain. Its mere implementation was like “Take Your Pick” , but with screens instead of boxes.
Click apply, and instantly be plunged into darkness. So which shall grant light first, if any. Come on. I’ve configured all correctly. One display port per card, one screen per display port. Still darkness, is anybody home. Wait! We have light on the left…now the right…no, now the centre and all is dark once again. Ah! At last all three are ablaze but their order awry, hold on 132, 312, 231, 321…..123. You get the picture…or rather you don’t.
• Video Card(s) – Three of Nvidia’s finest almost full fat Keplerians. Could well have been this investment’s most ill-judged aspect. Having entered its phase of cynically enticing enthusiasts with prohibitively priced pixel mashers who’s exclusivities transcended Elysium’s extremes, Nvidia was, with its GTX Titan incurring ire and awe in equal measure. To cut a long pipeline short, the RAM quota, unprecedented at the time and in an era of evolving eye-candy and radiating resolutions.
The chorus of Cuda Cores in their “Kepler” cathedral, derived from a design of industrial excellence and retaining all the crucial characteristics of an ancestry to match. Engineering of astounding quality and finesse, the quiet cooling, the robust physique were all essential in executing the miraculous mixture of potency and stability I solicited.
I wanted these things to last, to spin up and sparkle, to deliver frames by the freight load, leave rendering ravaged, tear texture packs asunder and gallop through games. I yearned for years of dedicated and dependable graphical splendour. I aspired to install and ignore an infallible service. No care, no concern, shove them in, let them shine.
Deep breath. I bought three. Hindsight? Come on doubters, prize those palms from your faces.
Ah! You should have waited for the R9 290X, under half the price, faster, better at 4k. Let me stop you. Hotter, less memory – not hugely significant I’ll concede – three of them, louder, costly watts, higher heat, worthless worries and a wait of over 7 months. Not feasible back then. Saved a stash in the sale of a pair of 680s.
The Titan Trio has yet to fluff a frame. As for the alternatives. 780? Half the memory. 780ti? See above. R295X? To longer delay and my central heating . Titan-Z? Call me a sucker, not a sinner. Besides, If I’d held out till then, my three vanilla Titan’s would’ve undercut a sole Titan-Z. Right, enough now, getting silly.
• CPUs: A pair of core riddled Xeon 2697 V2s – I’m no over-clocker just audio, video, prime and a spot of gaming, but sometimes all at once!
• Coolers – Please play me Chopin’s two Nocturnes opus NH-D14 in air minor. Well, only one candidate could possibly cater for so wilful a waiver of Water World and over-clocking or otherwise, with a double dollop of twelve cores, to economize would eschew logic. Phantek has since composed its own paraphrase, said to be just as impressive.
• Hard Drives: – 4x Samsung MZ-5PA256 (256GB Sata 2) – You couldn’t give those away now, but in 18 months of billowing bytes, not a bit breached the boundaries of its cell.
• Memory – 16GB Crucial 1333mhz ECC RAM – Again stability over speed. Besides, never considered memory a major catalyst for speed, and got sick of “extreme” RAM during the DDR2 era, when sticks would fail more frequently than a mass murderer’s moral compass.