At PC Gamer, we've long known this day would come—it's an inexorable part of PC ownership—but it doesn't make it any easier to face. The Large Pixel Collider has been outmatched, and shall lie in state for seven days before being fired into the sun. At the feet of LinusTechTips' $30,000, seven-Radeon R9 Nano, eight-1TB SSD and 256GB DDR4 RAM mutant, the LPC looks frail and defeated.
This is not a creature of science but of black magic. There's a trick to getting all those components to cooperate—or rather, to make sure they don't cooperate. This beast is seven rigs in a single tower, feeding into shared CPUs and split into seven virtual machines. Two Xeon E5-2697 hyperthreaded 14-core processors provide the equivalent of a quad-core CPU for each virtual machine. One seventh of this abomination is equivalent to a sturdy desktop rig.
Actually, that's not accurate. The only way to get 256GB RAM into a motherboard that's not from the future (the Asus Z10PE-D8 WS) is to use eight 32GB sticks. Each VM has 32GB DDR4 to itself, all powered by a 1600W EVGA PSU.
And it lives! From the 12-minute mark you can watch Crysis 3 being played at 60-110fps in ultrawide 1440p while six Unigine benchmarks rumble on alongside. I'm sure there are laws against this sort of thing.
Thanks, Kotaku.
