During CES this week, Sony proudly announced that they sold over 5.4 million PS4 units during the 2015 holiday shopping season, bringing the console’s global tally to 35.9 million. Clearly, the PS4 remains the console to beat from a popularity perspective, but if you want to talk about over the top gaming power, you might want to take a look at this nearly $30,000 gaming rig.
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Put together with some sponsorship dollars from Kingston, this rig can run seven versions of Windows simultaneously, each delivering impressively smooth gameplay. As Destructoid quips, this is a “one-machine LAN party.”
Naturally, the hardware underlying this impressive rig is ridiculous. We’re talking two 14-core CPUs, eight-1TB SSDs, 256GB of RAM, and seven AMD Radeon R9 Nano video cards.
The video below, put together by YouTuber LinusTechTips, shows how this monster rig came together while touching on many of the problems that had to be overcome in getting all the disparate parts to work in harmony.
As PC Gamer observes, the real genius behind this expensive setup isn’t simply gathering up and assembling powerful hardware components, but actually being able to get all of the hardware pieces to work smoothly together.
“This beast is seven rigs in a single tower,” the report adds, “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.”
A full list of all the components used in putting this beastly machine together can be found here. Some of them include:
- Kingston 32GB DDR4 ECC RAM (x8)
- Kingston KC400 1TB Business SSD (x8)
- Lime Technology unRAID Server Pro Software
- Caselabs Mercury S8
- Acer Predator X34 21:9 Gaming Monitor (x7)
- Intel Xeon E5 2697 V3 (x2)
- ASUS Z10PE-D8 WS
- AMD R9 Nano (x7)
- EVGA T2 1600W
- Cablemod Custom Cables for PSU
