Usually on Mobile Geeks we care more about mobile technologies such as smartphones, tablets and wearables, but today we bring you a video from IDF San Fransisco which showcases the other end of the technology scale. Check out this incredible demo of the new Intel Haswell-E processor paired with no less than four NVIDIA Titan graphics cards. There is only one word for this machine… Sick!
The eternal question for any geek is always of course, ‘Can it run Crysis?’. In this case the answer is an emphatic yes. The demo that Sascha caught during IDF was in fact running the latest Crysis 3 in an incredible 12K resolution spread across three displays. The result is a jaw dropping first person shooter experience. Check out the video below:
Haswell-E is the very latest performance oriented architecture from Intel, predominantly developed to create the next generation of Xeon server chips, but for those of us who need the absolute maximum performance, Intel also has its line of Extreme Edition desktop CPUs that are based on the same architecture. Derived from the more mainstream Haswell architecture, the Haswell-E based Intel Core i7-5960X Extreme Edition used in the demo is effectively the new top dog in enthusiast computing. It is a quad core chip clocked at 3GHz with a Turbo clock of up to 3.5GHz, a massive 20MB of smart cache and a whopping TDP of 140 watts. The Core i7-5960X alone will cost you above $1000 USD.
However, if you are going to run Crysis on a 12k resolution rig, you need some very serious graphics processing, and this rig does not disappoint; it has no less than four NVIDIA Titan cards, served up in an SLI configuration that takes advantage of the Core i7-5960X’s 40 PCIe lanes. The first card gets a full x16 PCIe lanes while the other 3 get 8x lanes each. The result is probably the most powerful PC you can build right now.
Each of these NVIDIA Titan cards will cost you around $1000 USD, so if you total it all up – throw in a 1,500 watt power supply, a full X-ATX case, 64GB of high-end DDR4 memory and of course a bunch of SSDs in a RAID 0 array – you are talking about a rig that will cost you approx $8-9,000 USD. Not bad… Not bad at all folks.
