Gadgetory

oh shoot dude what what the hell are you doing here oh yeah just in the area so I thought I'd dropped in see how you're likely No - OH - dude how the hell did you get in here bathroom window was open so I just crawled in through there breezy by the way your a/c was like not even on man it is hot your Ida crank that you strips are pretty good getting out that one do you know that you only have basic cable like a basic basic so did we launch a Netflix not everything belongs in your living room for a quiet and compact companion check out the node 2 oh 2 from fractal design you can find more info in the description below was it guys so in late June of this year I began working on my very first custom water-cooled build the next two months were filled with countless hours of painting sleeving bending and assembling a high end machine capable of smooth 4k gaming at high settings the end result was hot line a retro powerhouse sporting a 59 60 X 16 gigs of DDR 4 and 2 gtx 980ti s in sli and while the spec sheet alone implied some extraordinary potential I wouldn't be fully satisfied until I had hard evidence of its 4k capabilities so today I'll be benchmarking hot line for the first time to see what kind of gaming performance one can expect from this $5000 water-cooled behemoth before we dive right into the benchmarks though let's first take a look at the system's thermals and acoustics as both our areas which should benefit greatly from custom liquid cooling at idle we saw the CPU float at around 19 degrees Celsius with the hottest core at 22 a whole degree colder than a Benny's or Scrooged under a typical gaming workload the 59 60 X jumped up to 51 degrees and with balls-to-the-wall stress testing in prime95 the hottest core on our 8 core chip maxed out at 82 degrees Celsius with the average temp for all cores hitting a very respectable 73 degrees our gtx 980ti is idled at a frigid 36 degrees Celsius and max out at 51 degrees Celsius when gaming on a stable overclock it should be noted here that the top card runs slightly warmer since the liquid cooling passing through it incur some additional heat after first permeating the bottom card still these results fall right in line with my expectations from a custom loop such as this one making me one hell of a happy camper what's more is that the system is able to achieve these superb thermal conditions while staying insanely quiet have a listen at the idle and load acoustics using the standard fan mode in AI suite 3 as you could hear or not hear this rig is near dead silent with almost no audible difference between idling and gameplay I even had a hard time picking out any fan noise over the sound of the hard drive spinning platter surely an honorable mention goes to fractal design in this area for their venturi high pressure fans which stay whisper quiet without sacrificing much of their cooling capacity so now that we've talked thermals and acoustics let's make our way over to the system's gaming performance starting with our testing setup the 59 60 X was pushed to 40 400 megahertz at 1.3 volts and I was able to overclock the gtx 980ti x' to a whopping 14 hundred and 80 megahertz with the memory clock receiving a more modest boost of 50 megahertz all tests were run using the latest 350 5.8 - wickel driver on Windows 8.1 the system underwent testing in five different triple-a titles at max settings with the exception of having MS a a disabled as many would argue that its quality improvement is hardly noticeable at the higher pixel count of 4k this makes its usage tough to justify given its heavy tax on system resources which is why I've left it on the sidelines for the series of tests all right ladies and gentlemen I now present to you the moment we've all been waiting for so dim the lights grab some popcorn and let's check out all the 4k benchmarks for hotline starting with Metro last light we see crushing performance at 1080 and 1440 with average frame rates in the triple digits it takes jumping up to 4k to see our average finally sink below 100 but still the 980ti is managed a very playable 78 FPS in hitman absolution we ran into some CPU bottlenecking a conclusion we can quickly draw from near-identical frame rates across the various resolutions being tested even at 4k the GPUs aren't being stressed enough for our overclocked 59 60 X to keep pace which is quite a testament to the horsepower of our sli setup by the way did I mention we're still hitting over 100 FPS on average at 4k gta5 presents yet another example of cpu bottlenecking but this case varies slightly in that we see a noticeable performance hit when moving to 4k indicating the 59 60 X has finally caught up with the 980 T is since they're now far too busy rendering those extra pixels in battlefield 4 we saw 200 FPS on average at 1080 no big deal 165 FPS at 2k and 78 frames per second at Ultra HD I'm also rather amused that our minimum frame rate at 4k landed above 60 fps it just gives me a warm fuzzy feeling inside that makes me giggle naturally I thought it would be appropriate to save the most demanding game for last even with hotlines arsenal of souped-up hardware Crysis 3 gives it a run for its money averaging 54 fps and 4k while this is still quite playable until I acquire a g-sync monitor I'll probably stick with playing this game at 14:40 where the screen tearing isn't as noticeable ah Who am I kidding I only own this game for benchmarking rounding out our benchmarks I ran 3d mark firestrike ultra because I could and earned a ridiculous score of 8000 271 graphics test once on average FPS of 54 with test 2 coming in at 33 FPS I'd also like to point out that this was the first time I've ever seen this test run where it didn't look like a bloody flip book and those are all the benchmarks overall I am incredibly pleased with the final results which have reassured me now that this PC will serve me well for my venture into 4k gaming I'm also curious to know what you guys think of the performance here do the benefits of custom liquid cooling warrant the additional cost when will we be finally ready for 4k tacos go ahead and leave your thoughts in the comments and don't forget to toss me a like on this video if you enjoyed it also don't forget this is your last chance to enter the epic give away with fractal design you could win a define s Edison M power supply and $1,000 Amazon gift card wha so check the link in the description for details yo while you're down there feel free to pick up a glorious church from the awesomesauce store or bookmark my Amazon affiliate link and use it when you buy stuff it helps me as always in Cowes awesomesauce network thank you guys for watching subscribe to the channel if you haven't already and I'll see you all in the next video you