Re: Bonkers? Yes... Overpriced? Most definitely
And basic over clocking is so easy these days and is so much the norm now for even a basic gaming rig, for a Bonkers build, it should be mandatory!
I recently (about 3 weeks ago) upgraded my ageing Quad core Phenom that's done me proud for a few years but showing it's age these days. But I was a lot more conservative with my money than the build in the article.
Mobo: Asus P8Z77-V PRO Z77
CPU: i7 3770K (Stock 3.5GHz)
Corsair Hydro H60 cooler, so basically the smaller version of the one in the article.
Corsair Vengence Memory 16GB (4x4GB) DDR3 2133MHz
OCZ 240GB Vertex 3 SSD. (Plus some hand-me-down 1TB & 3TB HDs from the previous rig as data drives).
Asus provide out of the box over-clocking and tuning, both within the BIOS itself (which is a full menu drive mouse controlled affair now), and apps within Windows. This covers CPU speed, voltages, cooling fan tuning etc.
A single click OC after the build was all patched up, and the above was running a 4.2GHz, and still not hot enough to cause the CPU cooler fan to hit 100% speed. And this was using the 1 click option where it does everything for you, ideal for people who either have no idea what to do, or like me who simply can't be bothered to go into all the details. Obviously more time and effort spent on tweaking and it'll go even faster.
Also just a note on the CPU chosen, I don't see the point (at the moment at least) of more than 4 cores in a gaming rig, as most games still only have 1 or 2 threads, so don't really take advantage fully of even a quad core, let alone 6 or 8 cores. So I think currently, a faster core speed is still more important than having more cores and would suspect for gaming, for the CPU, that my current rig would outperform this Bonkers PC.
This will of course change over time, muti cores are now standard in even entry level devices and the new generation of consoles, with muti core i386 CPUs, will force game engine developers to start taking real advantage of those cores, so I expect over the next year or two, we'll see updates to main gaming engines to make them more muti core friendly, which should directly improve the PC performance of those engines as well. But it will still take some time to fully utilise a 4 core, let alone a 6 or 8 core rig.
Oh, that went on linger than I planned! Happy gaming everyone :-)
Paris, well, just because.