Most Powerful Computer You've Ever Used

[microsoft windows]

So what's the most powerful computer you've ever used? I'm having a tough time thinking of one for me, since most of my computers aren't the most powerful things in the world, but maybe it would be one of the servers at work.

[smknjoe]

Does it have to be one that you have physical access to?

[Puddsy]

My tower.

i5-2500k
6870
8gb

Kinda old, kinda lame compared to some newer stuff. Still runs games well, so I 'm not one to complain.

The servers at school are pretty powerful though. I've never used one though.

[127001]

Probably one of the storage arrays at work. It's not really that powerful in terms of processing but it can perform more IO than most anything else.

[PadawanGeek]

My main system is the most powerful system I have had the pleasure of using. None of my family members and friends has a system that comes even close to mine....though tons of local forum members have systems to put mine to shame.
LGA2011 i7 3960X @4.5ghz
Asus Rampage IV Extreme
16GB Corsair Dom Plat 2133mhz
3x HD7970 CFX

[ynrozturk]

Good friend of mine has a monster gaming PC which he uses to play Battlefield on. Which means that when I go over for a session, it usually lasts a while.

Intel i7-3820 3.60
Asus Sabertooth X79
Corsair Dominator Platinum 32GB's
ASUS GTX680
2 Corsair Force 240GB SSD's in RAID 0
4TB WD for storage
1350W Thermaltake power suppy

Thing is a monster.

[HoffmanMyster]

What's the definition of computer here?  I use an incredibly powerful system of computers every time I use Google.

[Findecanor]

I have used a maxed out SGI Onyx ... which was pretty powerful at the time.
It was managed by the same people who managed a couple of supercomputing clusters... that I didn't get to play with.

[tp4tissue]

Good friend of mine has a monster gaming PC which he uses to play Battlefield on. Which means that when I go over for a session, it usually lasts a while.

Intel i7-3820 3.60
Asus Sabertooth X79
Corsair Dominator Platinum 32GB's
ASUS GTX680
2 Corsair Force 240GB SSD's in RAID 0
4TB WD for storage
1350W Thermaltake power suppy

Thing is a monster.

In the united states.. that's a budget build.. Go "murica"

that PSU is way too huge for that computer which probably tops out at 500-600 watts or so

Is he getting 4.2ghz plus out of the 3820?

[Dubsgalore]

My current Rig

it's the fastest thing i've ever touched

3570k
z77-UD3H
8GB DDR3 1600
Gigabyte 7950
Phantom 410

[tp4tissue]

My current Rig

it's the fastest thing i've ever touched

3570k
z77-UD3H
8GB DDR3 1600
Gigabyte 7950
Phantom 410

that's a great sensitive build... I approve...

it's got all the best perf/$ parts  3570 UD3H 7950...

Now ur gonna tell me u also have a 1350watt psu... and ruin it...

[Dubsgalore]

 
first build ever, no regrets
 

[BakaPhoenix]

Actually is my pc XD

I switched from a c2d e6750 to a i7 3770k
The performance between them is huge XD

I'm quite happy with it, i can play everything smootly

[JPG]

Good friend of mine has a monster gaming PC which he uses to play Battlefield on. Which means that when I go over for a session, it usually lasts a while.

Intel i7-3820 3.60
Asus Sabertooth X79
Corsair Dominator Platinum 32GB's
ASUS GTX680
2 Corsair Force 240GB SSD's in RAID 0
4TB WD for storage
1350W Thermaltake power suppy

Thing is a monster.

The Raid 0 on those SSd's, for gaming, seems like a total waste of an SSD to me. I am 99.99% sure he would see no difference with only 1 of those SSD, and then having double storage on SSD's would be nicer imo!

BTW, I still use my 2500K stock and have been able to run things so smoothly with it. I even played BF4 beta with no lag. Got a GTX 570 and 16g of ram with it (8 would have been way enough, but it was so cheap and 1600 MHz too). I have absolutely no need for better rig since I play mostly at LOL.


Oh, and fastest computer? Well We have some decent servers at job, some Dell things doing the job way enough, but since we work a lot with databases, the CPU rarely work hard, even under big tasks since the disks are always the bottleneck. But 1 year ago we got to a point where we had some big problems when the SSIS (data importation) team was running big tasks that would consume all the I/O available and have a big impact on all the dev team. We were looking for ways to solve this, and considered buying another server or more disks, but after considering many costly options I suggested buying a single very high performance SSD (enterprise grade) that would be used for those massive queries and so we bough a intel 900 series SSD (the 800g version) and man does it deliver. That thing is plugged with a pci-express X8 and runs so fast that's amazing. I used it a little this last year for testing a job that is crunching 60 000 000 rows of audit and is then joining those rows with half the database and it was going at least 4 times faster than our better other disks option and it still had some juice available. ok, it was a 4500$ SSD, but worth every penny for us. And we still don't use more than like 10% of the server CPU most of the time.

[tp4tissue]

Good friend of mine has a monster gaming PC which he uses to play Battlefield on. Which means that when I go over for a session, it usually lasts a while.

Intel i7-3820 3.60
Asus Sabertooth X79
Corsair Dominator Platinum 32GB's
ASUS GTX680
2 Corsair Force 240GB SSD's in RAID 0
4TB WD for storage
1350W Thermaltake power suppy

Thing is a monster.

The Raid 0 on those SSd's, for gaming, seems like a total waste of an SSD to me. I am 99.99% sure he would see no difference with only 1 of those SSD, and then having double storage on SSD's would be nicer imo!

BTW, I still use my 2500K stock and have been able to run things so smoothly with it. I even played BF4 beta with no lag. Got a GTX 570 and 16g of ram with it (8 would have been way enough, but it was so cheap and 1600 MHz too). I have absolutely no need for better rig since I play mostly at LOL.

JPG is lying.  Battlefield games requires as many cores and mhz as you can throw at it..


Raid 0 ssd is good for transcoding.. who knows, maybe the guy transcodes on his x79.. which many people get to do transcoding...

why you always assume the worst..

[JPG]

Good friend of mine has a monster gaming PC which he uses to play Battlefield on. Which means that when I go over for a session, it usually lasts a while.

Intel i7-3820 3.60
Asus Sabertooth X79
Corsair Dominator Platinum 32GB's
ASUS GTX680
2 Corsair Force 240GB SSD's in RAID 0
4TB WD for storage
1350W Thermaltake power suppy

Thing is a monster.

The Raid 0 on those SSd's, for gaming, seems like a total waste of an SSD to me. I am 99.99% sure he would see no difference with only 1 of those SSD, and then having double storage on SSD's would be nicer imo!

BTW, I still use my 2500K stock and have been able to run things so smoothly with it. I even played BF4 beta with no lag. Got a GTX 570 and 16g of ram with it (8 would have been way enough, but it was so cheap and 1600 MHz too). I have absolutely no need for better rig since I play mostly at LOL.

JPG is lying.  Battlefield games requires as many cores and mhz as you can throw at it..

Show Image

Raid 0 ssd is good for transcoding.. who knows, maybe the guy transcodes on his x79.. which many people get to do transcoding...

why you always assume the worst..

I assume there is very very little chance he is having any performance gain for having the SSD's in raid 0 since the game won't be loading much from the disk once launched, and even if it does during map load, 1 SSD will probably deliver quite the same performance and he won't see any difference. I don't say it is not faster, I just say he won't see it while gaming and if I had those 2 ssd I would simply use them as 2 distinct disks for having double space, but that's me, not him.

[meiosis]

SGI Origin2000 (Interned at JPL)

I believe it had 128 processors and some amazing CAD software..

[TheSoulhunter]

JPG is lying.  Battlefield games requires as many cores and mhz as you can throw at it..[/img]

But even if I run BF3 at Ultra my CPU is only utilized 20-40% all the time...
I can even run video compression in the background (limiting it to 2 cores -> max eating 50% CPU usage)

[tp4tissue]

Good friend of mine has a monster gaming PC which he uses to play Battlefield on. Which means that when I go over for a session, it usually lasts a while.

Intel i7-3820 3.60
Asus Sabertooth X79
Corsair Dominator Platinum 32GB's
ASUS GTX680
2 Corsair Force 240GB SSD's in RAID 0
4TB WD for storage
1350W Thermaltake power suppy

Thing is a monster.

The Raid 0 on those SSd's, for gaming, seems like a total waste of an SSD to me. I am 99.99% sure he would see no difference with only 1 of those SSD, and then having double storage on SSD's would be nicer imo!

BTW, I still use my 2500K stock and have been able to run things so smoothly with it. I even played BF4 beta with no lag. Got a GTX 570 and 16g of ram with it (8 would have been way enough, but it was so cheap and 1600 MHz too). I have absolutely no need for better rig since I play mostly at LOL.

JPG is lying.  Battlefield games requires as many cores and mhz as you can throw at it..

Show Image

Raid 0 ssd is good for transcoding.. who knows, maybe the guy transcodes on his x79.. which many people get to do transcoding...

why you always assume the worst..

I assume there is very very little chance he is having any performance gain for having the SSD's in raid 0 since the game won't be loading much from the disk once launched, and even if it does during map load, 1 SSD will probably deliver quite the same performance and he won't see any difference. I don't say it is not faster, I just say he won't see it while gaming and if I had those 2 ssd I would simply use them as 2 distinct disks for having double space, but that's me, not him.

raid zero is the same capacity as 2x drives non-raid

[tp4tissue]

JPG is lying.  Battlefield games requires as many cores and mhz as you can throw at it..[/img]

But even if I run BF3 at Ultra my CPU is only utilized 20-40% all the time...
I can even run video compression in the background (limiting it to 2 cores -> max eating 50% CPU usage)

well yea.. in low load situations ur are correct...

but i speak of highly competitive situations where minimum framerates matter..  and high ghz/ core count is what keeps those frames from dipping, and getting you killed in the heat of battle... WHICH is where the frame rate dips most.. because you can't turn off those damn lighting effects that chew through cpu cycles just to blind you and blur the screen..

[tufty]

Had access to a CM2a for a bit, that was fun.  *Lisp was great, although most of the production stuff eded up being written in C*  Before that we used to send the occasional job down to CERN to run on their X-MP.

Of course, they're both now handily outpaced by my iMac.

[JPG]

Good friend of mine has a monster gaming PC which he uses to play Battlefield on. Which means that when I go over for a session, it usually lasts a while.

Intel i7-3820 3.60
Asus Sabertooth X79
Corsair Dominator Platinum 32GB's
ASUS GTX680
2 Corsair Force 240GB SSD's in RAID 0
4TB WD for storage
1350W Thermaltake power suppy

Thing is a monster.

The Raid 0 on those SSd's, for gaming, seems like a total waste of an SSD to me. I am 99.99% sure he would see no difference with only 1 of those SSD, and then having double storage on SSD's would be nicer imo!

BTW, I still use my 2500K stock and have been able to run things so smoothly with it. I even played BF4 beta with no lag. Got a GTX 570 and 16g of ram with it (8 would have been way enough, but it was so cheap and 1600 MHz too). I have absolutely no need for better rig since I play mostly at LOL.

JPG is lying.  Battlefield games requires as many cores and mhz as you can throw at it..

Show Image

Raid 0 ssd is good for transcoding.. who knows, maybe the guy transcodes on his x79.. which many people get to do transcoding...

why you always assume the worst..

I assume there is very very little chance he is having any performance gain for having the SSD's in raid 0 since the game won't be loading much from the disk once launched, and even if it does during map load, 1 SSD will probably deliver quite the same performance and he won't see any difference. I don't say it is not faster, I just say he won't see it while gaming and if I had those 2 ssd I would simply use them as 2 distinct disks for having double space, but that's me, not him.

raid zero is the same capacity as 2x drives non-raid

Oh, wrong raid then, haven't played with them for a while, I was sure Raid 0 "sacrificed" a disk for performance gain. If not then forget what I said lol!

[tp4tissue]

Good friend of mine has a monster gaming PC which he uses to play Battlefield on. Which means that when I go over for a session, it usually lasts a while.

Intel i7-3820 3.60
Asus Sabertooth X79
Corsair Dominator Platinum 32GB's
ASUS GTX680
2 Corsair Force 240GB SSD's in RAID 0
4TB WD for storage
1350W Thermaltake power suppy

Thing is a monster.

The Raid 0 on those SSd's, for gaming, seems like a total waste of an SSD to me. I am 99.99% sure he would see no difference with only 1 of those SSD, and then having double storage on SSD's would be nicer imo!

BTW, I still use my 2500K stock and have been able to run things so smoothly with it. I even played BF4 beta with no lag. Got a GTX 570 and 16g of ram with it (8 would have been way enough, but it was so cheap and 1600 MHz too). I have absolutely no need for better rig since I play mostly at LOL.

JPG is lying.  Battlefield games requires as many cores and mhz as you can throw at it..

Show Image

Raid 0 ssd is good for transcoding.. who knows, maybe the guy transcodes on his x79.. which many people get to do transcoding...

why you always assume the worst..

I assume there is very very little chance he is having any performance gain for having the SSD's in raid 0 since the game won't be loading much from the disk once launched, and even if it does during map load, 1 SSD will probably deliver quite the same performance and he won't see any difference. I don't say it is not faster, I just say he won't see it while gaming and if I had those 2 ssd I would simply use them as 2 distinct disks for having double space, but that's me, not him.

raid zero is the same capacity as 2x drives non-raid

Oh, wrong raid then, haven't played with them for a while, I was sure Raid 0 "sacrificed" a disk for performance gain. If not then forget what I said lol!

LOL, I wish I could sacrifice disk space for performance..

Literally EVERYONE would do this.. if possible.

[eth0s]

At my old job on the Discovery One, we used the HAL 9000.  Great computer, and very powerful.  Had voice recognition, voice synth, facial recognition, natural language processing, lip reading, art appreciation, interpreting, jealousy, rage, anger, aggression, self-awareness, sentience, and playing chess.  Only problem was this guy Dave I worked with.  He thought the HAL 9000 was trying to kill him.  What a jackass.

[ynrozturk]

Good friend of mine has a monster gaming PC which he uses to play Battlefield on. Which means that when I go over for a session, it usually lasts a while.

Intel i7-3820 3.60
Asus Sabertooth X79
Corsair Dominator Platinum 32GB's
ASUS GTX680
2 Corsair Force 240GB SSD's in RAID 0
4TB WD for storage
1350W Thermaltake power suppy

Thing is a monster.

In the united states.. that's a budget build.. Go "murica"

Show Image

that PSU is way too huge for that computer which probably tops out at 500-600 watts or so

Is he getting 4.2ghz plus out of the 3820?

I don't think most "budget" PC's have 32 gigs of RAM. As for the RAID 0, yeah, I would have went with RAID 1 as well but, not my computer.

[tp4tissue]

Good friend of mine has a monster gaming PC which he uses to play Battlefield on. Which means that when I go over for a session, it usually lasts a while.

Intel i7-3820 3.60
Asus Sabertooth X79
Corsair Dominator Platinum 32GB's
ASUS GTX680
2 Corsair Force 240GB SSD's in RAID 0
4TB WD for storage
1350W Thermaltake power suppy

Thing is a monster.

In the united states.. that's a budget build.. Go "murica"

Show Image

that PSU is way too huge for that computer which probably tops out at 500-600 watts or so

Is he getting 4.2ghz plus out of the 3820?

I don't think most "budget" PC's have 32 gigs of RAM. As for the RAID 0, yeah, I would have went with RAID 1 as well but, not my computer.

ah.. yea it would. he used all 8 slots with 4gb sticks.. that's being budget minded..  Since you can use 4x 8gb sticks and get higher OC, but that would cost more...

[ynrozturk]

Good friend of mine has a monster gaming PC which he uses to play Battlefield on. Which means that when I go over for a session, it usually lasts a while.

Intel i7-3820 3.60
Asus Sabertooth X79
Corsair Dominator Platinum 32GB's
ASUS GTX680
2 Corsair Force 240GB SSD's in RAID 0
4TB WD for storage
1350W Thermaltake power suppy

Thing is a monster.

In the united states.. that's a budget build.. Go "murica"

Show Image

that PSU is way too huge for that computer which probably tops out at 500-600 watts or so

Is he getting 4.2ghz plus out of the 3820?

I don't think most "budget" PC's have 32 gigs of RAM. As for the RAID 0, yeah, I would have went with RAID 1 as well but, not my computer.

ah.. yea it would. he used all 8 slots with 4gb sticks.. that's being budget minded..  Since you can use 4x 8gb sticks and get higher OC, but that would cost more...

Show Image

That's what he has. You're just assuming you he used 8 slots, when in fact he used 4 slots with 8GB sticks in each slot.

[JPG]

Good friend of mine has a monster gaming PC which he uses to play Battlefield on. Which means that when I go over for a session, it usually lasts a while.

Intel i7-3820 3.60
Asus Sabertooth X79
Corsair Dominator Platinum 32GB's
ASUS GTX680
2 Corsair Force 240GB SSD's in RAID 0
4TB WD for storage
1350W Thermaltake power suppy

Thing is a monster.

The Raid 0 on those SSd's, for gaming, seems like a total waste of an SSD to me. I am 99.99% sure he would see no difference with only 1 of those SSD, and then having double storage on SSD's would be nicer imo!

BTW, I still use my 2500K stock and have been able to run things so smoothly with it. I even played BF4 beta with no lag. Got a GTX 570 and 16g of ram with it (8 would have been way enough, but it was so cheap and 1600 MHz too). I have absolutely no need for better rig since I play mostly at LOL.

JPG is lying.  Battlefield games requires as many cores and mhz as you can throw at it..

Show Image

Raid 0 ssd is good for transcoding.. who knows, maybe the guy transcodes on his x79.. which many people get to do transcoding...

why you always assume the worst..

I assume there is very very little chance he is having any performance gain for having the SSD's in raid 0 since the game won't be loading much from the disk once launched, and even if it does during map load, 1 SSD will probably deliver quite the same performance and he won't see any difference. I don't say it is not faster, I just say he won't see it while gaming and if I had those 2 ssd I would simply use them as 2 distinct disks for having double space, but that's me, not him.

raid zero is the same capacity as 2x drives non-raid

Oh, wrong raid then, haven't played with them for a while, I was sure Raid 0 "sacrificed" a disk for performance gain. If not then forget what I said lol!

LOL, I wish I could sacrifice disk space for performance..

Show Image

Literally EVERYONE would do this.. if possible.

Ok, I just went back and googled the raids definitions and the Raid 0 was a good idea since he's not losing space and gains performance (at least in theory since with ssd's, that already use parallelism as far as I know it's maybe not the case). For sure if he loses 1 disk he loses it all, but for a gamer it should not be a concern. So worth it, maybe, maybe not, hard to tell, but not a bad move either.

[tp4tissue]

Good friend of mine has a monster gaming PC which he uses to play Battlefield on. Which means that when I go over for a session, it usually lasts a while.

Intel i7-3820 3.60
Asus Sabertooth X79
Corsair Dominator Platinum 32GB's
ASUS GTX680
2 Corsair Force 240GB SSD's in RAID 0
4TB WD for storage
1350W Thermaltake power suppy

Thing is a monster.

In the united states.. that's a budget build.. Go "murica"

Show Image

that PSU is way too huge for that computer which probably tops out at 500-600 watts or so

Is he getting 4.2ghz plus out of the 3820?

I don't think most "budget" PC's have 32 gigs of RAM. As for the RAID 0, yeah, I would have went with RAID 1 as well but, not my computer.

ah.. yea it would. he used all 8 slots with 4gb sticks.. that's being budget minded..  Since you can use 4x 8gb sticks and get higher OC, but that would cost more...

Show Image

That's what he has. You're just assuming you he used 8 slots, when in fact he used 4 slots with 8GB sticks in each slot.

IC.. well ur right 4x8gb is not budget..  the 3820 and sabertooth is though..

[PadawanGeek]

..  the 3820 and sabertooth is though..

Nope, a Sabertooth X79 cost >300USD, that is far from being budget.....mid-high range would be more appropriate. X79 boards are never budget.....a budget board would be anything less than 150USD imo. I know of many gamers with pretty good mid range gaming systems with mobo + CPU that cost less than what an LGA i7 3820 + Asus Sabertooth X79 would cost. FYI, an i7 3820 + Asus Sabertooth X79 comboa cost about 600USD, this is far from being budget....heck, some would say it's high end. While I'd say an i7 3820 + Sabertooth X79 is not quite enthusiast level, they certainly can qualify as high end.

[thegagne]

Probably my Isilon Cluster or my NexGen storage. Or Dell R720XD.

[TheSoulhunter]

JPG is lying.  Battlefield games requires as many cores and mhz as you can throw at it..[/img]

But even if I run BF3 at Ultra my CPU is only utilized 20-40% all the time...
I can even run video compression in the background (limiting it to 2 cores -> max eating 50% CPU usage)

well yea.. in low load situations ur are correct...

but i speak of highly competitive situations where minimum framerates matter..  and high ghz/ core count is what keeps those frames from dipping, and getting you killed in the heat of battle... WHICH is where the frame rate dips most.. because you can't turn off those damn lighting effects that chew through cpu cycles just to blind you and blur the screen..

But I have a constant framerate (I lock it to 60 because I'm recording the gameplay)
My guess is that almost everything "demanding" is done on GPU, hence the CPU utilization never exceeds 40%

[tp4tissue]

JPG is lying.  Battlefield games requires as many cores and mhz as you can throw at it..[/img]

But even if I run BF3 at Ultra my CPU is only utilized 20-40% all the time...
I can even run video compression in the background (limiting it to 2 cores -> max eating 50% CPU usage)

well yea.. in low load situations ur are correct...

but i speak of highly competitive situations where minimum framerates matter..  and high ghz/ core count is what keeps those frames from dipping, and getting you killed in the heat of battle... WHICH is where the frame rate dips most.. because you can't turn off those damn lighting effects that chew through cpu cycles just to blind you and blur the screen..

But I have a constant framerate (I lock it to 60 because I'm recording the gameplay)
My guess is that almost everything "demanding" is done on GPU, hence the CPU utilization never exceeds 40%

I think probably 90% of the time, you're covered...   but in the 64player maps, if enough people show up at the same time... and you want to kill them all...  You will need a beasty cpu to make sure the frame rate remains high..

[TheSoulhunter]

JPG is lying.  Battlefield games requires as many cores and mhz as you can throw at it..[/img]

But even if I run BF3 at Ultra my CPU is only utilized 20-40% all the time...
I can even run video compression in the background (limiting it to 2 cores -> max eating 50% CPU usage)

well yea.. in low load situations ur are correct...

but i speak of highly competitive situations where minimum framerates matter..  and high ghz/ core count is what keeps those frames from dipping, and getting you killed in the heat of battle... WHICH is where the frame rate dips most.. because you can't turn off those damn lighting effects that chew through cpu cycles just to blind you and blur the screen..

But I have a constant framerate (I lock it to 60 because I'm recording the gameplay)
My guess is that almost everything "demanding" is done on GPU, hence the CPU utilization never exceeds 40%

I think probably 90% of the time, you're covered...   but in the 64player maps, if enough people show up at the same time... and you want to kill them all...  You will need a beasty cpu to make sure the frame rate remains high..

Show Image

64 player Metro madness all day :D

[ynrozturk]

64 player Metro with USAS/Frag rounds

Man those were the days.

[TheSoulhunter]

64 player Metro with USAS/Frag rounds

Man those were the days.

Frag rounds and hallway bipodding
But I went bolt action a year ago, challenging but fun!

[ynrozturk]

64 player Metro with USAS/Frag rounds

Man those were the days.

Frag rounds and hallway bipodding
But I went bolt action a year ago, challenging but fun!

It was hilarious because the frag rounds literally made people do cart wheels. lols all round  )

And I really like throwing a 3.4 scope on my SV98 and just going aggressive recon. Makes the game so much more challenging. You miss = you're screwed. Solution? Don't miss. It really helps your aim when you're constantly going for headshots.