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What Does A $16,000+ PC Look Like, Anyway?
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1. You Spent *How* Much On That?

A couple of months back, I was talking to the folks at Puget Systems for the first time, and in our initial discussion, they mentioned a high-end system they were working on. Curious as to what the company meant by a true high-end machine, I asked about the box's innards.

The project was just getting started and it would apparently require lots of customization, so I naturally wanted to know more. It turned out that the system would cost in excess of $16,000.

Given the enthusiasm over our $5,000 System Builder Marathon machine (despite its prohibitively high price tag), we just had to get a complete album of what goes into a box priced at more than three times what we already considered to be the ultimate enthusiast build. 

In the pages to come, we'll give you the customer's reason for wanting such a powerhouse, the full list of specs, and plenty of shots of what Puget had to do to get this thing running the way it wanted.

2. Something Special

We asked Puget what its goals were in building this thing and, perhaps more important, what was their customer hoping to get out of it. They answered with the following:

"Our client came to us with a need we hear often: he wanted a high performance machine, but wanted it quiet. Of course, “quiet” is a subjective term... Building a mainstream PC to be quiet isn't difficult at all, but high-performance machines are more challenging. This particular computer has four quad-core Opteron processors, 32 GB of memory, two VelociRaptor hard drives in RAID1, and six 1 TB hard drives in RAID 5. That's not a easy machine to make quiet! We opted to cool the machine with a massive radiator mounted to the side of the case, providing an extreme amount of radiator surface area, allowing us to run the fans at 5 V for nearly silent operation. And the temperature on the CPUs? 36 C at idle, 45 C at load.

We begin by testing the board under air cooling, to make sure the motherboard, CPUs, and memory are working properly. It takes half a day to run one pass of MemTest!"

3. A Little Custom Prep Work

While the components are tested under air cooling, the chassis is prepared for the liquid cooling modding and assembly.

4. More Custom Prep Work

The radiator used to cool the system will accommodate nine 120 mm fans. With that amount of surface area, the fans can be run at the minimum voltage needed to get them to spin and still have all the cooling power needed.

5. Water Cooling Enterprise Hardware

Puget used Koolance CPU blocks on each of the four CPUs. "Not only do they work well, Puget says, "but their polished finish looks great. Since the chassis has a window, we want to make sure everything looks as great as it functions."

6. Mounting Water Blocks

A shot of the water blocks being installed onto each of the Opteron 8350 processors. Each of the 2 GHz CPUs dissipates up to 75 W of heat. Individually, they wouldn't be too hard to keep cool. But four of the chips in one system present more of a challenge.

7. And The Modding Begins

Some of the mod work is done the old fashioned way, using tools many enthusiasts probably remember from their early days of case alteration. Ah, to be working on a solid steel side-panel with a Dremel again...

8. Do-It-Yourself Radiator Mounting

To space the radiator away from the side of the chassis, risers had to be created out of brass tubing. This allows Puget to create exactly the spacing they needed for optimal cooling.

9. Close-Up Of The Standoffs

The brass tubing stands the radiator off from the Cooler Master Stacker 810's side panel, facilitating better air flow. Puget went with MagiCool's Xtreme Nova 1080 radiator and nine 120 mm fans.

10. Mounting Radiator To The Side Panel

The rest of Puget's water-cooling circuit consists of four Koolance water blocks (CPU-340), Koolance's RP-1000BK reservoir and pump, and the same company's liquid cooling fluid.

11. Prepping The Chassis For Tubing

Holes are drilled into the side of the chassis to allow the liquid cooling tubing to pass through.

12. More Modding

These holes are lined with rubber to prevent any sharp edges from damaging the tubing.

13. It's Coming Together

Once the radiator is mounted, it is a simple matter of hooking up all the tubing.

14. Running Tubes

The motherboard at the heart of this beast is Tyan's Thunder n6550EX. Here we see it with processors and water blocks already installed. The tubing for Puget's water-cooling system is being run.

15. The Monster, With More Hardware Installed

Another shot of water cooling hoses being run. In this picture, you can see the machine's power supply, a Corsair HX 1000W PSU, and its graphics card, an Asus GeForce 8800 GTS 640 MB. Clearly, this particular customer isn't gunning for maximum graphics muscle and instead needs as much compute power as possible.

16. Trimming Hoses

A Puget employee cuts the hose to the right length.

17. Hooking Up

Here's an image of the chassis side panel attached and an employee hooking up hoses from inside case. Note that this mod was done to the right panel, which never really needs to be removed. The enclosure remains easily servicable in case it becomes necessary to swap hardware. 

18. Keeping It Clean

Angled barbs on the radiator facilitate a lower profile with the tubing.

19. Another Shot Of The Angled Barbs

Everything is attached and running inside the chassis, now.

20. Getting Evertything Up And Running

The liquid cooling is now all set in place, and its time to fill the system and test it out.

21. Filling The Reservoir

Puget says, "We're running a Koolance combined pump and reservoir unit in one of the CD-ROM bays. We are very happy with this unit, as we can tune the pump speed up and down based on the performance and noise levels we want."

22. Keeping Things Quiet

"In this case, we could run the pump at 30% speed, which is very quiet!"

23. An Unassuming Exterior

From this angle, it's hard to tell that there are 16 cores and 32 GB of registered DDR2-667 ECC memory inside that Cooler Master case. 

24. That's More Like It

From here, it's pretty easy to tell that this system is sporting something special under the hood. In addition to the components already listed, this machine also includes an Asus Xonar DX PCI Express sound card, a 3Ware 9550SX-8LP SATA 3 Gb/s RAID controller, two Western Digital 300 GB VelociRaptor hard drives in RAID 1, two 1 TB Samsung SpinPoint F1s also in RAID 1, and four 1 TB Samsung SpinPoint F1s in RAID 5.

Also seen in the front are two Pioneer 20x DVD+/-R/RW SATA drives.

25. Final Cost:

This particular customer ordered his machine with Windows Server 2008 Standard. Puget adds a one-year parts warranty and a lifetime labor warranty, bringing the machine's total cost to $16,338.89.

"It is so choice. If you have the means, I highly recommend picking one up."--Ferris.