Dream Machine; when you have the money to go full out

Now comes the page you have been waiting for, the Dream System with all the parts you wish you had.  There are common sense limits in place here however, you could pick up the fastest RAM on the planet but it would cost more than the CPU and offer far less in the way of performance gains; you will need to look elsewhere for a list of all the most expensive parts you can buy.

That said however, the Intel Core i7-4960X will set you back just over $1000 but for pure performance and more PCIe lanes than you can get anywhere else as well as support for quad channel DDR3 keep LGA2011 in its top spot on the Leaderboard.  It is a shame that there are no dual socket boards available designed for gamers as we saw in the previous generations but there is still hope for future sockets.

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That CPU needs a good home and the EVGA X79 DARK certainly lives up to those expectations.  With five electrically 16x PCIe slots with the capability to run four at 8x speeds simultaneously you can really go crazy on GPUs if you so desire or even delve into the realms of the PCIe SSD.  This is a new board for Ivy Bridge-E not a previously existing model with a UEFI update which allows more peripheral ports and as it is a premium board it also comes with a lot of extras up to and including a 4-way SLI bridge.

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The current king of the single GPU world is the EVGA GeForce GTX 780 Ti Superclocked, it is expensive but worth it as it can even outpace the mighty TITAN.  This may change as custom cooled R9 290Xs appear but could still hold its spot if the pricing and availability is similar to the currently available stock cards.  The other lovely thing about this card is the scaling when used in SLI, you will see your performance almost double.

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The Mushkin Enhanced Blackline 16GB DDR3 2400 kit is a little expensive but with the incredible memory bandwidth that Ivy Bridge-E provides you will actually see a benefit to the higher clocked memory that you would not with Haswell.   This system also sticks to Samsung's 840 EVO SSD but this time at 1TB you can store just about anything you want on some of the fastest SATA connected flash available.

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With swappable OPamps and a good front panel along with a few connections your motherboard lacks the ASUS Xonar DSX 7.1 is a good pick for audiophiles but remains a personal choice.  To power this behemoth we turn to the XFX ProSeries P1-1250-BEFX 1250W with a total of eight 6+2 PCIe power connectors and the ability to provide 104 amps on the 12V line to keep even the power hungry GK110 more than happy.

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  Dream Machine System Leaderboard
Processor Intel Core i7-4960X Extreme Edition – $1049
Motherboard EVGA X79 Dark IVB-E EATX – $399
Memory Mushkin Blackline 16GB DDR3-2400 – $219
Graphics Card EVGA GeForce GTX 780 Ti SuperClocked – $719
Sound Card ASUS Xonar DSX PCIe 7.1 – $56
Storage Samsung 840 EVO Series 1TB SSD – $545
Case Corsair Obsidian Series 900D – $328
Power Supply XFX ATX ProSeries Black Edition 1250 watt – $269
Optical Drive ASUS 24x DVD-RW – $21
OS Windows 8 OEM – $99
Total Price $3704

So there you have the four current system builds of the PC Perspective Hardware Leaderboard for the 2013 Christmas season.  Keep your eyes peeled for changes though over the next year.  Sometimes they are just price changes but with CES coming up you will get a peek at some of the new components sure to find there way here in the next year.

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