ABT Builds a GTX 780 SLI Battlebox for 4K

Battlebox PCs

Here are 4 of Nvidia’s partners who build Battleboxes that we will compare with ABT’s own battlebox.

Digital Storm

Digital Storm offers liquid cooling and great features in the Adventum II as one of their 3 Battleboxes which start at just over $6,000

Digital Storm Aventum II

• Intel Core i7 Extreme Edition 4960X 3.6GHz
• 32GB DDR3 1866MHz
• 3x SLI GeForce GTX TITAN 6GB
• ASUS Rampage IV Extreme X79
• 240GB Solid State SATA 6Gbps
• 1TB 7200RPM Storage HDD
• Blu-Ray Player/DVD Writer

Falcon Northwest

Falcon Northwest uses Titan SLI and the i7-4930K for their Mach V.  Of course, you can customize it yourself right on their website before ordering starting for around $2,500 if you pick Core i7-4770K over the i7-4930K system.

Falcon Northwest Mach V

• Intel Core i7 4930K
• 32GB DDR3 1866MHz
• 2x SLI GeForce GTX TITAN
• Asus P9X79 PRO
• Western Digital 1TB Black
• ASUS 16X DVD+-RW Drive

Origin High Performance PCs

Origin’s Genesis uses Intel’s hex core i7-4930K together with 4 liquid cooled EVGA GTX Titans which you can configure yourself, starting around $3600.

Origin Genesis

• Intel Core i7 4930K Hex-Core 3.4GHz (3.9GHz TurboBoost), 12MB Cache
• 16GB Corsair Vengeance 1600Mhz (4x4GB)
• QUAD ORIGIN CRYOGENIC Liquid Cooled 6GB EVGA GTX TITANs
• ASUS Rampage IV Extreme
• 256GB Samsung 840 Pro Series
• 1TB Western Digital Caviar Black SATA 6.0Gb/s, 7200RPM, 64MB Cache
• 14X Blu-ray Burner

Maingear

Maingear has the lowest starting pricing for their Shift Battlebox compared to the other three vendors, starting at about $2300.

Shift

• Intel Core i7 4770K 3.5GHz/3.9GHz
• 16GB Corsair Vengeance DDR3-1600
• 2x SLI GeForce GTX 780 3GB
• 250GB Samsung 840 EVO
• 1TB Seagate Barracuda 7200rpm 64MB Cache SATA
• 24x Dual Layer DVD RW Drive

The ABT Battlebox

We will try to come closest to Maingear’s Battlebox specifications to try to approximate its performance as closely as possible.  Since Maingear allows “safe overclocking” under limited voltage increases for an additional $49, we figure that our own more aggressive Ivy Bridge i7-3770K overclock at 4.5GHz should be sufficient to match Haswell’s i7-4770K performance at perhaps a more conservative 4.2GHz.

Babel I

• Intel Core i7 3770K at 4.5GHz
• EVGA Z77 FTW motherboard with PLEX chip for 16x+16x PCIe 3.0
• 16GB Kingston “Beast” HyperX DDR3-2133MHz
• 2 GeForce GTX 780 3GB in SLI
• 240GB Kingston HyperX SSD
• 500GB Seagate Barracuda 7200rpm 64MB Cache SATA
• 24x Dual Layer DVD RW Drive
• Full tower Thermaltake Overseer RX-I with 7 Noctua fans and NH-DH14 CPU cooler

Unfortunately, we had to use an “ordinary” SLI bridge as we were unable to get the lighted one in time to build our Battlebox.

Check out the full specifications for the Babel I Battlebox on the next page.