4K build input

Chassis Model: Special Deal Hot Seller - Digital Storm Velox
Exterior Finish: - Standard Factory Finish
Trim Accents: - Standard Factory Finish
Processor: Intel Core i7 6700K 4.0GHz (Codename Skylake) (Unlocked CPU) (Quad Core)
Motherboard: ASUS Z170-DELUXE (Intel Z170 Chipset)
System Memory: 16GB DDR4 2800MHz Corsair Dominator Platinum DHX (Extreme-Performance)
Power Supply: 1500W Corsair HX1500i (Digitally Controlled Power)
Expansion Bay: - No Thanks
Optical Drive: DVD-R/RW/CD-R/RW (DVD Writer 24x / CD-Writer 48x)
Storage Set 1: 1x SSD (256GB Samsung 850 PRO)
Storage Set 2: 1x Storage (1TB Western Digital - Enterprise Edition)
Storage Set 3: - No Thanks
RAID Config: - No Thanks
RAID Card: - No Thanks
Internet Access: High Speed Network Port (Supports High-Speed Cable / DSL / Network Connections)
Graphics Card(s): 2x SLI Dual (NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti 6GB (ASUS Strix Edition)
Sound Card: Integrated Motherboard Audio
HPC Processor: - No Thanks
Extreme Cooling: H20: HydroLux Level 3: Digital Storm Exotic Custom Cooling System (2x Video Cards + CPU + Chipset)
H20 Tube Color: Red
Chassis Fans: Corsair performance airflow upgrade
Internal Lighting: Red internal LED.
Airflow Control: Digital Storm Thermal Management Control Board & Software
Chassis Mods: - No Thanks
Noise Reduction: - No Thanks
LaserMark: - No Thanks
Boost Processor: Stage 2: Overclock CPU 4.5GHz to 4.8GHz
Boost Graphics Card(s): Yes, Overclock the video card(s) as much as possible with complete stability
Boost Memory: - No Thanks, Please do not overclock my memory
Boost OS: Yes, Disable and tweak all of the non-crucial services on the operating system
Windows OS: Microsoft Windows 8.1 Home (64-Bit Edition)
Recovery Tools: Windows Recovery Toolkit (Bundled with Windows CD)
Virus Protection: FREE: McAfee AntiVirus Plus (1 Year Service Activation Card) (Not Pre-installed) ($35 Value)
Office: - No Thanks
Game: - No Thanks
Display: - No Thanks
Surge Shield: - No Thanks
Speakers: - No Thanks
Keyboard: - No Thanks
Mouse: - No Thanks
Portable Gaming: - No Thanks
Branded Gear: - No Thanks
Priority Build: - No Thanks, Ship Within 10-15 Business Days After Order Is Successfully Processed
Warranty: Life-time Expert Care with 3 Year Limited Warranty (3 Year Labor & 1 Year Part Replacement)

Monitor ill buy seperately and it will be a Seiki 40 inch 4k monitor at 60HZ

Usage: Well just 4k gaming. I dont do any editing, videos or any computer related projects.

Expectations:  I would like to be able to play as high of quality as I can with the best fps I can for the price. Single monitor experience. I play a ton of games ranging from HOTS to the Witcher. Currently im looking to build a new battle station(gaming playspace) before fallout 4.

Any inputs or suggestions would be appreciated, I welcome any advice the community has to give. If there is anything I need to elaborate more on I will happily do so.



Edited by Phantom1294 - 10 Oct 2015 at 8:07pm

looks like you've nailed it to game on a single 4k monitor.  like you said, you could go for faster storage with a pcie nvme drive, but that won't really give you more gaming performance.  you might notice levels loading a bit faster.  one thing i'd change is making your secondary storage a WD Black over a Seagate hdd.  are you going to be keeping just your current games+OS on the ssd or are you trying to keep all of your games on the ssd?  you might want to increase the capacity of the drive if the latter.

i concur with the mobo advice as well. 


Edited by db188 - 28 Sep 2015 at 7:21pm

Hi Phantom1294,

This build will work great for 4K games; however, 980tis will perform slightly better than two titans when overclocked with your water cooled setup, and you'll save money. An i7 6700K will work great, but going with two 980tis and moving to the X99 platform will cost just a much; plus you'll get a whole lot more out of the system in the future if you ever decide to upgrade your GPUs.

The titans do include extra bragging rights.
Good luck!

Originally posted by  The titans give about a 1-2 fps advantage over the 980 Ti, regardless of how they are cooled. The GM200 chips are poor at voltage scaling, so it isn't like you can get much more out of them by giving them a lot of extra cooling and cranking up the voltage. Even though the number of ROPs are the same, the deficiency of CUDA cores and Texture Units still give the Titan X the advantage, even with a 980 Ti at a slightly higher clock from better power delivery. As for the Z170 vs. X99, the Z170 has newer I/O (20 PCI-e 3.0 lanes vs. 8 PCI-e 2.0 lanes) and a faster interface to the Processor (DMI 3.0 vs. DMI 2.0). It can also support multiple NVMe PCI-e SSDs and doesn't use the PCI-e lanes coming directly from the processor to handle them at full speed. Also, the processors that go with the Z170 will have higher clock speeds, meaning they will perform better on applications that do not have a high amount of parallelism (a vast majority of games are included). Once heterogeneous multi-adapter technology has been successfully integrated into GPU drivers, the integrated GPUs (iGPU) in the processors can augment the graphics and compute processing of the discrete GPU (dGPU), further giving them an advantage over the larger enthusiast processors in games where GPU processing makes a much bigger difference.

I've seen a few benchmarks of 980tis beating the Titan X when overclocked. This mostly came down to the cooler as the Titan X was a blower style. The Titan X isn't really worth the extra cost, even for developers and creators. Some cards do respond really well depending on the card you go with such as the MSI lightning brand.

I don't know where you got the PCI-e 2.0 from as I'm pretty sure X99 doesn't use PCI-e 2.0. PCI-e 2.0 is fairly old, but 2.0 wont bottleneck a singe card out yet anyway. You are right about the DMI being 2.0 on X99; however, we have yet to see that effect any real-world performance. His system would be water cooled allowing a 5820K or other reach a high Ghz rating. That's just my opinion. Either option is great!

Edit: If the user is not going to overclock, z170 platform would be a better option. As you stated, because of the higher clock speed for single-threaded applications.

Edited by Reece - 30 Sep 2015 at 12:39am

Originally posted by  Yes, it really depends on what is being benchmarked, but the additional cores and texture units will more than make up for the slightly reduced clock in the majority of benchmarks. A lot of the cards hit a ceiling just above 1500MHz; Titan X cards can reach these speeds, too...it is up to the silicon lottery, though. There are alternate coolers for the Titan X, as well: EVGA makes an ACX 2.0 cooler for it; Zotac has their ArcticStorm hybrid water/air cooler; and, of course, there are several water blocks for it. X99 has always had PCI-e 2.0: http://ark.intel.com/products/81761. The PCI-e from the X99 is usually used for the x4, x1, Wi-Fi, Ethernet, and other similar I/O. The PCI-e lanes coming directly from the CPU are PCI-e 3.0, though. The GPUs almost always connect to the lanes coming from the processor, so the chipset has no effect on that.

Right. I still Don't see the extra cost of the Titan X being worth it. As you said yourself 1 - 2 FPS difference depending on the application. Obviously something like firestrike will show the Titan X as a better performer.

I still want to hold my stance at X99 as the extra cores will come into play down the road when the user ever decides he/she wants to upgrade the GPUs. We know three Titan Xs "bottleneck" the 5960X according to JayzTwoCents. I'd image the 6700K "bottleneck" would be larger than something like the 5820K. I want to hear hear your opinion on that.

For a here right now, pure gaming situation with no planned GPU upgrades down the road... z170 would probably be the best viable option. Correct?

Hopefully the user can take these friendly arguments and create their own opinion on the situation.

Originally posted by  No, the 980 Ti are definitely a better value, no disputing that. The Titan X will perform slightly better, that was all I was saying. The Z170 will handle 2160p60 fine with dual GPUs in (x8/x8) or perhaps a single Pascal or Volta in x16 in the future, so X99 won't have any advantage there. There may be a problem down the road with 4320p120, but that is a ways away...there are no video interfaces that can handle that aside from possibly industrial arrays (16 x 1080p120 or 9 x 1440p120?). So, yes, I do believe Z170 is Phantom1294's best option at the moment.

Okay, I completely agree with you.

I do see a couple questions with regards to what ill be doing with the GPU's down the line. I will be, when the time comes, and  their performance starts to waver, switching them out for two newer cards. I will not be adding a third(or fourth) card, this is simply due to the poster above myself sentiments about the poor scaling the more cards you have.

Hopefully this situation is quite a ways away, but I thought I would clarify to help with the discussion of the cpu.

As a last note thank you all for taking the time inform me about several different options with regards to CPU(and by definition chip sets) and GPU. The information has been helpful.

you can save yourself some more money with the following changes and not really notice it performance wise:

1) change your ssd to the EVO model
2) change your hdd to a WD Black model
3) change your system memory to the LPX or even DS certified
4) i know EK doesn't offer a chipset cooling option for the Asus Deluxe Z170

otherwise looks like a nice solid build.


Edited by db188 - 01 Oct 2015 at 6:46pm

that's like having unprotected sex.  i hope you've got some external storage solution to back that up.  i'd hate to see you 4-5 years down the road and you lose something important to a ssd failure. 

i also like to offload almost all of my page file and file folders to a data drive.


Edited by db188 - 01 Oct 2015 at 7:16pm

Originally posted by Phantom1294 Chassis Model: Special Deal Hot Seller - Digital Storm Velox Exterior Finish: - Standard Factory Finish Trim Accents: - Standard Factory Finish Processor: Intel Core i7 6700K 4.0GHz (Codename Skylake) (Unlocked CPU) (Quad Core) Motherboard: ASUS Z170-DELUXE (Intel Z170 Chipset) System Memory: 16GB DDR4 2800MHz Corsair Dominator Platinum DHX (Extreme-Performance) Power Supply: 1500W Corsair HX1500i (Digitally Controlled Power) Expansion Bay: - No Thanks Optical Drive: DVD-R/RW/CD-R/RW (DVD Writer 24x / CD-Writer 48x) Storage Set 1: 1x SSD (256GB Samsung 850 PRO) Storage Set 2: 1x Storage (1TB Western Digital - Enterprise Edition) Storage Set 3: - No Thanks RAID Config: - No Thanks RAID Card: - No Thanks Internet Access: High Speed Network Port (Supports High-Speed Cable / DSL / Network Connections) Graphics Card(s): 2x SLI Dual (NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti 6GB (ASUS Strix Edition) Sound Card: Integrated Motherboard Audio HPC Processor: - No Thanks Extreme Cooling: H20: HydroLux Level 3: Digital Storm Exotic Custom Cooling System (2x Video Cards + CPU + Chipset) H20 Tube Color: Red Chassis Fans: Corsair performance airflow upgrade Internal Lighting: Red internal LED. Airflow Control: Digital Storm Thermal Management Control Board & Software Chassis Mods: - No Thanks Noise Reduction: - No Thanks LaserMark: - No Thanks Boost Processor: Stage 2: Overclock CPU 4.5GHz to 4.8GHz Boost Graphics Card(s): Yes, Overclock the video card(s) as much as possible with complete stability Boost Memory: - No Thanks, Please do not overclock my memory Boost OS: Yes, Disable and tweak all of the non-crucial services on the operating system Windows OS: Microsoft Windows 8.1 Home (64-Bit Edition) Recovery Tools: Windows Recovery Toolkit (Bundled with Windows CD) Virus Protection: FREE: McAfee AntiVirus Plus (1 Year Service Activation Card) (Not Pre-installed) ($35 Value) Office: - No Thanks Game: - No Thanks Display: - No Thanks Surge Shield: - No Thanks Speakers: - No Thanks Keyboard: - No Thanks Mouse: - No Thanks Portable Gaming: - No Thanks Branded Gear: - No Thanks Priority Build: - No Thanks, Ship Within 10-15 Business Days After Order Is Successfully Processed Warranty: Life-time Expert Care with 3 Year Limited Warranty (3 Year Labor & 1 Year Part Replacement)

I would like to update you guys and let you know I purchased my system today, and I am extremely eager to join the stage waiting phase club.

Thank you all for your help and information it certainly helped when configuring my system.

.....im really excited I want this thing today, the wait will be real.


Edited by Phantom1294 - 10 Oct 2015 at 8:08pm