Tweet
One of the most compelling aspects of PC gaming is its sheer scalability: the idea of playing games to your own specific tastes, using the hardware you've chosen. The quality of a given PC experience is often defined to a certain extent by the pixel-count of the display, but refresh rate is clearly important too. Most displays run at 60Hz, meaning that 60fps is the limit for consistent, tear-free gameplay. However, a growing number of 120Hz and 144Hz screens are arriving, accompanied by exciting technologies like Nvidia's G-Sync and AMD's FreeSync. The question is: just how much of an improvement is an extreme frame-rate experience, and what kit do you need to achieve it?Our objective was simple. We wanted to play the latest games at 144fps on max settings or as close to it as possible on a 2560x1440 display. To ensure that we'd be getting the best possible results, we put together the most powerful PC we could muster. MSI supplied us with its rather splendid Gaming 9 AC X99 motherboard (more on that in the sidebar), while we still retained the 16GB of 2666MHz DDR4 RAM Corsair sent us for our Core i7 5960X review. That remarkable chip - eight cores, 16 threads, overclocked to 4.4GHz - would be the brains of our system, offering the raw computational horsepower of two mainstream Core i7 quad-core processor on one piece of silicon.
All of which just leaves us with the question of which graphics cards to use. Asus helpfully supplied us with its excellent Strix GTX 980 to help us investigate the GTX 970 memory set-up last month, while access to MSI's remarkable GS30 gaming laptop with Gaming Dock (with another GTX 980 mounted inside) gave us access to a matching GPU. On top of that we retained the standard reference card from Nvidia, giving us the potential for a three-way GPU set-up.
Read more…
More...