Heading the components list is Intel’s Core i7-4770K CPU—the pinnacle of the new Haswell family of chips—overclocked to an insane 4.7GHz. You’ll also find three video cards based on Nvidia’s best GPU, the GeForce GTX Titan, each with 6GB of GDDR5 memory, plus 16GB of DDR3/2400 system memory, and four of the best 256GB SSDs we’ve tested—Samsung’s 840 Pro—configured as RAID 0 for blistering speed.
The Shift Z87’s Desktop WorldBench 8.1 score of 435 means it’s more than four times faster than our reference system, the modest Acer Aspire A5600U-UB13. In fact, it’s the fastest desktop PC we’ve ever encountered. Although that overall score is only modestly higher than the 421 of MicroFlex’s significantly cheaper MicroExpress 47B, the Shift Z87 blew the competition out of the water when we played the latest games at very high resolution.
More: The PCWorld Lab team hooked the Shift Z87 up to three HD monitors and played Crysis 3 at a resolution of 5760 by 1440 pixels, all while achieving a consistent frame rate of 28 fps. That proves that all this power can afford you a real competitive advantage when playing games that challenge your situational awareness.
This machine also placed first in nearly every one of the productivity-oriented benchmarks that make up the WorldBench 8.1 suite, including PCMark 7 Productivity and each of the media editing and encoding tests we run.
The Shift Z87’s signature chassis orients the motherboard 90 degrees to the right so that the ports and fans normally on the back of a PC are on top. This arrangement leaves heatgenerating components, such as the video cards, hanging from their brackets. It also reduces the stress that the very heavy Titan video cards place on the PCIe slots.
This design is complemented by a proprietary open-loop, liquidcooling system that chills not just the CPU but also the motherboard’s voltage regulators to allow for higher overclocking.
The Gigabyte G1.Sniper 5 motherboard delivers pretty much every connection option your heart could desire: a PS/2 jack, two USB 2.0 ports, six USB 3.0 ports, and two gigabit ethernet jacks. Each video card has an array of outputs. We could go on...
Most of us can’t drop eight grand on a PC, no matter how powerful. But the Maingear Shift Z87 sits at the apex of personal computing.
Maingear Shif Super Stock Z87
PROS:
• Triple Titan video cards
• Extreme performance
• Excellent case design
CONS:
• Side panel can be difficult to remove
• Extreme price tag
BOTTOM LINE:
This incredibly expensive performance
desktop packs premium components
and water-cools them to deliver
benchmark-destroying performance
while remaining whisper-quiet.
PRICE:
$8000
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