We all want a high-end PC. You’ve probably got one and I’m planning on buying one. But how about for the whole family? If you don’t feel like shelling out around $8,000 for seven decent gaming PCs, you could spend $30,000 on one machine that can have seven sets of monitors, keyboards and mice plugged into it. It’s one massive tower put together by LinusTechTips, a hardware YouTube channel, and it’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve seen so far this year.
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It’s a work of somewhat mad genius, hooking up seven top of the range graphics cards, a stack of terrabyte SSDs, more cooling than the arctic circle and a whole heap of custom software to make it all play nice on a single motherboard. There’s a pile of CPUs for good measure and the largest power supply I’ve ever seen. Linus breaks down the build, the process of putting it together and shows that it does, somehow, actually work in this video.
Logically, it’s not particularly surprising that it’s possible. It’s effectively seven different computers all running from one large container, but things aren’t ever that simple. These things can only scale up so far, and even the most efficient of motherboards are going to start wobbling under the strain of routing so many different commands simultaneously. In its current form it’s not going to be of much practical use – not least because you could kit out seven people with a near-best-money-can-buy system each for the same price – but as an experiment it’s impressive. We won’t be picking one up for the office, but maybe you will?