Building the BFG
Our mega-blog on how Wired2Fire built the world's fastest computer. Named not for the Big Friendly Giant, but rather the iconic weapon of mass destruction from DOOM, this PC takes no prisoners!
To celebrate our twentieth year, we wanted to create something a little bit special – a spectacular system packed with the world’s fastest hardware to deliver the quickest PC we’ve ever built – and one that achieves the highest benchmark results ever seen. In this blog, we are going to take a deep dive into what makes the Wired2Fire BFG tick.
The CPU
AMD has been a dominant force in the high-performance PC space for more than half a decade; ever since the first generation Threadripper caught Intel and its aging X299 platform off guard back in 2017. Since then, AMD has iterated the line rapidly, serving up ever-higher densities of compute performance into a single socket CPU. With its new flagship, AMD has crammed in 50% more cores than its predecessor; the Ryzen Threadripper Pro 7995WX features a gargantuan 96 cores and 192 threads. Each of these cores can boost up to a theoretical maximum of 5.1GHz, with AMD’s Precision Boost Overdrive technology allowing for even higher clocks as long as the cooling is kept under control.
The Motherboard
Wired2Fire recommends and uses ASUS in its high-end PCs and workstations. Over the last 20 years, we’ve dabbled with just about every motherboard vendor out there, but for the high-end stuff, it is ASUS that consistently delivers the quality and consistency. In the BFG, we have the manufacturer’s top-shelf Pro WS WRX90E-SAGE SE – a socket TR5 monster with 8 memory slots, 7 PCIe 5.0 slots, dual 10G networking ports and built-in overclocking support. Oh, and it looks incredible too!
The Memory
If ASUS is king of the high-end motherboard vendors, then Kingston is most surely emperor of the memory manufacturers, with a dizzying array of qualified memory solutions for almost any conceivable PC. The BFG is not just any PC though, and its very particular demands are met by a kit with the right balance of speed and capacity. Enter the Kingston FURY Renegade Pro DDR5 RDIMM 256GB kit (kit reference KF560R32RBEK8-256). Not only does this kit support AMD EXPO memory mode, and a jaw-dropping speed of 6000MT/s, it also supports the processor’s native octo-channel memory mode – that’s right, the BFG has a not-immodest EIGHT-channels of DDR5 memory.
The GPU
The NVIDIA RTX 4090 is the most powerful GPU ever constructed. With its jaw-dropping 16,384 CUDA cores and 24GB of ultra-fast GDDR6X memory, even the mighty RTX 6000 Ada cannot dethrone it when it comes to raw content creation or gaming workloads. For the BFG, we went with one of the most powerful variants available – the ASUS ROG Strix RTX 4090 OC Edition. Large enough to beat a whale to death, this mighty card is factory overclocked and features beefed-up power delivery circuitry to maintain stability under load.
The Storage
SSDs with a PCIe Gen 5.0 interface are the fastest on the planet right now, and Crucial’s T705 is the quickest of them all. The insane 14GB/s performance of a single drive was considered, and ultimately deemed inadequate for the BFG, however, so we have striped three of these insanely fast drives together in a RAID Zero configuration. This has enabled a frankly ridiculous peak write speed of 24GB/s in our benchmarks; performance numbers we have only previously seen on specialist enterprise storage arrays with enormous DRAM caches. To put the storage system into perspective, a SATA SSD delivers 0.5GB/s of bandwidth, a really fast SSD delivers 3GB/s, and a really, really fast PCIe Gen 4 SSD, the flagship just a few months ago, delivers a paltry 7GB/s.
The Power Supply
It was very important to us that the BFG be a usable system; therefore, a single PSU must power it. Multi-PSU systems are notoriously problematic and difficult to troubleshoot in the event of issues, and if not configured properly, can also overwhelm standard domestic power sockets. We ultimately chose the Phanteks Revolt 1600W PSU – an 80 PLUS Titanium certified unit. 80 PLUS Titanium is the most stringent certification level for PSUs, and means the unit must deliver an efficiency of greater than 96% at 50% load, and no less than 94% at both 20% and 100% loads as well. Phanteks doesn’t provide cables as standard, allowing the user to choose what colours they want. We chose black for this unit as we wanted the water cooling to take centre stage. As with many of the top-performing power supplies, Phanteks commissions Seasonic’s factory to build this PSU on their behalf.
The Case
Considering the hardware inside, the BFG is housed within a relatively compact chassis. No “supertower” requiring a two-man lift in sight – you’ll be able to unpack and deploy the BFG all by yourself. Probably. The Phanteks NV7 is nevertheless a full-tower case, and perhaps the smallest case on the market that will accommodate the incredibly large ASUS WRX90 SSI EEB-sized motherboard. Despite this, it still has ample space for the system’s dual 360mm radiators and houses no fewer than 12 low noise 120mm fans. This keeps the BFG incredibly well-cooled, not to mention surprisingly quiet, considering the power beating within.
The Cooling
The water-cooling system keeping the BFG tamed is nothing short of a masterpiece, with lovingly hand-bent acrylic tubing and top-quality CPU and GPU blocks from Phanteks . We’ve also gone to Phanteks for the pump/reservoir unit, which proudly takes centre stage at the front of the machine. With two ultra-thick radiators, the water cooling loop is more than up to the task of keeping the mammoth CPU and GPU tamed, even with the substantial overclocking we have performed.
Building the BFG
With a PC like the BFG every part of the build needs to be planned in advance, or you’ll end up coming unstuck, with multiple rebuilds required as things don’t quite fit properly or work as planned. We use professional CAD packages resulting in a highly detailed schematic like the one shown below.
With our meticulous plan in place, we began by doing a test installation on the system, initially equipped with an air cooler and the stock graphics card cooler in place. The motherboard is a tight squeeze in almost any case, but we were committed to not building an immovable monolith. If you ever wondered what nearly £20 grand’s worth of components looks like, now you know!
Once we were comfortable the system’s components were all working as they should, we set about removing the graphics card’s cooler thereby making it ready to receive the incredibly shiny Phanteks water block. We protected this with the trusty Wired2Fire flannel while setting about fitting the rest of the loop.
Hard line water cooling is a meticulous and painstaking process, as the tolerances are incredibly fine. The old adage “measure twice, cut once” definitely applies here. Once the water-cooling pipes have all been cut and measured we pressure test the loop. If the loop passes a pressure test, you can be confident the machine will not leak once filled.
With the loop filled with our signature orange Fire Orange coolant, we then extensively bleed the loop by running the pump overnight, periodically removing air bubbles by strategically rocking the machine back and forth.
With the loop finally complete and filled, we again test the CPU and GPU under load, ensuring the CPU cores are all well within their tolerances and that the GPU is free of thermal hotspots. We can finally declare the beast complete!
Tweaking the BFG Part 1 – the CPU
With the BFG hardware element complete, we now begin the painstaking process of optimising and overclocking the Threadripper CPU. Under the hood, the CCDs (Core Complex Dies) or “chiplets” are identical to those on the Ryzen 7000 series, there are just more of them – a lot more. A flagship Ryzen 9 7950X has two CCDs, for example, where as the Threadripper Pro 7995WX has a ridiculous 12, with each chiplet sporting 8 physical cores.
AMD offers a number of different overclocking strategies with this platform, with various pros and cons for each process. One of the more popular strategies used for consumer processors is the Curve Optimizer; a feature introduced by AMD as part of its Precision Boost Overdrive 2 (PBO2) suite. This feature allows for granular control over the voltage applied to individual CPU cores, enabling fine-tuning of the performance and efficiency of each. The curve optimiser allows for both positive and negative voltage offsets at either a per-core or per-CCD level, the stability of which then needs to be tested incrementally. Whilst it may be impractical to spend a whole day individually core optimising a 96 core Threadripper, we did just that.
Some enthusiasts advocate manual overclocking on the Threadripper, but we don’t agree this is the best solution for most users. Whilst you may unlock better peak performance when all cores are running at 100%, you pay for this by losing all the benefits of Precision Boost 2 technology; all cores running at 100% is not really a desktop workload and you heavily compromise the performance in bursty and single threaded applications, as the cores will max-out only at the speed you manage to get all cores running stably at. We want the BFG to be a stunning performer in all tasks, not just all-core rendering!
We started with a negative curve optimiser per core of -15 and then tested each one, further reducing the input on stable CCDs and increasing it on less stable cores. This ultimately feeds the less performant cores with a bit more juice, making them more stable at the cost of extra heat, and keeps the top quality silicon running on as little current as possible, maximising the power envelope. Our chip seems to be particularly good, with most cores happy at between -30 and -50, thereby freeing up a significant additional power envelope for boosting. Running a multi-core workload like Cinebench resulted in all 96 cores sitting consistently at 4.8-4.9GHz, an insane result.
With our tweaking done we ended up with performance that was anywhere from a modest 5% in lightly threaded workloads like Geekbench single core, all the way up to an astonishing 34% boost on rendering with Cinebench. Of course, running an overclocked profile will have a substantial impact on your power consumption, with the overclocked 7995WX using more than twice the power consumption compared to the same chip at its default settings. For that reason at Wired2Fire we deliver the BFG with multiple BIOS profiles, allowing you to run at stock for “normal” every day usage, and a supercharged OC profile for when you need to bring the big guns out. Yes, we fully expect those stock profiles to remain unloved and unused. 😈
Tweaking the BFG Part 2: The GPU
We use MSI’s quintessential tweaking software when optimising the BFG – Afterburner. Arguably, overclocking the RTX 4090 is a bit like drawing a beard on the Mona Lisa, but given we have gone to all the trouble of removing the stock cooler and fitting a water block, it would be a shame to not see what the RG Strix OC can do! The first thing we did was to fire up the software and unlock some of the limits imposed on the card by the default VBIOS – namely unlocking voltage control and forcing constant voltage to keep the card’s boosting behaviour at its most consistent. We then boost the default card voltage from the default 0.95V to 1.1V. When overclocking a video card we like to find out what the peak GPU clock speed is and the peak memory clock speed are without artefacts, then combine the two and dial it back a bit. This gives you an extremely good chance of unlocking the maximum performance of the card. We ended up with +165MHz on the GPU frequency and +1450MHz on the VRAM.
The RTX 4090 is predominantly a VRAM bottlenecked platform, so in most benchmarks you get larger benefits from a higher VRAM clock than you do from the GPU frequency. Much like the Threadripper, modern NVIDIA cards use a form of “boost” technology to shoot for higher clock speeds when the thermal and power envelopes apply, so these frequency boosts effectively raise the ceiling rate on the boost values. For this reason, you can sometimes actually reduce stability during testing by providing better cooling to the card, as the enhanced thermal envelope will enable a brief boost to an unstable MHz level. As before, we provide MSI afterburner profiles for both stock everyday use, and an overclocked profile for the best possible gaming performance.
Want to build your own BFG?
The BFG is an effective showcase demonstrating the kind of PCs our talented engineers can build. If you want a BFG of your own, you can buy this very PC here. If you would prefer to build your own dream PC, then please reach out to us, and we can work collaboratively to build your ultimate PC from scratch. Want a more gaming-oriented build? No problem at all. Want a sleeper build without the fancy lights and coloured coolant? That’s fine! Rest assured our team can help you build your own ultimate PC today!