With the build complete, it was time for some testing.  With 1080Ti SLI and NVMe, some strong results should be expected.  Let’s see how that pans out!  First up, the disk subsystem.  We’re dealing with two different NVMe devices here.  An older OCZ Toshiba RD400 512GB device, and a newer Samsung EVO 960 1TB.  Both devices were set in the BIOS to PCIe x4.  The Toshiba is M.2-0, which for some reason becomes disk 1, and the Samsung is M.2-1, which becomes disk 0.  The OS was installed on the Toshiba, and the Samsung is being reserved for games.  First up, the OS disk:

There we see the power of NVMe.  It’s abundantly clear that the SATA bus is a crippling bottleneck for SSD and unleashed on the PCI-E x4 connection, even the modest 512GB Toshiba part sales past 2.5GB/s sequential read and even manages to hit nearly 200MB per second in the torturous 4K random write test.  Impressive results indeed.  So how did the Samsung do?

Wow!  Just insane that the Samsung 1TB part (a newer and better SSD) was able to sail past 3GB/s sequential and nearly hit 2GB/s on sequential writes.  It would be nice to have the faster performance for the boot device, but honestly given the option I’d rather that the games volume be the better of the two.  Once the OS is booted, there isn’t much happening with that volume that even a modest SATA SSD can’t handle.

So the disk subsystem is insane and definitely the strongest results seen yet in the Complaints HQ lab.  What about those GPUs?  After all, that’s what this whole build was really about!  Let’s start off with some synthetics, Firemark Ultra and Unigine Heaven 4.0, to close this entry out, and then get into some gaming tests next entry:

OK, not bad.  12046 with no overclock done on anything other than EVGA Precision set to 120% for the GPU power target.  Not huge numbers, but a solid 65% improvement over a single Titan X with the 6700HQ.

How about Heaven 4.0?  At 4k Ultra with Extreme Tessellation?

Now that’s impressive!   Blasting well past 70fps at 4k with everything maxed in Heaven is roughly a 50% improvement over 1080SLI for about the same at launch price.

One thing to note, for those who still fixate on CPU “bottlenecks”, and claim that Pascal is enough for 4k… Even with 1080Ti in SLI the CPU isn’t a bottleneck for 4k max detail.  Well, that’s it for now.  Stay tuned for some games!