LAB NOTES

Planning for Dream Machine 2021

 TESTED. REVIEWED. VERDICTIZED.

IF YOU’VE READ my “Editor’s Intro,” you’ll know this has been one heck of a month for myself and the team. I’ve been stuck at home self-isolating, fighting off COVID-19, and Christian’s also had to take a significant chunk of time out due to health concerns. It’s been rough, for sure, yet also very moving to see how our publishing house and the wider industry has come to our aid. I can’t thank the guys and gals at Tom’s Hardware enough for their support—it’s been invaluable. But I also want to apologize—when I first came on board, I promised two builds an issue, and this is the first time we haven’t managed to hit that target (although I’ve got two epic builds lined up for the March edition).

That aside, stuck at home, trying not to infect my photographers, I got to thinking about the next Dream Machine, and how different it’s going to be this year. We’re holding out for the next generation of Threadrippers first—they ought to be something special, so will be the CPU of choice. But it’s the GPU and storage that most interest me. SLI and Crossfire have officially departed this world. Nvidia only supports it on the RTX 3090, and is not providing any driver support (it’s down to the game devs to do that), and with AMD, although DX12 supports multi-GPU setups, no major titles take advantage of that feature either. Meaning in the world of gaming, only one GPU really matters.