Unveiling The UGM: Part 1

So boys and girls the time has finally arrived. The TWiT Ultimate Gaming Machine is complete.

For those of you who are just joining us on this journey, the UGM is the a project that the TWiT army started on at the end of 2008. The concept is nothing new, as it started a decade ago back on ZDTV, which became TechTV, and was then bought by G4. As all of us here know of course, TWiT live is where all the cool geeks are these days, and as such we had to take over the tradition.

So whats the point of building an Ultimate Gaming Machine? With few exceptions, playing modern video games at high settings, is one of the most computationally intensive applications that you can use a computer for. Building an UGM is an excercise in the state of the art in computing technology. The process of design, parts selection, construction, and setup of an ultimate gaming machien gives you a glimpse into the common household computer of tomorrow.

If you look at previous UGMs, you will see expensive "gaming parts" that were years ahead of their times. In the first ultimate gaming machine, many thousands of dollars were blown on a "large" widescreen monitor. Sure it was a crt, and was small by todays standards, but now everyone has transitioned to large format widescreen monitors.... or multiple ones at the same time.

Alright, so lets start off with the parts selection. The parts in the UGM include, but are not limited to...

1 - Intel q9770 3.2 Ghz processor overclocked to 4.2 Ghz. 3 - BFG H20C water Cooled NVIDIA GTX 280 graphics cards 1 - ASUS Striker II Extreme 790i water cooled motherboard 2 - Western Digital Velociraptor 10,000 RPM hard drives (RAID - 0) 2 - 4gb of Corsair 2000mhz ram sticks 1 - Lite-On Blu-Ray Drive 1 - Lite-On Blu-Ray Burner 1 - Custom water cooling system with parts from Petra's Tech Shop. 1 - Dell 30" monitor 1 - Razer / Microsoft Habu gaming mouse 1 - Razer Lycosa gaming keyboard 1 - Customized Lian-Li V2110 ATX case

What have we learned from building the UGM? So what in this UGM might be symbolic of future computing trends? How would we do it differently  with what we know now?

Stay tuned for Part 2 of Unveiling The UGM and find out!

- Colleen