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Why you should build your own PC
by Dominik Bärlocher
From the R&D meeting: The finishing touches to the digitec PC, powered by Joule Performance
27.4.2017
Translation: machine translated
Digitec has developed a PC together with the Swiss hardware tinkerers "Joule Performance". It will soon be available in a strictly limited edition. I was at a meeting where the prototype was presented and the finishing touches were discussed.
On the fourth floor of digitec's headquarters, there is a small meeting room that we internally call the "piratesque". Black walls with illustrations of a robot on them. We sit in this room. We are digitec editors, product managers, category managers and graphic designers. The purpose of the visit: light colours and logo positions. It's about putting the finishing touches to the digitec PC, which we designed in collaboration with Joule Performance.
The specs are largely finalised. The individual components of the PC are matched to each other to maximise stable performance. And then product manager Frédéric Müller has added a few visual goodies. "You can't imagine how difficult it is to determine cable colours," he says with a laugh. Normally, cables are simply cables that are neatly bundled in towers.
The concept of the PC is simple: Frédéric sat down with the professionals from Joule Performance, set a price and named the rough configuration. "The machine should be affordable and deliver as much performance as possible for the price," says the product manager. With just the figure for the sales price, the employees at Joule Performance got to work.
Overclocking from the world champion
Nothing is left to chance at Joule Performance and everything is tested and found to be stable. While the others are discussing cable colours and trying to connect the PC to the piratesque presentation system so that we can have a view of hardware monitoring programs, I have a checklist of the tests carried out by Hiva Pouri, overclocker at Joule Performance, in front of me. It is about three pages long. As an amateur screwdriver, I understand some of the entries well. "Temperature CPU stable", for example. Other entries could also be summarised with "fdghjkrtfohiujeroiu" and a lot of information would arrive in my head straight away.
The fact is, the processor is stably overclocked to 4.7 GHz. In other words, the PC does not overheat or crash. This is thanks to Hiva Pouri, who has participated in and won several overclocking world championships in the past. In other words, overclocking doesn't get any better than this. "Sure, I could easily have gone up to 5 GHz, maybe even 5.1, but that would have been at the expense of system stability," he says. The aim of the PC is not for it to give up the ghost after one use and one peak, but for you to be able to put it in your home and enjoy it for a long time. In addition to the frequency, Hiva also ensures that the temperature of the processor remains as close to room temperature as possible and that the voltage remains low. The current values: voltage low, temperature about 6°C above room temperature. This is only possible if the CPU is decapitated, the thermal paste is replaced and the cooling system is completely replaced.
That's why we're sitting in the meeting room and discussing this.
Blue or red?
"Unfortunately, the LED on the mainboard remains orange," says Philipp Krähenbühl, marketing expert at Joule Performance, "everything else can be freely adjusted. The RAM pulsates blue, which we like. But do we want the main lighting to be white or blue? Blue looks darker, heavier and more powerful. White emphasises the details inside the PC. We try it out.
Arguments for and against are voiced, somehow we decide that a democratic vote is needed. Why? Because we can't seem to agree on the discussion alone. There are seven of us. Three in favour of blue, one abstention... Well, another attempt. Somehow democracy seems to fail because of coloured lights in PCs. Or because of us. We think about it briefly and agree: it's the PCs.
In the end, we agree that the RAM pulsates blue, the housing is illuminated blue and the graphics card lights up red. And that only took just under two hours.
When will the PC arrive? What's inside?
I'm not going to tell you exactly what's inside the PC. Because we'll probably be tweaking the configuration until the very end. Because if we can offer you even better performance for the price we've set, then of course we will.
The digitec PC is strictly limited. We will only be offering 20 units at the special price in the first series. According to the meeting, the subsequent series will probably be somewhat more expensive.
But we can already tell you one thing. It will be called the Zenon ZX.
If you want to see the Zenon ZX, it will be on display at Fantasy Basel at the Asus stand. But this is just a prototype, probably the same one we were leaning over in the meeting. The little gem won't be available to buy until the end of May, beginning of June.
Until then, what do you expect from the Zenon ZX? How much will it cost? Let us know in the comments. Because that's the cheapest we'll ever be able to do market research.
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