Saturday 28 November 2015

AION Poseidon

AION Poseidon

Last month, we took an in-depth look at the AION Mars, a mini-ITX system with custom liquid cooling. And while the Poseidon is also a member of the AION lineup, it’s safe to say that this rig is a completely different, much bigger beast. Housed in an In Win 909 (an E-ATX chassis), the Poseidon is capable of quad-SLI and features your choice of Haswell-E processor. Liquid cooling is part of the package too, as is only befitting for a rig named after the god of the sea.


The Poseidon sent to us includes an Intel Core i7-5930K, three ASUS Strix GTX 980s (in 3-way SLI, of course), and 32GB of GeIL SUPER LUCE DDR4-2400. AION ran a custom liquid cooling loop through the CPU and GPUs, and boy, it’s a doozy. The loop consists entirely of EK Water Blocks components, including a 360mm and a 240mm EK-CoolStream SE radiator, EVO Blood Red coolant, a tall reservoir, and full-cover water blocks on the ASUS Strix GTX 980s.

The top-notch EKWB hardware fits right in with the rest of the system’s impressive components. After cooling off the processor, liquid coolant runs through the 360mm radiator and into the reservoir at the rear of the In Win 909 chassis. From there, coolant shoots through the GPU water blocks and is cooled by the 240mm radiator at the front of the chassis before returning to the CPU. Aesthetically, the radiators on the front and rear of the chassis nicely frame the cooling loop, and AION matches the bend angles of the tubing coming in and out of the CPU and GPUs for a smooth, clean look.

We were also impressed by the artistry of the lighting effects inside the Poseidon. AION added bright red LED strips that pulse and provide brief glimpses of the internal hardware, as well as the coolant passing through the loop. Red LEDs on the four GeIL SUPER LUCE modules also pulse, but the RAM LEDs aren’t as bright and the tempo is based on each module’s temperature, rather than the regular pattern of the LED strips. The dual pulsing effects produce an eyepleasing, almost living look, for the internals behind the tempered glass side panel of In Win’s 909. Even when the pulse illumination is dimmed, there’s a dull red glow from the Thermaltake Riing 12 LED fans next to radiators and above the case’s bottom vent.

The system interior is exceptionally clean. AION uses individually sleeved cables—red, of course—wrapped tightly together and neatly routed back to the PSU. There are lots of small details, such as customized GPU back plates and a cover for the SLI bridge, that conceal any elements that might distract from hardware and loop, which also helps to create a cohesive, custom look. Touches like these show that AION has thought about making the Poseidon a showpiece build, which is something you don’t see from every PC boutique.

Even under load, the AION Poseidon is barely audible. This is isn’t particularly surprising, given the collection of quiet liquid cooling parts and near silent nature of the Thermaltake Riing 12 LED fans. Still, it’s noteworthy for enthusiasts who don’t want a rig’s noise to spoil their gaming sessions.

This Poseidon build is more than just a speedy CPU, loads of memory, and 3-way SLI. For storage, there are two 500GB Samsung 850 EVO SSDs set up in RAID 0, while a 1TB Western Digital Black HDD provides room for personal file collections. Wireless connectivity is available as well, thanks to the use of GIGABYTE’s GA-X99-GAMING G1 WIFI motherboard. The build sent to us didn’t include an optical drive, but options are available in the custom configurator should you want to add one.

By default, AION doesn’t overclock the Poseidon, though the company tells us that OC service is available upon request for no additional charge at this time. We didn’t request the option, but with such a powerful liquid cooling system onboard, we couldn’t help ourselves and pushed the Core i7-5930K to 4.3GHz. Impressively, the Core i7-5930K barely got above 50 degrees Celsius under most loads.

The Poseidon handled our benchmarks like a champ. The 59fps in the Witcher 3, for example, is the highest we’ve seen on our test bench. The 3-way SLI configuration did great with Metro: Last Light (95.5fps) and Dying Light (99fps), too. The overclocked system reached nearly 2600 pixels per second in POV-Ray 3.7, so it clearly had no problem with processorintensive duties. In the storage-centric CrystalDiskMark, the Poseidon’s SSD RAID configuration delivered well above 900MBps sequential reads and writes.

The AION Poseidon displays both design precision and artistic creativity. If this particular build seems out of your price range, AION can scale the Posedion’s components all the way down to $2,500, so you can enjoy the same attention to detail in a rig that fits your budget and performance needs.

Test system specs
Processor: Intel Core i7-5930K
Motherboard: GIGABYTE GA-X99-GAMING G1 WIFI
GPUs: ASUS STRIX-GTX980-DC20C-4GD5 (3-way SLI)
RAM: 32GB GeIL’s SUPER LUCE DDR4-2400
Storage: 500GB Samsung 850 EVO (x2, RAID 0), 1TB Western Digital Black
PSU: EVGA SuperNOVA 1300 G2
OS: Windows 10 Professional 64-bit