$16k Water-Cooled PC With Four QuadCore Opterons

Ever wondered what $16,000 worth of custom PC would get you?  Over at Tom's Hardware they've been chatting with Puget Systems, who have recently finished putting together a monster computer costing its buyer in excess of $16k.  The brief was to create a quiet performance machine, with four quad-core Opteron CPUs, 32GB of memory and eight hard-drives in various levels of RAID.

To keep all that cool – never mind quiet – Puget turned to a custom watercooling system, with a huge nine-fan external radiator.  Each 120mm fan runs at 5V, meaning the whole thing is "nearly silent" but keeps the processors at 36 degrees C at idle or 45 degrees C under load.

The question remains of what the buyer actually intends to do with this monster.  Tom's Hardware doesn't say, but obvious avenues might be video editing (if you're seriously into HD) or perhaps running a few instances of Crysis simultaneous.