BestConfigs Poll Results: Your Winning Builds

  • Thread starter Thread starter Guest
  • Start date Start date
Toggle sidebar Toggle sidebar
Status
Not open for further replies.
I am visiting tom's daily (like every morning with my coffee) and I never saw the pools and when they accepted them. I only see the winners announced. Because yet again, the high-end workstation is rather disappointing. I give all kudos to the people that spend time to put them together and I do completely respect their work. but I do guess they do not use productivity software on a daily basis or rather not a large number of them.

A lot of people are overestimating the usage of GPUs in today's software. GPU acceleration is rather small and does not always use even half of the GPUs potential. Going over a K2000 or K4000 or a GTX660/760 does almost nothing in Premier, Photoshop or 2D vector packages. AE does exhibit small benefits, but nothing as major as sinking that money in a CPU. On Autodesk's front - you need the video card just for the display in Maya/Max/Autocad/etc. And at the current project I am in, the 2 million poly rigged character moves as smooth on my office K4000 as on my home 650TI plus all the particles and fluids. Rendering is all CPU based. There are few GPU renderers, but the quality is nowhere near that of a good old CPU based software renderer. 99% of the professionaly used renderers are CPU based. Vray, Arnold, Maxwell, PRM, MentalRay, etc. I-ray is yet to make a splash in the production world and up until now acts as a nice tech-demo or used in arhi previz. The Foundry's software is the same deal. NUKE and NUKEX are still (even though they say it does) very limited to what extend it uses CUDA. Tracking software, like 3D Equalizer - CPU does the work, GPU accelerated the image processing and loading. Some might argue about MentalRay and VRay IPR, but those are in their major usage - a preview renderer, before you batch render on the CPU. As it stands today - end of 2014 and beginning of 2015, spending more money on a GPU than a CPU for a workstation is a complete waste in 95% of the time. Unless you are going real-time interactive of real-time preview work - GPU is rather unused. And this covers the majority of Adobe, Autodesk, The Foundry and software used for visuals I use regularly.

I can not say anything about audio, because I am not in the audio and sound design sphere, so somebody with some real experience might want to cover that.

Cheers
 
Typo in the article: AMD Radeon’s Low Power Space Saving NAS
And further on re: Nas - I think besides the T series CPU it's completely wrong. Case which supports only 3 hd's and none-hotplug. DVD drive which is near useless (or 100% useless after the OS install) Too expensive mobo, too powerful PSU.

8gb is decent ram for NAS, but with cheap RAM which most systems could use for cache it would crime not to add more.

I also agree with Shneiky - I don't know how many people voted for this workstation build - but besides GPU (I won't know much about it) workstation is about typically multiple CPUs, server grade reliability supported by server grade hardware. Yes it's much more expensive, but guess what - it's worth it if you consider value of downtime for high paying professional.
 


I completely second this. I'm in the aerospace industry, and not so long ago, a quality Quadro card was absolutely necessary for every build we did. Otherwise the CAD software was unstable, had artifacts, and general screw-ups. Nowadays, we rarely get super high-end cards. The lowend k2000m or k1000m are more than enough for most of our usage, but even that is overkill. Hell the high end Surface Pro 3 can run all of our CAD software without a hitch.

We still haven't gone away from Xeons and ECC memory, but we are willing to pay the price for easy proc upgrades, amount of memory supported, the stability and longevity of the combo. We're willing to get a couple high end Xeons with tons of memory for the price of a highend graphics card. The most expensive card we've gotten in the past few years was a quadro 4000, just because HP set us up for an epic price, and my hyperv host wanted remotefx love.
 
I can't really say I saw the submission or voting links in the past. Had I saw submission site, I would've entered my Pentium 266 II with MMX PC system and that sure would've won all categories. I mean it's got 4 gig of HD. Who wouldn't salivate over that.
 
I read Tom's every week and several times per day and I don't recall any mention of a poll or I would have voted. Some of the winners are deserving but it would have been nice if more could have voted. Why hide the link to this poll?

Also I noticed on Damric’s $600 AMD Budget Tweaker in the system description you describe the CPU and motherboard as AMD FX-8350 and a Asus M5A99FX Pro R2.0 motherboard, Yet below it you list the parts as AMD Athlon X4 760K and a ASRock FM2A75 PRO4+, so which is it?
 
The winners are :

Home Theater PC Joseph

High-End Intel Gaming PC AMD Radeon’s

High-End AMD Gaming PC CJ

Budget AMD-Based Gaming PC Damric

AMD-Based Office PC Cody

Budget Intel-Based Gaming PC damric

Intel-Based Office PC AMD Radeon

MicroATX Gaming Build AMD Radeon

NAS PC AMD Radeon

High-End Workstation Joseph,

So, how many PCs a member can win??? From what I can see "AMD Radeon" got 4!!!! Is this real????
 
The winners are :

Home Theater PC Joseph

High-End Intel Gaming PC AMD Radeon’s

High-End AMD Gaming PC CJ

Budget AMD-Based Gaming PC Damric

AMD-Based Office PC Cody

Budget Intel-Based Gaming PC damric

Intel-Based Office PC AMD Radeon

MicroATX Gaming Build AMD Radeon

NAS PC AMD Radeon

High-End Workstation Joseph,

So, how many PCs a member can win??? From what I can see "AMD Radeon" got 4!!!! Is this real????
 
The winners are :

Home Theater PC Joseph

High-End Intel Gaming PC AMD Radeon’s

High-End AMD Gaming PC CJ

Budget AMD-Based Gaming PC Damric

AMD-Based Office PC Cody

Budget Intel-Based Gaming PC damric

Intel-Based Office PC AMD Radeon

MicroATX Gaming Build AMD Radeon

NAS PC AMD Radeon

High-End Workstation Joseph,

So, how many PCs a member can win??? From what I can see "AMD Radeon" got 4!!!! Is this real????
 
This contest must have been like 6-8 months ago at least. We all were able to submit buids, then they got narrowed down, and finally there was a vote. But all of this happened quite some time ago. I see why people are like...uh what contest poll?

Some of the components are quite irrelevent now. Best to start from scratch again 😛
 
I dont think the voters understand what a real workstation PC requires as far as hardware is concerned. Using a 2ghz cpu is only good for things like video rendering. Autocad uses one core and loves clockspeed. Rarely does it scale to other cores. I would be similar CAD programs are the same.

And like another poster said, the expensive GPU accelerator is a huge waste when you could go with a dual socket 3ghz+ setup and have near the same amount of cores but with a lot more clockspeed.


That and seeing "AMD" "Budget" "$1000" together in the same build is kind of silly. $1000 allows for some expensive GPUs, not budget rigs. Budget is more like $500-800, especially on this site. I wish everytime someone told me they need a 'budget' rig, they planned to spend $1000.
 
"Going over a K2000 or K4000 or a GTX660/760 does almost nothing in Premier"
You evidently don't know what you are talking about. Rendering a Premiere CS6 AVCHD timeline to MPG2 uses a GTX 580 at 98%.
Take care.
 
I also was not aware of this pole, but I see now that it seemed to have taken place some time ago. This being said, I don't see how this has any relevance today as new models and technologies are constantly being released every week. I think this type of pole would have been much better simplified as a short term pole ran over a one week period and results displayed at the end of the week.

I have to comment on how many of these winning builds were featuring AMD. I have been building my own PCs for over 10 years and as a FPS gamer I consider my builds to be of decent quality so as to achieve high frame rate. With my experience, I rarely find custom gamers who use AMD for their builds. I am wondering if there is a larger difference in pricing between Intel/AMD, Nvidia/AMD in the US, because here in Australia AMD are only a fraction cheaper. I have only used Intel and Nvidia in all my builds for at least 5-6 years now.
 
I think any build that comes in more than $100 under budget is simply incomplete. There is always something that can be added/upgraded for that amount. And where is the ECC RAM? Some of these builds should show a greater focus on the side of reliability, not just performance and penny pinching.
 
Wow. An i3 paired with an R9 290. Like asking a budget bottlenecked PC with a poor platform which will get tremendously expensive at upgrading.
So many R9 290 lovers out there I see, but then they go team green. Explain because I can't understand who does this tremendously bottlenecked gaming machines.
 


Every machine bottlenecks at something, unless all parts are so low end that performance is just bad at everything.

An i3 is just as useful as an i5 or i7, for many of todays modern games including mmorps and RTS, and also shines in outdated game engines that cannot effectively use many cores.

That being said, my only gaming CPU recommendations (as of right now today):

Budget: Athlon 760K (only because no mobos are shipping with BIOS for 860K)

Mid-range: Haswell i5 (doesn't need to be K) with H97.

High-end: Haswell i7 with Z97 (welcome to the land of diminishing returns for your money).

 
Status
Not open for further replies.

TRENDING THREADS

Latest posts

Moderators online

Share this page

COMPANY
RESOURCES
FOLLOW
Top Bottom