- May 16, 2015
- 148
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- 4,710
Hello users of Tom's Hardware! 
My friend Ethan is looking to get a gaming/workstation/editing pc to use over the summer and he has two people on the job, me and another friend that I haven't met before. He only has a couple of requirements, that it is about $1000 and that it is small, and needs wifi connection. It needs to have the horsepower to play games, as well as do some rendering in After Effects, or some editing in Vegas Pro. This has turned into a competition between the two of us as to who can come up with a better build for Ethan. I suggest that we should use some graphics card and he tells me why another one is better. He doesn't want to do any overclocking on anything, so I came up with this build:
PCPartPicker part list: http://pcpartpicker.com/p/F9QsrH
Price breakdown by merchant: http://pcpartpicker.com/p/F9QsrH/by_merchant/
CPU: Intel Xeon E3-1231 V3 3.4GHz Quad-Core Processor ($249.99 @ Directron)
Motherboard: ASRock Z97M-ITX/AC Mini ITX LGA1150 Motherboard ($110.82 @ Newegg)
Memory: Kingston Fury Black Series 16GB (2 x 8GB) DDR3-1866 Memory ($112.86 @ Newegg)
Storage: *Sandisk SSD PLUS 120GB 2.5" Solid State Drive ($52.67 @ Amazon)
Storage: *Hitachi Deskstar 1TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive ($45.68 @ Amazon)
Video Card: EVGA GeForce GTX 970 4GB FTW ACX 2.0 Video Card ($359.99 @ B&H)
Case: Cooler Master Elite 130 Mini ITX Tower Case ($38.36 @ Micro Center)
Power Supply: *EVGA SuperNOVA GS 550W 80+ Gold Certified Fully-Modular ATX Power Supply ($60.61 @ NCIX US)
Total: $1030.98
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
*Lowest price parts chosen from parametric criteria
Generated by PCPartPicker 2015-06-03 10:51 EDT-0400
It feautures a Xeon EX-1231 V3 processor, and an EVGA FTW ACX 2.0 GTX 970 all in the cute little button that is the Master Elite 130 Mini ITX Case. I am fairly proud of this as a got all of these feautures together with a motherboard that has integrated WIFI, an SSD for boot, and a fully modular power supply (usefull when squeezing in to a small case). First of all, is there anything you would change in this build, or will it not fit together in the case? Any recommendations such as those.
Secondly, the other friend is stuck in the mindset that the higher the clock speed on a graphics card, the higher the performance is. His build features an i5-4690k and a GTX 960 with a higher clock speed than the one I chose (the highest clocked gtx 970). I am having trouble convincing my friend Ethan that my build obviously has much more performance because his build is essentially decked out with all of the other components because of how much little money is spent on the GPU and CPU, while mine only houses average parts for other things. He has things such as a platinum certified power supply, an insanely expensive wifi adapter, higher speed, lower latency ram, a 250 GB SSD, some crazy watercooler for the cpu, but he told Ethan it is useful even if you aren't overclocking the cpu, etc. How do I prove that my build is obviously superior performance-wise? I only really care because I want my friend to get the best performance for his work, but he is essentially being brainwashed. The other friend even wrote an essay why his is better than mine! Can anyone find any benchmarks that will prove him wrong, or how I could explain that clock speed =/= performance? Thanks for the help!
My friend Ethan is looking to get a gaming/workstation/editing pc to use over the summer and he has two people on the job, me and another friend that I haven't met before. He only has a couple of requirements, that it is about $1000 and that it is small, and needs wifi connection. It needs to have the horsepower to play games, as well as do some rendering in After Effects, or some editing in Vegas Pro. This has turned into a competition between the two of us as to who can come up with a better build for Ethan. I suggest that we should use some graphics card and he tells me why another one is better. He doesn't want to do any overclocking on anything, so I came up with this build:
PCPartPicker part list: http://pcpartpicker.com/p/F9QsrH
Price breakdown by merchant: http://pcpartpicker.com/p/F9QsrH/by_merchant/
CPU: Intel Xeon E3-1231 V3 3.4GHz Quad-Core Processor ($249.99 @ Directron)
Motherboard: ASRock Z97M-ITX/AC Mini ITX LGA1150 Motherboard ($110.82 @ Newegg)
Memory: Kingston Fury Black Series 16GB (2 x 8GB) DDR3-1866 Memory ($112.86 @ Newegg)
Storage: *Sandisk SSD PLUS 120GB 2.5" Solid State Drive ($52.67 @ Amazon)
Storage: *Hitachi Deskstar 1TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive ($45.68 @ Amazon)
Video Card: EVGA GeForce GTX 970 4GB FTW ACX 2.0 Video Card ($359.99 @ B&H)
Case: Cooler Master Elite 130 Mini ITX Tower Case ($38.36 @ Micro Center)
Power Supply: *EVGA SuperNOVA GS 550W 80+ Gold Certified Fully-Modular ATX Power Supply ($60.61 @ NCIX US)
Total: $1030.98
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
*Lowest price parts chosen from parametric criteria
Generated by PCPartPicker 2015-06-03 10:51 EDT-0400
It feautures a Xeon EX-1231 V3 processor, and an EVGA FTW ACX 2.0 GTX 970 all in the cute little button that is the Master Elite 130 Mini ITX Case. I am fairly proud of this as a got all of these feautures together with a motherboard that has integrated WIFI, an SSD for boot, and a fully modular power supply (usefull when squeezing in to a small case). First of all, is there anything you would change in this build, or will it not fit together in the case? Any recommendations such as those.
Secondly, the other friend is stuck in the mindset that the higher the clock speed on a graphics card, the higher the performance is. His build features an i5-4690k and a GTX 960 with a higher clock speed than the one I chose (the highest clocked gtx 970). I am having trouble convincing my friend Ethan that my build obviously has much more performance because his build is essentially decked out with all of the other components because of how much little money is spent on the GPU and CPU, while mine only houses average parts for other things. He has things such as a platinum certified power supply, an insanely expensive wifi adapter, higher speed, lower latency ram, a 250 GB SSD, some crazy watercooler for the cpu, but he told Ethan it is useful even if you aren't overclocking the cpu, etc. How do I prove that my build is obviously superior performance-wise? I only really care because I want my friend to get the best performance for his work, but he is essentially being brainwashed. The other friend even wrote an essay why his is better than mine! Can anyone find any benchmarks that will prove him wrong, or how I could explain that clock speed =/= performance? Thanks for the help!
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