[citation][nom]Outlander_04[/nom]As you yourself pointed out previous builds have been pretty much solely gaming focused and the title of the article is "System Builder Marathon, Q1 2013: $600 GAMING PC "My opinion is that you had to change the focus of the article to justify the inclusion of the i5 quad because you clearly didnt build the best possible $600 gamer .To assert that a more gaming focused build is the result of fanboyism seems quite counter intuitive in these circumstances So I repeat my challenge .Build the AMD system . It does meet the criteria of the $600 build . If you can use discounted parts in the intel build then I see no difference to using parts that which have rebates in the AMD build In short build a GAMER . or change the title of this article[/citation]
No, sorry Outlander, you are totally mistaken! We didn't change the purpose to justify i5, quite the opposite. I'll explain this one last time.... SBMs have always been an attempt to do all things well at your budgets, in essence to win. This time I finally had enough budget to game well and possibly win at the same time, but ONLY if I grabbed a big CPU. And it's not like I picked a sub-$100 graphics card, 7850 @ $165 is pure beast for the money!
Oh, I even made an effort to change the low-budget build's name way back, but it's been dubbed the "Gaming PC" since long before I started building them back in 2008.
And no, $140 FX-6300 + $260 Tahiti LE was not an option for me, not even close. That's $55 more for the GPU and CPU alone. Then you'd need more power, and I'd want a better CPU cooler to push voltages/clocks. Such a build would be a nice $700 high-res gaming machine, but one that would have taken a distant back seat in value come day 4.
edit: And Outlander, since I will not build the same basic rig twice at $600, not even to win, who knows what you'll see next time. It depends on pricing/availability, and if we again put an extra special emphasis on value by keeping the budgets tightly grouped. At this 600/800/1000 theme, we'd learn far less on day 4 if one builder bows out of the competition to seek a different specialized goal.