Article asks: "This month’s high-end build looks lighter than its predecessor, yet includes a six-core Haswell-E CPU. Will the shift away from graphics kill its gaming cred?" Yes. Yes it did. It cost nearly the same as the SLI machine, and was comparably terrible in gaming, and in exchange you got about a 5% increase in a few media/rendering apps. For the price, you almost could have built an equally fast rendering PC without a dedicated GPU, and a gaming PC with a nice graphics card. Toms articles over the past few years proved that once you get to a certain point, 99% of games don't get any benefit from faster CPU's, (look at the "best CPU for the money" articles). What was going on with this build? it seemed to have wandered from the original mission of a gaming PC, and into a 1600$ office PC that can unzip files slightly faster? This is bizarre and confusing.
Not to say I wouldn't want this PC if it were cheaper, but why spend so much to make it middle-of-the-road in everything?