System Builder Marathon, Q4 2012: $2,000 Performance PC

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[citation][nom]Gin Fushicho[/nom]I have a good question... What is it with people and only getting 8GB's of RAM when they have everything else being so damned powerful? I could have sworn that a lot of RAM is taken up by system processes, and even some by the Graphics card and CPU. I wanna see the results with this kind of setup or an AMD equivalent both with 16Gigs or more of RAM.[/citation]

There aren't any games where going beyond 6GB is important. After even 4GB, there's almost never any improvement except in multi-tasking. Increasing memory capacity beyond the point where you can play the game doesn't improve the game's performance.
 
[citation][nom]EzioAs[/nom]That's not necessarily true. You are still using air to cool your components even on liquid cooling system and cooling is one of the few things that are future proof (to a certain extent) much like cases and psus. You can still carry them even for the next few systems (you may have to change a couple things though)In my opinion, motherboards and RAMs are the things that you could cut corners with. Don't go too extravagant on them like how some people seems to think that sabertooth or maximus boards are the best choice for gaming while they bought a GTX650 and hope to play the latest titles with max settings at 1080p.[/citation]

Using regular air coolers doesn't mean that you're skimping on cooling whatsoever. Closed-loop coolers aren't better than high-end air coolers that just happen to generally be much cheaper and also often quieter. Liquid cooling isn't better than high-end air cooling unless you get a custom loop or something that uses well-chilled liquid.

I agree with you on the motherboard and memory.
 


I was actually referring to custom loop though. My bad for not clarifying it :)
 
[citation][nom]Bluescreendeath[/nom]i7 3770k costs $240 at Microcenter. It costs $340 on Newegg. Newegg also charges $320 for the i7 2700k - which is an increase since Newegg charged ~$260 a few months ago.[/citation]
That’s all good, but kind of irrelevant to these builds. It’s still brought up and rehashed from time to time and the fact is Toms is fortunate to have Newegg’s amazing selection at our disposal in order have all retail-purchased (non-cherry-picked) parts to test and then give away.
OT - But let's not forget you can order ONE (3770K) at that low price and then must drive/go in to the store to pick it up. That in itself eliminates this option for the bulk of people. Not to mention, ever try to price up a whole system there? I frequent one when needed/possible, and on some components the selection is horrid compared to Newegg. Not to mention by the time you settle on a case, graphics, and power supply, you’ve likely made sacrifices and can kiss much of your CPU/mobo savings goodbye. You’ll always be able to save money shopping around and buying components when and where they go on sale. Still many folks I know actually prefer to buy all system components from one location, all on the same day (just as we do for the SBM), and Newegg rocks for these folks. Just factoring in their combos, promotional codes, and rebates, we could also do much better in these SBMs while retaining the huge selection that make this series possible. But then this $1985 build that dropped to near $1900 now, may instead be over $2000 once readers see these builds, tested and presented. Worse, my $501 build may then end up well north of $550, maybe $600(without making parallel substitutions), as price changes are rarely favorable at the frugal extreme. Prices and availability change, and Tom’s readers generally know (or can get help on the forums) on how to make substitutions and apply discounts relative to their own needs. Personally, it’s been a couple months since I’ve made the trek to a MC (been crazy busy, with hurricane Sandy, power outages, gas shortage/prices, and traffic to deal with), yet UPS has been to my house 4 times just since Black Friday dropping off a (shipped free) Newegg bargain I just couldn’t resist. :)
 
[citation][nom]blazorthon[/nom]There may be well-cooled micro-ATC cases, I know of a few others, but the graphics cards would at best be one slot apart and at worst be right on top of each other. That's generally not good for thermals, especially with overclocking, regardless of how good the case's cooling may be.[/citation]
I had to vote this up. While i believe Thomas could point out a pretty amazing mATX gamer he's tested, you are so right on the importance of spacing out those GPU's, and the general air flow, easyiness of working/overclocking with a larger enclosure. I've bumped into this problem on full ATX when testing triple-slot coolered models in pairs.
 
[citation][nom]Onus[/nom]While I agree that smaller cases can have thermal issues, that isn't necessarily true. The Fractal Design Define Mini I have may be the nicest case I've used, and it's got plenty of cooling..[/citation]
yeah i know about the mini...which is why i said "possibly" 😛

[citation][nom]ojas[/nom]The same logic applies to micro ATX towers: more cramped, possibly shitty thermals, components don't fit.[/citation]
 
[citation][nom]JonnyDough[/nom]In my opinion, excessive cooling and stuff is rarely worth it. Air is quiet, efficient, affordable.[/citation]
I know, which is why it's (liquid cooling) rarely used when you have to optimize according to budget. I used it in BestConfigs because i wanted to do something different this time.

Anyway, there is one advantage i have realised with a cooler like the H50. Since it an be mounted to the case and double up as an exhaust, you're reducing one fan from the system while simultaneously improving airflow across the motherboard AND you don't have to manage the hot air that comes off the CPU cooler's heatsink, since it's thrown out directly. And of course, since you don't have a huge tower cooler in the way, it's easier to work on the motherboard post-installation of everything (you don't scratch yourself on the tower cooler's heatsink while attaching an inconveniently placed 4/8-pin power connector, for example).
 
I agree with the choice of motherboard based on my own personal experience.
My AMD PC with a Gigabyte motherboard has worked perfectly with heavy use - using it now in fact.
My Intel PC with an Asrock motherboard - 2 RAM slots died in 4 months of light to medium use, now I can't get dual channel anymore. 🙁 This is not enough reason for me to go through the tremendous hassle of sending it back after removing all components, removing from case, etc.

I will probably not buy an Asrock motherboard again.
 
But what is the impact of the huge number of Nvidia CUDA cores or equivalent OpenCL cores on ATI on video rendering performance? As the number of cores is high (1500 to 2000 per GPU), this offers a massive parallelism (memory path width is 192 to 256 bits, GDDR5). Many video editors, such as Sony Vegas, uses GPU cores in rendering.

So the interesting question is, whether to buy more cores in CPU or GPU?
 
[citation][nom]kj3639[/nom]After building that awful piledriver rig you go ahead and do something like this... and totally REDEEM YOURSELVES!!!-Good Job[/citation]

what are you talking about, both rigs suffered from failures of cpu coolers and most certainly that should never happen in $1000 and $2000 rigs at the least a $10 fan could have been added to both cpu coolers in attempts to try and solve the problem with dual fans, but seriously there was no excuse for not using a corsair H50-80 cpu cooler or any of the self contained single radiator water coolers in a $2000 rig.

the motherboard was an automatic fail as it wasn't even a UD model so you knew it's over clocking was going to be limited the $100 saved could be better spent putting another $25-$50 on the cpu cooler and another $50 on a better mb like even an asus gene V.

i can't help but smile every time i see the newegg cpu prices with a 30% mark up over the microcenter prices and be grateful to have one nearby as that's another $90 off for alot of us.

also thank you for using win7 Thomas, i pretty much disregard anything with a win8 benchmark until 2013. touch should have been standard since the 90's when even shopping malls had it in kiosks for their directories and stores had them for choosing products and learning about products in kiosks located around the stores. voice command should have been the priorities since the 2000's rolled out when it was debuted in our cell phones even.


 
So it's very very hard to buy into the narrative that this isn't a pure gaming rig. Don't get me wrong, I think this is a MUCH more interesting build than the last time where you spent 50% on the processor, I'm just taking exception with the "high end general purpose" label being super glued on trying to tone down the red led lights of this build.

Sure, you threw in an $80 optical drive that is completely useless for gaming but given that optical is useless for anything these days it's hardly an argument that this isn't a gaming rig. I will give you that for gaming the i5 is so close to the i7 that it's hard to justify the extra money unless you need the raw compute power for non-gaming tasks. Well played but I'm not fooled.

What can't be overlooked is the choice to not spend the extra $15 to DOUBLE the ram. This would not have broken the budget even before all the price drops by the publish time. Sure this won't increase FPS but it will have large impacts if you are doing many other non-gaming tasks which you swear was forefront in your mind while doing this build. For example, virtual hosts, DBs, browsers with 100+ tabs, Microsoft Outlook with more than 100 emails in your inbox, etc. I know not everyone will use the extra RAM but it's an extra $15 and it will have some effect for everyone and a lot for a few!!!!

Take everything above as positive feedback. I think the format is more to blame than the actual build. I always enjoy reading and ranting.





 
WOW!! That IS virtually IDENTICAL my primary computer, cept I use an Antec 902 and Two GTX670's(which I'm puzzled you didn't choose over the 7970.)
 
Im just curious why both the intel builds (budget $500 & Performance $2000) Both have immaculate cable management where as the $1000 Enthusiast AMD build looks to have been slopped together by an inbred 7 year old...
 
[citation][nom]CMI86[/nom]Im just curious why both the intel builds (budget $500 & Performance $2000) Both have immaculate cable management where as the $1000 Enthusiast AMD build looks to have been slopped together by an inbred 7 year old...[/citation]Please be kind, Don is Canadian 😛[citation][nom]mraltoid19[/nom]WOW!! That IS virtually IDENTICAL my primary computer, cept I use an Antec 902 and Two GTX670's(which I'm puzzled you didn't choose over the 7970.)[/citation]They give about the same performance, apart from the BF3 bug which the builder obviously didn't have in mind. More readers requested the 7970 than the 670, so majority ruled.
 
[citation][nom]SchizoFrog[/nom]Can I ask why these high end builds never include a soundcard any more?[/citation]

Why put in a sound card? Even the integrated audio is generally as good as most affordable sound cards and anything better would be putting more pressure on an often already strained budget.
 
Not to mention the cheaper price of the last generation would enable you to get better cooling. And how come you won't use microcenter for pricing? NewEgg charges much more for processors.
 
[citation][nom]pinkfloydminnesota[/nom]Given the latest gen's overclock issues, why not use the Ivy Bridge chips?[/citation]
Ivy is the latest gen (perhaps you meant Sandy) and it doesn't have a problem with overclocking other than it only roughly matches Sandy rather than beats Sandy like many people wanted it too. Even then, that's only because of the crap paste that Intel replaced the flux-less solder between the CPU die and thee IHS with. The more adventurous customers can replace Intel's crap paste with some much more thermally conductive paste to get some better than Sandy overclocking done on the K-branded SKUs.

Newegg is used because Newegg gives the parts to Tom's for free IIRC. MC can't match free and most people don't have a MC easily available to them. I'd have to drive for about two hours to get to the nearest MC to me and that's not something that I want to do and I might not even save much money thanks to the costs of the short trip.
 
Storm Enforcer? Really? Come on!! I know you can at least get a HAF 922 or an NZXT Phantom up in here to help show off our super expensive machine
 
They should've cut the size of the SSD in half (you don't need 240gb on your system drive, that's silly), gone with an i5 instead of an i7 (paying $100 more for hyperthreading is silly in almost all cases), and either gotten a cheaper blu-ray drive or skipped out on it entirely and gone with a dvd drive instead. This would allow them to either spend more on the GPU or spend less money overall.
 
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