Gentlemen?,
As someone who has warmed slowly to Haswell as the result of being doomed to a life of LGA2011 workstations, a number of the builds shown have made me a convert.
I'm usually decisive in this kind of thing, but voting for only three systems was difficult as there were different merits everywhere > high performance (Digital Storm, Steiger Dynamics, Origin PC), cost/performance (Safe Harbor, Falcon Northwest), expandability (Safe Harbor), fantastic visual geometry inside and out (Digital Storm, Maingear, NCIX) , serious military hardware purposefulness (Highly Reliable System) and general KoolKuddly (NCIX) .
For those that like the looks of Ferrari V12's and the sanitary neatness of California hot rods, see the under the hood- well, through the window- view of the Steiger Dynamics, the winner visually in my book. I gravitated first to the Safe Harbor and Highly Reliable Systems as being more workstationesque- (if the HRSys were a dual Xeon 3D CAD workstation I'd have one in a minute), but then the amazing plumbing of the Digital Storm and Steiger Dynamics or the primal Yellow architecture of the Maingear then would steer me that way. Encouraging diversity that made it difficult to choose.
The specifications were well thought out- and some very wise- there’s no doubt that the ASUS Maximus, as well the Rampage, and Sabertooth in their several iterations are contenders for classic motherboard status. Not everyone relies on system ratings and benchmarks, but looking at the Top 100 systems in Passmark, the proportion of those MB’s, especially the Maximus in LGA2011 form, in that list is undeniably disproportionate.
For me, the only slight problem with the contest was that I would’ve liked to have had more views. No, on second thought it would be better if the contest entrants all had test drives at home before voting!
Cheers,
BambiBoom
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