Your Top Picks: Tom's Hardware Forums' Q4 2013 BestConfigs

Toggle sidebar Toggle sidebar
Status
Not open for further replies.
antemon

antemon

Distinguished
Jul 5, 2008
166
0
18,690
now I'll admit that I'm no expert, since I'm not in any way shape or form, but wtf?

The office PC has a better GPU than the HTPC? Flashy case for office use. I get that the CX430 is used here since it's a solid PSU, but branded memory?

1000USD for 'budget' gaming builds? you should at least aim to be a little closer to console prices since we're talking about budget gaming
 
Hutchinman

Hutchinman

Distinguished
Aug 2, 2013
24
0
18,520
The total for the budget based AMD gaming system is wrong. There is no way in hell Amazon is selling the MSI Twin Frozr 7950 for $105.

Your system mistakenly links the Amazon page for the MSI AMD Radeon HD 7770 1GB. Fix your system Tom's.
 
G

Guest

Guest
budget creep strikes again.

Is it still a budget PC if it can max out every game you own at 1080p? if it costs a lot of money (relative to the gaming market) and places well in the top 10% of peers?
 
L

lancelot123

Distinguished
May 12, 2008
135
1
18,695
What in the hell happened to the prices for the Intel Office PC? Says it was originally built for $500, but now it is saying $714. That is a HUGE difference. Not even sure what would be discounted, especially by that amount, unless the CPU was free.
 
D

Drejeck

Honorable
Sep 12, 2013
131
0
10,690
Office PC like that impacts a lot on power consumption, assumed your office goes a lot away from just excel, java-browser administration tools, powerpoint and the likes. That AMD office build is more like a budget multimedia machine with gaming purpose. The HTPC obviously suffer from the case price and thus goes with a lower performance videocard.
All builds underestimated SSDs and had just an HDD.
Ok, I get this. There are a lot of hardware prejudices.
DVD burners in 2013? From what country are you? I spent 4000 euros on my PC and the Asus BD usb3 I got came 6 months later...
 
Sangeet Khatri

Sangeet Khatri

Honorable
May 26, 2013
2,640
1
13,460
In the Bugdet AMD Based Gaming PC. I would have the || Asrock Extreme 3 board + Corsair 300R + 128GB SSD with a 3GB 7970 || from my build as compared to the || Asrock Pro 3 + Rosewill Case + No SSD with 770 2GB ||

Also most games now are starting to push more than 2GB VRAM. Hence this is where the extra 1GB RAM of the 7970 would be much more useful.

Just an opinion..
 
bemused_fred

bemused_fred

Honorable
Feb 18, 2012
519
0
11,010


Ha ha! Now's my chance!



[citation needed]

2GB seemed to be fine for 2550x1600 in the gtx 770 review.

'Grats on your entries, BTW!
 
-Fran-

-Fran-

Illustrious
May 3, 2007
9,143
2,466
42,140
An office PC would rather have a discrete Video card than an SSD or some HDDs in RAID 0 or 1? For real?

Other than that, pretty standard choices, which makes them good choices, I guess.

Cheers!
 
Sangeet Khatri

Sangeet Khatri

Honorable
May 26, 2013
2,640
1
13,460
The voters might have thought that there are a lot of OpenCL accelerated softwares, hence the 7770 might have some advantage there.

But seriously speaking, there is 1 in a 100 office PC that would use OpenCL accelerated software. Most of them never go beyond Excel and connecting to the Internet or some Database software. So, 7770 is of no use there.

I would have liked to see Jinayhvora's build win that one, but nevermind...
 
rwpritchett

rwpritchett

Splendid
Mar 17, 2006
3,159
1
21,865

The stock photo of the video card used by Tom's is not the model listed in the build. The build uses a low profile card that will fit in the MILO.

On a side note, the home theater system forum member didn't get credit.

 
g-unit1111

g-unit1111

Titan
Moderator
Jul 27, 2011
42,656
838
104,940


Yeah I don't get that one at all. I'd use an AMD A10-6800K, a Samsung 840 Evo (which mine had), and a Bitfenix Prodigy Red (as a tribute to Milton's red stapler from the movie Office Space), also a Seasonic PSU.
 
anbello262

anbello262

Distinguished
Sep 27, 2013
1,179
3
19,915
On page 9, High-End AMD-Based Gaming PC, the writer didn't specify exactly which AMD processor is being used, it only says "the lowest-end FX chip out of the five contenders"
If you can, specify that please (it IS actually pretty hard for me to look personally on the forum and linked threads, because I'm at the moment using only a 2001 PC, that's a 12 year old PC, so even browsing is hard ._.)
 
ojas

ojas

Distinguished
Feb 25, 2011
2,924
0
20,810
I wish i could have adjusted the 770's price to better compete with the 280X :(

But anyway, it's still a good build that got selected, congrats! :)
 
Maxime506

Maxime506

Honorable
Apr 22, 2013
1,032
0
11,960
The AMD Office PC looks like my gaming PC instead...(The only difference is that I am using a HD 6970 gfx) For me, if I put up an Office PC, athlon II 250 or celeron / pentium still exceed a little bit of my need. (I found out my laptop's celeron 1007U runs quite fast that's why)

@anbello262, what's ur configuration of your 12-yr-old rig? I'm quite curious how slow it could be. For now I still have an 12-yr-old laptop which has a Pentium III CPU and 384MB RAM, but I feel it runs still OK (w/ XP SP3 OS)
 
H

Haravikk

Distinguished
Sep 14, 2013
317
0
18,790
Does the NAS box really need to cost so much? Three 3tb WD Red's costs about $450, you should be able to get everything else you need for less than that, even accounting for a premium PSU. For example, 12gb is mentioned as being easily more than the last build's 8gb, but did either build actually need that? IMO 1gb of RAM is plenty unless you're determined to run ZFS with de-duplication enabled, though personally I wouldn't. Any decent cheap CPU should be plenty for running ReadyNAS with software RAID which is more than adequate for a solid three-disk RAID-5 set.

Also, I just don't see the benefit of the case; it's huge for what this machine is. If you were loading up on RAM for ZFS then why not go for a case with lots of external bays? A case with enough 5.25" bays can load hot-swappable back-planes, which would be ideal for expanding/repairing always-on storage, and would seem more reasonable for this kind of price point.

I guess I'll just have to try to come up with my own offering for the next best configs result =)
 
A

artk2219

Distinguished
Jun 30, 2010
1,369
663
20,340



Why even bother with an a10 6800k? An a10 5700 or A8 would work just fine, I do like the FX 6300's though, mighty fine little chips for relatively powerful office machines or any general build at all really.

 
pacioli

pacioli

Distinguished
Nov 22, 2010
1,040
0
19,360
There is a reason why the last AMD office rig I won with had a sensible case like the Antec Three Hundred... because it is an office PC. You don't put obnoxious cases on office PCs because they go into... (wait for it) offices. You know, professional environments where business happens.

And what is up with the mid-range gaming GPU? What "office PC" needs that?
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

TRENDING THREADS

Latest posts

Moderators online

Share this page

COMPANY
RESOURCES
FOLLOW
Top Bottom