The Winner of Our Hand-Picked Custom PC Rig
Congrats!
We normally give away the three systems that are featured in our System Builder's Marathon, but as a special for the fall we had an additional system to send off.
This hand-picked setup is the product of Thomas Soderstrom's lessons learned, and is everything we'd want if our own $2000 were on the line. Learn more about this machine here.
Today we're proud to announce that Timothy Hayes from Elgin, SC is the winner of our custom build.
Congratulations! Stay tuned for more contests from Tom's Hardware.
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Congratulations!
Whatever happened to that one rig you guys were going to give away from Cyberpower? For witty comments? I wanted to see what witty comments you chose as the funniest, TBH.
I concur! Let's see the CyberpowerPC winner!
My names not there... again. +1 for the witty comment cyberpower pc.
also, Id like to say that some people would like to comment on tomstyle articles. Tomsstyle isnt really the greatest idea youve come up with.
grats...
i say we fight to the death for one. pit 2 players in a Black Ops match and the winner gets the rig.
i say we fight to the death for one. pit 2 players in a Black Ops match and the winner gets the rig.
Or give them real guns? Better yet, make them joust.
Congratulations on that high end custom rig.Enjoy!
Another congrats...wishing it was me, but congrats to you.
Or give them real guns? Better yet, make them joust.
limo joust?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGr8mpSv60I
gratz Tim. one day my ship will come in. someday. . .
Whatever happened to that one rig you guys were going to give away from Cyberpower? For witty comments? I wanted to see what witty comments you chose as the funniest, TBH.
Toms is still waiting from someone to actually be witty.
....really guys, you misspelled my name and state...
1TB 7200rpm HDD? I say rubbish!
Mechanical drives are proven to be the bottleneck of PCs.
Any "enthusiast" PC should boot from SSD or a 10000rpm/15000rpm drive. Price is not an excuse as there are plenty of blazing-fast ~30GB SSD out there which fits OS and some apps easily. Also it's quite easy to get 10k/15k used/refurbished drives on the cheap.
I saw Timothy Hayes and was like wait I won? Unfortunately I don't live in Elgin, SC /qq
Price is not an excuse as there are plenty of blazing-fast ~30GB SSD out there which fits OS and some apps easily. Also it's quite easy to get 10k/15k used/refurbished drives on the cheap.
Now, since you didn't win the rig anyway, what do you care?
I removed my big rant here. Suffice it to say, if paying for a 30GB SSD is worth the 10-15 seconds you might save when booting your computer once a day, go for it. Everything else you have (games, apps, data) will have to be stored on HDDs, so in essence you bought an SSD for nothing. Way to go dude.
wish you guys would extend the giveaways to other countries too....eg India... welll...so at least i could have a shot at it
Once you've booted from the 30GB SSD, then what? How many times a day do you restart your computer? I have Win7 running off traditional HDDs in a RAID5. It boots up in under 1 minute. You are talking about only a few seconds of savings once, maybe twice a day. All your games and other media are going to have to be stored on traditional HDDs (I have over 250GB downloaded off steam, and a couple dozen more I uninstalled). Games and applications are what you load repeatedly, what write to the drive repeatedly. If you don't put those on an SSD, you have bought yourself nothing. I'm sick and tired of all you SSD-morons who think putting one application or your OS on an SSD actually buys you more than 30-seconds a day. Until SSDs are at a price/capacity ratio that allows them to be used for primary storage, you won't see them recommended on Tom's for their desktops (laptops could be another matter). They have stated that repeatedly.Now, since you didn't win the rig anyway, what do you care?
Did you even bother to read the post? I'm not playing the bigot here. Just pointing out that such an expensive rig could be a lot faster.
I run apps such as FF and Outlook (I use PST files) from my boot drive and the performance gains are great in comparison. Storing the swap file on a fast drive also changes PC responsiveness over time astonishingly.
For games a faster drive such as SSD isn't wrong either. Reducing load times matters a lot and several games load data during play. So a slow HDD will also decrease minimal and average FPS for these games for making the game engine wait longer for the eventual data load thus wasting CPU cycles along.
By the way my current boot drive is a 15k SCSI drive.
Did you even bother to read the post?...
Do you ever bother to read the system builder marathons (which is where this computer came about)? Every time they put one out, someone like you complains that an SSD could have made the rig faster. And every time the editors respond that, for the price, it just isn't worth it (as they have a set budget). Making Windows Boot faster will NOT affect any of the benchmarks they run (gaming and productivity). Tom's sets a price limit and tries to include the best overall computer they can at that price. For months now, that has meant doing without an SSD because the performance gains are there.
They do NOT run benchmarks on how fast Firefox or Outlook loads. They don't care about swap files (if you have an extra $100, but another gig or two of RAM, or put that towards the next best GPU, not an SSD). These are gaming rigs not office machines.
Yes, SSDs are fast, and if you can afford them, use them. However, most people with set budgets will NOT see improvements from SSD, not when that same money could go into a faster CPU, a faster GPU, a motherboard with more features, software, etc...
If you work with pst files on a daily basis a ssd is a godsend, it is all about the right tool for the job. by default 20gb file size for 07, 50 gb for 2010 unless you get a freak who like to put down every minute of there day then ?
I wish I can have that too.
A very very nice PC, Congrats to the winner.
....really guys, you misspelled my name and state...
LOL!!! Now that put a smile on my face, I wish I was that funny and witty! +1 this guy for the Cyberpower Contest
I shall haunt the Tom's forums until the day Canada is included in the contest!
Meanwhile, happy gaming on your new rig, Tim!
timothy hayes wow that sounds like the name of one of my buddies on steam if it is him congrats dude!
These are gaming rigs not office machines.
Ah yes, they are gaming machines, because 1/3 of the "performance score" is from games...but just to clarify, the six-core was added in response to a few reader requests...only because the other 2/3 of the score comes from non-gaming applications. Had this been purely a "gaming" machine the six-core would have been crossed from the list for the same reasons as the SSDs.