The Winner of Our Hand-Picked Custom PC Rig
By - Source: Tom's Hardware US
|
25 comments
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.
Discuss
Ask a Category Expert

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.
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.
Or give them real guns? Better yet, make them joust.
limo joust?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGr8mpSv60I
Toms is still waiting from someone to actually be witty.
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.
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.
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.
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...