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The Winner of Our Hand-Picked Custom PC Rig

By - Source: Tom's Hardware US | B 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.

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Top Comments
  • 20 Hide
    jomofro39 , October 29, 2010 1:13 PM
    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. :( 
Other Comments
  • 20 Hide
    jomofro39 , October 29, 2010 1:13 PM
    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. :( 
  • 7 Hide
    cmcghee358 , October 29, 2010 1:14 PM
    I concur! Let's see the CyberpowerPC winner!
  • Display all 25 comments.
  • 5 Hide
    bustapr , October 29, 2010 1:17 PM
    My names not there... again. +1 for the witty comment cyberpower pc.
  • 5 Hide
    bustapr , October 29, 2010 1:19 PM
    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.
  • 0 Hide
    nukemaster , October 29, 2010 1:36 PM
    grats...
  • 1 Hide
    tronika , October 29, 2010 3:29 PM
    i say we fight to the death for one. pit 2 players in a Black Ops match and the winner gets the rig.
  • 3 Hide
    ares1214 , October 29, 2010 3:49 PM
    tronikai 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.
  • 0 Hide
    jj463rd , October 29, 2010 3:57 PM
    Congratulations on that high end custom rig.Enjoy!
  • 0 Hide
    huron , October 29, 2010 4:13 PM
    Another congrats...wishing it was me, but congrats to you.
  • 1 Hide
    nukemaster , October 29, 2010 4:31 PM
    Quote:
    Or give them real guns? Better yet, make them joust.

    limo joust?

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGr8mpSv60I
  • 0 Hide
    pale paladin , October 29, 2010 4:39 PM
    gratz Tim. one day my ship will come in. someday. . .
  • 3 Hide
    husker , October 29, 2010 4:52 PM
    jomofro39Whatever 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.
  • 4 Hide
    surfer1337dude , October 29, 2010 4:58 PM
    ....really guys, you misspelled my name and state...
  • -3 Hide
    K2N hater , October 29, 2010 5:11 PM
    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.
  • 3 Hide
    annubiz , October 29, 2010 5:26 PM
    I saw Timothy Hayes and was like wait I won? Unfortunately I don't live in Elgin, SC /qq
  • 0 Hide
    hellwig , October 29, 2010 5:26 PM
    K2N haterPrice 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.
  • 0 Hide
    deletemach_kernel , October 29, 2010 5:36 PM
    wish you guys would extend the giveaways to other countries too....eg India... welll...so at least i could have a shot at it
  • 0 Hide
    K2N hater , October 29, 2010 6:58 PM
    hellwigOnce 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.
  • 1 Hide
    hellwig , October 29, 2010 9:20 PM
    K2N haterDid 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...
  • 0 Hide
    tourist , October 30, 2010 1:09 AM
    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 ?
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