
When cost is the primary concern, parts rarely seem to fit together ideally. So, we were really surprised at how easily ASRock's P67 Pro3 SE and PowerColor's Radeon HD 7970 fit inside the Apevia X-Trooper Junior case. It turns out that the small enclosure is extra wide and designed specifically to accommodate long graphics cards. A little bit of flexibility in hard drive mounting makes things even simpler. Also, the fact that ASRock's board is skinnier than more ATX platforms helped quite a bit. It’s been a while since I’ve worked with a case this small that didn’t cause some misery when it came time to pack parts inside.

The Apevia X-Trooper Junior isn’t without its flaws, though. Two of the motherboard standoff locations simply weren’t threaded properly, and I had to use brute force to jam them in. Moreover, a lack of cable management makes routing leads and then cleaning up more of a challenge. Those are the only two issues that keep me from recommending X-Trooper to friends and family.
More unfortunate is that our off-the-shelf ASRock P67 Pro3 SE doesn't work properly, refusing to run in dual-channel mode. The Mushkin Redline kit that we bought isn't on this platform's approved memory list; however, we tried modules from Corsair and OCZ as well. None of them got our board working the way it was supposed to. Increasing voltage didn’t help, and so we’re forced to run our tests in single-channel mode. This probably won’t affect the game benchmarks much, but it almost certainly will have a negative impact on memory-intensive application benchmarks.
Overclocking
The 3.1 GHz Core i5-2400 isn’t multiplier unlocked, but it does have to operate within the constraints of a 38x maximum Turbo Boost multiplier ceiling. This allows us to force all four cores up to 3.8 GHz.
That would have been a reasonable tradeoff, considering the Core i5-2400's relatively low price compared to Intel's Core i5-2500K. But because many vendors are now encouraging overclocking through Turbo Boost offsets, the technology remains on all of the time without an option to disable it. So, despite our 38x multiplier setting, our processor ended up running at 3.6 GHz in fully-threaded workloads and 3.7 GHz in less demanding tests. That's better than default, but not quite the 3.8 GHz we wanted.

The PowerColor Radeon HD 7970 was more than happy to hit the core and memory frequency ceilings imposed by AMD's Overdrive tool. Stock 925 MHz core and 1375 MHz memory clocks jumped up to 1125 and 1575 MHz, respectively. We also slid the power control setting to +20%, lowering the chances we'd see throttling under load. This specimen might have overclocked even higher, but we've been having some trouble unlocking higher clock rates in the latest version of MSI's Afterburner utility.

- Giving It Up For More Gaming Performance
- CPU, Motherboard, And Cooler
- Video Cards, Power Supply, And Case
- Memory, Hard Drive, And Optical Drive
- Building And Tweaking Around A Radeon HD 7970
- Test System And Benchmarks
- Benchmark Results: Synthetics
- Benchmark Results: Media Encoding
- Benchmark Results: Productivity
- Benchmark Results: Battlefield 3 And Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
- Benchmark Results: DiRT 3 And StarCraft II
- Power And Temperature Benchmarks
- A Surprisingly Robust Gaming System
I like how the 2400 is used but would it be okay dropping the cooler?
Read only optical drive? This makes no sense and is probably the worst skimp Ive ever seen. Spend the 5 bucks for a burner. Iso image anyone? This is an enthusiast level build... no mud flaps, no sale.
I desperately want a monitor at that resolution.
For the price, the lack of a larger SSD seems like an oversight. I would think anyone really considering this build would have done better to get a larger SSD and a 7950 or 7870. Or perhaps a single large hybrid HD would be a better option.
When you compare their overclocking potentials, they have about the same performance. And then there is the availability of the GTX 680, which is not. So it makes since why the 7970 was chosen.
The 7970 has better compute potential too. But I don't think that is relevant for a gaming box.
My thoughts exactly. This story was probably done before Kepler, but now with the 680 launched, the editor sure must be feeling a bit shortchanged.
Of course, the fact that the 680 has disappeared off the shelves is a different story entirely. In any case, within the next few weeks, we should see significant price cuts on the 7970, potentially making this build relevant once again.
I desperately want a monitor at that resolution.
Seriously folks, the NZXT GAMMA Classic Case is the best ATX case for under $50.
Also I agree, 64GB SSD is tiny for gamers. Its fine in an office enviroment, where you only have just the production programs that you use on a daily basis installed, with the actual data stored on a server/database. But for gamers whose Steam folder alone is in the 100s of GBs, its pointless.
Also, why bother with an aftermarket heatsink if you don't plan to overclock? I can understand if your after a low/noiseless pc (like me), but considering your running a 7970 and noisy stock case fan, it's a waste of money.
On a positive note, the $650 build was OK.
Not all of us need to run our games off an SSD. I use a 64GB SSD to boot from, and use my 7200rpm HDD to run my games, and it works just fine. I think people are being a little too picky. Especially about a build that will eventually be given away for free.
i think you meant 2560x1600!
Also interesting to note that the FX-6100 seemed to perform better in this comparison, then against the i5-2400 configuration used in the $600 December SBM which wiped the floor with it.
I understand that SSD is a no-brainer for a well rounded system. Heck, I myself would never spend north of a grand on a pc and not throw in an SSD. But the FPS per dollar is hurt by adding such an expensive storage subsystem.
Im pretty sure they stated in the $650 build that they had this stuff picked out a couple months ago, so pretty much just as the AMD 7xxx series came out, long before the Nvidia 6xx series was released. They also stated they are sick and tired of using the 2500k in their builds. I like it when they experiment. Otherwise we wouldnt have seen how horribly bad the bulldozer build was last time.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/overclock-core-i7-sli-liquid-cooling,3096-2.html
That was in the previous SBM so you really haven't been looking very long. I gave you a thumbs down just to cancel out some of those thumbs up you received
I like how the 2400 is used but would it be okay dropping the cooler?
Read only optical drive? This makes no sense and is probably the worst skimp Ive ever seen. Spend the 5 bucks for a burner. Iso image anyone? This is an enthusiast level build... no mud flaps, no sale.