
We were pleasantly surprised with Xigmatek's Asgard II case. The tool-less drive mounts work well, and the spacious interior provides ample room for a clean installation. For a budget-oriented chassis, it actually feels well-built, too. Our biggest complaint about this enclosure is that it appears to have been dropped during shipping, requiring us to push out a few creases.
With that said, Paul has used this case several times in the System Builder Marathon, and was happy with it in the past. It's good enough for me and my less-full wallet today.

The good news is that we didn't have any issues with the case, unlike Paul's experience yesterday. The orange-on-black color scheme inside is attractive enough, and we almost wish we had picked the orange-trimmed version to match.

Overclocking
Overclocking the Core i5-3550K is straightforward enough, and ASRock's Z77 Pro3 gives us all of the settings we need to do it properly. We did give the BIOS' auto-overclocking feature a try, but it failed to boot at 4.6 GHz. And while the automatically-configured 4.4 GHz setting did load up into Windows, one thread failed during a Prime95 stress test.
This forced us to tackle the overclock manually. Even with incremental voltage increases, the system wouldn't boot at 4.6 GHz. A 0.1 V bump to the processor yielded a stable 4.5 GHz. However, certain benchmarks returned lower performance than what I was getting at stock frequencies. So, I dropped the overclock to 4.4 GHz with a +0.085 V offset and got the speed-up I was expecting.
As for the memory overclock, I simply triggered the memory kit's XMP profile, which increased the frequency to DDR3-1600 with 8-8-8-24 timings.

I then swapped over to my graphics card. Not sure what to expect from AMD's Tahiti LE GPU, I was surprised to see the chip take 1,275 MHz and a memory frequency of 1,650 MHz. Unfortunately, those settings triggered some throttling during our benchmarks, requiring that I step back to a 1,150 MHz core clock and 1,575 MHz memory. Still, when you consider PowerColor's card ships at 975 MHz, our GPU overclock is respectable.

- Building A PC: What Do We Get For $800?
- CPU, Motherboard, And Cooler
- Video Card, Power Supply, And Case
- Memory, Hard Drives, And Optical Drive
- System Assembly And Overclocking
- Test System And Benchmarks
- Results: Synthetics
- Results: Media Encoding
- Results: Rendering And Productivity
- Results: Adobe Creative Suite
- Results: Compression Tools
- Results: Battlefield 3 And The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
- Results: F1 2012 And Far Cry 3
- Power And Temperature
- When Does $800 Buy You More Than $1000?
And therein lies the problem with benchmarks.
An enthusiast PC, without a SSD boot drive?
Overclocking the Core i5-3550K is"
there would be marginal performance boost from switching from a 7870 LE(nerfed 7950, heck can call it a 7930 and it would be partially correct in a way) to an actual 7950. Though its likely the outcome for the 1k budget coming up next.
That's cuz the 8350 is using a 670 which in GPU heavy titles will boost its numbers higher. Same GPU would show a more different story and the price difference between a 8350 and a i5 3570k is only able to bump a 7870xt to a 7950 at most, not to a 670
And therein lies the problem with benchmarks.
An enthusiast PC, without a SSD boot drive?
For a $800 budget, I would rather get all the real in game performance I can first while and add a ssd later than lose out on fps and get faster load times
higher fps(stronger cpu, gpu) > faster load times
$35 saved from cutting cooler and k is not enough for an SSD
After looking at this it would seem illogical to buy a 8350 over a I5. But yes it does do decent interns of price/performance.
This would have been correct for a "$800 Gaming PC" .
But for a "$800 Enthusiast PC " , a SSD is a must. Even a 64GB, lower end SSD would have been OK.
this build looks like a budget-upper-midrange build (if that makes any sense). the mobo... looks weak. the cooler and gfx card looked... cheap. i didn't expect the oc core i5 3570k build to keep up with oc fx8350 build in threaded benches (for $200 less, even). only 7zip seems to take advantage of 8 integer clusters/cores properly and the rest of them don't seem to scale well beyond 4~ cores. i noticed that trend in games but this is the first time i've seen it in non-games softwares. i use handbrake, lame mp3 and archivers (7z, zip/rars), so those benches were very informative for me. thank you.
when i first started reading, i wanted to see an fx8320, cm hyper 212 evo(or a corsair clc) with a sturdy 970 mobo + radeon 7870xt. as i read on, this current build and its performance started to look more and more interesting.
The difference between the 7870 XT and the 7950 can be huge when overclocking is considered. That lost memory bandwidth is no small matter for Tahiti LE when it runs at around 1.2GHz. I also suspect that the lost compute units from 28 to 24, although not a significant loss, are considerable.
EDIT:
http://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/5120/powercolor_pcs_radeon_hd_7870_tahiti_le_2gb_myst_video_card_review/index7.html
Also, not only are the 2560x1600 bencmarks not the only ones showing such a comparison, but also the 1920x1200 and 1680x1050 benchmarks. This is also fairly consistent across most games. Both of these claims are demonstrated to be true by the rest of this article.
For a $800 budget, I would rather get all the real in game performance I can first while and add a ssd later than lose out on fps and get faster load times
higher fps(stronger cpu, gpu) > faster load times
$35 saved from cutting cooler and k is not enough for an SSD
We could easily scrape out enough money from the budget for a decent 60GB/64GB SSD such as Plextor's M5S 64GB without really hurting core performance, at least if we didn't stick to Nweegg (granted Tom's doesn't have much option left in that if they want free systems to hand out). Loading times alone could be worth it.
I'm wondering if Blaz's disable-one-core-per-module trick would help Piledriver here, as you'd have a single core with access to 2MB L2 and 2MB L3 without the scheduler needing to worry about the second integer core. As it is, even if the software could make full use of all the CPU cores, they'd likely have a memory contention or bandwidth issue.
Steamroller will definitely improve matters but AMD will continue to be behind until anybody but the creators of 7Zip thread their software to hell (outside of rendering and productivity apps, of course).