Cooler Master’s Hyper 212 Plus uses standoffs atop the motherboard to secure a support plate beneath the board. An included socket allows those who lack sufficient tools to tighten its nuts with a screwdriver. The cooler’s top bracket is then attached to those standoffs using spring-loaded screws.

Note that the screws have springs on both sides, with shafts that narrow below the bracket. These must be pulled outward in order to change their alignment within the bracket’s three mounting positions (LGA 755, 1155, 1366).

Rosewill’s Redbone cases (including the tested U3 version) do not support 2.5” drives. Fortunately, Mushkin’s Chronos Deluxe includes a 3.5” adapter tray.

Rosewill’s Redbone cases also lack any cable management features. Front-panel cables were too short to even tuck between the motherboard and its tray. We had to settle for a messier installation than I'd tolerate in a $2,000 build, using cable ties to secure them out of the airflow path.

Our CPU fan prevents the side fan from fitting in its upper mount, and the lower fan mount is blocked by any full-sized power supply. Fortunately, the vent holes are spaced close enough to the fan’s screw holes to mount it in the middle, just below the CPU cooler, where it feeds cold air to both the CPU and graphics card.

- Can $1,000 Buy A High-End PC?
- Graphics, CPU, And Motherboard
- DRAM, Storage, And Optical Drive
- Case, Power, And CPU Cooling
- Hardware Installation
- Overclocking
- Test Settings And Benchmarks
- Results: 3DMark And PCMark
- Results: SiSoftware Sandra
- Results: Battlefield 3 And F1 2012
- Results: The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim And StarCraft II
- Results: Audio And Video Encoding
- Results: Adobe Creative Suite
- Results: Productivity
- Results: File Compression
- Power, Heat, And Efficiency
- Could We Have A Value Winner At $1,000?
Now instead of insults I can tell people "Don't be a stoogie". Thanks!
Otherwise, not much wriggle room here. Nice build!
Using the drive performance measurement to reflect program load times means loading all the programs on the SSD. And that explains why SSD capacity wasn't sacrificed to make more room in the budget for an HDD.
Looking from another perspective, these two builds, with two different builders, with $200 difference, just show(again) how much better price/performance wise are Intel CPU's and AMD GPU's.
I see your point, but I'd rather see slower game loads and better FPS , than faster game loads and lower FPS. And, the OS is accelerated in both cases anyway.
But hey, I'm on board with the 7870 Myst Edition CrossFire suggestion...I'll see if we can make it happen!
I think theres something to be said about the value at above $1000 though.. past this price range, people really start caring about having a nice case, nice cooler, etc that are more than just performance but aesthetics too.
Most likely they'd end up with a similar ugly case that no one would really want, possibly the same memory and hard disk, but the heart of the system would always be different.
Besides, people love rivalries. Sure, AMD processors blow in absolute performance, but they're cheap, and maybe the video card can save the day against the evil Intel/NVIDIA empires. It's a lot more interesting than testing two essentially identical machines, except for the hard disk.
Do it for different price ranges, and it might even be more competitive. $500, $750, and $1000 might not all have the same winner.
Pair a AMD CPU with a Nvidia GPU. So its expensive and may not perform as well.
(I will be extremely happy if this build performs well)