
We run two scripted Photoshop benchmarks: one that is threaded and fully taxes our CPUs, and another that leverages OpenCL acceleration to offload work to our graphics cards.
The Radeon R9 290 suffers compared to the GeForce GTX 770 in the OpenCL benchmark. When we look at the CPU side of things, though, the result is much closer, but the new build maintains a slight lead.
CPU and memory performance are critical variables in the rest of these tests, which do not leverage the heterogeneous nature of OpenCL. The Acrobat benchmark is single-threaded and, like iTunes and LAME, is affected primarily by clock rate. After Effects CC is as well. Similar to Photoshop, Premiere Pro is optimized for multi-core CPUs and benefits from Hyper-Threading. We can see that the After Effects benchmark probably relies on memory speed to some degree, giving the new build a chance to shine, but the other two benchmarks demonstrate much closer results.
- Changing Focus For A Look At Processor Performance
- CPU, Motherboard And Cooler
- Graphics Card, Power Supply And Case
- Memory, Hard Drives And Optical Storage
- Building And Overclocking
- How We Tested
- Results: Synthetics
- Results: Media Transcoding
- Results: Rendering And Productivity
- Results: Adobe Creative Cloud
- Results: Compression Tools
- Results: Battlefield 4 And Arma 3
- Results: Grid 2 And Far Cry 3
- Power And Temperature
- Q3 2014 Mainstream Enthusiast PC Under $1300 Verdict




[EDIT by cleeve]
They are not reversed. Check out the accompanying writeup to help make sense of it.
[/EDIT]
While I'd agree on the cheaper case, the 970 wasn't an option since they hadn't been released when they were buying parts for this quarter's SBM.
From Page 3 of the article: "The GeForce GTX 970 launched last week wasn't available (or even public information) back when we ordered the pieces for this build. So, I needed something cheaper than the Radeon R9 290 that wouldn't sacrifice gaming performance. Under $300, the best option was Nvidia's GeForce GTX 770."
Obviously, today the 970 would be a much better choice, but that option didn't exist when this build was purchased.
Good job. There is always that guy who does not read the article when it explains why the brand new card was not used, because it was not an option at the time of the review.
So congrats on being that guy this time. It only took 3 posts to get there.
on the last page:
may be you meant the Q2 enthusiast system. imo, yea, the q3 build doesn't seem as attractive as the q2 one. i think that one could add the ssd from this build and still be the better pc.
i wonder if you guys would build an fx8350/8320 pc as an alternative build at this price range for the ongoing overclocking theme.
I'd like to know more about the thickness / flexibility of the ASRock mobo. Otherwise, I don't think I have any niggles over performance-related parts.
I've never had any problems with Asrock and I'm on my second Asrock board.
Can I haz your 3GB 770 plz ?
Don't think the Q2 rig was properly setup if you are losing to the 770 in every test...
in page 5, GTX 770 overclocking used AMD OverDrive utility?
is there some kind of mistake or what?