
Memory: G.Skill Trident DDR3-2400 8 GB Memory Kit
It doesn't make much sense to chase after the highest overclock on an unlocked processor with cheap RAM. So, I splurged on G.Skill's Trident 8 GB DDR3-2400 kit. At $87, the two 4 GB modules aren't exactly extravagant, though they cost considerably more than the DDR3-1600 kit I bought last time. Sporting 10-12-12-31 timings at 1.65 V, this little upgrade should help me get the most out of my Core i5-4690K overclock.
Read Customer Reviews of G.Skill's Trident DDR3-2400 8 GB Kit
System Drive: Adata Premier Pro SP920 128 GB SATA 6Gb/s SSD
I'm running short on cash, but you made it clear last quarter that you consider solid-state storage a necessity. Therefore, I picked Adata's SP920 for its relatively low $75 price tag combined with a respectable 128 GB of space. It serves this system well and provides quick boot-up and application launching.
Read Customer Reviews of Adata's Premier Pro SP920 128 GB SSD
Hard Drive: Western Digital Blue 1 TB Hard Drive
Armed with a small boot SSD, I needed to add capacity elsewhere for user information. Western Digital's Blue 1 TB drive is the answer when all you need is affordable space. One terabyte should be ample for movies, music, documents, and pictures once you get everything else onto the 120 GB solid-state repository. You can't beat that $60 price tag either, particularly from a 7200 RPM disk.
Read Customer Reviews of Western Digital's Blue 1 TB Hard Drive
Optical Drive: Asus DRW-24B1ST DVD-Burner
As usual, I went with the cheapest DVD burner option on Newegg. This quarter's lucky winner is Asus' DRW-24B1ST, an OEM model with a 24x write speed and a miserly $20 price tag.
- 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?