System Builder Marathon, Q1 2014: Our New Enthusiast PC

Deals
By Don Woligroski
published

Memory, Hard Drives, And Optical Storage

Memory: Corsair Vengeance LP DDR3-1866 Memory Kit 8 GB (2 x 4 GB)

This dual-channel kit boasts an XMP memory profile with 9-10-9-27 timings at 1866 MT/s, while sipping power at a mere 1.5 V. Selling for $103 on Newegg at the time of writing, it's priced as expected for high-performance memory in this RAM-hungry market.

Read Customer Reviews of Corsair's Vengeance LP 8 GB Memory Kit

System Drive: Samsung 840 EVO 120 GB SATA 6Gb/s SSD

Currently selling for $90, Samsung's 840 EVO 120 GB SSD offers respectable value for a system drive. Our own Christopher Ryan is particularly smitten with this repository, praising its performance and value-added features that keep data safe, despite triple-level-cell flash memory. 

Read Customer Reviews of Samsung's 840 EVO 128 GB SSD

Hard Drive: Western Digital Black 500 GB

When it comes to choosing the right hard drive given limited funds, you need to balance capacity and performance. This quarter, I chose to favor speed.

Assuming 500 GB is enough storage space for music, movies, and pictures, $71 gets you Western Digital's high-performance Black with an impressive five-year warranty. Of course, if you need to house terabytes of data, you'll want a larger drive. That might necessitate stepping back to a slower-spinning disk instead.

Read Customer Reviews of Western Digital's Black 500 GB Hard Drive

Optical Drive: LG Black OEM Blu-ray Burner

A standard DVD burner sells for around $20. But if you fancy using your PC as a media center, a Blu-ray writer gives you a little more flexibility. LG's WH14NS40 is going for $54 on Newegg after a temporary promotion, and I consider that to be a reasonable expense, given the options it opens up to enthusiasts.

Read Customer Reviews of LG's WH14NS40 Blu-ray Burner

Don Woligroski
43 Comments Comment from the forums
  • envy14tpe
    Why a Galaxy GPU considering the company pulled out of US market? btw, nice work on the build.
    Reply
  • bemused_fred
    I wish more builds would account for the cost of the OS. It can be a significant expense, especially when you're working with builds of $600 or less.
    Reply
  • Drejeck
    770 sli also nets better performance when gaming on 120/144hz monitors
    Reply
  • Dark Oopa
    wow, I didn't think there would be such a little difference in gaming.In fact, the difference is so small that with all the inherent problems of the SLI, the new rig is always the better choice.
    Reply
  • redgarl
    Multi-gpu problems are always overly exagerated. I am using multi-gpu platforms for almost 5 years and the gain in fps over the UNOTICEABLE and overly exagerated stutering sweep away any disavantages.Folks, don't lure yourself, higher resolution demand multi-gpus. Single card is fine for anything around 1080p, more or less, but at 4K or 3 1080p monitors... your system is going to choke even with a 780 ti.
    Reply
  • npyrhone
    Having 1600x900 resolution in the gaming charts serves only one purpose: to create the impression that there is not really a difference between the two builds, while in reality the later one is obviously inferior to the previous one.
    Reply
  • vertexx
    It's a shame to completely remove the non-core components from the competition, but I understand why it's done here. A couple of ideas to throw out there:

    (1) You could include temperatures and acoustics performance in the overall assessment, given I think that is a big part of the case buying decision, and
    (2) A way to factor in the intangibles (i.e. blu ray vs dvd, choice of SSD/HDD, etc), you could include a separate vote between this quarter's and last quarter's to see what the readers would choose for the best build given all the performance factors, aesthetics, and other components that do not contribute directly to performance. The reader's vote of this quarter vs. last quarter and/or an overall value winner for this quarter could be included in the final write-up.

    I would also 2nd the vote for starting 4K testing. And also, why not 1440p? It seems those two resolutions are more relevant now in 2014 at the level of this competition than 1600x900 and 4800x900 resolutions.
    Reply
  • DarkSable
    I'm sorry, Tom's, but...You really need to stop misinforming the general public who comes here for your articles and doesn't read the forums in depth.You go with an i7 for the "performance benefits," which are nonexistent for gaming... except that this rig is aimed at gaming. I would have much, much rather seen an i5, with a note explaining that an i7 is a good upgrade if you're doing these sorts of things, but isn't helpful if you're building a gaming computer.There are wayyyy too many new builders out there who think that the i7 is better than the i5 and who are just wasting their money, and you aren't helping them or correcting that misinformation - rather, you're just reinforcing it further.
    Reply
  • nekromobo
    I would really like to see mATX and mini-itx versions of this article, pretty please :)
    Reply
  • vertexx
    12959893 said:
    I'm sorry, Tom's, but...You really need to stop misinforming the general public who comes here for your articles and doesn't read the forums in depth.You go with an i7 for the "performance benefits," which are nonexistent for gaming... except that this rig is aimed at gaming. I would have much, much rather seen an i5, with a note explaining that an i7 is a good upgrade if you're doing these sorts of things, but isn't helpful if you're building a gaming computer.There are wayyyy too many new builders out there who think that the i7 is better than the i5 and who are just wasting their money, and you aren't helping them or correcting that misinformation - rather, you're just reinforcing it further.
    Hmm.... What percentage of the performance measures in this article are for gaming?
    Reply