We asked you to build them. We asked you to vote on them. Now we’re asking you to check them out and recommend them to friends and family building their own PCs!
Alright, so it seems like you guys are doing quite a bit of work here, and the entire Tom’s Hardware staff appreciates the heck out of it. Our Q3’11 BestConfigs are finally up to date, and the winners have their props.
A bit of back-story: a couple of months ago, we asked you to weigh in with components for 10 different builds in the Systems section of our forum. The submissions poured in and, after a couple of weeks, we locked those threads. Thomas, Don, Andrew, and I sat down and picked our top three options in each category, trying to mix it up as much as possible to give you some real variety. Our community manager, Joe, took those selections and created a poll for each system, and we turned the contenders back to you for a vote.
Well, the votes are tallied, and we have winners in all 10 categories. They are:
Budget Intel-Based Gaming PC: The community chose techo’s build
Budget AMD-Based Gaming PC: The community chose lunyone’s build
High-End Intel Gaming PC: The community chose sadams04’s build
Intel-Based Office PC: The community chose r0aringdrag0n’s build
High-end AMD Gaming PC: The community chose mjmjpfaff’s build
AMD-Based Office PC: The community chose ice919’s build
MicroATX Gaming Build: The community chose ojas’ build
Home Theater PC: The community chose sadams04’s build
High-End Workstation: The community chose gkay09’s build
Do-It-Yourself NAS: The community chose palladin9479’s build
Don’t worry if your submission wasn’t picked this quarter. We’re going to keep the BestConfigs feature refreshed, preserving each winner on the Update section of the page, but making sure we’re covering the very latest hardware. So, we’ll have a whole new round of famous builds in a few more months for you to recommend to family and friends!
Thanks for contributing, folks. Your collective efforts serve as a resource for less experienced builders looking for the experts’ recommendations on their next do-it-yourself build. And while we experiment around with different parts in our quarterly System Builder Marathon, it’s hard to beat the opinions of the world’s foremost hardware enthusiasts.
Best regards,
Chris Angelini
Worldwide Editor-in-Chief, Tom’s Hardware