AMD-Based Office PC
Of the five builds in the running for this quarter's AMD-Based Home Office PC, we had three very strong competitors. In fact, we nearly had a three-way tie between AMD Radeon, jinayhvora and Lp231.
Ultimately, AMD Radeons’ “Office Micro GE Build” came out victorious by a single percentage point to become the winning Q2 2014 AMD-Based Office PC.
Congratulations to forum member AMD Radeon for having his recommended build picked by the Tom's Hardware community this quarter!
Packing AMD’s Vishera-based FX-6300 six-core CPU, AMD Radeon’s Office Micro GE Build presents a nice evolution over Q1’s APU-based setup sporting the A10-5800K. With mostly the same or equivalent components, this year’s AMD Home Office PC has a better processor and adds discrete graphics, yet sacrifices an aftermarket cooler, and still comes in well under the $500 price ceiling.
With six Piledriver cores, the FX-6300K packs as much processing power as most office PCs could possibly need. AMD Radeon chose ASRock’s AM3+-based 960GM/U3S3 microATX motherboard as the Office Micro GE Build's platform.
The most notable addition to this quarter’s winning build compared to the last one is discrete graphics. AMD Radeon managed to find room in the budget for a Radeon (what else?) HD 7770 GHz Edition. It might not seem necessary to integrate an add-in GPU, but a growing list of OpenCL-accelerated apps means that gaming cards may very well come in useful for improving performance in the office.
AMD Radeon stuck with many of the remaining choices used by last quarter's winner, Pacioli. Occupying the board’s DIMM slots are two sticks of 4GB DDR3-1600 Ripjaws X Series memory modules from G.Skill, a slight upgrade from the non-X Series version in the previous winning build.
There is still no SSD in sight, and the same 1TB Western Digital Caviar Blue is the system’s sole storage drive. Corsair's ever-popular CX430 430W PSU from the company’s Builder Series also remains untouched.
Since Pacioli’s Antec Three Hundred was discontinued, the chassis had to change. AMD Radeon went with the slightly flashier Rosewill Ranger-M. Our biggest issue is the old school top-mounted PSU. Lite-On provides the almost extinct, yet somehow still mandatory optical drive in the form of a 24x DVD writer.
At the time AMD Radeon configured this build, the components added up to $444.93, which was exactly $16 cheaper than last quarter’s AMD-Based Office PC. The current price of AMD Radeon’s Office Micro GE Build can be found in the BestConfigs shopping tables.
