Your Top Picks: Tom's Hardware Forums' Q4 2013 BestConfigs

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By Adam Overa
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Have you ever come up with your own idea for a killer rig? Don't forget to tell us about it on the Tom's Hardware forums. The following ten setups were configured by forum members and chosen as winners in the Q4 2013 BestConfigs Poll.

MicroATX Gaming PC

We picked five submissions for the MicroATX Gaming PC this quarter.

When the polls closed, AMD Radeon scored a second win in this quarter’s BestConfigs with the Micro GE Build, earning 40 percent of the vote.

Congratulations to forum member AMD Radeon for having his recommended build picked by the Tom's Hardware community for the second time this quarter! 

The MicroATX Gaming Build has always been about portable power for LAN parties. This quarter, a Haswell-based Core i5-4670K replaces the Ivy Bridge-based predecessor found in last quarter’s system.

Cooler Master’s award-winning Hyper 212 EVO sticks around for yet another mATX gaming build.

ASRock's Z78M Extreme4 hosts two PCIe 3.0 x16 slots and supports both SLI and CrossFire. This motherboard is also equipped with USB 3.0, gigabit Ethernet and 7.1-channel audio.

Two 4GB sticks of DDR3-1600 from G.Skill’s Ripjaws X Series occupy half of the Extreme4’s DIMM slots, leaving plenty of room for expansion.

Always the rebel, AMD Radeon went with (what else) a single Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition. The Sapphire card sports 3GB of GDDR5 and twin axial-mounted fans.

The system drive is a 120GB Samsung 840 SSD, with a 1TB Caviar Blue from Western Digital holding user data. A 650W Rosewill Hive 80 PLUS Bronze PSU powers the Micro GE Build. Enveloping it all is the 350D from Corsair’s always-classy Obsidian series. A DVD drive from Lite-On satisfies the obligatory optical duties.

The Micro GE Build came out to $1156.69 when AMD Radeon originally configured it. The current prices of AMD Radeon’s Micro GE Build can be found in the BestConfigs shopping tables.

Adam Overa
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27 Comments Comment from the forums
  • Dark Lord of Tech
    That's a nice budget build.
    Reply
  • antemon
    now I'll admit that I'm no expert, since I'm not in any way shape or form, but wtf?

    The office PC has a better GPU than the HTPC? Flashy case for office use. I get that the CX430 is used here since it's a solid PSU, but branded memory?

    1000USD for 'budget' gaming builds? you should at least aim to be a little closer to console prices since we're talking about budget gaming
    Reply
  • Hutchinman
    The total for the budget based AMD gaming system is wrong. There is no way in hell Amazon is selling the MSI Twin Frozr 7950 for $105.

    Your system mistakenly links the Amazon page for the MSI AMD Radeon HD 7770 1GB. Fix your system Tom's.
    Reply
  • budget creep strikes again.

    Is it still a budget PC if it can max out every game you own at 1080p? if it costs a lot of money (relative to the gaming market) and places well in the top 10% of peers?
    Reply
  • lancelot123
    What in the hell happened to the prices for the Intel Office PC? Says it was originally built for $500, but now it is saying $714. That is a HUGE difference. Not even sure what would be discounted, especially by that amount, unless the CPU was free.
    Reply
  • Drejeck
    Office PC like that impacts a lot on power consumption, assumed your office goes a lot away from just excel, java-browser administration tools, powerpoint and the likes. That AMD office build is more like a budget multimedia machine with gaming purpose. The HTPC obviously suffer from the case price and thus goes with a lower performance videocard.
    All builds underestimated SSDs and had just an HDD.
    Ok, I get this. There are a lot of hardware prejudices.
    DVD burners in 2013? From what country are you? I spent 4000 euros on my PC and the Asus BD usb3 I got came 6 months later...
    Reply
  • Sangeet Khatri
    In the Bugdet AMD Based Gaming PC. I would have the || Asrock Extreme 3 board + Corsair 300R + 128GB SSD with a 3GB 7970 || from my build as compared to the || Asrock Pro 3 + Rosewill Case + No SSD with 770 2GB ||

    Also most games now are starting to push more than 2GB VRAM. Hence this is where the extra 1GB RAM of the 7970 would be much more useful.

    Just an opinion..
    Reply
  • cats_Paw
    MixroATX gaming section:
    40% people chose "AMD" Radeons build... wich happens to use.... an INTEL! :D.

    Toms is starting to be my favorite humor page.
    Reply
  • bemused_fred
    12078455 said:
    The total for the budget based AMD gaming system is wrong. There is no way in hell Amazon is selling the MSI Twin Frozr 7950 for $105.

    Your system mistakenly links the Amazon page for the MSI AMD Radeon HD 7770 1GB. Fix your system Tom's.

    Ha ha! Now's my chance!

    12079601 said:
    Also most games now are starting to push more than 2GB VRAM. Hence this is where the extra 1GB RAM of the 7970 would be much more useful.


    2GB seemed to be fine for 2550x1600 in the gtx 770 review.

    'Grats on your entries, BTW!
    Reply
  • -Fran-
    An office PC would rather have a discrete Video card than an SSD or some HDDs in RAID 0 or 1? For real?

    Other than that, pretty standard choices, which makes them good choices, I guess.

    Cheers!
    Reply