High-End AMD-Based Gaming PC
Five entrants were chosen to compete in this quarter’s High-End AMD-Based Gaming PC.
The choosing of this quarter’s AMD enthusiast system was no heated battle. Rafeed’s AMD anti-fanboi build smoked the competition with 39 percent of the votes cast.
Congratulations to forum member Rafeed for having his recommended build picked by the Tom's Hardware community this quarter!
Naturally, any top-of-the-line AMD rig is built around the company’s current flagship CPU, right? Not this quarter. The AMD anti-fanboi build actually featured the lowest-end FX chip out of the five contenders. We’ll give you one guess as to where that savings wound up.
Like g-unit1111’s winning build last time around, Rafeed’s system also features Noctua’s NH-D14, a true monster of a heat sink that keeps all other air coolers in check.
The choice of motherboard is another sign of things to come, as Rafeed went with a very affordable ASRock 970 Extreme4 rather than some of the enthusiast- and gamer-grade platforms that sell for three times as much.
While this build only has 8GB of Patriot Vengeance DDR3-1600 memory, once again, you’ve got to know this cost cutting is going somewhere...
And here it is: a pair of GeForce GTX 780s from EVGA. What else can we say? Rafeed spent $1300 of his $2000 price limit on graphics. Now that’s a gaming system! Since this machine was priced out, the GTX 780 dropped to $500, so any enthusiast replicating this machine today is going to get $300 worth of savings right off the bat. We'd like to know if the choice in CPU bottlenecks these fast graphics cards.
SanDisk's Ultra Plus acts as a 128GB boot and application drive, while a 1.5TB Western Digital Caviar Green serves as a spacious and low-power data disk. The whole thing is driven by the 850W version of Corsair’s Enthusiast Series TX850W 80 PLUS Bronze-certified PSU.
The AMD anti-fanboi build is enclosed in Cooler Master’s HAF 912. Rafeed chose an Asus DVD writer for the optical drive.
When originally spec’ed out, this rig rang up to $1996.89. The current prices of Rafeed’s AMD anti-fanboi build can be found in the BestConfigs shopping tables.
