System Builder Marathon, December 2010: $2000 PC
With all of your feedback from last quarter's System Builder Marathon under our belts, this time around, we attempt to fit a no-sacrifice, luxury and performance build into our moderately-high $2000 budget. Will this new build succeed on all fronts?
Motherboard And Graphics
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD3R
We wanted a motherboard with at least 32 PCIe 2.0 lanes, high overclocking stability, and enough features to justify existence in a PC that cost nearly $2000. The two best-priced models to fill those criteria were Asus’ Sabertooth and Gigabyte’s X58A-UD3R.
Read Customer Reviews of Gigabyte's X58A-UD3R
The X58A-UD3R’s advantages are few, such as its support for x8 mode on the third slot by lane-sharing, and its support for two more hard drives. But those extra features combine with our extra experience with this model to make it the easiest choice.
Graphics: 2 x EVGA GTX 470 in SLI
CPU bottlenecks were such a big issue at the graphics resolutions used in our previous Day 4 value analysis that we decided to scale back from a pair of GeForce GTX 480s to a pair of GeForce GTX 460s. Those high-end, value-crippling resolutions will still apply this round, yet we though we might be able to pick up a little medium-resolution performance from a pair of GeForce GTX 470s.
Read Customer Reviews of EVGA's GeForce GTX 470
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Imagine our surprise when we found a pair of EVGA’s lifetime-warranty 012-P3-1470-AR cards priced similarly to its three-year-warranty competitors! A free warranty upgrade sounds like a bargain to us, so we put these on top of the list.
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micr0be i think im gona get a revo 2 drive ssd to upgrade my current build.... all thanks to santa !!Reply -
Tamz_msc Its good to know that choosing the wrong memory can affect performance in such a way.Reply -
fstrthnu I'm pretty surprised we didn't see Geforce GTX 570s in this build, I guess they got released too late to make it here.Reply -
kkiddu Most perfect build ever ? Just read the configs yet, and I think that's a possibility.Reply
Now don't skin me if the config proves to be a flop in the coming pages. Just read the first page and couldn't resist a comment. -
hemburger Why not replace the two ssd's with a single intel 120gb... same price and now on 35nmReply -
kkiddu I think this one can be trimmed to a very good $1500 build as well. Change the CPU to i5 760, remove one of the cards, one of the SSDs, and you'll need lower capacity PSU for that, let's slash $30-$50 there, you get a very good PC for $1500.Reply -
kkiddu And oh, cheapen the case as well. There's no free lunch. You gotta sacrifice some silence to gains some frame rates.Reply