BestConfigs Poll Results: Your Winning Builds
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 Q2 2014 BestConfigs Poll.
High-End AMD Gaming PC
Only two entrants were chosen to compete in this quarter’s High-End AMD-Based Gaming PC BestConfigs category. Ivan’s AMD Overkill Build put up a good fight, taking 40 percent of the vote. But readers overwhelmingly favored CJ’s White Unicorn with no horn in this category.
The winning rig from CJ’s White Unicorn with no horn was built around the AMD FX-8350 4.0GHz processor, with a Corsair H110 94.0 CFM closed-loop cooler on an Asus Sabertooth 990FX R2.0 ATX AM3-based motherboard. It has Kingston's Blu Red Series 16GB (2 x 8GB) DDR3-1600 for memory, a Samsung SH-224DB/BEBE DVD/CD writer optical drive, and splits up its storage duties between a super-fast Samsung 840 EVO 120GB 2.5” SSD and a roomy Seagate Barracuda 2TB 3.5” 7200RPM hard drive.
The graphics capabilities are exceptional in this build thanks to the XFX Radeon R9 290X 4GB Double Dissipation video card, which features AMD’s PowerTune, TrueAudio, UltraHD and Eyefinity technologies. CJ’s White Unicorn with no horn’s build is powered by a low-noise, high-efficiency Corsair RM 1000W 80 PLUS Gold-certified modular power supply and housed in a Corsair 500R White mid-tower case, adding even more cooling to keep the graphics card humming smoothly.
CJ’s White Unicorn with no horn:
Congratulations to forum member CJ for having his recommended build picked by the Tom's Hardware community this quarter!
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Shneiky I am visiting tom's daily (like every morning with my coffee) and I never saw the pools and when they accepted them. I only see the winners announced. Because yet again, the high-end workstation is rather disappointing. I give all kudos to the people that spend time to put them together and I do completely respect their work. but I do guess they do not use productivity software on a daily basis or rather not a large number of them.Reply
A lot of people are overestimating the usage of GPUs in today's software. GPU acceleration is rather small and does not always use even half of the GPUs potential. Going over a K2000 or K4000 or a GTX660/760 does almost nothing in Premier, Photoshop or 2D vector packages. AE does exhibit small benefits, but nothing as major as sinking that money in a CPU. On Autodesk's front - you need the video card just for the display in Maya/Max/Autocad/etc. And at the current project I am in, the 2 million poly rigged character moves as smooth on my office K4000 as on my home 650TI plus all the particles and fluids. Rendering is all CPU based. There are few GPU renderers, but the quality is nowhere near that of a good old CPU based software renderer. 99% of the professionaly used renderers are CPU based. Vray, Arnold, Maxwell, PRM, MentalRay, etc. I-ray is yet to make a splash in the production world and up until now acts as a nice tech-demo or used in arhi previz. The Foundry's software is the same deal. NUKE and NUKEX are still (even though they say it does) very limited to what extend it uses CUDA. Tracking software, like 3D Equalizer - CPU does the work, GPU accelerated the image processing and loading. Some might argue about MentalRay and VRay IPR, but those are in their major usage - a preview renderer, before you batch render on the CPU. As it stands today - end of 2014 and beginning of 2015, spending more money on a GPU than a CPU for a workstation is a complete waste in 95% of the time. Unless you are going real-time interactive of real-time preview work - GPU is rather unused. And this covers the majority of Adobe, Autodesk, The Foundry and software used for visuals I use regularly.
I can not say anything about audio, because I am not in the audio and sound design sphere, so somebody with some real experience might want to cover that.
Cheers -
BoredSysAdmin Typo in the article: AMD Radeon’s Low Power Space Saving NASReply
And further on re: Nas - I think besides the T series CPU it's completely wrong. Case which supports only 3 hd's and none-hotplug. DVD drive which is near useless (or 100% useless after the OS install) Too expensive mobo, too powerful PSU.
8gb is decent ram for NAS, but with cheap RAM which most systems could use for cache it would crime not to add more.
I also agree with Shneiky - I don't know how many people voted for this workstation build - but besides GPU (I won't know much about it) workstation is about typically multiple CPUs, server grade reliability supported by server grade hardware. Yes it's much more expensive, but guess what - it's worth it if you consider value of downtime for high paying professional. -
envy14tpe I haven't seen one of these "poll" builds for months and now there are winners. No one knew which explains why I see some bad build "winners". In the future it would be nice to vote.Reply -
TechyInAZ Where did this come from? I have never heard of this best configs thing before, it would be nice to know so I can vote next time.Reply -
gamebrigada 14868115 said:I am visiting tom's daily (like every morning with my coffee) and I never saw the pools and when they accepted them. I only see the winners announced. Because yet again, the high-end workstation is rather disappointing. I give all kudos to the people that spend time to put them together and I do completely respect their work. but I do guess they do not use productivity software on a daily basis or rather not a large number of them.
I completely second this. I'm in the aerospace industry, and not so long ago, a quality Quadro card was absolutely necessary for every build we did. Otherwise the CAD software was unstable, had artifacts, and general screw-ups. Nowadays, we rarely get super high-end cards. The lowend k2000m or k1000m are more than enough for most of our usage, but even that is overkill. Hell the high end Surface Pro 3 can run all of our CAD software without a hitch.
We still haven't gone away from Xeons and ECC memory, but we are willing to pay the price for easy proc upgrades, amount of memory supported, the stability and longevity of the combo. We're willing to get a couple high end Xeons with tons of memory for the price of a highend graphics card. The most expensive card we've gotten in the past few years was a quadro 4000, just because HP set us up for an epic price, and my hyperv host wanted remotefx love. -
burmese_dude I can't really say I saw the submission or voting links in the past. Had I saw submission site, I would've entered my Pentium 266 II with MMX PC system and that sure would've won all categories. I mean it's got 4 gig of HD. Who wouldn't salivate over that.Reply -
littleleo I read Tom's every week and several times per day and I don't recall any mention of a poll or I would have voted. Some of the winners are deserving but it would have been nice if more could have voted. Why hide the link to this poll?Reply
Also I noticed on Damric’s $600 AMD Budget Tweaker in the system description you describe the CPU and motherboard as AMD FX-8350 and a Asus M5A99FX Pro R2.0 motherboard, Yet below it you list the parts as AMD Athlon X4 760K and a ASRock FM2A75 PRO4+, so which is it? -
hons The winners are :Reply
Home Theater PC Joseph
High-End Intel Gaming PC AMD Radeon’s
High-End AMD Gaming PC CJ
Budget AMD-Based Gaming PC Damric
AMD-Based Office PC Cody
Budget Intel-Based Gaming PC damric
Intel-Based Office PC AMD Radeon
MicroATX Gaming Build AMD Radeon
NAS PC AMD Radeon
High-End Workstation Joseph,
So, how many PCs a member can win??? From what I can see "AMD Radeon" got 4!!!! Is this real???? -
hons The winners are :Reply
Home Theater PC Joseph
High-End Intel Gaming PC AMD Radeon’s
High-End AMD Gaming PC CJ
Budget AMD-Based Gaming PC Damric
AMD-Based Office PC Cody
Budget Intel-Based Gaming PC damric
Intel-Based Office PC AMD Radeon
MicroATX Gaming Build AMD Radeon
NAS PC AMD Radeon
High-End Workstation Joseph,
So, how many PCs a member can win??? From what I can see "AMD Radeon" got 4!!!! Is this real???? -
hons The winners are :Reply
Home Theater PC Joseph
High-End Intel Gaming PC AMD Radeon’s
High-End AMD Gaming PC CJ
Budget AMD-Based Gaming PC Damric
AMD-Based Office PC Cody
Budget Intel-Based Gaming PC damric
Intel-Based Office PC AMD Radeon
MicroATX Gaming Build AMD Radeon
NAS PC AMD Radeon
High-End Workstation Joseph,
So, how many PCs a member can win??? From what I can see "AMD Radeon" got 4!!!! Is this real????