Your Top Picks: Tom's Hardware Forums' Q1 2013 BestConfigs

Round-ups
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So you like our System Builder Marathon? 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 in Q1 2013 BestConfigs Poll.

AMD-Based Home Office PC

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Five builds were in the running for this quarter's AMD-Based Home Office PC.

Ultimately, Pacioli’s “Office Workhorse” beat out fellow forum member g-unit1111’s “Yeah, I’m going to need you to work on Sunday. If you could be here around 9:00, that’d be great” by a single vote to become the Q1 2013 AMD-Based Home Office PC.

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

Packing AMD’s highest-end APU, the A10-5800K, Pacioli’s Office Workhorse is nice evolution over 2011’s A8-3850-based build. With mostly the same or equivalent components, this year’s AMD Home Office PC has a better processor, CPU cooler, and power supply, yet still hits the same price target of $500.

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The AMD A10-5800K packs as much compute and graphics processing power as most home office PCs would ever need, all wrapped up in one piece of silicon. Keeping temperatures under control is Cooler Master’s Hyper TX3, a smaller, quieter alternative to the company’s now-legendary Hyper Evo cooler. Pacioli chose the ASRock FM2A55M-DGS as the platform for his AMD-based Office Workhorse.

Occupying the board’s DIMM slots are two sticks of 4 GB DDR3-1600 Ripjaws memory modules from G.Skill. Spending big on core components leaves little in the budget for an SSD. Instead, Pacioli went with old faithful, a 1 TB Western Digital Caviar Blue. Driving the combination of parts is another popular, reliable, and budget-friendly component: Corsair's CX430.

Something tells us that this won't be the last time you see those two products in this quarter’s BestConfigs.

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G.Skill Ripjaws DDR3-1600

The whole enchilada is wrapped up in Antec’s tasteful and timeless Three Hundred chassis. Samsung provides the not-quite-obsolete optical drive in the form of a cheap 24x DVD burner.

At the time Pacioli configured this build, the components added up to $460.93. The current price of Pacioli’s Office Workhorse can be found in the BestConfigs shopping tables.