Guru3D Rig of the Month - April 2011 - Page 3

7. Why ATI or NVIDIA, why Intel or AMD?

I chose NVIDIA and AMD for cost savings. At the time, I was trying to get some benchmarks that were close to an Intel 980x. I went with the hexacore because it was only the third of the cost of the Intel chip. As a result, I can get a healthy 75GFLOPS in LinX (Linpack) testing. In Sandra 2010, I get a peak of 103GFLOPS! It puts a nice dent into a stock 980X in the multimedia benchmark. Even better, my max CPU temps never go over 40 degress C. Currently since it is a little cold outside, I idle at 16 degrees C and get a full load of 36 degrees C. Not bad for about third the price. Thanks NVIDIA and AMD!

8. Does your PC live up to your expectations ?

Yes. I use my pc everyday. It can do basically anything I throw at it which is what I like to have. It doesn’t have to be the fastest, but I loathe waiting for stuff to load. This system boots fast despite the 5 drive raid 0 array and plays any game I currently own just fine. Nice.

9. What's the best part of your rig?

I think the best part about my rig is my raid array. With the 5 drives, Sandra reports that I can get up to 1.2GB/sec random WRITE AND READ. Holy cow these Caviar Black drives are fast….whew…
 

10. What sucks and should not have been bought?

My case is nice, but I think I outgrew it. I would say a nice Corsair would be a good upgrade. It would be fun to remount everything :p