Build-A-Rig Round 1: The $1500 PCs and Interviews from Corsair and Zotac

What Happens Now

We have the components for both of these systems in house, ready to build, test and review. This will take a couple of weeks, and we’ve chosen a good array of benchmarks to suit most needs while still retaining the focus of the purpose of this round of Build-A-Rig: a $1500 single monitor gaming machine. Given the responses from both Corsair and Zotac, it is clear that Corsair sees 4K gaming as the future and has designed for it, whereas the Zotac build might struggle at 4K but do great at 1080p/1440p which is ultimately where most gamers are at right now. With features like dynamic scaling resolution coming into the mix, perhaps the resolution of the panel is not the be-all and end-all of gaming.

Dustin Sklavos (Corsair) against Chinny Chuang (Zotac)

We will write up each PC for a full individual review, as well as a build log describing the experience of how the parts fit together. These reviews will be released over the next couple of weeks. Obviously the first one out of the gate gets the top results, but this is only because someone has to be the first tested (anyone remember Harry Enfield in Top Gear S01E01?). We have different editors working on each build as well, so each perspective should shed some light into how building the systems is easy, difficult, or fun to do.

How to Enter

For Build-A-Rig, we are posting the survey link on each piece so users can enter at any time. The final entry date is listed in the survey, and will most likely be a few days after we post our final round-up later in the month.

For the purposes of the giveaways, we should state that standard AnandTech rules apply. The full set of rules will be given in the survey link, but the overriding implementation is that the giveaways are limited to United States of America (US50), excluding Rhode Island, and winners must be 18 years or older.

With apologies to our many loyal readers outside the US, restricting the giveaways to the US is due to the fact that AnandTech (and more specifically our publisher, Purch) is a US registered company and competition law outside the US is very specific for each nation, with some requiring fees or legal implementations to be valid with various consequences if rules aren’t followed. It’s kind of difficult for the rules of 190+ countries/nations worldwide to all be followed, especially if certain ones demand fees for even offering a contest or tax on prizes. We recognize that other online magazines and companies do offer unrestricted worldwide competitions, but there are specific rules everyone should be following in order to stay on the side of the law. That’s the reality of it, and unfortunately we cannot change on this front, even with the help of Purch.

The survey link is:

http://www.surveygizmo.com/s3/2209797/AnandTech-Newegg-Build-A-Rig-Challenge-Sweepstakes-Q2-2015

Your Thoughts

Not everyone builds a system the same way in the same budget, and it’s all fine and well for us here at AnandTech to reel off a parts list but it seems to be great fun for everyone involved when the manufacturers of the components actually do it instead. Clearly there are disagreements to be had over which case to use, whether this SSD is better than that SSD and all sorts of things. In our initial Build-A-Rig introduction, one reader (gamer1000k) suggested a full build given the budget, focusing on mini-ITX:

User: gamer1000k
Name: Destroyer of Consoles
Case: Silverstone FTZ01B ITX $130
PSU: Silverstone SX600-G 600W $130
MB: ASRock Z97E-ITX $130
CPU: Intel Core-i5 4690K $240
RAM: G.SKILL Sniper 2x4GB DDR3-1866 $58
GPU: Zotac NVIDIA GTX 980ti AMP! $650
SSD: Crucial MX200 250GB $103
CPU Cooler: Corsair H55 $60
OS: SteamOS or Windows 10 Preview $0
Total: $1501

Rationale: Recently I've become fascinated with ITX gaming systems, and Silverstone makes some amazing cases that allow for a tremendous amount of power in a console form factor. This build takes into account not only traditional GPU bound games, but also provides a very fast CPU with a lot of overclocking headroom (courtesy Corsair H55 and 600W PSU) for some of the newer indie games (like Kerbal Space Program) that are actually CPU bound. The potent combination of an overclocked i5 and 980ti should allow for 4K gaming at reasonably high settings. This system is designed to be used in conjunction with a NAS/media server due to the low internal storage, but if the budget were flexible this case has room for another 2.5" and 3.5" drive.

This actually aligns quite well with Corsair’s build, with the CPU and GPU, although takes the mini-ITX route with less memory but some wiggle room due to the use of a ‘free’ operating system. I’d also be wary of the DRAM and storage, as these are difficult things to budget around without dropping capacity significantly.

So do you prefer having two extreme items and upgrading over time, or having a general all-around system every few years? Thoughts and comments on the builds from Corsair or Zotac are highly recommended. If you would take a different build completely (perhaps AMD, or dual GPU), we might loop a group of them into a pipeline post to see how they compare, so any explanation for choosing some parts over others (such as how gamer1000k has above) would be interesting to read.