Conclusion

To quantify the performance of our system we're using well-know benchmarks and games. Regarding the 3D perfomance this system scores 5'867 points in 3DMark Fire Strike Extreme and Unigine Heaven shows 1'157 points or 46 fps. In the heavy multi-thread benchmark Cinebench R15 525 points are achieved in stock mode and 715 points, when we overclocked the CPU to 4.5 GHz. Since we installed an aftermarket cooler on an unclocked CPU, pushing the CPU to higher frequencies is very well possible. For that purpose the ASRock motherobard even offers various presets, which make overclocking super easy.

Of course we also tested the system with some of the latest games available such as Battlefield 4, GRID Autosport and Tomb Raider. In all the three titles were tested with FullHD resolution and we managed to get an average of 50 fps with high settings.

The benchmarks only tell one part of the story and we were pleasantly surprised by the overall performance this system achieves. Despite the fact that these days Intel processors are superior in terms of raw performance, IPC and power consumption, we believe that this AMD system still is decent value for the money. Apart from that the SSDs also play a very important role and since we're using two fast drives in a RAID0 configuration the operating system is very responsive and loading times are really quick.
For a little bit over 1200 euro we have a fast and whisper quiet machine, which is capable of running games at 1080p/50fps with high settings. The two 240GB SSDs gives you plenty of space for operating system and also games and apps and the make the system very responsive.

Page 1 - Introduction	Page 4 - Component selection: part 2
Page 2 - Preview	Page 5 - Installation
Page 3 - Component selection: part 1	Page 6 - Conclusion