TEch Reports September 2014 System Guide

guess it must be. Intel has shaken up the high end of its desktop line with Haswell-E processors and the new X99 chipset, which has also had the side-effect of bringing DDR4 memory into the picture. None of that premium, state-of-the-art hardware is particularly cheap, but it sure is fast—and there’s nothing else like it in the market today.

Then there’s AMD’s Radeon R9 285 graphics card, which came out of a couple of weeks ago and is perhaps the best option around $250 right now. It may even be a better deal than the pricier Radeon R9 280X. A couple of Nvidia’s high-end offerings have come down in price, too, which has made us rethink our recommendations somewhat.

All in all, there’s plenty of meat here for a substantial guide update.

To mark the occasion, we’ve also featured not one but two Haswell-E configs in our sample builds section. The fastest one is decked out with 32GB of DDR4 RAM, dual GeForce GTX 780s, and other such indulgences. It’s kind of crazy, but that’s part of the point of Intel’s new platform. Read on for all the gory details.

via TR’s September 2014 System Guide – The Tech Report