Hear Me Roar

T he PAX Predator belongs in the same  genus as the rest of our CPU System  Workshop builds, but it’s clearly a new  species all to itself. Once we finished putting  all the components together, our latest  custom PC was ready to show its fangs and  eat up our benchmarks.
Haswell quickly became one of our  favorite processors, appearing in two of our  four CPU System Workshop PCs last year.
The Core i7-4770K in the PAX Predator is  the third time we’ve used this chip, so we  were quite comfortable with it this time  around. In fact, we used our familiarity (and  a little help from Thermaltake’s Water 3.0  Pro) with the 4770K to push its clock speed  to new heights—4.4GHz, or 100MHz  faster than our previous OC. As a result,  our CPU-intensive benchmarks benefitted  the most from the healthy overclock. Our  Cinebench 11.5 results improved by 12.5%,  and our POV-Ray 3.7 Beta results shot  up 12.6%. As we’ve said before, getting  extra performance without paying a dime  is always a winning strategy, and the 4770K  can go well beyond 3.5GHz.
Hear Me Roar
The PAX Predator’s GeForce GTX  760 came to us already overclocked,  so we thank GIGABYTE for doing all  the hard work. Because of this, you’ll  notice that our graphics scores didn’t  really budge when we tested the system  at two processor clock speeds. For a  graphics card that some consider to be  midrange, the GV-N760OC-4GD did  very well for itself. In both games, the  graphics card produced great results  at 1080p with maxed quality settings.
If you want to dial down some of the  quality settings, this single GTX 760 should make you plenty happy at higher  resolutions, too.
This system is fast on its feet, thanks  to the HyperX 3K SSD. Everything  loads incredibly fast thanks to this boot  drive. Windows was ready in a matter of  seconds, and games load incredibly fast. Thanks to all of the excellent components  tucked away within the PAX Predator, it’s no  wonder that this machine produced envious  results in our benchmarks. We’ll have it on  display at PAX Prime, so GET TO THE  CHOPPA and get yourself entered for a  chance to win.
Processor: Intel Core i7-4770K; Motherboard: GIGABYTE GA-Z87X-UD5H; Graphics card:
GIGABYTE GeForce GTX 760 (GV-N760OC-4GD); RAM: 16GB G.Skill RipjawsX DDR3-1600;
Storage: 128GB Kingston HyperX 3K SSD; PSU: LEPA MaxBron 1000-MB; Cooler: Thermaltake
Water 3.0 Pro; OS: Windows 8.1 Pro
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