AVADirect Deluxe Quiet Gaming Desktop PC Review

Since our last desktop review, I've overhauled the benchmarking suite for desktop systems. That means that AVADirect's build is getting a fairly fresh start. Futuremark has updated their PCMark 8 and 3DMark suites somewhat, making test results less comparable, and Cinebench has updated in the interim to R15. I figured now would also be a reasonable opportunity to trim down and focus gaming benchmarks.

Unfortunately, until I get more test systems in, comparison points are essentially lacking, but I can at least present the test results I do have for AVADirect's system.

Note that for PCMark 8, I'm running it with OpenCL acceleration. Since this is essentially the direction things are moving, it seems sensible to enable OpenCL.

Scores are about where they should be, although the modest overclock and DDR3-1600 does hurt AVADirect a little. As far as the overclock goes, I'm not sure what can be done other than to try and cherry pick as many i7-4770Ks as possible; Haswell has a pretty wide range that I've experienced myself. 4.2GHz is conservative, but it's also about as high as I'd guarantee the majority of chips to be able to reliably hit and it seems to be what the SI industry has standardized on.

For gaming, I'm stuck on 1080p testing, so I've instead opted to just ramp settings as high as possible for each game. The reality is that our high end gaming hardware is stuck in a sort of limbo: too powerful for 1080p, nowhere near enough for 4K. Suffice to say, a single GTX 780 is mostly enough to handle the games in my revised suite.

Keep in mind that Metro: Last Light and Tomb Raider are both running with SSAA, which is pretty taxing. So while we've got playable performance, it's not otherworldly just yet; we're not hitting the magic 60fps.

The bottom line is that AVADirect's system is more than adequate for handling most tasks and a fine gaming machine.