Overclockers Gold Rush Gamer Pro

 

This is a machine that in-corporates the top desktop CPU of this new Fourth Gen line of products and Nvidia's grandest 700 series graphics processor. With that in mind, does it give it that top spot? I will say No…because the 3XS Vengeance 780 by Scan is till my better choice - and it's much cheaper, too.

Does that mean I have no reason to talk about this machine? Even as it struggles to go hand in hand with the cheaper Scan PC? The only answer is that Scan has a better version of the GTX 780 that beats the one Overclockers is using hands down.

Thinking about the Titan-esque cooler that GTX 780 has, it's harder to tell who copied the other, even though the consumer still wins. This machine is also ranked below Scan’s Vengeance 780 that used the lightly tweaked EVGA version.

Something else is that overclocking the GPU does not make your graphic card performance necessarily better. For example, for the GTX 770 - its reference card can be offset by 125MHz but this boost will only add you a mere couple fps is you are lucky…after all, the GK104 GPU is already giving all it can.

On the other hand, the GK110 GPU in the GTX 780 still has a lot of juice unsqueezed, doing a 175MHz offset can be more productive in terms of the gaming performance.

Benchmarks

CPU rendering performance
Cinebench R11.5: Index score: Higher is better
OC Gold Rush Gamer Pro: 9.68
Scan 3XS Vengeance 780: 9.59
Aria Gladiator Diablo GTX: 7.69

DirectX11 gaming performance
Heaven 4.0: Frames per second: Higher is better
OC Gold Rush Gamer Pro: 55
Scan 3XS Vengeance 780: 780 63
Aria Gladiator Diablo GTX: 49

DirectX 11 gaming performance
BioShock Infinite: Frames per second: Higher is better
OC Gold Rush Gamer Pro: 23
Scan 3XS Vengeance 780: 28
Aria Gladiator Diablo GTX: 19

The Bitfenix chassis is far nicer than Scan's more budget-oriented Corsair case, but still doesn't merit the price bump. Overclockers can lay claim to quicker Team Group 8GB 2,133MHz memory, but the weaker 840 series SSD has that offset already.

Verdict

Sadly, this Overclockers machine is just a shade off the pace. And when you're talking about a rig that still has some of the finest CPU and GPU combos around, that might be a bit of a shock. Scan has been very smart with its choice of GPU and very aggressive on price too, and this rig really struggles to make a stand against it.