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Review: The MicroFlex 47B delivers outstanding Haswell-powered performance at a reasonable price |
June 01, 2013
The desktop PC gets a bad rap. It’s cheap, dependable, and oh so customizable. It’s just just not sexy enough to keep the eye of HP, Sony, and the industry’s other big players from straying to the lucrative mobile market. Even Intel’s new line of processors, the highly-anticipated fourth-generation Core chips so boringly codenamed Haswell, are designed with notebooks and tablets top of mind. But we’ll forgive Intel for that, because these new parts are faster, they’re more efficient, and they feature better integrated graphics performance than any of their Ivy Bridge predecessors.
The MicroFlex 47B tore through our Desktop Worldbench 8.1 benchmark suite.
Hold the phone! Two of those three enhancements are meaningless to desktop PC buyers. Who cares how much power your PC sucks down? And if you outgrow your video card, you just save up the cash for an upgrade, right? Right. Performance today and easy upgrades when you need them are what’s really important. That must be why Micro Express chose this flat-black megalith of a case and filled it with the delicious components that make up the surprisingly affordable MicroFlex 47B.
The MicroFlex 47B has the distinction of being the first Haswell-equipped desktop PC to come through the PCWorld test lab. It boasts a 3.5GHz Intel Core i7-4770K, 16GB of DDR3/1600 memory, and an Nvidia GeForce FTX 680 discrete graphics card with its own 2GB. Those components reside in an Asus Z87-Pro motherboard. The operating system resides on a 512GB Samsung 840 Pro SSD, and there’s a 1TB, 7200-rpm mechanical drive for storing all your data.
With specs like those, it should come as no surprise that the MicroFlex tore through our Desktop Worldbench 8.1 benchmark suite, settling with a score of 421. That makes it four times faster than the relatively tame Acer Aspire U desktop machine we’ve established as our 100-point reference. (It's also faster than the Intel reference motherboard with desktop Core i7-4770K that we benchmarked). What we did find remarkable about this monster is how quietly it went about humiliating the competition, even while playing the latest PC games with all the quality settings turned up to maximum.
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Link: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2040520/review-the-microflex-47b-delivers-outstanding-haswell-powered-performance-at-a-reasonable-price.html#tk.rss_reviews
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