Bonus: We Build And Test A Budget Gamer's Special

Though not strictly one of our test systems, we thought it would be very, very interesting to see what happens when we put a top-of-the-line Geforce 8800 GTX in our low cost system. Here's why:

One of the hotly debated topics on our forums is whether or not the 8800 GTX is meaningfully bottlenecked by a low-end CPU. The System Builder Marathon offered us the perfect opportunity to put this argument to the test.

So we pitted the mid-range system - a well balanced machine with solid components and an 8800 GTS - against our low-cost system in gaming-only benchmarks. The difference is we'll be trading out the 7600 GT in our low-cost system for a Geforce 8800 GTX! We'll also be using the midrange system's power supply, as the low-cost PC's power supply doesn't have enough PCIe power cables to support the 8800.

We've called the resulting low-cost system with a better PSU and 8800 GTX the 'Budget Gamer's Special'. Here's a list of components and costs vs. the mid-range system:

At this point, it's hard not to notice that the 8800 GTX's price has nearly doubled the low-cost PC's price, bringing it much, much closer to the cost of the mid-range system. This lessens the impact of the results, but it'll still be interesting to see what happens.