Related articles

• System Builder Marathon, May '09: $2,500 Performance PC

  System Builder Marathon, May 2009: The Articles Here are links to each of the four articles in this month’s System Builder Marathon (we’ll update them as each story is published). Day 1: The $2,500 Performance PC Day 2: The $1,300 Enthusiast PC Day 3: The $600 Gaming PCDay 4: Performance and Value Dissected Introduction Tom’s Hardware looks to your feedback in article planning. One of the most frequent of many System Builder Marathon (SBM) themes you’ve proposed in our comments section is that of the “gaming cube,” and that's why all three of this month's configurations attempt to maximize the performance potential available with portable enclosures. Forget the term small form-factor cases (SFF) when thinking of Micro-ATX cubes, since “form factors” are dimensional standards that apply to internal components. SFF originated with the two-slot designs of Shuttle barebones PCs, so the insistence of some manufacturers on using the term to describe much larger and completely incompatible Micro-ATX parts only serves to confuse inexperienced builders. With portability our first priority, we tried to stuff as many high-end parts as our budget would allow into the most portable Micro-ATX case we could find. Here’s what we came up with: $2,500 Portable PC Performance Parts PricesMotherboardDFI LANParty Jr X58-T3H6 Micro-ATX Intel X58/ICH10R, LGA1366$220ProcessorIntel Core i7-920 Four Cores, 2.66 GHz, 8 MB Cache$289MemoryMushkin 998679 6.0 GB DDR3-1600 3x 2.0 GB, CAS 7-8-7-20, 1.65 V$138Graphics2 x EVGA GeForce GTX 295 in SLI 1,792 MB GDDR3-2000 Per Card 576 MHz GPU, 1,242 MHz Shader$1,058Hard Drives2 x Western Digital RE3 WD50002ABYS (RAID 0) 500 GB, 7200 RPM, 16 MB Cache SATA 3.0 Gb/s$180OpticalLG GGC-H20LK Blu-ray Disk/HD-DVD ROM 6x BRD, 3x HD-DVD ROM, 16x DVD±R$100CaseSilverstone SG04B-H Micro-ATX Mini-Tower$170PowerCorsair CMPSU-1000HX Modular 1,000 W ATX12V 2.2, EPS12V 2.91, 80-Plus Certified$240Intake Fans2 x Scythe S-Flex SFF21F 120 mm, 1,600 RPM, 63.7 CFM at 28.0 dBA$28Exhaust FanSilverstone RL-FX121 Cross Flow Blower 3,000 RPM, 14 CFM at 26 dBA$17 Total Cost$ 2,440 While we stick to the above price list as our recommended configuration, a serious shortage of GeForce GTX 295 boards forced us to buy the only model in stock at ordering time, resulting in some visually-different but functionally-identical replacement products. We’re fairly certain that the lucky winner of today’s build will be pleased with the overall result. Ed.: Wait, what was that? The lucky winner? That's right folks. We're going to be giving away this system, plus the two machines to follow tomorrow and the day after. Once the SBM series has run its course this week, look for a contest page to go up on the front page of the site. You'll need to answer one question about each of our configurations and will then be entered into a drawing for one of this month's three SBM builds!

• Conclusion

  Today’s $2,500 system certainly feels like a performance machine, but we’ll have to wait until Thursday to see where it stands against the less expensive builds of this month’s marathon. However, we can consider the impact of overclocking on performance and efficiency. While the graphics system had the highest overclock as a percent of base speed, the greatest performance yield came in A/V encoding by way of CPU overclocking. But overclocking increases heat and a warm system is usually less power-efficient than a cool one. So how much did overclocking hurt efficiency? We’re thrilled to see an efficiency increase of 1% (actually, 0.6% rounded up) through overclocking in the chart above, and the added efficiency makes some sense because of the low voltage levels used to reach those higher clock speeds. While supply issues led us to use substitute parts, identical specifications helped ensure that the substitutes had no performance impact on today’s build. And while the end product doesn’t look identical to the system we planned, it was still a pleasure to use. Ed.: Stay tuned for part two of our System Builder Marathon tomorrow. And as mentioned, keep an eye out for the upcoming contest, where we give this machine (plus the other two) away!

• Media Encoding And Rendering Benchmarks

  In audio encoding applications, the overclocked Phenom II can’t even keep up with the stock Core i7-920. The story is the same when it comes to video encoding. The overclocked Phenom II X4 955 comes close to the stock Core i7-920, but when the Intel CPU is overclocked, it isn’t even a contest. In 3ds Max, the Cyberpower Gamer Dragon places well, but is still no match for the stock Core i7-920, never mind the overclocked version.