We've seen the fancier system win the vast majority of benchmarks, but now it's time to interpret the results of two systems that use similar technologies, where one has "performance doubling" features and the other a "price halving" options sheet.

The most noticeable average game performance gain for the Digital Storm Twister Extreme was in F.E.A.R., with a 51% difference. That's fine if you don't mind gaming at lower resolutions, but we also saw a 100% performance difference in all three games when using the highest possible settings.

3D Studio Max tops the applications performance comparison, giving the Digital Storm Twister Extreme an 85% lead over the far cheaper AVA Direct system. The old-version DivX benchmark isn't fully optimized for the Digital Storm system's four cores, but still shows it 26% faster than its competitor.

Sandra 2005 shows the greatest appreciation for the Digital Storm Twister Extreme's four-core processor, while SYSmark 2007 Preview acts like it was designed without multicore processors in mind. Our selection of several synthetics shows a spread similar to what a person would expect from real applications, where some are multi-core optimized and others are not.