This month, I was forced to give up $1,000 worth of my budget to create a tighter comparison when we get the chance to break down value. But last quarter's $2,000 setup won't be a part of that story. So, I'll draw my comparisons now. We know that it cost twice as much and came nowhere near delivering two times as much performance. This is our chance to quantify the difference.

Serving up 83% of the previous build's performance, today’s half-priced machine gets a 61% value boost from its lower price. Both systems gain value from free overclocking, which is technically free. However, this quarter's overclocked value leads our previous effort by around 66%.

Gaming value becomes even more important when a PC is built expressly for that purpose. We’d like to say that today’s build turned into a capable gaming platform by accident, but we always knew that leaving out enhancements that don't affect performance would limit the utility of this machine to the most performance-sensitive workloads.
With that in mind, Q4 2012's advantage in games is larger than its overall performance lead (when we factor in the other benchmarks). But that advantage is still not large enough to overcome its astronomical increase in price.
- Can $1,000 Buy A High-End PC?
- Graphics, CPU, And Motherboard
- DRAM, Storage, And Optical Drive
- Case, Power, And CPU Cooling
- Hardware Installation
- Overclocking
- Test Settings And Benchmarks
- Results: 3DMark And PCMark
- Results: SiSoftware Sandra
- Results: Battlefield 3 And F1 2012
- Results: The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim And StarCraft II
- Results: Audio And Video Encoding
- Results: Adobe Creative Suite
- Results: Productivity
- Results: File Compression
- Power, Heat, And Efficiency
- Could We Have A Value Winner At $1,000?
Now instead of insults I can tell people "Don't be a stoogie". Thanks!
Otherwise, not much wriggle room here. Nice build!
Using the drive performance measurement to reflect program load times means loading all the programs on the SSD. And that explains why SSD capacity wasn't sacrificed to make more room in the budget for an HDD.
Looking from another perspective, these two builds, with two different builders, with $200 difference, just show(again) how much better price/performance wise are Intel CPU's and AMD GPU's.
I see your point, but I'd rather see slower game loads and better FPS , than faster game loads and lower FPS. And, the OS is accelerated in both cases anyway.
But hey, I'm on board with the 7870 Myst Edition CrossFire suggestion...I'll see if we can make it happen!
I think theres something to be said about the value at above $1000 though.. past this price range, people really start caring about having a nice case, nice cooler, etc that are more than just performance but aesthetics too.
Most likely they'd end up with a similar ugly case that no one would really want, possibly the same memory and hard disk, but the heart of the system would always be different.
Besides, people love rivalries. Sure, AMD processors blow in absolute performance, but they're cheap, and maybe the video card can save the day against the evil Intel/NVIDIA empires. It's a lot more interesting than testing two essentially identical machines, except for the hard disk.
Do it for different price ranges, and it might even be more competitive. $500, $750, and $1000 might not all have the same winner.
Pair a AMD CPU with a Nvidia GPU. So its expensive and may not perform as well.
(I will be extremely happy if this build performs well)