
We begin our benchmark analysis with the synthetics, which should pinpoint the biggest differences between this quarter's and last quarter's System Builder Marathon setups. There's the Core i7 against the Core i5, and the GeForce GTX 780 Ti against the 770s in SLI.
Processor-oriented tests able to exploit Hyper-Threading should demonstrate gains on the new system. Meanwhile, games designed to tax GPUs could go either way, depending on optimizations for Nvidia's multi-GPU technology.

The Cloud Gate test result (in red) favors the single GeForce GTX 780 Ti over our previous SLI setup. This could be considered surprising, given how much higher those 770s score in the Graphics component. But because our Core i7-4770K features Hyper-Threading, allowing it to excel in the Physics test, Futuremark appears to weigh that functionality more heavily.


In PCMark, the Core i7 clearly enjoys a huge advantage in the Home and Creative benchmark tests, while the work result barely changes between systems. As far as storage is concerned, the fast SSDs achieve almost identical scores.

The Core i7-4770K shows up the previous build's Core i5-4670K when it comes to Sandra's Arithmetic module, which obviously takes advantage of as many logical cores as it can.

With the new build defaulting to 1333 MT/s memory settings, bandwidth appears disappointingly low until the XMP memory profile is instantiated. This will likely have a detrimental impact on any memory-dependent benchmarks in our test suite.
- Taking The SBM Down A Different Road
- CPU, Motherboard, And Cooler
- Video Card, Power Supply, And Case
- Memory, Hard Drives, And Optical Storage
- System Assembly And Overclocking
- Test System And Benchmarks
- Results: Synthetics
- Results: Media Transcoding
- Results: Rendering And Productivity
- Results: Adobe Creative Suite
- Results: Compression Tools
- Results: Battlefield 4 And Arma 3
- Results: Grid 2 And Far Cry 3
- Power And Temperature
- A Core i7 And Flagship GPU Impress, Naturally
(1) You could include temperatures and acoustics performance in the overall assessment, given I think that is a big part of the case buying decision, and
(2) A way to factor in the intangibles (i.e. blu ray vs dvd, choice of SSD/HDD, etc), you could include a separate vote between this quarter's and last quarter's to see what the readers would choose for the best build given all the performance factors, aesthetics, and other components that do not contribute directly to performance. The reader's vote of this quarter vs. last quarter and/or an overall value winner for this quarter could be included in the final write-up.
I would also 2nd the vote for starting 4K testing. And also, why not 1440p? It seems those two resolutions are more relevant now in 2014 at the level of this competition than 1600x900 and 4800x900 resolutions.
Hmm.... What percentage of the performance measures in this article are for gaming?
I'm thinking a selection of CPUs as a fixed starting point, and GPU decisions based on remaining budget. Maybe an i7, i5, FX-8, and an APU.
Would be really interesting to see the performance differences across workloads by allocating budget between CPU and other components.
Already done for ITX. See here:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/build-your-own-haswell-overclocking,3608.html
I'd second the uATX. In fact, I'd really like to see Crash attempt a uATX dual-gpu setup.
Frankly, it was the cheapest available card when the systems were ordered.
Nope.
The purpose is to have a resolution that the low-budget PC can operate at for the comparison article at the end of the week.