Will It Game?

Always frugal but never “cheap”, our $500 system looks great. But how does it perform? Today we’ll go over a few details of assembly and overclocking before jumping into the benchmarks. We’ll finish the day with a comparison of relative value between this low-budget gamer and our March System Builder Marathon “Low-Cost” configuration.

We’ll start with a quick price comparison of the two competitors. First, a second look at our $500 gaming system price sheet.

For a few dollars more, our System Builder Marathon’s “Low-Cost” configuration got a better graphics card and quad-core processor.

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• 1 – Will It Game?
  

  1. 1 – Will It Game?
  2. 2 – Overclocking Details
  3. 3 – Test Configuration
  4. 4 – Benchmark Results: Crysis, Prey
  5. 5 – Supreme Commander, UT3, Warhammer
  6. 6 – Audio: iTunes, Lame MP3
  7. 7 – Applications: 3DS Max, Cinema4D, Photoshop, AVG, WinRAR
  8. 8 – Synthetics: 3D Mark 2006
  9. 9 – PC Mark 2005
  10. 10 – Sandra XII
  11. 11 – Average Performance Differences
  12. 12 – Performance Per Dollar, Conclusion
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