Liquid cooling pumps are somewhat of a power hog, so we expected our new system to consume a little more at idle compared to the previous build.
Overclocking requires much more power, so its big consumption numbers are par for its superior overclock.

Liquid cooling usually drops temperatures, though sharing a small radiator with the GPU doesn’t help our CPU temperatures compared to the previous machine.

Efficiency compares work to energy, so we first compile a performance chart to gauge work per unit of time in comparison to the previous system’s baseline. After this, we compare the performance ranking to the power ranking.

The current overclocked PC is around 9% faster in games than its tweaked predecessor, but it also consumes more than 9% additional power. Keeping the former system’s standard speed as our baseline, we calculate our efficiency chart around it. Since the baseline is 100% (and yet nothing is 100% efficient), we then subtract 100% from the efficiency chart results to show only how much more or less efficient each system is by comparison.

First calculating overall performance at 10% for storage performance and 30% each for Gaming, Encoding, and Productivity scores, our power-per-performance chart shows that the previous build was more efficient in spite of its lower performance. Overclocking boosted its efficiency by increasing performance by more than power consumption.
A big boost in CPU voltage required by the new system increased its power consumption by a greater percentage than performance, resulting in less efficiency.
- A Bigger Budget For A Better PC
- Motherboard, CPU, And RAM
- Graphics, Case, And Power
- SSD, Hard Drive, And Optical Drive
- The Build
- Overclocking
- Test Settings
- Benchmark Results: 3DMark And PCMark
- Benchmark Results: SiSoftware Sandra
- Benchmark Results: Crysis And F1 2010
- Benchmark Results: Just Cause 2 And Metro 2033
- Benchmark Results: Audio And Video Encoding
- Benchmark Results: Productivity
- Power, Heat, And Efficiency
- Are Liquid-Cooled Graphics Cards Worth The Extra Expense?
Also, as much as I understand the frustration with sacrifices, IMHO that's where the best lessons are.
Fun to read, yes, but just not practical. Hmmm, I guess that means the downvoting is about to begin...
Also, as much as I understand the frustration with sacrifices, IMHO that's where the best lessons are.
Fun to read, yes, but just not practical. Hmmm, I guess that means the downvoting is about to begin...
So, I wait until tomorrow to enter?
No, you're good today. It should start with today's story. I'll see if I can get that changed.
Its also half the price.
Toms needs more current benchmarks, some of these games were talking are ages old. And need i say we need a RTS game in this mixture. I am a bit disappointed that the 3930k wasn't in this build along with a nice X79 board. Not that a 2600k processor isn't fast enough but you never know. I would rather pick up my six core but thats just me, and most likely it could be a waste. But like i said you never know, i remember SupCom came out and that required some CPU multi core power. Not sure how many cores were needed but a Quad was definitely better then a Dual core.
Considering the price of the 2 gtx580s, 3 hd6950s might offer better value - as long as the game allows multi-gpus.
You can compare the two by using another article by Thomas Soderstrom that also utilizes the i7-2600k but is looking at SLI/Crossfire scaling.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/crossfire-sli-3-way-scaling,2865.html
In the 3 games that the two systems both had shared benchmarks, the 3x 6950 was the clear winner.
Toms, can we get some reviews on how the computers from each bracket compare year over year as a general summary to end the year out? I would love to see what $2000 gets you in 2010 vs 2011, and even 2009. My bet is that there would be some decent changes over the last 2 years as everything has droped in price with the exception of those peskey hard drives.