Our new PC was more expensive and it performed better. But was it worth the increase in price? Using the same performance formula from our efficiency calculations (10% storage, 30% each Games/Encoding/Productivity), we compared the overall performance of each system to its build cost using the former non-overclocked build as our baseline.

Most of the extra money in this month’s budget was spent to promote improved overclocking, and the new system did overclock better. Its performance increase was far smaller than its price increase, however. Furthermore, if you're not an overclocker, then that money would go to waste on unrealized potential.
At the same time, most of that extra money was spent in an effort to boost graphics performance, so perhaps a chart comparing each system’s highest-resolution gaming performance to its price will be the saving grace for our latest build?

And there’s what we wanted to see. The only problem with our new build is that it doesn't achieve similar benefits at lower game settings or in other applications. If you're spending big money on a pair of GeForce GTX 580s, though, we'd recommend using a display (or displays) befitting such a powerful combination.
The reason we put such a large percentage of our budget into graphics is that it accounts for 30% of our overall performance score, and there are few other places where big gains can be achieved. We are after all using the second-best LGA 1155 CPU at a fairly high overclock, and even fewer of our programs could benefit from the hundreds of dollars it would cost to upgrade to a Core i7-3930K. In this instance, the only buyers who can justify the added expensive of liquid-cooled graphics cards are the ones who value gaming supremacy above every other task they plan to throw at their new PC.
- 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.