And last but certainly not least, let's have a look at the big daddy of the marathon, the high-end system:

With a water-cooling system included in the case and a high-output power supply, the high-end system is an ideal overclocking candidate.

While we found the QX6850 to be unhappy with high FSB speeds, its unlocked multiplier allows us a lot of wiggle room. While we only needed a 355 MHz front side bus speed, when paired with an 11x multiplier this resulted in a final clock speed of 3905 MHz. While not a full GHz over the stock speed of 3.0 GHz, it's hard not to be impressed with four cores brushing up so closely against the 4 GHz mark.

It's notable that the Ballistix PC2-6400 RAM was performing at 947 MHz when paired with the overclocked bus speed, with solid 4-3-3-8 timings.

Concerning the graphics card overclock, the cards would clock to around 630 MHz GPU / 1043 MHz RAM until the system got hot. Notice that the Thermaltake Armor LCS has no side fan next to the graphics card, something that was needed even at stock speed for the previous marathon's high end build. Rather than perform further modification to the somewhat troublesome case, the final overclock was lowered to 615 MHz core and 1000 MHz memory.

With this info out of the way, let's look at the performance.