The gaming benchmarks are undoubtedly the most interesting benchmarks you'll see in this article. Even though we won't compare our results here with those of the other two systems until Thursday, you can still get a decent idea of the gaming capabilities of the mid-range PC just by perusing our findings below.

We begin with Prey, which has a 3d engine based on a highly modified version ID's Doom3 engine. This modified engine is much harder on the PC than Doom3 is, so let's see if it offers a challenge to the mid-range PC.

Prey is totally dominated by the Q6700/ Geforece 8800 GTX combo. Even at the highest resolution with 4xAA, the system pushes out an extremely smooth average of over 60 frames per second. The mid-range PC appears to be a strong gaming platform already.

The next first person shooter we will analyze is Unreal Tournament 3.

While Unreal was benchmarked without anti-aliasing enabled, due to hardware limitations, we can still see that the mid-range system has more performance than this title requires at 1920x1200. Once again the mid-range system offers an average frame rate over 60 fps, demonstrating ultra-smooth gameplay.

The mid-range system seems unbeatable at this point. But that's only because we haven't looked at the Crysis benchmarks yet...