Once again, with no other benchmarks to directly compare it to, we can only speak to our experience with the mid-range system. It feels like a capable machine and it has certainly proven it's viability as a capable gaming machine, despite the fact that it uses only a single graphics card.

The Q6700 also promises some wicked overclocking, and, even though we didn't have space in our budget to include high-end water-cooling, we have high hopes.

(Compare Prices on Core 2 Quad Q6700)

Next, Thomas Soderstrom will be posting the results he achieved with his uber high-end system, and after that we will put these machines directly head to head to measure relative performance and value. It should be an interesting rest of the week!

Here's a list of the System Builder Marathon (SBM) articles in this five day series.

• Day 1: The Low-Cost PC
• Day 2: The Mid-Cost PC
• Day 3: The High-Cost PC
• Day 4: All Three SBM PCs Overclocked
• Day 5: Summary - The Price/Performance Winner