Using the same sort of approach as Paul did yesterday, Don picks the parts for his System Builder Marathon machine with a bias toward gaming. How ... Read more

This quarter, we're starting our System Builder Marathon with a little experiment. Paul wanted to build a gaming PC for $650 that'd target smooth ... Read more

A 20% budget boost for this quarter’s machines gave every builder room to fix former foibles, yet only the cheapest system showed big performance ... Read more

You've already seen our first two System Builder Marathon configurations, both of which are more expensive than last quarter's. Our entry-level ... Read more

We mix things up with a $1200 budget, a brutally powerful Radeon HD 6950 CrossFire combo, and AMD's new FX processor in the final mid-range ... Read more

Lessons learned over the past two quarters have helped us build one of our fastest PCs yet. But is it really worth the extra $400 over the ... Read more

You don't need a massive case to cram in tons of computing muscle. With a little help from a few manufacturers, our excessively-overclocked ... Read more

Big changes to a few components radically alter the performance profile of every machine in this quarter's competition. We’ve already seen how ... Read more

A few months ago, we built our $500 gaming PC using Intel's Sandy Bridge-based Core i3 processor, and it was a real screamer. This time around ... Read more

This quarter's $1000 enthusiast-oriented PC gets a new lease on life with a 30 GB solid-state drive and a couple of GeForce GTX 460s. Does that ... Read more

Falling memory prices make it easier to spend our $2000 budget on the fastest available components. How much faster is a pair of GeForce GTX 580s ... Read more

You spoke up in the first story from this quarter's System Builder Marathon, and we listened. Today we compare that first $2000 build to an ... Read more

With so little happening in the hardware world since the beginning of this year, our second-quarter System Builder Marathon sees only minor ... Read more

This quarter's $500 PC is sure to be a little controversial. We've built plenty of AMD-powered budget boxes in the past, but now we're testing ... Read more

This quarter, we're keeping the Core i5-2500K processor from our previous build, but we're adding a pair of Radeon HD 6850s in CrossFire. How ... Read more

The launch of Intel's Z68 Express platform affects our build in a way we aren't benchmarking. But can we still put together a better ... Read more

We used our second chance opportunity to hand-pick a $2000 PC with even more graphics power, at a lower cost. Getting more powerful GPUs means ... Read more

Day 4 of our System Builder Marathon compares performance achieved to money spent. With outright speed the top priority, can either of our ... Read more

The last two System Builder Marathon configurations centered on Intel's Sandy Bridge architecture. But AMD still seems to rule the ... Read more

We give Sandy Bridge yet another shot in our second System Builder Marathon configuration of the month, leaning on Intel's Core i5-2500K. How ... Read more

Nick-of-time availability on revision B3-based P67 motherboards makes it possible for us to explore Intel's Sandy Bridge architecture in the ... Read more

The first $2000 build in this quarter's SBM series provided astonishing performance overall, but a few disappointments forced us to consider ... Read more