Thomas Soderstrom and Shelton Romhanyi

Gaming enthusiasts always look for an edge, but that edge usually comes at a cost--time or money. We compare three systems from HP, Falcon NW, and Vigor aimed at gamers with more money than time.

Our three systems have been built and tested, so now it’s time to put them to the real test: will overclocking provide the performance advantages we anticipated?

Yesterday we chose our components, today we’ll test them. Does our $500 gamer make the grade?

How much performance can $500 buy? We set out to find the answer. Today we show you our choice of components. Tomorrow we present test results.

With prices of just about everything except computer components increasing, we stretched our budgets out a little...

The "High-End" build from our first System Builder Marathon is ready to show its overclocking stuff. We show you the results and present our overclocking recipe.

Over the next 3 days we overclock Dell's factory-overclocked XPS 720 H2C, our high-end System Builder Marathon PC and a new budget build. We pull it all together on Friday.