System Builder Marathon, Q4 2012: $500 Gaming PC

Benchmark Results: Audio And Video

Although a number of our tests are changing this quarter, we retain the same workloads and executables for iTune and Lame. We know that there's virtually no difference between Windows 7 and 8. So, we can assume the difference in encoding time between both machines is a result of this quarter's 100 MHz-lower clock rate.

Our comparison has to end there, though, since we're updating the rest of our tests.

Considering the processors in both machines share the same architecture, we expect (and receive) roughly the same outcome from our threaded benchmarks. This quarter's machine ends up being a little bit faster. Could this be a result of tighter memory timings?