System Builder Marathon, December 2010: $2000 PC

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With all of your feedback from last quarter's System Builder Marathon under our belts, this time around, we attempt to fit a no-sacrifice, luxury and performance build into our moderately-high $2000 budget. Will this new build succeed on all fronts?

Benchmark Results: 3DMark And PCMark

Today’s charts are arranged in order of average performance. Improvements at higher presets put the current build’s GeForce GTX 470s on top of the previous build’s GeForce GTX 460s, even though the previous build’s six-core processor had a higher CPU score.

PCMark loves I/O performance, with the new system’s striped pair of SSDs taking a big lead over the previous system’s single HDD.

We tried to pick the four most relevant scores from PCMark’s hard drive test to approximate real-world performance differences, but we don’t have these numbers from the previous build. That means today’s final score will be calculated without the above data, though our Day Four comparison of current systems will employ it.

It appears that overclocking actually improves the performance of our software RAID controller, probably by improving the performance of its host processor, the CPU.

Thomas Soderstrom
Thomas Soderstrom
Thomas Soderstrom is a Senior Staff Editor at Tom's Hardware US. He tests and reviews cases, cooling, memory and motherboards.
131 Comments Comment from the forums
  • amk09
    The link to enter the giveaway doesn't work!

    I would love to be first to enter :)
    Reply
  • micr0be
    i think im gona get a revo 2 drive ssd to upgrade my current build.... all thanks to santa !!
    Reply
  • Tamz_msc
    Its good to know that choosing the wrong memory can affect performance in such a way.
    Reply
  • fstrthnu
    I'm pretty surprised we didn't see Geforce GTX 570s in this build, I guess they got released too late to make it here.
    Reply
  • fstrthnu
    >> First time in recent memory
    "Cough Cough" Lame Pun
    Reply
  • jerreece
    Wow that Mushkin memory really jacked up this benchmark.
    Reply
  • kkiddu
    Most perfect build ever ? Just read the configs yet, and I think that's a possibility.

    Now don't skin me if the config proves to be a flop in the coming pages. Just read the first page and couldn't resist a comment.
    Reply
  • hemburger
    Why not replace the two ssd's with a single intel 120gb... same price and now on 35nm
    Reply
  • kkiddu
    I think this one can be trimmed to a very good $1500 build as well. Change the CPU to i5 760, remove one of the cards, one of the SSDs, and you'll need lower capacity PSU for that, let's slash $30-$50 there, you get a very good PC for $1500.
    Reply
  • kkiddu
    And oh, cheapen the case as well. There's no free lunch. You gotta sacrifice some silence to gains some frame rates.
    Reply