System Builder Marathon, December 2010: $2000 PC

Benchmark Results: DiRT 2

DiRT 2 is the second gaming benchmark to show us what appears to be a CPU bottleneck. But that can't be right, since the current system is clocked higher that the previous system.

We again confirmed that the true bottleneck was memory response time, where using better memory with either lower latency or higher frequency settings cured the problem.

As we would have expected from a CPU bottleneck, memory bottlenecks begin to disappear as we approach the limits of the graphics sub-system. That means the higher the detail levels, the higher the current system appears on our charts.