Could We Have A Value Winner At $1,000?
This month, I was forced to give up $1,000 worth of my budget to create a tighter comparison when we get the chance to break down value. But last quarter's $2,000 setup won't be a part of that story. So, I'll draw my comparisons now. We know that it cost twice as much and came nowhere near delivering two times as much performance. This is our chance to quantify the difference.
Serving up 83% of the previous build's performance, today’s half-priced machine gets a 61% value boost from its lower price. Both systems gain value from free overclocking, which is technically free. However, this quarter's overclocked value leads our previous effort by around 66%.
Gaming value becomes even more important when a PC is built expressly for that purpose. We’d like to say that today’s build turned into a capable gaming platform by accident, but we always knew that leaving out enhancements that don't affect performance would limit the utility of this machine to the most performance-sensitive workloads.
With that in mind, Q4 2012's advantage in games is larger than its overall performance lead (when we factor in the other benchmarks). But that advantage is still not large enough to overcome its astronomical increase in price.
