System Builder Marathon, March 2012: $2600 Performance PC

Deals
By
published

Benchmark Results: Productivity

The new $2600 PC tears through Photoshop and 3ds Max roughly 50% faster than its predecessor. That's a good sign that the core count increase is being taken advantage of. Not even last quarter's overclocked configuration can stand up to our new setup at its stock settings in these first two tests.

None of our file-compression utilities are well-threaded, yet the most commercialized of these has the worst CPU support. At substantially similar overclocked frequencies, our new six-core PC even falls behind the old quad-core chip in WinZip. A little birdie tells us that the next version of WinZip will take advantage of available compute resources more readily though, so we're eager to see what Corel has in store.

ABBYY FineReader enjoys somewhere around 45% better performance from a 50% increase in core count when both PCs are set to similar overclocks.

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.
134 Comments Comment from the forums
  • llguitargr8
    Just curious, did you guys purchase all these parts and right these articles before the GTX 680 was released? I really thought you guys would have gone with that, and if it wasn't because they weren't available at the time, then what makes the 7970 better in your opinion?
    Reply
  • llguitargr8
    Sorry, *write. It's late.
    Reply
  • g-unit1111
    Not sure if I agree with that choice of cooler but I definitely like the rest of the setup!
    Reply
  • bystander
    llguitargr8Just curious, did you guys purchase all these parts and right these articles before the GTX 680 was released? I really thought you guys would have gone with that, and if it wasn't because they weren't available at the time, then what makes the 7970 better in your opinion?Almost all these build articles are based on purchases that took place 2 months ago. Even if they were to have bought these parts today, it would be hard to purchase a 680, as stock is a major issue.
    Reply
  • mjmjpfaff
    I like it a lot. I am glad you mixed it up and went with the x79 platform.
    Reply
  • esrever
    I like the build except the x79 adds like $500 extra that I see very little benefit from.
    Reply
  • Pezcore27
    Love the build. Do want!
    Reply
  • e56imfg
    Dang I need to win this one!! I'm so happy they balanced the CPU with the GPU this time around.
    Reply
  • hmp_goose
    Good job: Working through the details of the CPU cooler like that is half the fun of this hobby. Great build.
    Reply
  • theuniquegamer
    Good build . But there could be more improvement by replacing a $600 cpu and $320 mother board with a i7 2600k and a $200 z68 mother board . And also replacing the 7970($590) with 2x680 at 2x$500(from the money saved from cpu and motherboard and 7970). It may give better gaming result than this build.
    Reply