System Builder Marathon, May '09: $1,300 Enthusiast PC

Benchmark Results: Stalker: Clear Sky

Stalker sports another demanding 3D engine, but at high settings with no AA, the $1,300 Micro-ATX system handles it very well. Even at stock clock speeds, the system manages to push out about 60 FPS on average at 1920x1200. The CPU overclock does add a noticeable amount of performance, even at this resolution, indicating that this title is highly CPU-dependent.

When 4xAA is added, things slow down considerably and the CPU overclock accomplishes much less as the bottleneck is once again shifted to the graphics cards. Here we see 1680x1050 performance is good, and 1920x1200 is perhaps on the verge of comfortable, depending how low the minimum frame rates fall.