System Builder Marathon, August 2012: $500 Gaming PC

Benchmark Results: Productivity

Although we welcome the speed-up, there is little reason to celebrate. Neither dual-core machine delivers impressive performance in our threaded metrics. Putting things into perspective, Thomas Soderstrom’s last $2000 build, overclocked, was able to complete all seven of these tests in a little over eight minutes. That's slightly faster than last quarter's configuration took to finish our 3ds Max benchmark alone.