System Builder Marathon, May '09: $2,500 Performance PC

Benchmark Results: Synthetic

Synthetic benchmarks don’t represent actual programs, but they do help to show how well specific parts of a system perform.

3DMark benefits from improved CPU, GPU, and DRAM performance, yet on average, these benchmarks scaled almost equally to the change in CPU speed.

PCMark puts more emphasis on launch times, but hard drives can’t be overclocked. A 7% improvement is noteworthy.

Sandra CPU performance scales almost perfectly with clock speed.

While the memory speed of the overclocked configuration is slightly slower than stock, improvements in memory timings provide a 2% boost in Sandra Memory Bandwidth tests.