What's Faster Our Builds or Dell's H2C?

Introduction

Editor’s Note : This is the last day of our Overclocking Marathon. We’ve pushed three PCs to the edge of stability. Now it’s time to see if there’s a winner from a price/performance perspective. Before we get into that, here are the links to the previous three days of our Marathon.

• Can we further overclock Dell’s factory-overclocked XPS H2C ?
• How much more performance can we extract from our high-end build from May’s System Builders Marathon ?
• Can we overclock a $1,000 budget build so it’s competitive with the other two PCs ?

An almost universal truth of computers is that lower-cost parts offer more value for the amount of money spent. The reason for this is simple : "one-model-down" components are often 20%-50% cheaper but only 10%-20% slower than the next-best models. But what happens when you overclock ?

Overclocking is certainly a good way to get a free performance boost, but larger gains often require specialized components. In particular, a highly-overclocked CPU usually requires an oversized cooler and higher-speed RAM for system stability. Value goes out the window once again when the cost of additional equipment exceeds the performance gained.

With these issues in mind, we overclocked three systems to find the ultimate performance of each, and now we’re ready to see how far our money got us.

Test Setup

The specifications of our overclocked test systems are listed in the following table. For information on the original specifications and how we got to these speeds, please read our XPS 720 H2C, Tom’s Hardware High-End PC, and Tom’s Hardware Low-Cost PC overclocking articles.

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