Results: 3DMark And PCMark
3DMark shows that the Radeon R9 290X was a great choice for my $1600 PC, almost propping it up as the CPU trips over itself in the overclocking portion.
The $1200 machine’s Radeon R9 290 still looks strong, though perhaps weaker than expected in comparison to the expensive machine’s single-GPU flagship.
Paul's $600 PC necessarily includes a weaker graphics card, though that's still a boon to value since the half-priced platform achieves more than half of Don's performance.
Paul figured out the trick to Don’s improved PCMark scores, and I eventually got in on the secret too: an error in the batch process produced low (but consistent) Home and Creative scores, so we re-ran this benchmark manually.
Because PCMark’s storage scores are based on real-world load times, they’re the only synthetic metrics that make it into our final performance analysis. All three systems feature a WD Blue 1 TB disk. However, my $1600 machine uses it as a secondary drive, backing a 250 GB Samsung 840 EVO SSD.