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

Benchmark Results: Synthetic

3DMark Vantage splits the difference between our 22% CPU overclock and 10% graphics overclock, rewarding 15% for our efforts.

PCMark focuses more on the great SSD performance, diminishing any gains from overclocking other components.

Sandra’s CPU benchmarks show 21% and 22% improvements.

The Sandra memory bandwidth benchmark shows a tiny 3% performance boost, in spite of our clock speed and latency improvements. This is probably a limitation of the CPU, and points to a good reason for not spending more money on faster RAM.