Value Analysis
With a lower total cost and higher performance at lower resolutions, the new budget system's overall gaming value is much higher than just the performance delta would suggest. We see a number of 140% representing its gaming value compared the old budget overclocker's system.
Once again, we need to take these figures with a grain of salt, as the performance of the slower CPU with faster video card would have shone at higher resolutions we weren't able to test in this review, specifically above 1600x1200.
The total system value looks very impressive. When the new budget system's lower cost is factored in along with its superior performance, it looks to be an incredible value: about 160% of the value of the old budget overclocker's system overall.
Conclusion
The conclusion is obvious: $1,000 buys a very formidable PC in today's market, thanks in no small part to Intel's new e6750 CPU. While it is true that many parts of the budget PC have upgraded in speed since our last marathon, it's the e6750 that looks to have the most performance increase for the buck.
This might be a 'budget' machine, but there's nothing this low-cost PC couldn't eat up and spit out. I don't think the $1,000 price point has ever seen such fine performing hardware.
The real question is: how will this $1,000 dual-core system compare to a $1,500 quad-core system when we calculate value per dollar? Stay tuned this week to see the results!
Editor's Opinion
The results I'm personally looking forward to the most will be the comparison between this budget e6750 machine and the midrange q6600 machine brought to life by Shelton Romhanyi and Thomas Soderstrom. With a $500 price difference, will the extra two cores in the Q6600 CPU allow the midrange system to surge ahead in applications? Or are the applications we use in our test suite not yet sufficiently able to take advantage of quad core optimizations? We'll have to see.
