System Builder Marathon: Low-Cost System

Features
By Don Woligroski
published

Application Benchmarks - Productivity

Our last application benchmarks, AVG and WinRAR will give the low-cost PC some real-world file work to accomplish. First off, the system will perform a complete AVG scan on a 3.82 GB file folder with multiple tiny files to analyze.

The low-cost PC does the job in just under 7 minutes. Now, we'll see how quickly it can compress a 642 MB folder using WinRAR:

The benchmark completed in just over 3 minutes, which isn't all that telling. However, the next benchmarks can be very informative indeed, even in isolation: yes folks, it's the fun part, the game benchmarks!

Don Woligroski
2 Comments Comment from the forums
  • romulus47plus1
    Paying $230 for a 3870?
    Get the 8800GT for that price!
    Reply
  • Retrogame
    The $500-$700 system is more important than you realize: it's an extremely important price point in the "Consoles vs. PC wars"

    For about $500, you can buy a top of the line current generation PS3 or XBox 360 with a few accessories.

    Of course, there are always games better on one platform than the other; and naturally, your PC is a lot more versatile; i.e. it's a "REAL COMPUTER!" Even so, it's nice to know that you can actually put together a low cost machine, overclock it a smidgen, and still run this games representative of this year's crop of PC titles... and if you were to actually scale down the graphics settings to the same level that the consoles would be running things at, probably end up with better frame rates and the advantage of using a nice monitor instead of a TV.
    Reply