System Builder Marathon: Mid-Cost System

Synthetic Benchmarks

We will start the synthetics with everyone's favorite graphics benchmark, 3DMark 2006!

These are solid scores, and even the 1920x1200 test results in over 10000 3dmarks; with anti-aliasing and anistropic filtering enabled the performance is lowered considerably however. Still, we can see the Geforce 8800 GTX is a formidable graphics card at high resolutions.

Now we'll move on to another of Futuremark's benchmarks, PcMark 2005, which places it's focus on general computing performance rather than just graphics.

PCMark 2005 ran solidly and without any problems. Note that the CPU score is higher than the total system score, and the Raptor hard disk is showing well. There's not much we can tell yet, though, without comparing the mid-range build to the other System Builder Marathon PCs later in the week.

Let's move on to SiSoft's Sandra XII benchmark suite:

Core 2 CPUs seem to thrive on the Dhrystone and iSSE3 CPU tests. This will probably be an area where the Phenom in the low-cost PC will not fare well in comparison.

Well, those are the synthetics. Now to the real meat of it, the application benchmarks!