The Tom's Hardware Guide Power Box

Other Components

In this edition I refrained from adding any other component to the Power Box, such as a sound card, DVD-ROM, CD/RW and more, because the benchmarks in this first Power Box article would not benefit from it.

The Challengers

To give you some kind of idea of the performance of the Power Box, I compared it to two top-notch systems that are available right now. The first is a system equipped with Intel's Pentium 4 1.5 GHz processor, Asus P4T i850 motherboard, 256 MB PC800 RDRAM and a GeForce2 Ultra graphics card. The other system comes with AMD's Athlon 'C' 1.2 GHz, Asus A7M266 AMD760 motherboard, 256 MB PC2100 CL2 DDR-SDRAM and also a GeForce2 Ultra graphics card.

You will see that the second half of this article is a feast for benchmark addicts. I ran as many benchmarks as I could think of to compare the three systems. You will see that the Power Box is as good as unchallenged.

Test Setup