Results: Synthetics
We begin our benchmark analysis with the synthetics, which should pinpoint the biggest differences between this quarter's and last quarter's System Builder Marathon setups. There's the Core i7 against the Core i5, and the GeForce GTX 780 Ti against the 770s in SLI.
Processor-oriented tests able to exploit Hyper-Threading should demonstrate gains on the new system. Meanwhile, games designed to tax GPUs could go either way, depending on optimizations for Nvidia's multi-GPU technology.
The Cloud Gate test result (in red) favors the single GeForce GTX 780 Ti over our previous SLI setup. This could be considered surprising, given how much higher those 770s score in the Graphics component. But because our Core i7-4770K features Hyper-Threading, allowing it to excel in the Physics test, Futuremark appears to weigh that functionality more heavily.
In PCMark, the Core i7 clearly enjoys a huge advantage in the Home and Creative benchmark tests, while the work result barely changes between systems. As far as storage is concerned, the fast SSDs achieve almost identical scores.
The Core i7-4770K shows up the previous build's Core i5-4670K when it comes to Sandra's Arithmetic module, which obviously takes advantage of as many logical cores as it can.
With the new build defaulting to 1333 MT/s memory settings, bandwidth appears disappointingly low until the XMP memory profile is instantiated. This will likely have a detrimental impact on any memory-dependent benchmarks in our test suite.