SBM 5: Price/Performance

Synthetics, Continued

Hard drives of similar generations usually perform similarly, but the high-priced system's RAID controller allows it to shine through its Level 0 array.

Four-cores are magnificent here and overclocking provides a great performance boost. Together they make the low-cost system's 2.66 GHz dual-core processor look pretty darned weak at stock speed in Sandra 2005's Arithmetic and Multimedia extensions tests.

The Sandra Memory Bandwidth benchmark surprisingly shows the mid-priced system at the bottom, but that's likely due in part to its slower bus speed. Meanwhile, the high-performance system proves its title with remarkably low latencies at high clock speeds, even though the low-cost system uses Intel's reputedly more efficient memory controller.