System Builder Marathon, December 2010: Value, Compared

New benchmarks, new test methods, and new hardware mark exciting updates to this month’s System Builder Marathon. Today, we cover the most exciting part of all: the value competition. Remember, we're giving all three systems away, so enter to win them!

System Builder Marathon, December 2010: The Articles

Here are links to each of the four articles in this month’s System Builder Marathon (we’ll update them as each story is published). And remember, these systems are all being given away at the end of the marathon.

To enter the giveaway, please check out this Google form, and be sure to read the complete rules before entering!

Day 1: The $2,000 Performance PC
Day 2: The $1,000 Enthusiast PC
Day 3: The $500 Gaming PC
Day 4: Performance And Value, Dissected

Introduction

Builders with different budgets have different priorities. While a gamer working with a limited amount of spare cash might prefer the most powerful graphics card he can fit into a tight $500 budget, someone with a Benjamin Franklin party in their pants should be able to afford a system that does everything well. Taking the middle ground is more representative of most enthusiasts' minimum performance requirements, and our $1000 system tries to do everything well, while putting game frame rates first. At least, that’s how things normally work out when we build with balance in mind.

SSD drives were one of the most persistent requests for our high-end build, but those offered little performance gain in our traditional benchmark set. That’s a problem for our value comparison, since the scant performance difference could never offset the high price of these parts. Yet, our readers made their voices heard, stating that the gain in responsiveness from a machine that loads programs almost instantly was a necessity at the high-end price point. After much discussion, we struck a deal with a few of our readers, and today we’re adding hard drive performance to the value analysis.

Because hard drive tests would represent program launch performance, in addition to Windows load times, we required a system partition at least large enough to hold all of our programs with room to spare. Our $1000 builder considered his SSD options and chose to add a second graphics card instead, taking advantage of the GeForce GTX 460’s amazing SLI scaling in games that would make up ¼ of our total performance score. The questions that remain are whether low-cost SLI or high-priced SSDs will help the $1000 or $2000 systems beat the $500 PC in value.

Let’s find out!