Synthetic Benchmarks
We always like to start the synthetic benchmarks with the fun and sometimes misleading 3dMark 2006:
Despite the slightly slower CPU in our new build, 3dMark heavily favors the dual 8800 GTS 512MB cards over the single 8800 GTX used in our previous build. This is pretty much to be expected, and bodes well for our new mid-range system.
Let’s look at the application-centric PC Mark scores and seen if the trend continues:
PC Mark 2005 shows the previous SBM machine leading all categories by a small but noteworthy margin; PC Mark likes CPU speed, and the Q6700 is marginally faster at stock speeds compared to our current Q6600. However, when you look at the price difference, the Q6600 is a far better choice.
It’s interesting that, according to PC Mark, the single Raptor drive appears to perform better than our RAID 0 setup in the new mid-range system!
Now we’ll look at SiSoft’s Sandra XII benchmark suite:
Once again we see close scores, but the previous SBM system comes out on top. We expect that both the Q6600 and Q6700 CPUs will have a similar top overclock speed, so this trend might not continue in the overclocked review of the SBM machines next week.
With the synthetics out of the way, let’s see how these boxes perform with real-world tasks!
- cpu ,
- graphic ,
- performance
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Although I fully appreciate the "bang for your buck" approach to this sub $2K build, if you're going to come under budget by over $600 then surely there's room for improving things a little bit more? I thought this was "the best you can get for $2,000" not necessarily the "best performance per dollar for $2,000"
Certainly if I had budgeted $2,000 and came under by that much I'd certainly up a few things simply because I had the room - 80GB OS drive (Raptor?) and upping the graphics to paired GTXs maybe? Even then you're probably still $300 under...so throw in a dedicated sound card.
I agree with the other comment to an extent. However i do thing that this is a very solid build, that if you used the $2000 budget would be phenomenal in performance terms. Perhaps factor in an extra water pump and graphics blocks to get the liquid cooling to the GPUs too? Perhaps even upgrade the graphics cards to HD4870s or similar.
Dedicated soundcard is also a must in my opinion. Apart from those things, good choice!
Apologies if I gave the impression I didn't find this to be a solid build. I was simply voicing an opinion that there's money left over in the $2,000 budget so a little squeezing of extras could've been done. Certainly I always use a dedicated OS drive and at 25GPB for 80GB Seagate Barracuda you can't argue!