3DMark appears to favor the Customer Choice PC’s GeForce GTX 560 Ti cards in SLI over the single Radeon HD 7970 that shows up in our $1300 build. Because those GeForce boards were so overclockable, their advantage only grows after our tweaking efforts.
PCMark favors the Customer Choice PC’s 128 GB SSD over the $1300 PC’s 64 GB part, and by a larger than expected margin.
The big performance difference seen in PCMark’s overall score is most easily found when we drill down to its Starting Applications benchmark profile. While the difference appears either impressive or frightening, these three tests together make up only 10% of the value score’s overall performance calculation. So, Don's setup isn't completely doomed just yet.
Summary
- The Ultimate Honor: A Top Reader Ranking
- The Honored List: Your Picks, Picked By Tom's
- Building Your Beast
- Tuning The Components By Overclocking
- Test Settings And Benchmarks
- Benchmark Results: 3DMark And PCMark
- Benchmark Results: SiSoftware Sandra
- Benchmark Results: Battlefield 3 And DiRT 3
- Benchmark Results: Skyrim And StarCraft II
- Benchmark Results: Audio And Video Encoding
- Benchmark Results: Productivity
- Paying The Price In Power And Efficiency
- So, Is The Customer Always Right?
Sponsored
