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 $400 Gaming PC
Day 4: Performance And Value, Dissected

Introduction

Enthusiasts have a different mindset from the general public with regard to performance. While Joe down the street equates value with how cheap his PC is, real power users know that performance defines what their PC is worth. It doesn’t matter how inexpensive something is if it doesn’t work well, and a functional product certainly has no value if it isn't fast enough to perform its intended task.

While Joe certainly wouldn’t be foolish enough to put his child on the freeway with a moped, he might be tempted to buy that $300 discount PC for his little-Joe-gamer. Enthusiasts know better.

This month saw budget-builder Paul Henningsen attempt to provide little-Joe-gamer a convincing counter-offer, in a true gaming system that ran him only $400. Of course, the builder who follows in Paul's footsteps still has to find his own peripherals and operating system, but we hope he is able to reclaim much of that stuff from the waste of purchases past.  Discontinued discounts have since pushed his system cost up to a still-acceptable $409.

Our mid-budget build followed a more conventional enthusiast-class plan, beginning with Intel’s popular, mid-range Core i5. Builder Don Woligroski nearly broke the bank with his choice of graphics card, but recent price cuts and limited-time discounts brought his system price back under the limit.

Our high-end build took a completely different direction when its builder caved to reader requests from System Builder Marathons past, fitting a six-core processor and two GeForce GTX 480 graphics cards within his $2000 budget. High GPU-oriented costs limited our six-core options to AMD’s cheapest Phenom II X6, in turn forcing the unconventional choice of Nvidia’s previous-generation SLI chipset to make it all work.

Huge reductions in the budget-build’s price are almost certain to increase its value rating, but will that machine still perform adequately throughout our entire benchmark set?

Conversely, will AMD’s lower performance-per-clock throughput combine with the poorly-threaded nature of many desktop applications to sabotage our high-priced machine?

Before anyone assumes a big win for the mid-priced system, let’s take a closer look at the benchmark data.

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