MaximumPC 2008 04

The Technology Treadmill

Sometimes the rapid pace of progress works in your favor, sometimes it doesn’t

Bemoan the technology treadmill all you want, but there are

times when a power user can really take advantage of the

ever-fl uctuating landscape. Last year’s $1,500 PC was a

decent machine for its time, but it had a few fatal fl aws: a tiny

hard drive, criminally meager RAM, and onboard audio. Sure,

we had a DX10 card, but the aforementioned compromises

haunted us for a whole year. This time, we wanted to avoid

such trade-offs, so we sought to make every penny count.

And as it turned out, the treadmill worked for us. While 1GB of

RAM cost us $150 last year, we were able to score four times

the memory this year for $120 ($80 if you count the rebate).

We also decided that there was no way in hell we would settle

for a hard drive capacity that laptops can surpass. With the

vast stores of video, music, and photos most of us own, not to

mention all the other crap, Seagate’s 750GB seemed like a far

wiser choice than last year’s 250GB number.

When you directly compare the budget breakdown of last

year’s $1,500 PC against this year’s, it’s easy to see why

there’s so little love between Intel and Nvidia. Last year, 30

percent of the PC’s total cost went to the GPU. This year,

the GPU takes up just 24 percent of the budget, but that

still outstrips the 18 percent that went to the CPU—a quad

core, no less.

Last year, the puny 1GB of RAM ate up 10 percent of

our total budget. This year, with quadruple the amount,

RAM accounts for just 8 percent of our costs (sans rebate,

mind you). In other words, it’s ugly to be in the RAM busi-

ness right now.

The prices of the OS, PSU, case, and optical drive were

pretty much static, but we did lower our motherboard bill. Last

year, we shelled out for a high-end 680i, while this year a mid-

range P35 board fulfi lled our needs.

The short story is that the treadmill was our friend this year,

getting us way more machine for the money.

T

o test the mettle of our $1,500 creation,

we benched it against our standard zero-

point system (which cost twice as much to

build). The results? Pretty damned good.

In the CPU-dependent tasks, our mildly

overclocked 2.8GHz quad core outran the

stock 2.67GHz Core 2 Quad Q6700 in Adobe

Premiere Pro CS3, Photodex ProShow

Producer, and MainConcept Reference. All

three tests are optimized for four cores and

favor high clocks. In Photoshop CS3, howev-

er, our $1,500 rig was about 11 percent slow-

er despite the slight clock-speed advantage.

Why? Photoshop CS3 likes fast hard drives.

While the 750GB Seagate is a fi ne performer,

the zero-point’s single 10,000rpm 150GB WD

Raptor is able to nullify the $1,500 PC’s RAM

and CPU advantage.

We didn’t expect any wins in gaming—

and we didn’t get any. Our zero-point

machine packs two GeForce 8800 GTX

cards in SLI mode. There’s just no way a

single GeForce 8800 GTS 512 can beat

those odds. Still, our $1,500 PC performed

better than you might expect. The SLI 8800

GTX cards were roughly 30 percent

faster in gaming, which isn’t a com-

plete beat down. Of course, it helps

that our current gaming benchmark

tests are conducted at 1600x1200

resolution. At a much higher resolu-

tion of, say, 2560x1600, the SLI cards

would whale on our singleton. But

then again, how many budget buyers

are going to pair an $1,800 monitor

with a $1,500 box? The upshot is

that we’re pleased as punch with our

$1,500 PC’s performance.

THE NO-COMPROMISES PC IN ACTION

ZERO POINT SCORES

0 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100%

Our current desktop test bed consists of a quad-core 2.67GHz Intel Core 2 Quad Q6700, 2GB of Corsair DDR2/800 RAM on an EVGA 680 SLI motherboard, two EVGA

GeForce 8800 GTX cards in SLI mode, a Western Digital 150GB Raptor, a 500GB Caviar hard drive, an LG GGC-H20L optical drive, a Sound Blaster X-Fi soundcard, and a

PC Power and Cooling Silencer 750 Quad. The OS is Windows XP Pro.

XP PRO BENCHMARKS

930 sec

157 sec (-11%)

969 sec

1,747 sec

93 fps (-29%)

109 fps (-29%)

1,255 sec

140 sec

1,290 sec

2,057 sec

131 fps

164 fps

PREMIERE PRO CS3

PHOTOSHOP CS3

PROSHOW

MAINCONCEPT

FEAR 1.07

QUAKE 4

http://www.maximumpc.com | APR 08 | MAXIMUMPC 35

We don’t want just a smooth-running rig—we want a machine with benchmark numbers we can brag about!