Saturday, February 28, 2009

System Builder Marathon: Performance & Value : What’s Your Idea Of Value?

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).

Introduction

The best performance per dollar is usually found in low-cost components that are, unfortunately, often too weak to perform high-end tasks. That is to say, if the most-expensive system has the minimum required performance, the others, even if vastly cheaper but only slightly slower, fail. We certainly didn’t see many failures in our $625 or $1,250 builds, but is the $5,000 system ever really needed? That’s something each buyer must decide based on his or her personal expectations.

The $625 system certainly looks cheap and the $5,000 system certainly looks pricey, but appearances can’t begin to distinguish the vast differences of internal components. Our $1,250 system, for example, looks cheap because our builder picked the best-ventilated low-cost case in an effort to allocate a greater portion of his budget to advanced internal parts

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