Sandbox Part 3: Benchmarking

Once the PC was booted up and running stably, my first move was to get it connected to internet, and then do some benchmarking (testing the performance of the computer). I started out with UserBenchmark, a free tool, which was great for diagnosing each part of the system. Starting out, I had some issues (mainly involving the GPU), but I simply overclocked it a bit and it performed above expectations. Most of my other parts were doing fine, although I was noticing some general lag involving files, which I addressed by adding an SSD. As you can see above, this PC functions in the 83rd percentile for PCs with the same components.

This is a CPU-Z status display, showing the performance of the i7-870 in this machine. Interestingly enough, it clocks in at 3.29 GHz, rather than the 2.93 GHz it was advertised to have, leading to better than expected performance. This CPU works quite well with the GPU I paired it with.

I wanted to do some sort of stress test benchmark, so I used the benchmark built into Rainbow 6: Siege. It performed superbly, running the benchmark at about 160 fps on average.

Overall, the price to performance boasted by this $350 PC is astounding to me. It manages to meet benchmark tiers reserved for PCs that cost twice as much. It took a little debugging, but in the end, this route has shown its worth.