Woohoo!

[reboot]

Just lurking around a well known big box store, and they have a DUAL Athlon XP 2000 system, for the measly amount of $2699.00 CDN.
It's an IWill board, 512 meg of PC2100, GF4 MX440, XP Pro.
BIG sign on the side, says it "benchmarked" at 5292 in 3dmark2001.

Whoopeee! I think...go home, get 3dmark2001, and run it, on my single XP2000, with 256 meg of DDR, and the exact same video card.

Guess what? My score: 5417

Sure, I gotta save up $2700 plus taxes to get that! NOT!

[Fastfly]

3dmark doesnt thread so only one CPU would be used. and The GF$ MX would be the bottle neck not the ram so you basically ran it on the same system.

[reboot]

Yup. Different mobo, and less RAM, but basically the same system, so you tell me why my system, with less RAM, and identical video would be that much faster.

[Alienware_Dude]

The difference is almost within the margin of error. Changing just one or two settings could affect the score by that much.

[reboot]

That's nice. I still want someone to explain why a $2600 machine can't beat a pieced together homebuilt. What setting do YOU think they've got wrong?

[Alienware_Dude]

Do you have an irrational dislike for pre-fab systems? The difference is under 200 points!

[Ryan2318]

the video card is probably holding it back so much that the ram doesn't mean a thing... if you had better cards in both then maybe the ram will then show some difference.

[Xayd]

Yah but the point is putting 3dmark bench results on an ad for a dually CPU machine is as stupid as the person who built it (apparently) .

[reboot]

Do you have an irrational dislike for pre-fab systems?

YES!

putting 3dmark bench results on an ad for a dually CPU machine is as stupid as the person who built it

YES!

[grasshopperbe]

i totally agree with reboot
prefab systems, brand names or not, are only good as 'high tech' typewriters in my opinion
ive seen compaqs hp's dells, store built ecs and dfi mobo pc's aven acer mobos.
allmost every one has serious cons.
and they are hardly cheaper than a home build.
examples ?
-on board everything (4 mb s3 card on an athlon 2.4 w/o agp slot anyone)
-with a compaq you pay for a windows licence and disc, but you get those
'restore discs' which do not work 9 times out of 10. and cannot be used when you switch systems.
-upgrade a prefeb? 90% of the time, forge t it.
i could go on for hours with this

[Sauron]

Have you ever noticed that they try to sell you on speed?? Like Dell : This computer packs a whopping 2.53 CPU!!! And we have 512 megs of memory in it! And a 40 gig hard drive! And the rest of it, ever notice that you don't see the brand names next to those components?

[raftero]

the only con i can think of is,if you need the extra software that comes with most of them and you dont know how to get and install it,or don't want to,then you need a store bought(this applys to most users).most of us don't want-need a lot of it and if we do we install ourselves.