It's that time of year again. While many might be decking the halls or trimming the tree, the CRN Test Centre is building the Ultimate PC.
Just in time for the holiday buying season, we present our annual report of the state of the art in off-the-shelf PC components.
The 2010 model came in at $US3,295 with a single video card and no monitor. Last year's Ultimate PC listed for around $US9,000, including three video cards and two monitors. Neither keyboard nor mouse were stirring on either system.
The current model is built around an Intel Core i7 Extreme processor and is supported by the company's X58 chipset. But replace the 965X quad-core running at 3.2GHz with a 980X six-core device and that reaches 3.6GHz when necessary, settling down to a power-saving 3.3GHz during normal operations. Performance was dazzling, surpassing by far any desktop machine we've seen. For more on overall system performance, jump to the benchmarks section.
Next: Processor And Motherboard
-1.jpg&w=100&c=1&s=0)
.png&w=100&c=1&s=0)
