Bringing It All Together

Performance of our assembled system was quite good. We validated performance using Performance Test V6.1 (for x64) from PassMark Software. The system offered an overall PassMark Score of 1066 with the default settings in place.

Using the AMD Overdrive utility (a performance-tuning and overclocking application), we were able to push the PassMark Score up to 1188, using conservative settings. Pushing the system beyond that resulted in reliability issues, such as system lockups or random reboots and other errors. Once our settings were fine-tuned and found to be reliable, we ran Vista's performance information and tools wizard, which gave the system a Windows Experience Index Base Score of 4.0, which is determined by the lowest-performing component.

The component scores were a 5.9 for the processor, RAM and primary hard disk. Graphics scored a 4.0, and gaming graphics scored a 4.1. Those are good scores considering that the system uses an onboard graphics processor. Using a Kill A Watt Pro to measure power consumption, we found the system only used 95 watts while idle and peaked at 173 watts during benchmarking.