Custom PC's "Beat the Office PC"

Inquitus

Read the blurb below, for the tests used to determine your PC's rating.

What is the best setup for these tests?

Clearly it must be dual core. So either the X2 4800+ or the Dual Core Pentium 840EE. I suspect, as these tests only Multitask with 2 tasks the X2 would be best, as the EE Pentiums Dual HT cores would be of no benefit.

Clearly 2GB of very fast RAM are required, 4 x 512MB of TCCD 2.5-3-3-7 @ PC-4400, I reckon.

And some very fast HD's. Is it worth going SCSI, or would a pair of Raptors or the new 7200RPM 16MB Buffer NCQ drives in RAID0 do the job?

I am going to build a rig to have a go at the leaderboard. It's looking like a watercooled X2 4800+ with 4 x 512MB G.Skill LE. What Mobo offers the best X2 overclocking (NB The board must be SLI)? What HD's should I go for?

Custom PC's Blurb on the tests.

Benchmarking is very important to us, because a product's performance is one of the most important factors in assessing quality. And, without the relevant benchmarking tools, it's impossible for us to judge which hardware deserves your cash. Unfortunately, most third-party benchmarking tools rely on synthetic tests that don't accurately reflect what most PC enthusiasts do on a daily basis. That's why we developed our own Media Benchmarks, which use real applications to carry out the tasks that most of you perform on a regular basis, and we've now updated these to stress even the latest hardware. There are three tests, each of which measure different aspects of a PC's performance. These are also the same benchmarks that we use in the magazine, so you can make a direct comparison between your PC and the kit we review. You can also submit your results to the Custom PC website and compare your PC's performance with that of other readers' PCs.

Paint Shop Pro

The Paint Shop Pro image-editing test simulates how well a PC can manipulate large digital photos. The new test is similar to the previous version, except that it uses a greater number of higher-quality images. The test has three distinct stages. The first of these opens a large number of digital photos and applies filters to them, the second creates a large poster, and the third creates a huge panorama from six images. Due to the number and size of files used, the test is very memory-intensive, using up to 1.5GB of RAM (real or virtual). It also benefits from a fast hard drive, as files are frequently loaded from and saved to disk.

TMPEGEnc DVD encoding

The second test is an update to our video encoding benchmark, which now encodes a large DivX movie, featuring plenty of rapid camera panning, which is difficult to encode, into DVD-compliant MPEG. This primarily tests CPU performance, although it naturally favours deep-pipelined CPUs. TMPEGEnc is also SMP-aware, so dual-core CPUs, dual processor systems and CPUs with Hyper-Threading get a deserved boost.

Multi-tasking

Dual-core CPUs are already available and, as most future developments in CPU technology will be based around multiple cores, it makes sense to include a dedicated multitasking test. However, we've also ensured that the test is realistic, which is why it doesn't involve playing a DVD while listening to MP3 music, for example, as no one would ever do this. Instead, our test archives a massive collection of files into a single highly compressed RAR file, while also editing photos in Paint Shop Pro, as this is something that you may realistically want to do. This is a very tough test, stressing CPU, memory, and hard disk performance and, as you'd expect, dual or multiple-processor PCs have a distinct advantage.