Usually PC builders are trying to get the most power possible into a specific setup. But Gordon Mah Ung, PCWorld Executive Editor and gleefully cackling agent of chaos, is aiming for something a little different with the latest PCWorld video. His “Island of Misfit Toys” build, a Frankenstein monster of components from a series of cursed machines, is aiming to get the worst score in the Cinebench benchmark.
Along with special guest Dr. Ian Cutress, Gordon gives a tour of his tortured machine. It’s powered by the Gigabyte P750GM, which has a reputation for exploding. The motherboard is an ancient, forgotten BTX design from a Dell pre-built desktop, with a plastic shroud over the Celeron D processor that sucks in cooling airflow. That cooling setup makes it impossible to plug in a modern GPU, so Gordon had to connect a Radeon Fury X card with an NZXT PCIe riser cable…which has been recalled as a fire hazard.
And the whole thing is running Windows Vista Ultimate on a 160GB spinning hard drive. This is the most low-power build possible, with a 64-bit desktop CPU and a PCIe port for discrete graphics. The parts don’t fit in a case. It’s an absolute freakshow of a computer. And, as if its mere existence wasn’t painful enough, Gordon and Ian are going to torture it with Cinebench.
I won’t spoil the results of the video for you, but I’ll say that Gordon is trying to beat (as in, score lower than) a Cinebench R15 single-thread score of 17, which Ian achieved with a similar PC several years ago. For a point of comparison, Intel’s latest flagship CPU gets a single-thread Cinebench R23 score of around 2300. My home-built work desktop, with a 4-year-old mid-range CPU and a dozen running programs, manages 1006 with a maximum possible score of around 1275.
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