One graph (shown after the break) has an FX-74 gobbling what looks like near double the juice of a Core 2 Extreme QX6700 chip for comparable (or lesser) performance values.

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When you pack Intel's blazing new Core 2 Extreme processor and a pair of top-of-the-line nVIDIA GeForce 7900 GTX graphics cards into a single gaming desktop, you can pretty much expect it to post impressive benchmark numbers.

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The folks there got their hands on a pre-release version of the system, loaded with a Core 2 Extreme QX6850 processor factory overclocked to 3.67GHz, 4GB of Corsair dual channel DDR2-8500 RAM, and two GeForce 8800 Ultra cards running in SLI mode, among other desirable specs.

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Testing the cards on an Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6700-powered machine with 2GB of RAM, the single R600 card bested the solo 8800 GTX in basically every benchmark they tried, with common applications seeing minimal gains, but games saw between ten-percent (Half-Life 2: Lost Coast) and 42-percent (1701 A.D.) hikes.

ENGADGET: ATI R600 graphics card benchmarked, cruises by NVIDIA's GeForce 8800 GTX

Still, the four BTO gaming rigs unveiled by the latest iteration of Commodore -- the XX, GX, GS, and G -- seem to stand on their own as solid machines, offering anywhere from a 1.86GHz Core 2 Duo E6320 to a 2.66GHz QX6700 Core 2 Extreme CPU, a single NVIDIA GeForce 7900 GS all they way up to dual 8800 GTX cards, between 2GB and 4GB of RAM, and hard drive capacities up to 750GB in an array of RAID configurations.

ENGADGET: Commodore unveils boutique gaming rigs at CeBIT