We've seen a number of pre-overclocked systems in the Labs recently, and this seemed like the perfect opportunity to compare a baseline system to the kind of performance you can expect when you let the experts overclock for you before you buy. It gives a good idea, too, of what a home-overclock might look like.

Before we get to the nitty gritty of performance difference, however, it's worth taking a look at the overall package, and what you get for an overclocked vs stock system.

The Ti Deluxe Phenom 955 and Ti Deluxe Phenom 955 OC
Trinity International specialise in budget power systems - there's lots inside the case for your dollar, but the features and add-ons are often more minimal to keep costs down. In this case, the Ti Deluxe Phenom 955 boasts 3.2GHz quad-core AMD Phenom X4, backed up by a Gigabyte GA MA790XT-UD4P motherboard and 4GB of 1333MHz DDR3 RAM.

Graphics
The motherboard, a mid-range AM3 board from Gigabyte, uses the 790X rather than the 790FX chipset, meaning that it can't run Quad-fire graphics. Even so, that's a minor flaw, particularly for a budget system; it's a good motherboard for a very good price, and worthy of inclusion here. It supports AMD processors such as the Phenom II included here and also supports Crossfire on its two x8 PCIe slots.

The system Ti provided doesn't include Crossfire, however, having opted for the more pedestrian single card solution - in this case the GTX 260, which provides decent bang-for-buck, and rated above average - if not by much - in our roundup. The graphics card isn't the only letdown here: the iCute case is a bit poky for the components included, but makes the most of the balance between performance and affordability. The airflow is reasonable, aided by the additional included fans, but we'd liked to have seen something with a little more scope for upgrades and other additions.

The overclocked Ti system provided some slight performance gains, but we would find it hard to recommend as supplied, without a better power supply and case

Storage, connectivity
Two 500GB Seagate drives in RAID0 give a modicum of capacity, but we've come to expect more than a single Terabyte of space for all the music, games and multimedia that most people want to store on their desktop system.

Connectivity is good, but it's not as fully-featured as a more enthusiast-style case could provide. You get a reasonable 2x PS/2, 8x USB, 4-pin Firewire, 6-pin Firewire, Gigabit Ethernet, 7.1 Channel Audio, Optical and Coaxial connections.

Benchmark results
These two helped the stock system to a benchmark score of 2.04. The overclocked system has the X4 955 boosted to 3.8GHZ, thanks to adjustments in the voltage supplied to the processor on the Gigabyte board, but despite that enhancement, the benchmark score dips to 1.77.

There's improvement in most results, with productivity apps such as Office seeing the smallest improvement at around 5%; in other areas, though, the improvement is around 15%. But encoding saw a performance drop - it looks like the CPU got too hot and throttled in the video encode, although it could be a result of the 550W power supply not delivering sufficient watts for the increased TDP of an overclocked system under load.

The TI Deluxe Phenom 955 results - click to enlarge

The TI Deluxe Phenom 955 OC results - click to enlarge

For gaming, the comparative results are similarly disappointing. That's not to say that these systems don't have great gaming potential - apart from a base score in our Crysis low settings test of over 100fps, the stock system managed 23fps on very high settings. Not quite gaming extreme, but still an excellent system for most games you could throw at it.

The overclocked system saw almost identical results, however, and it's disappointing to see a mere 5fps difference between the two systems on low settings.

The overclocked system had problems with heat and noise, too - the fan was considerably louder than in its stock sibling, and it averaged 20 degrees hotter while running under load.

Conclusion
The difficulty for us comes in judging these two systems together. Even though we'd prefer a slightly bigger case, a little more hard disk capacity and a Crossfire option - such as two ATI 4770 cards, to go for a slightly more budget option - in the stock system, there's very good value.

But the overclocked system looks like less of a bargain, and it's hard to consider the stock system independently. Looked at this objectively, the results, components and price, combined with a 2yr RTB warranty, make this a system worth considering, but we'd strongly recommend a better case and power supply if you plan to overclock it yourself or opt for an overclocked system.