Best of the best: 10 top high-performance computing upgrades on test

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High-end PC processors and motherboards rated

Bench analysis: Making sense of an awful lot of numbers

This is all rather different to our traditional, gaming-centric set of benchmarks, and shows the productivity prowess of the real top-end platforms on the market. The eight-core Intel Xeon dropped into a desktop X79 board, like the excellent Gigabyte X79-UD3, makes for the most powerful desktop solution around.

For any video encoding, database-crunching or image manipulation tasks you can't get quicker. That said the cheaper 3960X does a good job of getting close and the AMD FX 8150 actually takes the lead in our Photoshop tests. You can put together a decently priced AMD workstation, but the top-end Xeon-powered beast will cost you.

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Jeremy Laird
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Technology and cars. Increasingly the twain shall meet. Which is handy, because Jeremy (Twitter) is addicted to both. Long-time tech journalist, former editor of iCar magazine and incumbent car guru for T3 magazine, Jeremy reckons in-car technology is about to go thermonuclear. No, not exploding cars. That would be silly. And dangerous. But rather an explosive period of unprecedented innovation. Enjoy the ride.