Well yes and no...most of us are proud of or creations we threw together and call "our" computers. Every person is different and has selected different hardware and setups. Every person spends different amounts of time tweaking his or her computer just the way they want it. I think it's great people put their rig in the sig and benchmark it
Yeah it is cool, everyone has their hobbies. Some are into computers, some into photography, web development, art, so on and so forth. However, building a computer is really not a hard task, though people seemed to be over whelmed by it, nor does it require you to know and understand the fully inter workings of a computer system or an operating system. That is a good thing too, we don't need our technology to be over complicated and only have engineers be able to work on things. 20 years ago computers were pretty complicated compared to what they are now. Even though technology has advanced and they have become more complicated they have also become way more streamlined, which makes them easier to set up and configure.
Imagine running directory services in the early 90s. Lots and lots and lots of command line binaries to go through to create network accounts. Today, you just point and click from a GUI. Tomorrow, you may just speak it out loud and the computer does everything for you.
I could probably push 18k or higher with over clocks and tweaks to my rig, but for me I don't want to bother. I could care less if those people who do so, do in fact over clock and tweak, however my main point still stands. A benchmark does not reflect real world performance.
My quad-core processor would eat a dual core in almost any cpu intensive application, and in multi tasking. yes, I run sometimes 4 virtual machines at once on my PC, but that would never reflect in 3Dmark at all.
3Dmark is a good way to test the machine's gaming capabilities but anything that scores over 12k probably can run 90% of games on high settings. You don't need to have a 20k system to play all the games at high settings.
