Let’s build the world’s slowest desktop PC!

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.

For more of Gordon’s mad scientist antics (and also news and reviews on the latest PC innovations), be sure to subscribe to PCWorld on YouTube!