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| by lemonlime | July 26, 2009 | ||
| System Benchmarks System Benchmarks SuperPi Mod v1.5 When running the SuperPI 32MB benchmark, we are calculating Pi to 32 million digits and timing the process. Obviously more CPU power helps in this intense calculation, but the memory sub-system also plays an important role, as does the operating system.  As we’re accustomed to seeing, SuperPI prefers raw computational power above all. Not very significant gains were realized with memory subsystem performance improvements. PCMark Vantage X64 The latest iteration of the popular system benchmark is PCMark Vantage from the Futuremark crew. The PCMark series has always been a great way to either test specific areas of a system or to get a general over view of how your system is performing. For our results, we simply run the basic benchmark suite which involves a wide range of tests on all of the sub-systems of the computer.  In our PCMark Vantage testing, the quad “unlocked” configuration did best as these tests are multi-threaded. Small but measurable gains were seen across the various memory configurations. Cinebench R10 64-Bit Developed by MAXON, creators of Cinema 4D, Cinebench 10 is designed using the popular Cinema software and created to compare system performance in 3D Animation and Photo applications. There are two parts to the test; the first stresses only the primary CPU or Core, the second, makes use of up to 16 CPUs/Cores. Both are done rendering a realistic photo while utilizing various CPU-intensive features such as reflection, ambient occlusion, area lights and procedural shaders.  Wow, talk about a massive boost thanks to the two unlocked processor cores. Cinbench scales very well in multi-core scenarios. Memory performance alone didn’t seem to impact Cinebench scores much. It appears that it prefers raw computational power. X264 HD Benchmark Tech Arp’s recent development of the x264 HD Benchmark takes a 30 second HD video clip and encodes it into the x264 codec with the intention of little to no quality loss. The test is measured using the average frames per second achieved during encoding, which scales with processor speed and efficiency. The benchmark also allows the use of multi-core processors so it gives a very accurate depiction of what to expect when using encoding application on a typical full length video.  We see a similar pattern emerge in x264. The extra processing cores made a significant improvement in performance and memory performance boosts did little to improve the frame rates. WinRAR 3.80 The last of our real-life tests will be with the highly popular & multi-threaded WinRAR 3.8.0 tool. WinRAR is a compression and decompression tool with a built in benchmark. We simply run the benchmark up to 500MB of processed data and record how long it takes.  WinRAR realizes some significant performance improvements with higher memory efficiency and loves the quad configuration due to its multi-threaded nature. We found it pretty surprising that there was a whopping thirty eight second delta between 7-7-7 and 6-6-6 timings. | ||
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