System Benchmarks

When running the 32M benchmark of SPi, 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. SPi 32M has been a favorite amongst benchmarks for these very reasons and is admittedly the favorite benchmark of this reviewer.

In all honesty, running SPi in Vista is a bit of a challenge. In order to do so, we had to utilize the efforts of HyperPi which is simply a better interface for running SPi Mod v1.5. The results are less than spectacular because the operating system is not tweaked for SPi but the gap is definitely noticeable. On a properly tuned Windows XP system, these results would be much better.

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.

An increase of overall score of 14.1% indicates that not all aspects of the system have benefitted from the increase in memory, system, and processor frequencies. This is to be expected as hard drive performance shouldn't normally be improved with overclocking. Even still, this is a substantial increase in performance from stock clocks.

Another benchmarking community favorite, Cinebench renders an intense 2D scene relying on all the processing power it can. Cinebench R10 is another 64-bit capable application and is likely the most efficient program tested today at utilizing all cores of a processor. We will be running both the single threaded and multi-threaded benches here today.

The overclocked settings continue to thrash the stock settings and in Cinebench, this is primarily going to be a result of the massive processing power increase going from 3.00GHz up to 4.1GHz.

Moving from some of the more 'synthetic' benchmarks, we find ourselves smack dab in the middle of an AVI to DivX encoding task. We will take an AVI rip of the movie Blade Runner, the 1982 cult classic, and convert it into DivX using the default multi-media setting of DivX converter v6. DivX fully utilizes both cores of the processor and will rely heavily on all aspects of the system for performance.

Over a 27% decrease in encoding time was recognized through this overclock. That equates to nearly five full minutes off of a twenty one minute task. Clearly the benefits of overclocking a system can be found in results like this. Sure some benchmarks are just a measurement of the performance differences that may or may not equate to 'real world' gains. These results on the other hand are as 'real world' as it gets.

Un-like the DivX conversion we just looked at, Lame Front End is not multi-threaded and only utilizes a single core of a processor. This will obviously limit performance but we should still recognize significant time savings going from the stock settings to the overclocked results. We will be encoding a WAV rip of the Blackalicious album, Blazing Arrow and converting it to MP3 using the VBR 0 quality preset.

A whopping fifty full seconds was knocked off the encoding time which is quite significant considering the total encoding time was just over three minutes for the stock clocks. Again, another real world test shows the true power and time savings of being able to overclock hardware.

Adobe Photoshop CS3 is full x64 compliant and ready and able to use every single CPU cycle our processor has available. Since digital photography is as popular as roller skates were in the 70's, we are going to be timing how long it takes to convert 100 RAW images from a Canon 20D into half size JPG files of maximum quality.

Unfortunately we only had a single hard drive setup for all of the benchmarks and it appears that the Photoshop RAW conversion test was the most affected by this. There is still a solid performance increase but it was less than 17% which is quite a bit less of a gain than we have seen on previous results. The last of the benchmark sections will focus on 3D applications and gaming, let's take a look at those now.