Explanation of the tests

Cinebench R10

Here is a bit about Cinebench from the official site:

CINEBENCH is a real-world test suite that assesses your computer’s performance capabilities. MAXON CINEBENCH is based on MAXON’s award-winning animation software CINEMA 4D, which is used extensively by studios and production houses worldwide for 3D content creation.

The test procedure consists of two main components: The first test sequence is dedicated to the computer’s main processor. A 3D scene file is used to render a photorealistic image. The scene makes use of various CPU-intensive features such as reflection, ambient occlusion, area lights and procedural shaders. During the first run the benchmark only uses one CPU (or CPU core) to ascertain a reference value. On computers that have multiple CPUs or CPU cores and on those that simulate multiple CPUs (via HyperThreading or similar technologies), MAXON CINEBENCH will run a second test using all available CPU power.

The second test measures graphics card performance and is run inside the 3D editor window. The project file used can test all graphics cards that support the OpenGL standard. In this scene, only the camera was animated. This scene places medium to low demands on graphics cards and tests the maximum speed with which the scene can be properly displayed.

SANDRA

SiSoftware Sandra (the System ANalyser, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant) is an information & diagnostic utility. It should provide most of the information (including undocumented) that you need to know about your hardware, software and other devices.

Everest

EVEREST Ultimate Edition is a system diagnostics and benchmarking solution for enthusiast PC users. During system optimizations and tweaking, it provides essential system and overclock information, advanced hardware monitoring and diagnostics capabilities to check the effects of the applied settings. The CPU, FPU and memory benchmarks are available to measure the actual system performance and compare it to previous states or other systems. Furthermore, complete software, operating system and security information makes EVEREST Ultimate Edition a comprehensive system diagnostics tool that offers a total of 100 pages of information about your PC.

CustomPC Benchmark

These benchmarks use widely available open-source applications to carry out the tasks that most of us perform on a regular basis. There are three tests, each of which measure different aspects of a PC’s performance. These tests are NOT synthetic benchmarks, but instead they use real world scenarios to test the performance.

The tests are:

GIMP Image Editing

H.264 Video Encoding

Multitasking

PCMark Vantage

PCMark Vantage is a PC benchmark suite designed for Windows Vista offering one-click simplicity for casual users and detailed, professional grade testing for industry, press and enthusiasts.

A PCMark score is a measure of your computer’s performance across a variety of common tasks such as viewing and editing photos, video, music and other media, gaming, communications, productivity and security.

From desktops and laptops to workstations and gaming rigs, by comparing your PCMark Vantage score with other similar systems you can find the hardware and software bottlenecks that stop you getting more from your PC.

7z Compression

This is one of our custom designed tests. For this test, I use the freely available 7z software and the Big Buck Bunny movie available from this Divx HD Video showcase page. I compress this 507MB video file using normal settings for 7z. The settings are shown below

Fritz Chess Bench v4.2

Download from here

x264 HD Benchmark v2

We are using TechARP’s x264 HD benchmark. This test uses the open source x264 encoder for H.264 streams to encode videos and measure the time taken. In this test, we are reporting the results of the second pass from the newer version of x264 used in this test. The reasoning behind reporting only the second pass FPS is that 100% CPU may not be used in the first pass due to bottlenecking by Avisynth or other factors.

LameXP

This is another of our custom tests. LameXP software is specifically used for this purpose because it is highly multi-threaded. The way multi-threading works is that this software assigns each track to be encoded to an individual core. As an example, say you are encoding 4 tracks and have a quad core processor. Instead of waiting for first track to complete encoding to start the encoding of the second track, this software will instead assign each track to a core. LameXP is a graphical front-end for the LAME MP3, Ogg Vorbis and Nero AAC audio encoders. Supported input types are Wave, MP3, MP2, OGG/Vorbis, FLAC, MP4/AAC, AC3, DTS, WavPack, Musepack, TTA, Speex, Monkey’s Audio, Shorten, ALAC and WMA. It also reads M3U, PLS and ASX playlists as well as Cuesheets.

For this test, I used 30 WAV files obtained from my collection of Gladiator and The Village soundtrack CDs and converted them to mp3 using the LAME encoder with maximum quality/q0 settings.

Game Benchmarks

For some of the games we use a custom recorded timedemo. All these timedemos can be downloaded from here.

I would like to mention that the FRAPS min/max results don’t always correspond with the frame by frame FPS results. So, you might see some discrepancy in the min/max and min/max of the line graphs.

Let’s move on to the results.