Game-related benchmarks

The synthetics

3DMark 11 and Vantage are useful tests to track changes within the same system and they are often used to give a rough comparison between platforms.

Vantage

First up we look at Vantage on the HDD using our GTX 670 and i7-3770K at stock speeds. Looking carefully at each of the tests, all drives fall within a very small margin of error.

Here is the chart.

There is no difference running a SSD or a HDD for Vantage.

Now let’s look at 3D Mark 11.

3D Mark 11

Now lets check out the score with the SSDNow 300 SSD:

Here is the chart of our results:

There is no difference running a HDD or a SSD. Let’s look at Heaven Benchmark and Crysis to see if there is any difference in frame rates between SSD and HDD.

Heaven 3.0 & Crysis framerates

We run Crysis at 1920×1080 on Very High setting with 4xAA/16xAF.  Heaven 3.0 is run as below on all 5 of our drives.   Everything is at identical settings under the same conditions:

We compare identical runs and chart the result:

No difference outside of benchmarking “noise”. We cannot substantiate the second part of Kingston’s claim that “Kingston’s HyperX SSD lets users load games and applications faster, increase frames per second (FPS)”.  We do not find any difference in the frame rates.

Now we will look at three new very practical tests for gamers.