More Tests

 

Super Pi

Here is the test and we choose 1 million digits.

First up is Core i7-920 at 4.2GHz.

Here is Super Pi on the Core i7-3770K at 4.2GHz

 

Ivy is faster by a second. And this is a single-threaded application. Please continue on to Fritz Chess Bench.

 

Fritz Chess Bench

Fritz Chess Benchmark is found within the game’s program files and basically it crunches numbers to test your processor’s speed. Deep Fritz takes advantage of massive calculations and multi-threaded performance to work any CPU fully. It loads all threads 100% and will drive your CPU temperatures way up.

First the Core i7-920 at 4.2GHz:

 

Besides showing relative speed when compared to a P3 1.0GHz CPU, it also shows the nodes completed. The faster your CPU, the more nodes completed. next up is the Core i7-3770K at 4.2GHz.

 

Here in a multi-threaded benchmark, Ivy Bridge at 4.2GHz is faster clock-for-clock than our aging and overclocked-to-the-max Core i7-920.

CustomPC Benchmark

CustomPC benchmark 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 themselves are not synthetic benchmarks but instead they use real world image, video and multi-tasking tasks to test the performance of your computer.

The tests are:

• GIMP Image Editing
• H.264 Video Encoding
• Multi-tasking

First these tests are run on the overclocked to 4.2GHz Core i7-920.

As usual we test next with the Core i7-3770K also at 4.2GHz.

Here are the results of Custom PC benchmarking expressed first as a graph and then as a chart:

Ivy Bridge is much faster at video encoding  and it wins in all three tests on our ECS motherboard while we observed on our mATX Gigabyte Z77 motherboard, the older CPU was slightly faster at multi-tasking and image editing.

CINEBENCH

CINEBENCH is based on MAXON’s professional 3D content creation suite, CINEMA 4D. This latest 11.5 version of CINEBENCH can test up to 64 processor threads accurately and automatically.

First the i7-920 at 4.2GHz with the GTX 680 at reference clocks

Next, the Ivy Bridge Core i7 at 4.2GHz with the reference GTX 680 and the same settings.

Here is the Graph.

Ivy Bridge is much faster in both tests.

X264

Basically this test encodes a HD video clip into a x264 video file. The first pass is very quick and the second one is much slower and much more demanding of a task as it does the actual encoding. This benchmark is heavily mult-threaded. First up is the Core i7-920 at 4.2GHz

And now the Core i7-3770K.

As we can see, both passes are much quicker on Ivy Bridge. The newest architecture is favored in a heavily-multi-threaded task.

The next series of tests is going to focus on the hard disk drive (HDD) or SSD as a performance upgrade for both PCs

 

Crystal Disk Mark

CrystalDiskMark is a HDD benchmark utility for your hard drive that enables you to measure sequential and random read/write speeds. Here are some key features of “CrystalDiskMark”:

• Measure sequential reads/writes speed
• Measure random 512KB, 4KB, 4KB (Queue Depth=32) reads/writes speed

First up is the i7-920

Now the 3770K

The Ivy Bridge platform is quicker.    The writes differences would be much less due to using less expensive NAND in the HyperX 3K SSD than they are due to the higher bandwidth of the Ivy Bridge platform.

HD Tune

HD Tune is a hard disk utility which has the following functions:

• Benchmark measures the performance of:
  • Transfer Rate
  • Access Time
  • CPU Usage
  • Burst Rate
  • Random Access test
  • Write benchmark
• Hard Disk information which includes partition information, supported features, firmware version, serial number, disk capacity, buffer size, transfer mode
• Hard Disk Health
  • S.M.A.R.T. Information (Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology)
  • Power On Time
• Error scan
• Temperature display

The Bloomfield platform is up first.

Next the i7-3770K

These two Kingston Hyper-X SSDs are very close in performance and we will compare them to each other in an upcoming evaluation with another Kingston consumer-grade SSD next month.

 

 

AS SSD

AS SSD is especially designed for Solid State Drives (SSD). The tool contains synthetic and practice tests. The synthetic tests determine the sequential and random read and write performance of the SSD without use of the operating system caches. In Seq-test the program measures how long it takes to read and write a 1 GB file. In the 4K test, read and write performance for random 4K blocks are determined. The 4K-64-thrd test are similar to the 4K procedure except that the read and write operations on 64 threads are distributed as in the usual start of a program.

In the copying test, two large ISO file folders are created, programs with many small files, and a games folder with small and large files. These three folders are copied by the OS copy command with the cache turned on. The practice tests show performance with simultaneous read and write operations

AS SSD gives an overall “score” after it runs the benchmarks.  These scores and comparisons are summed up in the performance summary charts.

First up, i7-920

Now the i7-3770k

Ivy’s plaform is faster.

 

ATTO

ATTO is a disk benchmark.  The ATTO Disk Benchmark  measures a storage system;s performance with various transfer sizes and test lengths for reads and writes. Options are available to customize the tests, including queue depth, overlapped I/O and even a comparison mode.

First up is i7-920.

Now 3770K

Very similar results.

 

HD Tach

HD Tach is a low level hardware benchmark for random access read/write storage devices iincluding SSDs and HDDs. HD Tach uses custom device drivers and low level Windows interfaces to determine the physical performance of the device.

Here is the Long Bench with Bloomfield.

Now we repeat the same test with Ivy Bridge with identical settings.

fg

With this test, we are just measuring the slight differences between the SSDs.  There really isn’t any except in the quality of the NAND.

 

Folder copy

Here is a task that we all carry out and it shows the superiority of USB 3.0 over 2.0.  Only Ivy Bridge natively supports it for Intel platforms; not even Sandy Bridge.  Ivy Bridge also brings PCIe 3.0 although it is available to Sandy Bridge owners through BIOS updates for suitable motherboards.

Here we copy 10GB from a 32GB Kingston DataTraveler Elite 3.0 USB Flash drive to a folder on the desktop.  First up is the i7-920 platform and it takes 5 minutes and 24 seconds.

Now the 3770K, to copy from the flash drive is 2 minutes and 35 seconds.   It’s more than twice as quick!

Now we copy the same 10GB folder from our SSD’s desktop – one folder on the SSD to another – 122 seconds on Bloomfield and 90 seconds on Ivy!  And to copy from the desktop to the Kingston DataTraveler Elite 3.0 takes 7 minutes 33 seconds on Bloomfield and 5 minutes 53 on Ivy.

Check out the charts and see how much time you have to waste with older tech.

We found this is quite practical as we moved our 104GB Steam folder from one SSD to another in under 10 minutes using the Ivy Bridge platform.  In contrast, it seemed to take forever on the Bloomfield platform and we lost track of the time as we went off to do something else.

Now we move on to game-related benchmarks and games.  Next up are the synthetics.

«1. Platform Upgrade Introduction2. Unboxing & Installation - Air or Watercooling?3. Inside the ECS Z77H2-A2X BIOS4. Overclocking, HyperX DDR3 and SSDs5. Test Configuration6. Synthetic Benchmark Suite7. More Tests8. Gaming Benchmarks & Summary Charts9. Conclusion10. View All»