MaximumPC 2005 10

How We Test

Real-world benchmarks. Real-world results

OCTOBER 2005 MA XIMUMPC 6

BEST OF THE BEST

High-end Videocard:

GeForce 7800 GTX

Midrange videocard:

ATI Radeon X800XL

Soundcard:

We’re waiting to see a final

Creative Labs X-Fi before

making an investment

7,200rpm SATA:

Hitachi Deskstar 7K500

External backup drive:

Western Digital Dual-Option

Media Center 250GB

Portable USB drive:

Seagate Portable External Hard

Drive 100GB

DVD burner:

Plextor PX-716A

Widescreen LCD monitor:

Dell 2405FPW

Desktop LCD monitor:

Dell 2001FP

Desktop CRT monitor:

NEC FE2111 SB

Due to waning interest, this

category will be dropped

next month

Socket 939 Athlon 64 mobo:

ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe

Socket 775 Pentium 4 mobo:

ASUS P5ND2-SLI

See this month’s Head2Head

for details

Portable MP3 player:

Apple iPod 60GB

Photo printer:

Canon i9900

5.1 speakers:

Logitech Z-5500 Digital

2.1 speakers:

Klipsch GMX A2.1

Mid-tower case:

Cooler Master Praetorian 730

Full-size case:

ThermalTake Armor VA8000BWS

Games we’re playing:

Area 51, Battlefield 2, Grand

Theft Auto: San Andreas

Our monthly category-by-category

list of our favorite products. New

products are in red.

P

C performance used to be measured with

synthetic tests that had little or no bearing

on real-world performance. Even worse, when

hardware vendors started tailoring their driv-

ers for these synthetic tests, the performance

in actual games and applications sometimes

dropped.

At Maximum PC , our mantra for testing

has always been “real-world.” We use tests

that refl ect tasks power users perform every

single day. With that in mind, here are the six

real-world benchmarks that we use to test

every system we review.

SYSmark2004 : This is the most compre-

hensive application benchmark available, using

no fewer than 19 applications to measure the

time it takes for the PC to complete to real-world

computer-intensive tasks. Our SYSmark score is

a composite based on the time the test takes to

complete several different types of tasks.

Adobe Premiere Pro : The leading non-

linear digital-video editor has recently been

retooled with more support for multi-thread-

ing. We take a raw AVI file, add several

transitions and a soundtrack, export it to a

generic MPEG-2 file, and then report the time

the script takes to complete.

Adobe Photoshop CS : We don’t subscribe

to Apple’s half-baked idea that running one fi lter

test in Photoshop , in one certain way, at a partic-

ular time of day provides an accurate measure of

performance. Instead, we take a high-resolution

image and throw it through just about every fi lter

available in Photoshop CS at it. Our score is the

time it takes for the script to complete.

Divx Encode : Video encoding is today’s

time-suck. We transcode a short movie stored

on the hard drive from MPEG-2 to Divx using

#1 DVD Ripper. We report the length of time the

process takes to complete.

3DMark05 : After ranting about real-world

tests, you might be surprised to fi nd this “syn-

thetic” graphics test in our suite. 3DMark05 ,

however, has proved to be the standard by

which graphics cards and PCs that run them

are judged. Instead of reporting a meaning-

less composite score, we run the third test at

1280x1024 with 4x antialiasing and 4x aniso-

tropic fi ltering, then report the frame rate. Our

zero-point system with SLI can’t even break 30

frames per second.

Doom 3 : Id’s hugely popular game is a

dark, scary, and serious test of PC horsepower.

We run this game with 4x antialiasing and 4x

anisotropic fi ltering, at 1600x1200 resolution,

and report the frame rate.

BENCHMARKS

SYSmark2004

ZERO POINT SCORES

Premiere Pro

Photoshop CS

Divx Encode

3D Mark 05

Doom 3

0 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100%

216

494 sec

362 sec (-20.99%)

1942 sec

34 .3 fps +

How to Read Our Benchmark Chart

Maximum PC’s test beds double as zero-point systems, against which all review systems

are compared. Here’s how to read our benchmark chart.

Our zero-point reference systems uses a 2.6GHz Athlon 64 FX-55, 2GB of DDR400 Crucial Ballistix RAM,

two nVidia GeForce 6800 Ultra cards in SLI, a Maxtor 250GB DiamondMax10, a Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS,

a PC Power and Cooling TurboCool 510 Deluxe Express, and Windows XP Pro with SP2.

The scores achieved by our zero-point system are noted

in this column. They remain the same, month in, month

out, until we decide to update our zero-point.

The actual

scores achieved

by the system

being reviewed.

The bar graph indicates how much faster

the review system performed in respect

to the zero-point system. If a system

exceeds the zero-point performance by

more than 100 percent, the graph will

show a full-width bar and a plus sign.

The names

of the actual

benchmarks

used.

Every month we remind readers of our

key zero-point components.

0 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100%0 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100%

201

620 sec

286 sec

1812 sec

29.3 fps

77. 1 fps 77.7 fps