MaximumPC 2005 11

BENCHMARKS

SYSmark2004

ZERO POINT SCORES

Premiere Pro

Photoshop CS

Divx Encode

3DMark 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%

How We Test

Real-world benchmarks. Real-world results

NOVEMBER 2005 MA XIMUMPC 6

BEST OF THE BEST

High-end videocard:

Asus GeForce N7800 GTX Top

This dual-slot card slays all other

7800 GTX cards we’ve seen

Midrange videocard:

XFX GeForce 6800GT

With the latest price cut, the

6800GT leaps to the front of the

budget line

Soundcard:

Creative Labs X-Fi Extreme Music

Excellent headphone performance

and overall fi delity make it the top

soundcard

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

Socket 939 Athlon 64 mobo:

Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe

Socket 775 Pentium 4 mobo:

Asus P5ND2-SLI

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: FEAR

demo, Dungeon Siege II, Battlefi eld

2, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas

Our monthly category-by-category

list of our favorite products. New

products are in red.

C

omputer performance used to be mea-
sured with synthetic tests that had little
or no bearing on real-world performance.
Even worse, when hardware vendors started
tailoring their drivers for these synthetic tests,
the performance in actual games and applica-
tions 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-threading.
We take a raw AVI fi le, add several transi-
tions and a soundtrack, export it to a generic
MPEG-2 fi le, and then report the time the
script takes to complete.
Adobe Photoshop CS: We don’t sub-

scribe to Apple’s half-baked idea that running

one fi lter test in Photoshop, in one certain

way, at a particular 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.

201

620 sec

286 sec

1812 sec

29.3 fps

77. 1 fps 77.7 fps