MaximumPC 2005 12

How We Test

Real-world benchmarks. Real-world results

DECEMBER 2005 MA XIMUMPC 77

BEST OF THE BEST

High-end videocard:

eVGA e-GeForce 7800GTX KO ACS3

A tick faster than our previous favor-

ite, Asus 7800GTX, the KO occupies

just one slot

Midrange videocard:

GeForce 6800GT

Soundcard:

Creative Labs X-Fi XtremeMusic

7,200rpm SATA:

Western Digital WD400KD

Faster, quieter, cooler, and cheaper

than the previous top drive, what

more could you want?

External backup drive:

Western Digital Dual-Option Media

Center 320GB

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:

M-Audio Studiophile LX4 5.1 (LX4 2.1

with 5.1 Expander System)

The Studiophiles are pricey, but worth

it if you want the ultimate in speakers

2.1 speakers:

M-Audio Studiophile LX4 2.1

Reference speakers tend to sound

flat, but not these babies

Mid-tower case:

Lian Li PCV-1100

We’ve moved the PCV-1100 from

the full-tower to mid-tower category,

where it should be

Full-tower case:

Thermaltake Armor

Games we’re playing: FEAR,

Brothers in Arms: Earned in Blood,

X-Men Legends II, Indigo Prophecy,

Quake 4, Dungeon Siege II,

Battlefield 2

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 tailor-
ing their drivers 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-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 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.

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.

BENCHMARKS

SYS mark 2004 201

Premiere Pro^620 sec

Photoshop CS 286 sec

Divx Encode 1812 sec

3D Mark05 29.3 fps

Doom 3 77. 1 fps

0 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100%

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 number will

appear to the right in parentheses.

The names

of the actual

benchmarks

used.

Every month we remind readers of our

key zero-point components.

216

494 sec

362 sec (-20.99%)

1635 sec

82 fps

62.3 fps (112.63%)

0 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100%

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

0 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100%

BENCHMARKS

ZERO POINT SCORES