SEPTEMBER 2007MAMAMAXIMXIMXIMXIMUUUUMMPPPCC
Benchmarking the Beast
Of the 12 Dream Machines we’ve built in as many years, this one is far and away the fastest
Benchmarking the Beast
far and away the fastestfar and away the fastest
S
ince the inception of this magazine,
the Dream Machine has always
been about building the very best
machine possible using the best compo-
nents available at the time. To get there,
we wheedle, cajole, push, and beg ven-
dors for their newest unreleased parts.
Sometimes we get ’em, and sometimes
we don’t. This year, there was no magic
bullet, but we still managed to build a
righteous rig—even without a nitrous
tank under the passenger seat or a blow-
er poking through the hood.
This year’s Dream Machine repre-
sents the very best PC a person can
build right now. Bar none. How do we
know? We didn’t just grab the parts and
go. We actually tested other options as
well—including AMD’s Quad FX plat-
form, equipped with a pair of dual-core
Athlon 64 FX-70 CPUs, and an Intel
V-8 system using a pair of quad-core
3GHz Xeons. In the end, we decided
that Dream Machine ’07’s confi guration
was the best blend of performance for
today and tomorrow.THE NUMBERS DON’T LIE
To judge the performance of our Dream
Machine, we reached for our standard
benchmark suite, which we use to
measure the performance of the many
primo PCs that enter our Lab. The suite
includes Adobe’s Premiere Pro 2.0 and
Photoshop CS2, Nero’s Recode 2.0,
Monolith’s FEAR, and Raven’s Quake 4.We also continue to use BAPCo’s appli-
cations test, SYSMark2004 SE, but the
benchmark has proved fi nicky over
the last year and runs only 20 per-
cent of the time on bone-stock
machines.
So how fast is the Dream
Machine? One look at our
benchmark chart will tell you
it’s pretty damned fast. Our
aging zero-point system
consists of a dual-core
Athlon 64 FX-60 with 2GB
of DDR400 and a pair of
Nvidia GeForce 7900 GTX
cards. That’s not a confi g to
scoff at—it’s still within the
bounds of a high-end machine.
Yet against our zero point, the
Dream Machine pulls in scores
that are almost 100 percent better in
every category. In FEAR, the DM’s lead
is 120 percent. Keep in mind that these
benchmarks aren’t even fully multithread-
ed to take advantage of our overclocked
quad-core CPU. So pat yourself on the
back, Dream Machine, you decimate our
performance standard-bearer.
More critical readers are prob-
ably saying, “So what? Beating up on
a moldy-old Athlon 64 is no big whoop.
How about the real challengers—those
$7,000 to $10,000 machines you review
each month?”
That’s where the fun begins. We com-
pared the Dream Machine’s numbers to
every single rig we’re reviewed this year.Many of these PCs feature similar
components, but even when stacked
up against that fearsome lineup, Dream
Machine fared well, setting benchmark
records in Nero Recode 2.0 and FEAR.
In Premiere Pro, Dream Machine trails
the fastest rigs we’ve tested—Falcon
Northwest’s $10,000 Mach V (reviewed
June 2007) and Overdrive’s $7,250 Core2.
SLI (reviewed August 2007)—by a mere
0.7 percent. The Mach V, running at an
overclocked 3.73GHz, outmuscled DM
’07 in Quake 4 thanks to its clock-speed
advantage. The three-month-old Mach V
doesn’t have the advantage of our new
Ultra cards running in SLI, however, and
it takes a beating in FEAR, where the
Dream Machine is 27 percent faster.
It’s also worth mentioning that
Overdrive’s Core 2.SLI just barely holds
the Photoshop CS2 record. But really, the
difference in scores between the top four
machines in this test is negligible.
To sum up, Dream Machine sets
two records (albeit by slim margins) and
holds its own against a stable of the fast-
est PCs on the planet. Not too shabby, if
we do say so ourselves.BENCHMARKS
SYSmark2004 SE 275ZERO POINT SCORESPremiere Pro 2.0 3,000^ sec
Photoshop CS2 295 sec
Recode H.264 2,648 sec
FEAR 1.07 80 fps
Quake 4 110.5 fps0 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100%1,508 sec
146.1 sec (+101.9%)
1,231 sec (+115.1%)215.1 fps177 fps (+121.3%)Our current desktop test bed consists of a dual-core 2.6GHz Athlon 64 FX-60, 2GB of Corsair DDR400 RAM on an Asus A8N32-SLI motherboard, two
GeForce 7900 GTX cards running in SLI mode, a Western Digital 4000KD drive, a Sound Blaster X-Fi, a PC Power and Cooling Turbo Cool 850, and XP SP2.
WNR