MaximumPC 2007 112

72 MAXIMUMPC december 2007

in the lab Real-WoRld testing: Results. analysis. Recommendations

reads both Blu-ray and HD DVD discs and

gives us DVD and CD burning capability.

The drive has a SATA interface and will likely

mark the end of PATA in our Lab.

Soundcard

As good as the EVGA 680i SLI boards are,

they still use Realtek’s onboard audio, with

its fake-ass EAX support. To fill the void,

Creative Labs’s X-Fi XtremeGamer gives us

hardware audio support in XP (and the Vista

drivers almost work too!).

Power SuPPly

We’ve long used PC Power and Cooling’s

PSUs in our zero-point machines. In almost

10 years of testing, we’ve had only one sup-

ply ever fail, and that was due to impact

damage that no editor ever owned up to

(Josh!). In a shocking move, we’re stepping

back from our previous test bed’s insanely

high wattage in favor of a quieter Silencer

750 quad supply.

The Benchmarks

Our benchmarks continue to be 100 per-

cent synthetic-free tests. If a machine

gets faster scores in our benchmarks, it’s

because it’s faster, not because of an eso-

teric driver hack

adobe Premiere Pro cS3

We decided to reuse much of our project

from the previous Premiere Pro 2.0 bench-

mark suite, but we’ve upgraded to Premiere

Pro CS3. Additionally, we’ve tweaked our

output options. Instead of outputting the file

to WMV9, we take our HDV-res video and

spit it out to a 1080i

Blu-ray-compatible file

in MPEG-2 format. The

project continues to use

multiple effects, both

CPU and GPU, and

multiple video overlays.

The benchmark really

highlights the improved

multithreading support in

CS3. The test favors fast

CPUs and scales well

with clock speeds, but

not as much when you

move beyond four cores.

adobe

PhotoShoP cS3

The only major change

to our Photoshop test

is the jump from CS2

to CS3. For this bench-

mark, we take a RAW file (shot with a 12MP

Canon EOS 5D) and apply a ton of filters to

it with multiple reverts along the way. Our

Photoshop script tends to be CPU inten-

sive, but disk I/O and the amount of system

RAM also influence the result. Multicore

support in Photoshop is better than in pre-

vious versions, but for the most part, this

benchmark prefers clock speed over the

number of cores.

Photodex ProShow

Producer

New to our benchmark retinue is Photodex’s

popular ProShow Producer application. The

application is a popular slideshow program

among professionals and advanced amateurs.

We like it because it not

only represents real-world

workloads but is also

extremely multithreaded

and will even load up a

dual quad-core machine.

In our benchmark, we

build a slideshow using

130 12MP images shot

with an EOS 5D at 3200

ISO. We apply a random

selection of transitions

and effects to the images

and two MP3 files are

used for background

music. The entire show is

then rendered as a 1080p

MPEG-2 file. The bench-

mark likes clock speed

and gets a good bump

from quad-core CPUs, but our tests show

that Intel’s eight-way Xeon platform doesn’t

scale as well as we’d expect.

mainconcePt reference

Also new to our benchmark suite is

MainConcept’s Reference. You might

not be familiar with the MainConcept

name, but you probably use one of its

products. Corel, Adobe, and AverMedia

all use MainConcept’s codecs. We use

MainConcept’s freely available Reference

demo to transcode the 1080p MPEG-2 file

created in our ProShow Producer bench-

mark to the AVC/H.264 codec at 1920x1080

resolution. The Reference demo uses the

same codec as the fully licensed version

but includes a watermark in a corner. The

benchmark gets a healthy bump from quad

cores and scales well with clock speed.

Interestingly, this is one of the few bench-

marks that run significantly faster under

Windows Vista than XP.

fear

FEAR: First Encounter Assault Recon was

a punishing game and benchmark when it

shipped two years ago, but it’s no match

for today’s hardware. It is still very much a

GPU benchmark at higher resolutions, but at

1600x1200, a combination of GPU and CPU

influence the score. As a compromise, we

run FEAR’s demo with soft shadows enabled

and 16x anisotropic filtering. Hardware

audio support, if available, is enabled for the

benchmark runs as well. We’ll be replacing

FEAR with a more current game within the

next three issues.

ProShow is one of the top choices for professionals who want

to make video slideshows from their still images.

MainConcept is a popular multithreaded codec maker that’s

embedded in many consumer and commercial applications.