MaximumPC 2007 112

74 MAXIMUMPC december 2007

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

Quake 4

This venerable Doom 3–engine game is

OpenGL-based and generally exposes

poor OpenGL drivers. We run our custom

timedemo at 1600x1200 with 4x AA and 4x

anisotropic filtering. The game is one of the

first to support dual cores and it scales well

with CPU support. We’ll also be replacing

this benchmark within the next three issues.

How the New Zero-

Point Stacks Up

Windows XP isn’t going away, so our new

benchmark suite supports both OSes, but

the speed differences are surprising

We selected all of our benchmarks because

they run on both Windows Vista and

Windows XP Professional. As performance

hounds, we lean toward Windows XP

Professional, so we considered running

our benchmarks in XP and simply compar-

ing Vista-only machines that we receive on

the same scale. After lengthy debate, we

decided that would be unfair, so our zero-

point is a dual-boot system with Windows XP

Professional SP2 and Windows Vista. We ran

the benchmarks on each OS independently.

Wonder why enthusiasts are skip-

ping Vista? Look at our benchmark chart.

Vista performance generally dragged

behind XP except in two tests: FEAR and

MainConcept. We were particularly sur-

prised by FEAR. Vista drivers have been hor-

rible since launch, but apparently Nvidia has

finally turned a performance corner.

There’s no such speed increase else-

where, though. ProShow Producer showed

a 14 percent performance decrease in Vista,

and Photoshop was about 8 percent slower.

OpenGL performance was atrocious in Vista,

as well, with Quake 4 scores about 18 per-

cent slower than XP’s. Ouch.

How does the new zero-point stack up

against a high-end machine? You can read

this month’s system review on page 76 for

details, but a faster CPU, RAID 0, and faster

graphics cards amounted to as much as a

50 percent increase in performance.

Our zero-point machine is not intended to

best the machines we review but to provide

a frame of reference for readers who wonder

just how fast a 4GHz Penryn is compared to

what’s in their own rigs.

We use the same HDV content we previously used, but now we’re outputting it to

a Blu-ray-friendly MPEG-2 format instead of WMV.

1,000 sec

zero point scores

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

107 sec

1,046 sec

1,065 sec

205 fps

184 fps

Our current desktop test bed is a Windows Vista Ultimate machine using a quad-core 2.66GHz Intel Core 2 Quad Q6700, 2GB of Corsair DDR2/800 RAM on an EVGA 680 SLI

motherboard, two EVGA GeForce 8800 GTX videocards in SLI mode, Western Digital 150GB Raptor and 500GB Caviar hard drives, an LG GGC-H20L optical drive, a Sound Blaster

X-Fi soundcard, and a PC Power and Cooling Silencer 750 Quad PSU.

vista benchMarks

zero point scores

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

Our current desktop test bed is a Windows XP Professional machine using a quad-core 2.66GHz Intel Core 2 Quad Q6700, 2GB of Corsair DDR2/800 RAM on an EVGA 680 SLI

motherboard, two EVGA GeForce 8800 GTX videocards in SLI mode, Western Digital 150GB Raptor and 500GB Caviar hard drives, an LG GGC-H20L optical drive, a Sound Blaster

X-Fi soundcard, and a PC Power and Cooling Silencer 750 Quad PSU.

xp pro benchMarks

1,000 sec

107 sec

1,046 sec

1,065 sec

184 fps

205 fps

PrEMiErE Pro Cs3

PHoTosHoP Cs3

ProsHoW

Mai NCoNCEPT

FEar 1.07

QUakE 4

1,310 sec

152 sec

1,506 sec

1,448 sec

137 fps

135 fps

1,255 sec

140 sec

1,290 sec

2,057 sec

131 fps

164 fps

PrEMiErE Pro Cs3

PHoTosHoP Cs3

ProsHoW

Mai NCoNCEPT

FEar 1.07

QUakE 4