MaximumPC 2008 09

I

n the end, all this hardware amounts to

one hell of a fast machine. And not just in

theory—as in, next year when such and such

comes out, this rig’s power will be evident

(although we do admit that some soft ware opti-

mizations will be needed).

In the here and now, we routinely saw per-

formance benefi ts with many of today’s applica-

tions. For comparison, we put Dream Machine

against our standard zero-point 2.67GHz Core

2 Quad Q6700, GeForce 8800 GTX box—and

DM pretty much fl attened it with double- and

triple-digit spreads. While a sub-3GHz quad-core

box might sound quaint today, we’ll remind

you that our zero-point PC actually gave a new

3.5GHz Core 2 Duo gaming PC that we reviewed

in August a pretty good drubbing.

Still, for an even more worthy contender,

we turned to the CyberPower Gamer Ultimate

SLI Quad PC that we reviewed in July. With

its 4GHz Core 2 Extreme QX9770 CPU, 4GB of

DDR3, and a pair of GeForce 9800 GX2 cards,

the system rocked all those that came before

it and we knew this mean machine would be

diffi cult to overcome. But DM did it. At least in

some tests. We saw Dream Machine rip past

the CyberPower box in both Premiere Pro CS3

and ProShow Producer by 23 and 36 percent,

respectively. That’s nothing to turn

your nose up at. In other tests,

Dream Machine did well, but not

spectacularly. In Photoshop CS3—

not exactly the most threaded

application in the world—Dream

Machine scored a near tie with CyberPower, tak-

ing just two more seconds to complete our test.

Since Photoshop doesn’t exploit our second proc,

and honestly, barely pushes a single quad-core

CPU to the edge, this is about what we’d expect

from PCs that operate at the same clock speed.

In our MainConcept benchmark, DreamMa-

chine was about 10 percent slower. Why? The

encoder that’s used in MainConcept Reference

is license-limited to single-processor support.

Multi-processor support is available only with

the professional version, which on the Dream

Machine cut the encode time in half, by the way.

In our Unreal Tournament 3 Direct X 10

benchmark, DM’s pair of Radeons didn’t disap-

point, cranking out 145 fps. Mind you, our

normal benchmarks are designed to measure

system-level performance. They’re not meant

for pure GPU analysis—thus, we don’t run with

antialiasing or massive amounts of fi ltering en-

abled. Still, we saw almost double the numbers

that a pair of GeForce 8800 GTX cards could

produce and 12 percent more than quad SLI

cards mustered. With AA and aniso cranked up,

the Radeons really start to strut their stuff. When

we were still deciding what cards to use in DM,

we also ran a GeForce GTX 280 in 3DMark Van-

tage. A single GTX 280 belts out 9,668 in the GPU

tests—very impressive. But not as impressive as

the 19,014 that our two Radeons put out. For all

you 3D Vantage fans, Dream Machine’s overall

score was 20,539. Not bad.

This leads us to our most heartbreaking test:

Crytek’s Crysis. We expected the Radeons to

excel in this benchmark, but they didn’t. Why?

First, as we mentioned earlier,

our system benchmarks are

designed to refl ect normal

system use, not act as GPU

tests—AA is not enabled nor is

tons of fi ltering. However, we

do run at an all-out 1920x1200 resolution. That’s

enough to make most systems whimper. While

CyberPower’s Quad SLI rig spit out 55 fps, DM

was chugging along at 26 fps—about the same

performance we got from two GeForce 8800

GTX cards. What the frak? We got ATI on the

horn and learned that the likely culprits were

driver and OS optimizations—or rather, lack

thereof. ATI didn’t expect to make the cards pub-

lic for several more months. The company has

done some optimization for the X48 chipset, but

Skulltrail’s 5400 chipset wasn’t on the top of the

list. The company is still sorting out some issues

with how Windows Vista handles ATI’s AFR ren-

dering. So this is what we’re talking about when

we say future performance will come through

improved drivers.

But what choice did we have? We sure as

hell weren’t going to participate in this silly

battle between the CPU and GPU camps. As true

believers in pure PC power, we weren’t going

to betray that mission statement in our 10th

anniversary issue—thus, this machine marks our

commitment to having it all.

DREAM MACHINE ’08

The Numbers Don’t Lie

Ladies and gentlemen, we present the benchmarks

ZERO POINT

1,260 sec

150 sec

1,415 sec

1,872 sec

26 fps

83 fps

Our current desktop test bed consists of a quad-core 2.66GHz Intel Core 2 Quad Q6700, 2GB of Corsair DDR2/800 RAM on an EVGA 680 SLI motherboard. We run two EVGA GeForce 8800 GTX cards in SLI mode, Western Digital 150GB Raptor and 500GB Caviar hard drives, an LG GGC-H20L optical drive, a Sound

Blaster X-Fi soundcard, a PC Power and Cooling Silencer 750 Quad PSU, and Windows Vista Home Premium 64 bit.

Premiere Pro CS3

Photoshop CS3

ProShow

MainConcept

Crysis

Unreal Tournament 3

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

VISTA 64-BIT BENCHMARKS

8080

547 (+130%)(+130%)

577 (+145%)(+145%)

1,3531,353

26

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40 | MAXIMUMPC | SEP 08 | http://www.maximumpc.com

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