YEP, WE’RE FINALLY going to introduce
chassis testing. System-building is hugely
important to us, and we feel it’s about time
we introduce our own case testing.
Not only are we going to test these cases
in their stock, shipped configurations, with
whatever fans are (or are not) included,
but we’ll also test them in an optimized
configuration too. So how will we do it?
Well firstly it’s all about hardware. Since
we’ll be testing everything from ITX cases
to full towers and beyond, we’re going
to need two very similar test beds at two
different form factors. Before we test,
we’ll manually “overclock” the CPU to
4.5GHz @1.2V, and set the GPU to run at a
fixed max clock speed of 1,750 MHz. This
will eliminate fluctuations in temperature
output at lower or higher ambient temps.
For cooling, our “stock” configuration
is going to use a Noctua NH-U12S air-
tower equipped with twin Corsair ML120
Pro fans. In very extreme ITX cases we’ll
be swapping that out for a Noctua NH-L9i,
which is a super-slim cooler, althoughFOR THE MAJORITY of people, a good
GPU is all about gaming, but that’s not
the only area where they’re effective. In
computational tasks with large datasets,
and in video-rendering programs, having
a good graphics card is key. To that end
we’ve dramatically readjusted how we’re
going to be testing these cards.
For synthetic benchmarks, we’re
running the tried and true 3DMark tests,
including Fire Strike for DX11 and Port
Royal for RTX (or ray tracing), all at 1080p.
What we’re looking for is a fixed figure to
compare graphics cards across multiple
generations without having to worry about
resolution-based bottlenecks.
Moving on to the games, and this
time we’ve picked four A A A titles. We’ll
test each card with these games at a
resolution that’s appropriate for the
card itself. These titles are Total War:
Three Kingdoms, Metro Exodus, Red
Dead Redemption II, and Assassin’s
Creed Odyssey, all of which have in-built
benchmarks. However, with Assassin’sGRAPHICS CARD BENCHMARKSProduct Name Product Name
3DMark: Fire Strike (Index) 00 00
3DMark: Port Royal Ray Tracing (Index) 00 00
Total War: Three Kingdoms (fps) 00 00
Assassin’s Creed Odyssey (fps) 00 00
Metro Exodus (fps) 00 00
Red Dead Redemption II (fps) 00 00
CompuBench 2.0 N-Body Simulation 1024K (Iterations) 000 000
FAHBench (Index) 000 000
Adobe Premiere Pro Benchmark @ 4K (m:s) 0:0 0:0
Adobe After Effects Benchmark @ 4K (m:s) 0:0 0:0
Power Draw Idle/Load (W) 00/00 00/00
Max Temp (C) 00 00Best scores are in bold. Our test bed consists of ......Creed we will be swapping this out for the
latest title, Valhalla, when that launches.
We’ve also added CompuBench 2.0’s
N-Body Simulation 1024K, an OpenCL
benchmark primarily used to showcase
N-Body physics simulations. It spits out
a number based on how many iterations/
sec the GPU can produce. These kinds of
simulations mimic a system of particles
and bodies under the effects of gravity in
a vacuum, and are used in astrophysics
with large datasets. We’ve also added
FAHBench. This is another OpenCL test
that mimics workloads assigned during
Folding@Home tasks to identify how well
a GPU can simulate molecular dynamics.
On top of that, we’ve included the same
Premiere Pro and After Effects benchmarks
we’re using in our CPU testing.
For temperature and power testing,
we’re going to pull figures during a run of
3DMark: Fire Strike @ 1080p. We’ll run a
custom, repeating, combined test for 10
minutes, noting down max temp and w at ts
drawn from the wall.Graphics Card Benchmarks
Chassis
Benchmarks
Motherboard
Benchmarks
MOTHERBOARDS ARE WHERE things
get surprisingly interesting. We’re seeing
manufacturers tweak their boards and
push more voltage into certain areas at
stock, so it’s vital that we keep a vigilant
eye on that. That way you can stay
informed and decide whether you want to
purchase a motherboard that might give
you more stock performance in favor of
more heat and a shorter life cycle, or vice
versa. To help identify those situations,
we’ve included a bevy of benchmarks
aimed at every area of system use.
We’re expanding our traditional
synthetic rendering performance test,
Cinebench R20, to not only include multi-
core but also single-core performance.
While this is running, in a similar manner
to our CPU benchmarks, we’re also going
to measure max sustained single and
multi-core clock speeds. Although we’re
not swapping out processors, this will
give us an indicator as to the stock auto-
overclocking performance of the board.
We’ve picked up AIDA64 again for
memory latency, and this time bandwidthbenchmarking
30 MAXIMUM PC SEP 2020 maximumpc.com