REVIEWS
ISSUE 379|COMPUTERSHOPPER|SEPTEMBER (^2019109)
★★★★★
Excellent
★★★★★
Verygood
★★★★★
Good
★★★★★
Belowaverage
★★★★★
Avoid!
ComputerShopperrates
productsoutof five:
BUSINESSBUY
The very bestproductsforwork
winourBusinessBuy award.
RECOMMENDED
Productsthatdon’t quitequalify
foraBestBuyawardbutarestill
highly rated by our reviewers.
BEST BUY
Productswithoutstandingquality
andperformanceforthe money
winourBest Buy award.
Thebestproductscan win
thefollowingawards:
BENCHMARKS RATINGS&AWARDS
DIRTSHOWDOWN
Dirt Showdownisacrackingracing
game that makes good use of
DirectX11’sfancy graphicaleffects.
You’llwantatleast30fpsfor
smoothracing.
TOMB RAIDER
With the ultra-demanding
Super-SamplingAnti-Aliasing
(SSAA)enabled,2013’s TombRaider
rebootis agreat indicator of
mid-rangeperformance.
METRO:LAST
LIGHT REDUX
Ourmost demandinggraphicstest
uses tessellation,SSAA and massive
textures to giveevenhigh-endcards
athoroughworkout.
SHOPPERBENCHMARKS
Our benchmarksuiteuses open-sourcesoftware that runs on Windows,macOSand Linux
systems. This lets us use objectiveresults to comparePCs and laptops, no matter which
operatingsystem theyrun. It’s designedto test each computer to its limit, using a
combinationof intensive image-editing,video-encodingand multitaskingtests.
We ran the tests on our reference PC, which has an Intel Core i5-4670Kprocessor,
8GB of DDR3 RAM and an AMD RadeonR7 260X graphicscard. We normalisedour
results so this PC had ascore of 100. This makes it easy to draw comparisonsbetween
test systems.
The resultingoverall score is shown at the bottom of every PC and laptop review.
As we use the same tests in our standaloneand group test reviews, you can compare
the performanceof any computer,whether it’s ahybrid, laptop or desktop,from both
sectionsof the magazine.
3D BENCHMARKS