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Monday, August 8, 2011

INTEL & AMD Hardware


The AMD Hardware

AMD’s best desktop CPU currently available.  We could have gone with a slightly faster quad, but personal preference is for more cores for better multitasking.
Heatsink: Noctua NH-D14
This beast of a heatsink is the only internal component carried over from the previous configuration, simply because it’s extremely effective and very quiet.
AMD’s current best desktop chipset in a board that allows up to three GPUs at a time, supports DDR-3 speeds of up to 1866MHz, and includes SATA 6G and USB 3.0 onboard.
RAM: 4GB (2x2GB) OCZ Platinum DDR3-1600 9-9-9
4GB is the norm for a dual channel system, and this RAM from OCZ is a great, low-power (1.35V) kit.
Officially this is a Radeon HD 6950, but it’s an open secret that the first batch is nothing more than an underclocked Radeon HD 6970 with a BIOS that turns off one block of shader units.  One of the card’s two BIOSes has been flashed to a 6970 and clock speeds have been brought up to their full HD 6970 glory.  The card doesn’t have the eight-pin PCIe connector though (it uses 2×6-pin) and while this shouldn’t matter even under a heavy workload, for official testing it’ll be left at 6950 specs in case the reduced power plug comes into play.
Primary storage: OCZ Vertex 2 120GB (review)
Thanks to OCZ, the benchmark systems will use Vertex 2 SSDs!
Until CES 2011 this was the top-performing 2.5″ SSD available from OCZ.  Arguably the best SATA 3G SSD available, Windows and all of our test suite will be launched from this SSD.  Advertised speeds are up to 285MB/s sequential read, 275MB/s sequential write, and 50K IOPS 4K aligned random write.

The Intel Hardware

The current top-end Sandy Bridge CPU is our pick for the new Intel system.  The benefit to the ‘K’ variant is its unlocked multiplier, allowing simulation of any higher frequency models that may be released later on.
Heatsink: Noctua NH-D14
Motherboard: ECS P67H2-A2
Our Cougar Point motherboard is the first P67 board we received for testing.  The B2 revision is currently in the test system. We’ve been asked to withhold the review until the B3 revision is received which will hopefully be mid-April.
RAM: 4GB (2x2GB) Mushkin Blackline Ridgeback DDR3-1600 6-8-6 (review)
Our review of this great RAM was published back in September.  During benchmark testing the timings will be scaled back to 9-9-9 just to keep things as even as possible between the AMD and Intel systems.
Primary storage: OCZ Vertex 2 120GB (review)

The software

Along with the updated hardware comes a few changes to our software suite.  Most of the changes are updated versions of software used in previous testing, but there are a few new additions, mostly in the form of DirectX 11 games and bench software.

Operating System

We are using Windows 7 Ultimate SP1 for all of our testing.

Synthetic Benchmarks

3DMark 11
3DMark 11 tests the DirectX 11 capability of a system including tessellation, compute shaders, and multithreading.  It’s a pretty intense benchmark and visually stunning to boot (this is quite helpful when watching multiple runs of a benchmark).
3DMark Vantage
3DMark Vantage is a DirectX 10 benchmark application.  It provides two GPU tests, two CPU tests, and six feature tests.  Tests include shadow maps, cloth simulation, ray-tracing effects, physics, pixel shaders, and parallax occlusion mapping.
PCMark Vantage
PCMark Vantage tests overall system performance in a variety of common tasks such as photo editing, video editing, music, gaming, communications, productivity, and security.  An overall score and individual scores for each test component are provided.
SiSoft Sandra 2011 SP1
The latest version of SiSoft Sandra brings two new component tests:
  • Media transcoding takes a 30-second, 1280×720 Windows Media file and transcodes it to .mp4/H.264 using various quality settings.
  • GPGPU cryptography uses OpenCL 1.x, DirectX Compute Shader, and CUDA 3.x to measure encryption bandwidth of CPUs and GPUs.  Multi-GPU setups are supported in this benchmark.
wPrime
wPrime is a multithreaded benchmark program that tests the CPU by calculating square roots with a recursive call of Newton’s method for estimating functions, performs several iterations to increase the accuracy of the results, and then confirms the calculation results.  This process is then repeated for all numbers from 1 to the requested maximum.  Our test data requests a maximum value of 32,000,000.
DirectCompute Benchmark
DirectCompute Benchmark tests general-purpose computing on both the CPU and GPU.  It uses both DirectCompute and OpenCL APIs to calculate large quantities of FFT-like data and memory transfers.
Unigine Heaven
Unigine Heaven is a DirectX 11 GPU benchmark based on the Unigine engine.  Its amazing artwork makes heavy use of tessellation, ambient occlusion, and dynamic lighting.

Storage

PCMark Vantage Disk Suite
Part of the PCMark Vantage benchmark, the storage component evaluates the performance of hard drives and SSDs.  Tests include a Windows Defender scan; data streaming performance in Alan Wake; image importing to Windows Photo Gallery; Windows Vista Ultimate startup time; and video editing using Windows Movie Maker; video playback, streaming, and recording in Windows Media Center; adding music to Windows Media Player; and application load times for Microsoft Word 2007, Adobe Photoshop CS2, Internet Explorer 7, and Outlook 2007.
CrystalDiskMark
CrystalDiskMark measures the read/write speed for storage devices using a series of sequential and random tests of various sizes.
AS-SSD
AS-SSD simulates a heavy workload test for devices and, as its name implies, is primarily targeted at SSDs.  Data written to the storage devices is uncompressible, providing a worst-case scenario for writing to the drive.  Tests involve sequential and random reads and writes.
Atto
Atto Disk Benchmark shows off the speeds a storage device is capable of.  Thanks to some highly compressible data, Atto shows off a best-case scenario for SSDs.
RAM <-> Disk copy
DataRAM’s RAMDisk is our product of choice for some real world file transfer testing.  Using a RAMDisk provides a significantly faster storage medium to allow already fast SSDs to not experience a bottleneck transferring to/from a mechanical drive.
Windows/Application load times
We use EasyBCD to force Windows to a boot selection screen to allow for a consistent starting point.  The time is stopped when the Windows finishes loading and the “ready” cursor is presented (the “busy circle” disappears from the arrow icon).
Actual application performance is gauged by load times for the first level of Crysis: Warhead.

Real Applications

Cinebench R11.5 tests rendering on both the CPU and GPU.  The CPU test renders a 3D scene and utilizes all cores/threads available.  The GPU test renders a complex 3D car chase scene using OpenGL.
H.264 transcoding
For transcoding we use Handbrake build svn3758, taking The Matrix from two sources (Blu-ray and DVD) to H.264-encoded .m4v files.  The Blu-ray source is used to produce content at both its native 1080p and 720p, while the
MP3 encoding
LAME’s command-line MP3 encoder will be used for this test.  The test CD will be converted using these settings: 256kbps q0 VBR MP3.  This conversion process demonstrates single-core efficiency.
7-Zip
For this CPU-intensive task, three groups of files will be compressed into a .rar archive using maximum compression: approximately 500MB of small files, 500MB of large files, and a 1GB test involving both small and large file sets.  Times will be reported for each.

Games

Our gaming suite has expanded a bit to include some newer titles.  Tests are run at 1680×1050 and 1920×1080 and a variety of quality settings to get an idea of the best possible resolution to play at given a particular hardware configuration.  We’re working on bringing multi-monitor gaming (AMD’s Eyefinity and NVIDIA’s Surround Gaming) into the test suite.  This should be ready soon.  3D gaming is not currently in the plans.
DirectX 11 titles
Metro 2033 (FPS), Aliens vs Predator (FPS), Lost Planet 2 (FPS), Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X. II (Action)
DirectX 10 titles
Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II (RTS), Batman: Arkham Asylum (Third-person action), Crysis: Warhead (FPS)
DirectX 9 titles
Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X. (Action), Crysis 2 (FPS)

Power/Heat

Power usage is monitored by observing a Kill-A-Watt.  CPU/GPU heat is measured by observation of OCCT’s readout.  Both power and heat will be measured at idle and under load during instances of Handbrake, Unigine Heaven (max settings, DX11 where possible), Prime95 (max CPU heat), and VLC (using a 1080P video).

Conclusion

 It’s a big list, and not every reviewed part will use all parts of the test, but if it helps you decide whether to buy that shiny new something, it’s worth it.  A comparison of both systems will be posted after the revised P67 motherboard is received.

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