Benchmarking the Beast!

Since the inception of this magazine, the Dream Machine has always been about building the very best machine possible using the best components available at the time. To get there, we wheedle, cajole, push, and beg vendors for their newest unreleased parts. Sometimes we get ’em, and sometimes we don’t. This year, there was no magic bullet, but we still managed to build a righteous rig—even without a nitrous tank under the passenger seat or a blower poking through the hood.

This year’s Dream Machine represents the very best PC a person can build right now. Bar none. How do we know? We didn’t just grab the parts and go. We actually tested other options as well—including AMD’s Quad FX platform, equipped with a pair of dual-core Athlon 64 FX-70 CPUs, and an Intel V-8 system using a pair of quad-core 3GHz Xeons. In the end, we decided that Dream Machine ’07’s configuration was the best blend of performance for today and tomorrow.

The Numbers Don’t Lie

To judge the performance of our Dream Machine, we reached for our standard benchmark suite, which we use to measure the performance of the many primo PCs that enter our Lab. The suite includes Adobe’s Premiere Pro 2.0 and Photoshop CS2, Nero’s Recode 2.0, Monolith’s FEAR, and Raven’s Quake 4. We also continue to use BAPCo’s applications test, SYSMark2004 SE, but the benchmark has proved finicky over the last year and runs only 20 percent of the time on bone-stock machines.

So how fast is the Dream Machine? One look at our benchmark chart will tell you it’s pretty damned fast. Our aging zero-point system consists of a dual-core Athlon 64 FX-60 with 2GB of DDR400 and a pair of Nvidia GeForce 7900 GTX cards. That’s not a config to scoff at—it’s still within the bounds of a high-end machine. Yet against our zero point, the Dream Machine pulls in scores that are almost 100 percent better in every category. In FEAR, the DM’s lead is 120 percent. Keep in mind that these benchmarks aren’t even fully multithreaded to take advantage of our overclocked quad-core CPU. So pat yourself on the back, Dream Machine, you decimate our performance standard-bearer.

More critical readers are probably saying, “So what? Beating up on a moldy-old Athlon 64 is no big whoop. How about the real challengers—those $7,000 to $10,000 machines you review each month?”

That’s where the fun begins. We compared the Dream Machine’s numbers to every single rig we’re reviewed this year. Many of these PCs feature similar components, but even when stacked up against that fearsome lineup, Dream Machine fared well, setting benchmark records in Nero Recode 2.0 and FEAR. In Premiere Pro, Dream Machine trails the fastest rigs we’ve tested—Falcon Northwest’s $10,000 Mach V (reviewed June 2007) and Overdrive’s $7,250 Core2.SLI (reviewed August 2007)—by a mere 0.7 percent. The Mach V, running at an overclocked 3.73GHz, outmuscled DM ’07 in Quake 4 thanks to its clock-speed advantage. The three-month-old Mach V doesn’t have the advantage of our new Ultra cards running in SLI, however, and it takes a beating in FEAR, where the Dream Machine is 27 percent faster.

It’s also worth mentioning that Overdrive’s Core 2.SLI just barely holds the Photoshop CS2 record. But really, the difference in scores between the top four machines in this test is negligible.

To sum up, Dream Machine sets two records (albeit by slim margins) and holds its own against a stable of the fastest PCs on the planet. Not too shabby, if we do say so ourselves.

Our current desktop test bed is a Windows XP SP2 machine, using a dual-core 2.6GHz Athlon 64 FX-60, 2GB of Corsair DDR400 RAM on an Asus A8N32-SLI motherboard, two GeForce 7900 GTX videocards in SLI mode, a Western Digital 4000KD hard drive, a Sound Blaster X-Fi soundcard, and a PC Power and Cooling Turbo Cool 850 PSU.

All Together Now! (click to see the Dream Machine 07 in all its glory, including price breakdown!)