Maximum PC Benchmarks Explained

Posted 02/08/2013 at 3:40pm | by Gordon Mah Ung

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How to benchmark like a pro

There’s a joke in the hardware community that the only thing a performance computer is good for is running benchmarks. This dis at benchmarking suggests that such performance measures are pointless.

We disagree. We honestly think that benchmarks keep the hardware world honest. They give you a real metric with which to measure one piece of hardware against another, or one system against another. Yes, there are times when politics get injected into benchmarks and they can be misapplied, cooked, or even cheated on. But think of what the world would be like without benchmarks. A vendor could make claims that his gadget is faster than the competitor’s. An Internet declaration claiming a PowerPC Mac was 10 times faster than a Pentium II would stand as truth. A good benchmark run well and analyzed correctly can tell you more about a piece of hardware than any marketing flyer.

Since Maximum PC’s system benchmarks haven’t been updated since the last decade, we’re rolling out newer, more punishing tests that push today’s hardware. We’re also using real-world workloads such as gigapixel imaging and multiple 1080p streams to closely match what people are doing today.

With new benchmarks also comes a new zero-point system to give you a reference point for how today’s fastest PCs perform. And after we’ve given you a tour of our official system tests, we’ll point you to some benchmarks you can run at home on your own rig.

Introducing Our New Zero-Point

We didn’t need benchmarks to tell us our Nehalem-based test bed was dragging ass

If we tell you how fast some new $5,000 PC is, it doesn’t mean much without a reference point. That’s why we build standard zero-point PCs to compare machines to. It’s hard to believe, but our previous zero-point is now several generations old. It’s still serviceable for many folks, but when it’s meant to be our measuring stick for some of the fastest production computers in the world, it better have some chutzpah.

In choosing our parts, we spent some time pondering whether to go LGA1155 or LGA2011. Quad-core or hexa-core? Single GPU or dual? In the end, we decided that more cores still matter, so Intel’s Core i7-3930K would be the basis of our new ZP. Yes, it’s based on the older Sandy Bridge microarchitecture, but it still has plenty of speed, and LGA2011 gives us an upgrade path to Ivy Bridge-E and perhaps an eight-core chip in the future. The 3930K is stock-clocked at 3.2GHz with Turbo Boost to 3.8GHz. We decided to override the stock clock and run it at 3.8GHz full time, with Turbo taking it to 3.9GHz.

A hexa-core CPU and top-of-the-line GPU give us a good baseline against which to judge new systems.

For storage, we are finally unshackled from SATA 3Gb/s speeds with the X79 chipset, via an Asus Sabertooth X79 board. A 120GB OCZ Agility 3 gives us zesty SATA 6Gb/s reads and writes and has enough capacity to handle our benchmarks. For graphics, we’ve long used a single‑card dual-GPU and we continue that trend with Nvidia’s benchmark- and wallet-busting GeForce GTX 690. It’s basically the equivalent of two GTX 680 cards—in performance and cost. The rest of the build is essentially borrowed from the $2,100 Tax Refund PC in our May 2012 issue and includes 8GB of 2GB DDR3/1600 in quad-channel mode, a 2TB WD Caviar Green drive, an 850W Corsair HX850 PSU, and an NZXT Phantom 410 case and Havik heatsink.

To create our benchmarks, this wasn’t the only hardware we used. Additional testing was also done using a stock Core i7-3770K and GeForce GTX 580 card. We also tested our benchmarks using an OCZ Revo 3 X2 card to see how much of an impact I/O would have on the individual tests. It was negligible.

Click the next page to read about our new benchmark tests