So what’s to be made of all those numbers in the previous post? What kind of difference has all that tuning made to performance? Let’s take a look.
3Dmark06
This is the previous gen benchmark from Futuremark and is still useful for comparing against older DX9 systems. Here I could compare my stock and overclocked scores from the new I7 machine to my previous best score from my old 939 system (AMD X2 4400+ OC’d to 2.6, 7900GT OC).
3Dmark Vantage
Vantage is the latest benchmark from Futuremark and it puts a good test on the graphics system (including DX10 features) and the CPU (including physics processing). Incidentally, during the overclocked run the CPU temp peaked at 76°C and the GPU hit 65°C.
Crysis
Since it was released in Nov ’07 the game has been making graphics cards cry uncle. Using the CryEngine 2 engine it takes advantage of the latest DX10 features and makes extensive use of physics processing. The game includes a built-in benchmarking utility which makes for reproducible test runs. The temperatures reached in the overclocked configuration were 65°C on the GPU in the graphics test and 54°C on the CPU in the CPU test. Both tests were run with 64bit high quality settings, 1920×1080, and 2x anti-aliasing.
Team Fortress 2
TF2 is a fairly low demanding game graphics-wise, but one I play a lot. This benchmark (as well as for the other games) was averaged from multiple runs of typical gameplay at max quality settings.
Left 4 Dead
L4D is one of Steam’s newest game set in the middle of a zombie apocalypse. The number of on screen models and sophisticated physics and AI engine make the game fairly demanding on the highest quality settings (1920×1080, 4x anti-aliasing, 4x filtering, high quality)
UT3
Unreal has been a staple of fast-paced FPS for years. UT3 is a couple years old now, but still provides a decent graphics test with high settings (1920×1080, max quality).
Audio Encoding
For this test I ripped an audio CD to mp3 (13 tracks, 256kbps, CBR, Lame encoder).
Video Encoding
For this test I converted a 40MB flv video to mp4 H.264.
WinZip
Here I compressed 223MB (17 files) into a new zip archive.
In summary, while the synthetic benchmarks show sizable gains from overclocking, most games already run so smooth on this platform that there is only a relatively small difference in frames per second. The improvement tends to be about 10% which is in line with the overclocking on the graphics card. The big boost I made to the CPU simply doesn’t factor into in-game performance since there is already ample processing power. In comparison, the encoding and compression tasks that rely on the CPU showed a nice 20-30% performance bump.
Tags: Comp hardware / mods
