Performance - 3DMark 06 | 3DMark Vantage

3DMark 06 CPU test

Well, everybody loves 3DMark06, and nowadays, it's CPU limited, making it a good application to check CPU performance. The scores that you see obviously are the CPU test itself, not overall 3DMark06 scores.

3DMark Vantage (DirectX 10)

3DMark Vantage focuses on the two areas most critical to gaming performance: the CPU and the GPU. With the emergence of multi-package and multi-core configurations on both the CPU and GPU side, the performance scale of these areas has widened, and the visual and game-play effects made possible by these configurations are accordingly wide-ranging. This makes covering the entire spectrum of 3D gaming a difficult task. 3DMark Vantage solves this problem in three ways:

1. Isolate GPU and CPU performance benchmarking into separate tests,
2. Cover several visual and game-play effects and techniques in four different tests, and
3. Introduce visual quality presets to scale the graphics test load up through the highest-end hardware.

To this end, 3DMark Vantage has two GPU tests, each with a different emphasis on various visual techniques, and two CPU tests, which cover the two most common CPU-side tasks: Physics Simulation and AI. It also has four visual quality presets (Entry, Performance, High, and Extreme) available in the Advanced and Professional versions, which increase the graphics load successively for even more visual quality. Each preset will produce a separate, official 3DMark Score, tagged with the preset in question.

3DMark Vantage also has a standalone CPU test. It's very multi-core and multi-threading aware, it was no surprise to see the Core i7 kick in real hard, but the Gulftown is just kicking major ass there.

With a new graphics card being (HD5870) recently used, we don't have much other Performance scores we can compare to. But above you can see that with a Radeon HD5870 this PC would score (P) 18.300 points. Overclocked to 4.4 GHz we'd gain a little more and drive it towards roughly 19.000 points.