Page 5 -- Benchmarks and Testing
Benchmarks
The Firestorm arrived with a small bundle of benchmarking software on it, including 3DMark Vantage, 3DMark 06, and the interesting Heaven Benchmark. In addition to those, we used FRAPS to count frames on the game benchmarks, consisting of at least 5 runs of 60 seconds each. A set of in-game activities was repeated for each benchmark run to minimize variation from run to run.
Equipment and software used are as follows:
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Windows 7 64-bit
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nVidia 191.07
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CoreTemp 0.99.5
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CPUZ64 1.53.1
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CPUID HWMon 1.15.0
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SiSoft Sandra
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Lavaly Everest 5.3
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3DMark Vantage
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CineBENCH R10
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Heaven Benchmark
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Call of Duty 4
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Far Cry 2
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Battlefield Bad Company 2
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Borderlands
FutureMark 3DVantage
The Firestorm and its BFGTech GTX285 brings standard image quality and numbers.
Let's get the big gun out of the way first. SmoothCreations provides a benchmark sheet along with the Firestorm, and, actually, it's one of the more complete check-lists I've seen (and they keep adding to it). But, our results are less than their results (P15778). I'm guessing that here in California, we're totally green power, so computers go slower. Yeah, you can quote me on that. LOL, actually, no you probably shouldn't quote me on that.
Everest Benchmark CPU
Yup, that hurts. I used Hilbert's database to gather these results. He used the regular ASUS Rampage II, as opposed to the Gene in the Firestorm, to get these results. Not apples to apples, but in case one of your buddies at a LAN party is packing, you can get a general sense.
Ahah! The low-latency Patriot RAM is paying dividends here.
Floating Point performance is excercised here. None too shabby, really.
Still off the pace a bit with this CPU benchmark.
Everest Benchmark Disk
The Firestorm has two disks, a 128GB boot dist and a 2TB storage dirve. We used Everest to check the read rates for both drives. Although writing data is a weak point for SSD drives, the Patriot Torqx drive has a new controller from Indilinx which which increases writes to around 150 MB/s.
SSD is a major force now. Just about everybody should have one now for their boot drive. I'm kidding. However, it is a monumental shift in PC architecture, which I am very excited about. While the Patriot Torqx is getting mixed reviews in terms of reliability, we had no issues with it whatsoever.
Traditional mechanical storage still can't be beat in terms of capacity and dollar per gigabyte. This WD 2TB Black is very fast even if it is traditional mechanical storage.
