Gaming Benchmarks
The SX38P2 is an X38 based system with a QX9650 CPU and one of the fastest video cards on the market, so we expected it to tear through the benchmarks and demonstrate great gaming performance. What we were looking for was weaknesses that would prevent this system from meeting our expectations.
The gaming benchmarks were captured with FRAPS during a real game play experience at 1600x1200 resolution. The benchmark tests include game play from each level of the single player games. Multiple levels of the game were played and at least 30 minutes of game play was captured, as well as some slight sections of cut scenes and system loads, but these did not affect the overall results (with the possible exception of Crysis). The two main games tested were Crysis and Call of Duty 4, which proved to be the most demanding tests. BioShock and Company of Heroes did not push this system enough to make further benchmarking valuable.
We didn’t test the XPC against another system; our tests were limited to the XPC in that we are only testing how viable the XPC is at being a LAN party box. The largest monitor I had on hand to test the XPC was limited to 1600x1200, so that was the maximum resolution for our tests. Let’s start with the hardest one first: Crysis.
Crysis cuts powerful systems down as fast as Nomad dispatches his enemies. Configuring the SX38P2 for what seemed like days to get good game play resulted in some fairly high settings; the game was run at 1600x1200 resolution, with everything set to ‘HIGH’ detail except shaders quality, game effects quality, and postprocessing quality, which were set to ‘MEDIUM’. No anti-aliasing was applied.
Note that the system will have times where the minimum frame rate reaches zero. We hadn’t noticed any horrendous drops during game play, so this might be accounted for during the loading sequences. Playing through each level of the game revealed that this system had no major weaknesses that every other system doesn’t face when running this demanding title.
Also of note is that our maximum overclock results seem a bit lower than our 10% overclock results. This is probably attributable to a margin of error—at a certain point Crysis will be bottlenecked by the graphics card, and there’s little an overclock will do about it.
After being punished by Crysis, the system was happy to see Call of Duty 4. Playing through each level of game to capture the various game play elements meant cranking through the gaming benchmarks without any disappointing results. The Call of Duty 4 visual options were all enabled at 1600x1200, with dynamic lights, model detail, and water detail set to normal. All texture resolutions were set to ‘Extra’, anisotropic filtering was maxed out, and antialiasing was set to 4x.
As you can see, even at these high settings, the XPC provided smooth game play.
We tried a couple of more games on the XPC, such as Company of Heroes and Bioshock; even at maximum detail the frame rates were so high that the minimum frame rate exceeded the 60 Hz refresh rate of most LCD monitors. Clearly, the XPC can handle games as well as any enthusiast class PC.
