Benchmark Results: Synthetics
First up, 3DMark Vantage. We’re seeing some impressive scores from this Micro-ATX system. There’s clearly a lot of gaming power in this little box, which is no surprise since it’s hosting a Core i7 CPU and two GeForce GTX 260s in SLI.
Note that since the CPU is really carrying the overclocking scores, its advantage practically disappears as resolution is increased to 1920x1200, as part of the Extreme preset. This is where a high graphics card overclock would have had a chance to show itself.
PCMark is showing us strong scores, but surprisingly little gain for the ~800 MHz CPU overclock, with the aggregate system test score only jumping 4%. The productivity score shows us a higher performance increase in the realm of 10%.
The new version of SiSoft’s Sandra changes the way this benchmark rates performance, but the relative results are the same. In this case, the overclocked system is delivering about a 30% performance increase over the stock-clocked system, which we’d expect in CPU- and memory-intensive benchmarks. Sandra will practically ignore any graphics card performance.