Benchmark Results: Synthetics
3DMark Vantage results are exactly what we’d expect from the various graphics hardware, but only because we turned off PhysX on the $500 system. 3DMark’s PhysX score-enhancements have been a bitter point of contention between AMD and Nvidia graphics card users, and two charts below will show why.
With PhysX enabled, 3DMark Vantage GPU scores look proportional to gaming performance, however…
3DMark Vantage CPU performance charts are completely unrealistic. Never before has Futuremark so deceptively favored a single added feature over actual system performance, and this explains why we disabled PhysX for the 3DMark score chart.
PCMark’s overall performance score reflects the difference in clock speeds between the $1,500 and $4,500 systems, but doesn’t penalize the $500 PC nearly as much as one might expect.
PCMark’s Memories score again shows the expected performance difference between the $4,500 PC’s DDR3 memory and the $1,500 system’s DDR2, but with unexpectedly low results for the DDR2-equipped $500 build.
Performance scores spread out even more in PCMark’s Productivity test.
The performance differences between the $500 system’s single hard drive, the $1,500 build’s 2-drive RAID 0 array and the $4,500 system’s four-drive RAID 0 array are easily seen in PCMark’s Hard Drive test.
Sandra’s CPU tests show the $4,500 system performing around three times as well as the $500 system, but it’s still nine-times the price!
Sandra’s memory bandwidth scores look completely realistic given the technologies used, unlike those seen in PCMark.
