Benchmark Results: Synthetics
The bigger picture is somewhat obscured by charting only the total 3DMark scores. The March PC easily takes the Entry and Performance presets thanks to far higher Physics scores favoring the Phenom II X4 processor. But more successful graphics overclocking allows the December rig to record the higher Graphics score, resulting in the close overall Extreme preset results.
This quarter's $500 PC manages to secure narrow victories in much of our synthetic testing. Sporting the same motherboard and hard drive, these systems facilitate unimpressive storage performance, unfortunately.
Breaking down the individual HDD tests shows similar theoretical hard drive performance, aside from noticeably lower Media Center scores for the current PC.
We made a switch to Sandra 2011 this month, but results should still be comparable with our December 2010 data. The extra processing core more than makes up for a lower operating frequency, as the March PC leads in both stock and overclocked trims.
We should have seen a clean sweep in the Processor Multimedia test as well. But despite multiple runs and re-installing the application, the Int. x16 iSSE2 score is less than 40% of what we'd expect.
Although the current PC utilizes the same motherboard, as well as the same memory frequency and timings, its Phenom II processor delivers slightly higher memory bandwidth.
