Benchmark Results: Synthetics
As usual, I always like to kick the synthetic benchmarks off with some 3DMark Vantage...
3DMark is showing us a significant speed increase at the lower-resolution Performance preset, but this increase definitely slows down as the resolution and details are increased. By the time we hit the Extreme preset, the overclock doesn’t seem to be providing that much of a boost.
This is likely due to how higher resolutions will move the performance bottleneck from the CPU to the video card, and despite our CPU clock speed of 4.25 GHz, our Radeon HD 4870 X2 didn’t provide us with much of an overclock.
We now move on to Futuremark’s other benchmark, PC Mark Vantage:
PC Mark Vantage demonstrates big gains in the system test and productivity scores, although the memory and hard drive tests remain similar, even lowering a little in the hard drive test. The memory score probably didn’t increase much due to the relaxed timings used for overclocking. Why the hard drive performance would fall a little is odd.
We now move on to the final synthetic benchmarks, courtesy of SiSoft Sandra XII:
Sandra’s raw CPU and memory performance tests show a 35% CPU increase right in line with our 35% overclock. It also shows the overclocked memory providing a 22% increase in bandwidth.
Now that we’ve seen the theoretical numbers, let’s move a little closer to reality and check out the application benches!
