Synthetic Benchmarks
Let’s start off with everyone’s favorite synthetic graphics test, 3DMark Vantage. In order to get an idea of how this setup performs at the benchmark’s various workloads, we ran the Performance, High, and Extreme presets.
The total 3DMark Vantage scores show us a capable system with relatively little gain from the 1 GHz CPU overclock. That’s probably because this benchmark is graphics-centric, and the video card overclock is minimal.
Let’s look at the application-centric PCMark Vantage scores, which should show the CPU overclock in a much more positive light.
PCMark Vantage shows a respectable performance increase of about 20% across total system performance, memory performance, and productivity performance. The exception is hard disk performance, which of course does not benefit from the overclocked processor.
Now we’ll look at SiSoft’s Sandra XII benchmark suite:
Sandra demonstrates scores far more dependent on raw CPU performance, as the overclocked scores bring us up some 44% over stock speeds. Memory bandwidth is also increased about 25% over stock due to the increased clock speed.
With the synthetics out of the way, let’s see how the system performs in real world applications.
