To kick things off, we fired up Futuremark's system performance benchmark, PCMark Vantage. This synthetic benchmark suite simulates a range of real-world scenarios and workloads, stressing various system subsets in the process. Everything you'd want to do with your PC -- watching HD movies, music compression, image editing, gaming, and so forth -- is represented here, and most of the tests are multi-threaded, making this a good indicator of all-around performance.
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Futuremark PCMark Vantage and PCMark 7
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Simulated Application Performance
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The Digital Storm Bolt absolutely smoked the competition in PCMark Vantage. Granted, these other systems are all packing last-generation processors and graphics cards, but with the exception of the Alienware rig, these are all mid- or full-tower gaming systems, not small form factor PCs.
The scores for PCMark 7 are essentially identical to those for PCMark Vantage, with the Bolt clearly out in front and by roughly the same percentage.
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Futuremark 3DMark 11
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Simulated Gaming Performance
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The latest version of Futuremark's synthetic 3D gaming benchmark, 3DMark11, is specifically targeted at Windows 7-based systems due to its DirectX 11 requirement. 3DMark11 isn't simply a port of 3DMark Vantage to DirectX 11, though. With this latest version of the benchmark, Futuremark has incorporated four new graphics tests, a physics tests, and a new combined test. We tested the graphics cards here with 3DMark11's Performance preset option, which uses a resolution of 1280x720 with 4x anti-aliasing and 16x anisotropic filtering.
In 3DMark 11, the Bolt falls back to earth somewhat, although it does handily beat out all but one of the other systems.
