Digital Storm's Enix Gaming System Reviewed

Name: Digital Storm's Enix Gaming System Reviewed - Page 4
Brand: Digital

by Joel Hruska — Wednesday, May 04, 2011, 01:00 PM EDT

PCMark Vantage

Next, we ran the test systems through Futuremark’s PCMark Vantage. This benchmark suite runs through a host of different usage scenarios to simulate different types of workloads including High Definition digital video playback and editing, gaming, image editing and manipulation, music compression, communications, and productivity. We like the fact that most of the tests are multi-threaded as well, in order to exploit the additional resources offered by multi-core processors.

One thing to keep in mind when comparing PCMark Vantage results is that the benchmark's margin of error is fairly wide—we'd estimate 5-7 percent. Relevant factors include whether or not the hard drive was defragmented immediately prior to the run and whether Vantage was run immediately following OS+driver installation, or only after a full suite of tests and other benchmarks had been run.

Futuremark PCMark Vantage

Simulated Application Performance

PCMark Vantage testing shows the Digital Storm Enix slightly ahead of the MainGear SHIFT as we tested it, and quite a bit faster than the Origin Genesis we originally tested. There are several reasons for this. Both the Maingear and the Enix used SSDs with faster controllers (Marvell and SandForce respectively). The Shift and the Enix each have their own particular strong points—the Enix is a quad-core Sandy Bridge processor with its performance improvements and a 4.7GHz clockspeed while the Shift ran at 4.2GHz, but with six cores instead of four.