HP Blackbird 002 High Performance Gaming System
3DMark06 and F.E.A.R.
3DMark06's built-in CPU test is a multi-threaded "gaming related" DirectX metric that's useful for comparing relative performance between similarly equipped systems. This test consists of two different 3D scenes that are generated with a software renderer that is dependent on the host CPU's performance. This means that the calculations normally reserved for your 3D accelerator are instead sent to the central processor. The number of frames generated per second in each test are used to determine the final score.
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As expected, the HP Blackbird 002 had no trouble outperforming the stock systems in 3DMark06's CPU benchmark. In this test, the Blackbird 002 was between 8% and 12% faster than our reference machines.
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Next, we moved on to some in-game benchmarking with F.E.A.R. When testing processors with F.E.A.R, we drop the resolution to 640x480, and reduce all of the in-game graphical options to their minimum values to isolate CPU and memory performance as much as possible. However, the in-game effects, which control the level of detail for the games' physics engines and particle systems, are left at their maximum values, since these actually do place some load on the CPU rather than GPU.
F.E.A.R. is CPU and memory-bound when run at a low resolution, but despite the Blackbird 002's "win" here, it didn't finish all that far ahead of the stock system. The Blackbird 002's unpatched Vista OS and somewhat older video drivers certainly held it back here.
