iBuyPower Gamer Paladin F970 System


3DMark Vantage and LAME MP3 Encoding

Futuremark 3DMark Vantage
Synthetic DirectX Gaming


3DMark Vantage

3DMark Vantage is the latest version of Futuremark's synthetic 3D gaming benchmark. This benchmark is constrained to Windows Vista-based systems because it uses some advanced visual technologies that come by means of DirectX 10, which isn't available on previous versions of Windows. With this latest version of the benchmark, Futuremark added two new graphics tests, two new CPU tests, and several new feature tests, along with support for the latest PC hardware. We used the Performance preset for our test.

As you can see from the above image, the Gamer Paladin F970 managed an overall 3DMark Vantage score of P21254. By comparison, the Velocity Micro Z55 scored P12941 overall and the LANShark Extreme managed an overall 3DMark Vantage score of P13721. The Gamer Paladin F970’s GPU score of 17986 was also better than the Velocity Micro Z55 (11760) and the LANShark Extreme (13840)’s GPU scores.


LAME MT
 Audio Encoding

In our custom LAME MT MP3 encoding test, we convert a large WAV file to the MP3 format. This simulates a common scenario that many of us users work with on a regular basis to provide portability and storage of digital audio content. LAME is an open-source, mid- to high- bit-rate and VBR (variable bit rate) MP3 audio encoder that is widely used around the world in a multitude of third party applications.

In this benchmark, we've created our own 223MB WAV file and converted it to the MP3 format using the multi-thread capable LAME MT application in single and multi-threaded modes. Processing times are recorded below, listed in seconds. Shorter times equate to better performance.


Our custom Lame MT test is a measure of processor performance, and is not impacted significantly by L2 cache size or the presence of more than two cores. This test ranks the Core-i7 965 Extreme where we expected—behind the overclocked Dell XPS 730x H2C. Because many mainstream applications still lack support for multi-threading with more than two cores, the results shown here are pretty close to the performance you should expect when encoding audio.


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