Maingear SHIFT Super Stock X79 System Review


SiSoft Sandra & Cinebench

We continued our testing with SiSoftware's SANDRA, the System ANalyzer, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant. We ran four of the built-in subsystem tests (CPU Arithmetic, Multimedia, Memory Bandwidth, Physical Disks).
 
Preliminary Testing with SiSoft SANDRA
Synthetic Benchmarks

   

Once again, the SHIFT shattered scores set by previous systems. Quite frankly, we expected this kind of performance from a machine wielding a heavily overclocked Intel Core i7 3960X processor with six processing cores and a dozen threads.

   

Even more impressive are the Physical Disk and Memory scores. With gobs (16GB, to be exact) of high-frequency RAM (DDR3-1866) and two ultra-performing SSDs in RAID 0, we can't say we're surprised by these results, albeit we're plenty impressed with a system that offers over 40GB of memory bandwidth and around 950MB/s of storage read performance.

Cinebench R11.5 64bit
Content Creation Performance

Maxon's Cinebench R11.5 benchmark is based on Maxon's Cinema 4D software used for 3D content creation chores and tests both the CPU and GPU in separate benchmark runs. On the CPU side, Cinebench renders a photorealistic 3D scene by tapping into up to 64 processing threads (CPU) to process more than 300,000 total polygons, while the GPU benchmark measures graphics performance by manipulating nearly 1 million polygons and huge amounts of textures.

Normally this is the part of the review where we talk about how brutal of a benchmark Cinebench is, and how the system being evaluated is ill-suited for CAD work and other professional design work. Well, that's not the case today. In a shocking reversal of past trends, the SHIFT Super Stock X79 made a mockery of Cinebench instead of it being the other way around.

Granted, if you make a living performing workstation chores, there are more appropriate setups out there, but at the same time, a system like this is capable of handling professional level workloads.
 


Related content