Voodoo PC OMEN a121x CrossFire Extreme Gamer PC

If you stepped up to the price range of the OMEN CrossFire (and your wallet feels like it was just worked over "prison style"), you most likely are hell-bent on the best gaming performance money can buy.  Gaming benchmarks are next, Zen Pony...

Futuremark 3DMark06 DirectX Gaming Performance

3DMark06'stest is a multi-threaded "gaming related" DirectX metric that's useful for comparing relative performance between similarly equipped systems.  This test consists of different 3D scenes that are generated with a software and hardware GPU renderers, which is also dependant on the host CPU's performance. In its CPU tests, the calculations normally reserved for your 3D accelerator are instead sent to the central processor.  GPU rendering tests employ a mix of SM2.0, SM3.0 and HDR techniques and effects.

Since the OMEN CrossFire a121x has a 300MHz+ CPU clock speed advantage over either of our Athlon 64 FX-60 reference systems here (one with X1900s in CF and the other with 7900GTXs in SLI), it puts all competitors out to pasture, since 3DMark06 also weighs-in heavily with respect to CPU resources.  We need to note however that both of our CrossFire test systems, including the OMEN CrossFire, showed graphical anomalies in the Canyon Run section of this benchmark.

Performance Comparisons with FarCry v1.33 DirectX 9 Gaming In SM3.0

FarCry

If you've been on top of the gaming scene for some time, you probably know that FarCry was one of the most visually impressive games to be released on the PC last year. Courtesy of its proprietary engine, dubbed "CryEngine" by its developers, FarCry's game-play is enhanced by Polybump mapping, advanced environment physics, destructible terrain, dynamic lighting, motion-captured animation, and surround sound. Before titles such as Half-Life 2 and Doom 3 hit the scene, FarCry gave us a taste of what was to come in next-generation 3D gaming on the PC. We benchmarked the graphics cards in this article with a custom-recorded demo run taken in the "Catacombs" area checkpoint, at various resolutions without anti-aliasing or anisotropic filtering enabled, and then again with 4X AA and 16X aniso enabled concurrently.

Far Cry, even at 1600X1200 with 4X AA is still very much CPU bound and as a result, although our reference CrossFire rig loses out against the 7900GTX SLI setup, the OMEN CrossFire is able to eek out a few extra FPS over the fastest NVIDIA has to offer.  Although again, we'll point out the OMEN's factory CPU speed of 2.95GHz versus our test system's stock A64 FX-60 at 2.6GHz.  Faster CPUs are great but gamers need more emphasis placed on GPU power obviously.  We'll see how things stack up in some of our more challenging gaming tests, next.