Voodoo PC OMEN a121x CrossFire Extreme Gamer PC

For our next round of synthetic benchmarks, we ran the CPU and Memory performance modules built into Futuremark's PCMark05.  We incorporated PCMark05 into our benchmark suite soon after its release, and have found it to be even more robust in terms of test features than its predecessor.  That said, the CPU and Memory test modules we use for comparison are very similar to the 04 version of the test suite.  For those interested in more than just the graphs, we've got a couple of quotes directly from Futuremark that explain exactly what these tests do, and how they work.

Futuremark PCMark05 More Synthetic CPU and Memory Benchmarks

"The CPU test suite is a collection of tests that are run to isolate the performance of the CPU. The CPU Test Suite also includes multithreading: two of the test scenarios are run multithreaded; the other including two simultaneous tests and the other running four tests simultaneously. The remaining six tests are run single threaded. Operations include, File Compression/Decompression, Encryption/Decryption, Image Decompression, and Audio Compression" - Courtesy FutureMark Corp.

The hyperthreaded dual-core Pentiums take the lead in this test versus the Voodoo OMEN, since they can process up to 4 threads simultaneously, but the OMEN easily boasts the fastest CPU score against the Athlon 64 based reference systems.  It takes the lead by a comfortable 500+ points versus our stock FX-60 setup.  No surprises here, an overclocked 2.95GHz processor is faster than a stock 2.6GHz processor obviously.

"The Memory test suite is a collection of tests that isolate the performance of the memory subsystem. The memory subsystem consists of various devices on the PC. This includes the main memory, the CPU internal cache (known as the L1 cache) and the external cache (known as the L2 cache). As it is difficult to find applications that only stress the memory, we explicitly developed a set of tests geared for this purpose. The tests are written in C++ and assembly. They include: Reading data blocks from memory, Writing data blocks to memory performing copy operations on data blocks, random access to data items and latency testing."  - Courtesy FutureMark Corp.

Here we see similar results in the Memory Performance module of PCMark05, but only the 1066MHz FSB based Intel rigs can compete with the OMEN.  However, PCMark05 is largely a synthetic benchmark, so we encourage you to look more closely at the read-world application testing that we'll provide next.