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Futuremark PCMark Vantage |
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Simulated Application Performance | |
We then ran our test motherboards through PCMark Vantage, Futuremark’s latest system performance metric built especially for Windows Vista. PCMark Vantage runs through a host of different usage scenarios to simulate different types of workloads, including High Definition TV and movie playback and manipulation, gaming, image editing and manipulation, music compression, communications, and productivity. Most of the tests are multi-threaded as well, so they can exploit the additional resources offered by multi-core CPUs.
What really jumps off of the page in the PCMark Vantage results is the wide margin between the older boards and the two X58s in regards to the gaming performance. A lot of this can be explained by the new architecture: with an on-die memory controller, lateny is decreased and increased bandwidth is offered by that extra memory channel. As expected, all other scores increased as well, but to a lesser degree. The overall PCMark scores gains were almost 10% higher than the similarly clocked Core 2 Quad and Phenom CPUs, but about on par with the much faster Core 2 Extreme.
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Futuremark 3DMark06 CPU Testing |
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Synthetic DirectX Gaming | |
3DMark06's built-in CPU test is a multi-threaded DirectX gaming metric that's useful for comparing relative performance between similarly equipped systems. This test consists of two different 3D scenes that are processed with a software renderer that is dependent on the host CPU's performance. Calculations that are normally reserved for your 3D accelerator are instead sent to the CPU for processing and rendering. The frame-rate generated in each test is used to determine the final score.
Solely looking at the CPU performance with 3DMark06, we saw the two X58 boards running nearly parallel with each other. The extra cores in the Core i7 920 combined with the Hyperthreading technology allow 3DMark to churn through this benchmark in record time. The Core i7 920 in our X58 boards was also to pull out just in front of the Core 2 Extreme QX9770, and easily handled the Core 2 Quad and AMD Phenom X4.
