For this test we encrypt our precious data at 128-bit with the help of the CPU and absolute daunting task for any PC.

CPU data de-compression

A data de-compression test similar to un-ZIPing your packed files. We measured in MB/sec, the the amount of data unpacked in MB per second.

CPU-Bound 3D Rendering

We recently stumbled onto this great little tool called Kribi bench. It is a 3D rendering benchmark produced by the people at Adept Development. Kribi bench is an SSE aware software renderer where a 3D model is rendered and animated by the host CPU and the average frame rate is reported. Now the great thing is, it therefore bypasses the GPU .. so everything is in direct relation towards your memory and CPU.

We used two of the included models with this benchmark: a "Sponge Explode" model consisting of over 19.2 million polygons and the test suite's "City" model that is comprised of over 107 billion polygons. The score is the time in seconds needed to finish a rendered sequence.

This multi-threaded tool is extremely nice to test RAW performance with, and clearly Intel based systems love it.

HDD performance

The last synthetic test slide I wanted to show you was HDD performance. If you purchase a high-end PC, you'd go for speed. Though both volume and speed has gone up massively with the more regular HDDs really what you want in a system like this is a WD Raptor driver or a nice fast SSD.

Volume wise you then add a big-ass HDD for local storage. yet your OS, you want on the fast drive. The Smooth Creations System was equipped with only one driver, you can pick them up for roughly 140 USD. A Western Digital 1 Terabyte HDD.

For overall usage they are really just fine and extremely cost effective. However speed is a bit of an issue. Your burst speed will be great, but sequential read and write speeds will suffer from the number of platters. To the more data that is written to closer to the end of the volume, the slower it'll be. In this case at the end of the platter you'll see read .. again read performance drop below 40 MB/sec.

This is a great HDD, but not as primary boot/root drive for your operating system. Smooth Creations should opt to include one fast boot drive as standard, and then a cheapo high volume TB drive as secondary storage volume.