Performance with 4.0 GHz overclock
Overclocking performance
With the processor now overclocked towards roughly 4 GHz we also wanted to demonstrate you a couple of results. Have a look at what kind of effect the 600 MHz increase has on the overall performance of the PC with a couple of benchmarks.
Let's first have a look at two CPU transcoders.
Encoding over the CPU
The fun thing about this video encoder is that it can utilize the GPU to assist it with the process. However, you can also solely use the CPU, making this a very interesting benchmark and you can check out behavior of CPU transcoding AND GPU transcoding all in one test.
Above you can find the results of this new test. In this test we transcode a 200 MB AVCHD 1920x1080i media file to a 1280x720P MP4 binary (YouTube format). As you can see a 600 MHz overclock shaves off 6 seconds of the transcoding process.
Video Transcoding H.264 towards to x.264
We encode a h.264 Dolby Digital 1080P trailer of 150 MB to Matroska x.264 with 5.1 channels AC3. It's compressed in such a way you can play it back with Haali media splitter and/or FFDSHOW codecs. We use Handbrake software which is multi-core aware... the more processor cores it sees, the faster it can and will transcode. This software is a great benchmark for CPU and memory testing.
The displayed number is the number of frames rendered per second averaged out over the encoding process. The higher the number, the faster the performance is. As you can see, the overclock gets us a little more performance.
But what about games you ask?
Resident Evil 5 (DirectX 10)
A new addition to our benchmark suite is Resident Evil 5. Capcom's newly released game ensures you a survival horror sequel that will let you bust up some zombies on your hard drive. Resident Evil 5 PC will support DirectX 9 and 10 along with ultra-high resolutions.
Resident Evil 5 again -- DirectX 10.0 mode with 4x AA -- all settings are maxed out including BLUR activated. If you like to reproduce the benchmark scores yourself, then please select the fixed benchmark as we opted for a fixed time demo.
As you can see and as we have been saying a lot, RE5 is a great title to use as benchmark, it's very sensitive to system changes and very multi-core aware. As a result, a 600 MHz increase on the processor will immediately have an effect on overall game performance.
Far Cry 2
Throw your memory back to the year 2004 and the release of the innovative Far Cry on PC. Developer Crytek managed to fashion one of the most convincing and striking locales in all of gaming, and satisfied gamers with the freedom to pass through the landscape and tackle enemies in almost any way they saw fit. You surely remember Jack Carver and that things were about to get seriously messed up for you? Well, tough luck. You are no longer at that deserted tropical island but hop into a jeep and arrive at the sandy savannah surroundings of Africa. And that's a change... as much as you'll no longer run into any mutants, aliens, or any superpowers or psychic powers. Also - you are no longer Jack Carver, you assume the role of one of nine different mercenaries who are embedded in the midst of a brutal civil war which rages in an imaginary African nation.
Everything that goes down is involved in a dirty little bush war in central Africa and you'll have to use a rusty AK-47 and whatever bits of scavenged land mine you can duct-tape together. Two factions struggle for supremacy: the United Front for Liberation and Labour and the Alliance for Popular Resistance, and both are known for blood and control.
Far Cry 2 -- We again use high-quality DX10 mode with 4x AA (anti-aliasing) and 16x AF (anisotropic filtering). And as you can see, overclocking (a faster processor) does help with a super fast graphics card of course.
