8 - CPU performance
Setup your monitor
Make sure before playing games only is setting up your monitors contrast & brightness levels a very important thing to do. I realized recently that a lot of you guys have setup your monitor improper. How do we know this ? Because we receive a couple of email every now and then telling that a reader can't distinguish the benchmark charts (colors) in our reviews. We realized, if that happens, your monitor is not properly setup.
This simple test pattern is evenly spaced from 0 to 255 brightness levels, with no profile embedded. If your monitor is correctly set up, you should be able to distinguish each step, and each step should be roughly visually distinct from its neighbors by the same amount. As well, the dark-end step differences should be about the same as the light-end step differences. Finally, the first step should be completely black.
A word of Advice
The results in the following benchmarks are not there to show a 1 on 1 race in-between PCs, the results are presented in a manner so you can comprehend where this system is performance wise. Therefore we test is against AMD's fastest system available, the 790GX chipset with AMD Phenom X4 9950 processor, yet also a more affordable Quad Core Q6600 processor on an Intel X48 chipset.
DhryStone CPU test
We make use of a multi-threaded Dhrystone test from SiSoftware Sandra, which basically is a suite of arithmetic and string manipulating programs. Since the whole program should be really small, it fits into the processor cache. It can be used to measure two aspects, both the processor's speed as well as the optimizing capabilities of the compiler. The resulting number is the number of executions of the program suite per second.
The DhryStone test pure CPU test that runs completely in the CPU itself. A perfect test to see the general efficiency per core
As stated already, it's not a comparative competition today, we just take two other systems and compare performance to them, so you know and can understand at what level this Smooth Creations PC is actually operating with daily applications.
Today compare to Phenom X4 9950 performance at a 790GX AMD mainboard. Intel wise I opted the most popular Quad Core processor that money buys, the Core 2 Quad Q6600 - we did place it into an X48 Intel chipset based mother board though.
Colored in Deep Green, throughout the review you'll also notice the results of the Smooth Creations.
Queen CPU test
This simple integer benchmark focuses on the branch prediction capabilities and the misprediction penalties of the CPU. It finds the solutions for the classic "Queens problem" on a 10 by 10 sized chessboard. At the same clock speed theoretically the processor with the shorter pipeline and smaller misprediction penalties will attain higher benchmark scores. For example -- with HyperThreading disabled -- the Intel Northwood core processors get higher scores than the Intel Prescott core based ones due to the 20-step vs 31-step long pipeline. However, with enabled HyperThreading the picture is controversial, because due to architectural bottlenecks the Northwood core runs out of internal resources and slows down. Similarly, at the same clock speed AMD K8 class processors will be faster than AMD K7 ones due to the improved branch prediction capabilities of the K8 architecture.
CPU Queen test uses only the basic x86 instructions, it consumes less than 1 MB system memory and it is HyperThreading, multi-processor (SMP) and multi-core aware and thus is a multithreading CPU Benchmark with MMX, SSE2 and SSSE3 optimizations.
Traditionally a benchmark where AMD Phenom X3/X4 processors are extremely strong.
ZLib CPU test
This integer benchmark measures combined CPU and memory subsystem performance through the public ZLib compression library Version 1.2.2
CPU ZLib test uses only the basic x86 instructions, and it is HyperThreading, multi-processor (SMP) and multi-core (CMP) aware. A very good test to measure multi-core performance among platforms.
