Gaming/3D Performance

3DMark Vantage

As we mentioned in previous reviews, Vantage is a new addition to our test suite to replace the aging 3DMark 2006, and though the new payment scheme is inconvenient, it is still user reproducible (once). Vantage runs on Windows Vista only, and has four different default test settings: Entry, Performance, High, and Xtreme.

3DMark Vantage Entry

3DMark Vantage Performance

3DMark Vantage High

3DMark Vantage Extreme

The Reactor is a Core 2 Quad machine at 3.4GHz with a GTX 280, while the CyberPower is a 4.0GHz Core 2 Quad with two GTX 280 cards in SLI. In the Entry run, which is primarily dependent on the CPU, the Edge Z55 is held back by its clock speed. At Performance and higher, once GPU power begins to factor in, the Z55 takes its rightful place ahead of the Reactor and F131, but still trails the Xtreme XI system.

Crysis

Crysis is punishing to even the most recent PC hardware. This demo also has two built-in benchmarks in the "bin32" folder, one "CPU" and the other "GPU". We ran several configurations to show the scalability of this game. We ran all benchmarks three times, discarding the first result and averaging the other two. We ran all tests at "High" quality unless otherwise specified. These results used the 8.12 beta drivers.

Crysis

Always ready for more GPU power, Crysis performs very well on the Z55.

Far Cry 2

Far Cry 2 is a new addition to our test suite. It's a fun game with great ratings, and has a fantastic built in benchmarking tool (located in the "bin" folder with the executable, or right-click on the shortcut in Games and select "Benchmark"). We've chosen to run our system tests with the reproducible settings shown below:


Far Cry 2


As this is our first system through the tests, we don't have direct comparisons yet, but the game looked fantastic. Here we see a clear delineation between CPU constraint without anti-aliasing, and GPU constraint with 4xAA. 1920x1200 at 2xAA is a great playable framerate on this system at Very High quality.

General Performance Power, Noise and Temperature
Comments Locked

27 Comments

View All Comments

  • leexgx - Saturday, December 13, 2008 - link

    it utterly destroys hard disk performance when it gets stuck doing an shadow copy for 1hr until it give up and stops
    on my d: drive it has an tendansy to read my 3dmark vantage setup file 4 times as i can see it doing it in resource monitor repeatably reading the same files

    but i must admit system restore on vista does work alot better when useing it and tends to brake less things when ran
  • UNHchabo - Friday, December 12, 2008 - link

    I looked at some of their machines, and they do offer Norton Suite pre-installed as an optional extra.

    One small request: jpegs make sense for posting gaming screenshots or photos, but could you please switch to .png files when posting screenshots of regular windows programs? The lack of artifacting makes it easier to read things like the System Information window.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_Network_Grap...">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_Network_Grap...
  • leexgx - Saturday, December 13, 2008 - link

    is there any way to make MSpaint on vista allways pick PNG

    i can see why web sites do not use PNG still but realy users should be useing Opera (still works on win95 and up)/Firefox 3 with 2-3 plugins for exploits/ IE7 (maybe not IE with lots of 0day problems at this time but should be installed and fully up to date)

    PNG should be used nowadays or very uncompressed JEPG (do not use msPant as it has no compression settings)
  • Voldenuit - Friday, December 12, 2008 - link

    Intel stock cooler? And wait, what is this I'm hearing... *chipset fan*???

    Blegh.
  • Cuhulainn - Saturday, December 13, 2008 - link

    This is just unbelievable to me.

    Spending that kind of scratch on a system with the latest greatest Intel processor (which is known to run hot!) and not getting an aftermarket cooling solution?!

    It's like buying a fine wine and drinking it out of a dixie cup.. or something.
  • mmntech - Sunday, December 14, 2008 - link

    It certainly is chintzy. If you're spending $2100 on something like that, I would expect at least high end air.
  • UNHchabo - Monday, December 15, 2008 - link

    At Core i7's launch there were only two LGA1366 aftermarket coolers on Newegg, and both had reviews saying that the stock cooler actually did a BETTER job of cooling the CPU.
  • strikeback03 - Friday, December 12, 2008 - link

    That is the stock Intel cooler on an Intel board, and it looks like it overhangs the first DIMM slot?
  • Matt Campbell - Friday, December 12, 2008 - link

    Good eye - yes, it does.
  • afkrotch - Friday, December 12, 2008 - link

    I read Anandtech a few times during the week and noticed this review. One thing I feel is lacking is the Customer Service portion. I like the way HardOCP deals with it. They call customer service with an issue to see how it gets resolved. They act like a regular customer with a regular problem and rate it based on their experience.

Log in

Don't have an account? Sign up now