Testing – Video
Now on to the fun stuff video testing! Our first test is 3DMark 11, we ran it on the “Performance” (720p) setting.
Next is 3DMark Vantage. It was run on both the “High” and “Performance” setting.
Stone Giant is a DirectX 11 demo produced by Fatshark in collaboration with BitSquid using BitSquid Tech. It has primarily been developed to test the BitSquid tools and technology in a real-world production environment. The demo showcases how DX11 hardware tessellation can be used to achieve a high level of geometry detail in close-up shots. The settings we used were Aspect: Auto, Tessellation: High, 4x AA and we did 3 different resolution settings.
Our final video benchmarking tool is the Heaven Demo v2.5. The Heaven Demo is based off the Unigine and is actually a DirectX 11 demo. The settings we used were shaders: high, textures: high, filter: trilinear, Anisotrophy: 4x, antialiasing 8x. Again we ran it on 3 different resolution settings.
Man, seeing an X79 build review really takes me back. The i7-3930K was such a legend in its day; having 6 cores at 3.20GHz for a home gaming rig felt like absolute madness when most of us were still struggling to justify moving past quad cores. I especially remember the hype around liquid cooling being a “must-have” to really let those Sandy Bridge-E chips stretch their legs.
It’s funny to look at these specs now that my daily focus has shifted more toward enterprise hardware. I’ve been spending a lot of time lately with a ProLiant DL360 rack that has a 16 Core 2.9GHz Xeon https://serverorbit.com/pc-and-servers/proliant-dl360/16-core-2-9ghz-xeon, and it’s wild how much the “core wars” have evolved. Back then, 6 cores were for extreme gamers, but now 16 cores in a 1U chassis is just a standard Tuesday for virtualization tasks. I still have a soft spot for the “cool factor” of cases like the NZXT Phantom mentioned in the post, though—server rails definitely aren’t as fun to look at!
Do you think these older enthusiast platforms like X79 still have a place as budget workstations today, or has the power draw versus modern efficiency finally made them too expensive to keep running?