Testing – Gaming
The Alien vs. Predator benchmark is our first game benchmark, it is a standalone benchmark. As with many of the already released DirectX 11 benchmarks, the Aliens vs. Predator DirectX 11 benchmark leverages your DirectX 11 hardware to provide an immersive game play experience through the use of DirectX 11 Tessellation and DirectX 11 Advanced Shadow features. In Aliens vs. Predator, DirectX 11 Geometry Tessellation is applied in an effective manner to enhance and more accurately depict HR Giger’s famous Alien design. We ran the benchmark at high settings with 4x antialiasing and at 3 different resolution settings.
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Call Of Pripyat. It is also a DirectX 11 game and a standalone benchmark. We ran the benchmark on high, directX 11 enabled, 4x MSAA, tessellation enabled at 3 different resolution settings as well.
Battlefield 3 is probably the most popular PC game to come out in the past year and it really pushes video cards and gaming systems to the max! There is no official benchmarking tool for the game so we will be doing this one the old way with FRAPS. First we needed to pick a sequence to benchmark. We decided on the second mission where you get ambushed. To see the full sequence check out the video below.
So now we have the sequence set we can go ahead and benchmark it with FRAPS. We set the in-game settings to Ultra and ran the sequence at 3 different resolutions, here at the results.
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?