Testing – Real World
I performed reviews on 18 motherboards last year, along with a fair number of video cards and memory kits, and ran basically the same benchmarks on all, with some exceptions. During that time I felt that though these benchmarks were relevant, many of the numbers really mean little by themselves, when comparing one rig to another. And they all mean pretty much nothing to someone not familiar to them. So I felt the need to come up with some kind of testing that would represent real tasks that people regularly perform with their rigs. Something like using PhotoShop and encoding video for DVD burning.
For encrypting and burning a DVD, I took a video that I had taken myself, which was 1hr 9min long, and 1.25GB in size. I used Windows Movie Maker and Windows DVD maker.
How about that for saving time with the i7?
For PhotoShop testing, I used Driverheaven.net’s PhotoShop Bench V3. The benchmark is a series of scripts that works in PhotoShop, running various filters on a large .jpg. The series of tests is 15 steps, for brevity I’ll list only some of the longer tests, many of them only take a few seconds.
The i7 rig beat the C2D rig in every step but one, where they tied, same as with the i7 at stock clock and overclock. Very impressive.