Nero Recode
Our first real-world test, and really the only desktop test to be used, is a run-through of Nero Recode to encode a DVD to iPod video. For this test, I’m using Star Wars II: Attack of the Clones. I wanted a movie with a wide selection of both bright and dark scenes, lots of action, and a decent amount of detail. Though the reviews of this movie are mixed, it fits the bill nicely for what I’m looking for in a benchmark title.
Nero Recode turned the tables on what was observed with our synthetic test. Though the two Intel and AMD procs were separated by 100MHz in favour of the Intel chip, the results still showed the Intel rig beating the AMD test bed by more than 12 minutes. This is a result of the efficiency of the Intel CPU combined with the memory and I/O performance of the motherboard. The performance of the new rig in this test actually sparked a gear change in our remaining benchmarks.
Gaming Benchmarks
For gaming we decided to keep things brief, focusing only on a couple DX10 based titles. Our first benchmark title is World in Conflict. This latest RTS game is our replacement for Supreme Commander. SupCom is getting a little old for us, both physically and as a benchmark. The results it’s been outputting haven’t been very conclusive, and the DVD copy I have has worn out to the point of being very spotty to read. World in Conflict is then a welcome change.
World in Conflict
As for that gear change I had just mentioned, for testing with WiC we ditched the old AMD rig and decided to see how the game scales across multiple resolutions. We started with a low resolution, to isolate the CPU and memory, and ramped things up from there. The good news is that the rig running the Gigabyte motherboard scaled quite well, with playable performance all the way up to the native resolution of my test LCD.
The bad news is that I didn’t get a chance to really sit down and play through some of this game. World in Conflict is quite a nice looking strategy game, and there were only a few drops in frame rate during use of the highest resolutions. This would be more to the video card then any other component in the test rig.