Tom's Hardware Wants You: CPU Benchmarks 2011/12

[Yargnit]

Multi-tasking for sure. No specific programs really, but things like video encoding while watching 1080p videos/YouTube etc in the background. or Various games while playing video/YouTube on a second monitor. Even things like multi-boxing MMO's on multiple monitors.

Basically anything that is able to test which systems stay the most responsive/suffer the least performance hit when they are forced to divide their attention between multiple high demand programs at the same time.

I agree with bringing in some RTS games as well. Not necessarily SC2, but look to ones, even if they are a bit older, that can really hammer a CPU with complex AI's and thousands of units at the same time.

 

[cangelini]

Thanks for the feedback guys. Obviously for now we have to stick to software that's available, but BF3 will absolutely be part of the graphics suite, at the very least, once it's available (just as BF2 was before it 😉

Best,
Chris

 

[gfg]

Excel 2007 or 2010
multithread bech: main concep and 7zip. handbreak and antivirus. handbrea, antiviruz and minimun pfs game....
minimun fps on several games like crysis 2...

 

[wiyosaya]

I'd like to see the floating-point and integer benchmarks here: http://www.spec.org/cpu2006/ or any of the benchmarks at spec. I would suggest any of the BOINC apps, too, but the ones that I run seem highly variable.

I also second the motion for SolidWorks.

 

[oldbluekid]

Tom should test Facebook FLASH games like Frontierville wich are VERY CPU LIMITED because of FLASH, and are used by millons.
I know it may be hard to get FPS info on such games.
This can be hard also because these games are updated frequently. But you should find a way to make it happen.
As a matter of example I have an i5 2500k and Frontierville runs at probably 20-30 fps on a reasonably big farm. (level 60ish)
(I don't like facebook games, but my girlfriend does, as many others)
(Sorry for the bad English)

 

[Pyree]

I recommend testing Adobe Acrobat X for conversion of picture to text (text recognition). Gives credit to a cpu for office productivity.

 

[cmcghee358]

Even though Grand Theft Auto IV is old, CPU bottleneck was the dominant frame rate issue with the game.

So much so that Quad cores had a significant performance increase over what was considered adequate at the time(dual cores)

 

[superhighperf]

voice recognition is becoming more popular and integrated into many portable devices. i use it on my desktop and speed is essential.

a dragon test would be nice especially if there were other background tasks running.

 

[hunter315]

I would like to see a MATLAB benchmark, its a common one asked about in the forums and the benchmarks that mathworks has on file are limited and dont cover anything newer than a C2Q 9300 so some benches on the new stuff would be nice, just used their built in suite.

 

[l23j4l2jjgljwsjsk]

Id like a section on compile time for a few open source libraries.

Its about the only thing i do that pegs all my cores at once.

 

[Guest]

GPU base renderer like mental images's iray or Chaos Group's V-Ray RT

 

[iam2thecrowe]

test games that take advantage of 4+ cores. Also i dont see the point in testing at 800x600 resolution just to alleviate a gpu bottleneck as its not a likely scenario. Maybe keep a count of the number of times the fps drop to below playable (below 25fps). Having just a single lowest fps score is not always accurate as it could be a single anomoly caused by something else.

 

[cassembler]

Excel (giant spreadsheet re-calculation) or a big SQL query perhaps?

 

[Zero_]

As a gamer, I agree with many on the gaming benchmarks.

F1 is heavy on the CPU, the others, not quite so.

GTA IV - still the heaviest game I've seen on my CPU. Performance scales well with additional cores and clock speed.
SC II - heavy on the CPU, but also heavy Intel bias (Pentium G850 can get more fps than a Phenom II X4)
Civ 5 - good modern gaming benchmark that scales well.

 

[stephenhowell84]

Skyrim looks amazing, and might be a good one for games testing on CPUs once released. That and every man and his digital dog will be purchasing it!

 

[PreferLinux]

Software compilation tests?

 

[Guest]

servers and windows 7 in hypervisor how does hyperthread and the core numbers affect.
-ant2

 

[nick8191]

LAPACK or LINPACK would be a great way to measure raw computation ability. They are usually used on servers but there are C++ versions of both that are easier to work with then the old fortran versions.

 

[AbdullahG]

I don't think GTA IV would be a good benchmark game. Sure, it requires a powerful PC, but the game is horribly optimized for the PC because it was console ported.

 

[clonazepam]

Privacy and a person's right to it is talked about quite often on Tom's. So what exactly does it take to encrypt that HDD or SSD? How long does it take to encrypt a HDD of (???) size?

super-pi is a quick and easy test anyone can run on their system for easy comparisons to Tom's results.

Check out http://www.maxxpi.net/ ---> MaxxPI², is an benchmark to measure CPU / GPU / cache / memory / HDD performance of computer systems. Something everyone can download and experiment with.

 

[kajabla]

Crysis 2, please! Tons of people play it.

 

[Guest]

desktop vs mobile?

 

[CaedenV]

expanding the productivity suite would be my suggestion. Running full HD encoding in Premiere and Aftereffects instead of 720p, and rendering to various formats would be interesting.
Also, as others have said, 3D rendering is one of the largest and hardest tests for a machine, and Maya is huge in the industry. Each 3D title renders very differently and we need to know what takes advantage of what hardware so we can build to our software of choice
As a personal interest it would be interesting to add a multi track audio editing aspect. I realize it is more HDD dependent than CPU dependent, but something more than just rendering an mp3 like audio cleaning, or multitrack effects, etc.

As far as games, I think Skyrim will be a nice addition when it becomes available, and have a policy to drop all games that have a frame rate cap from any and all hardware reviews.

 

[cassembler]

[citation]As a personal interest it would be interesting to add a multi track audio editing aspect. I realize it is more HDD dependent than CPU dependent, but something more than just rendering an mp3 like audio cleaning, or multitrack effects, etc.[/citation]

I could see something like Reaper running very high bit rate audio tracks and virtual instruments through a large amount of plug-ins. I don't think it would be an easy initial test set-up, but could be effective.

 

[mjam2000]

Tests lack some famous engineering programs which most of the times use complicated and improved mathematical algorithms that extremely loads CPU.
I suggest
1.Matlab and Simulink.
2.Some well-known finite element softwares like Ansys or Abaqus that can be a real challenge for a CPU in every aspect.