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

[Guest]

Please incorporate large REVIT (AutoCAD) modelling. There is a minimum 8GB requirement for 64x OS and 16GB for large or complex models. The graphics card also requires a minimum of 2GB and Shader Model 3. I can blue screen virtually any system older than 9 months with a 30 story office tower.

 

[NapoleonDK]

[citation][nom]NM64[/nom]2) The ultimate in CPU stressing: EMULATION. Unlike modern PC games, Dolphin and PCSX2 rely on a fast CPU rather than a fast GPU.[/citation]THIS! I understand the difficulties and potential legal implications of emulation, but I would LOVE to see this! I wasn't able to take all my consoles with me when I moved out, and I miss my PS2 something fierce! XD Yes, the software might be poorly coded, or glitchy, but... *nostalgic nerd moment* 😉

 

[Guest]

All new computers should be tested to see if they can run open source
software such as Wings3d, blender, gimp etc. My new toshiba laptop
will not work properly with Wings3d (CANT SELECT FACES). each computer should be rated on support of opengl drivers etc. as open source friendly or unfriendly. Toshiba and other computer manufactures should
be rated as open source friendly or unfriendly, also. More needs to be
done to encourage computer manufactures to keep opengl driver updates
current, for those manufactures who have OEM modified opengl drivers,
as the Intel website will not update opengl drivers for OEM customized
opengl drivers. Intel should also encourage OEMs to do this for their
intrigrated graphics products.

 

[Guest]

Sword of the Stars II (comes out in a month or so).

Large battles can really choke a CPU.

 

[aune]

Other sites have used Civ5, but I don't see Civ5 in your list. I usually look for a fast moving game, ie a first person shooter, and a turn based game, like Civ5.

 

[slabbo]

I would love to see CPU gaming benchmarks with multitasking involved. I have 2 monitors and I usually watch a DVD or Netflix/Hulu/crackle/Amazon Prime streaming, or decode encode mp3's videos on one monitor while playing a game on the other. You should also open up 2 games at the same time and benchmark that, might be handy for people who multibox games.

 

[K2N hater]

[citation][nom]niceview[/nom]and for the love of techs everywhere:time how long it takes to install some big antivirus programs, like AVG, McAfee, MSE, etc. years ago working as a tech at a bigbox, installing tons of antivirus programs took much of my time, and i realized that timing them was a great way to measure system wide performance of the machines that i worked on!hell, i still have to do serious malware cleanup for friends/family/acquaintances a few times a month, it seems.actually, to make things easier for you, just report how long it takes to install some of the bigger programs or games that you are using as benchmarks! i have a feeling that reporting the install times of a few big programs would indicate how long it takes to install just about any other big program, antivirus included.[/citation]
Such test is very valuable for measuring disk I/O and chipset bandwidth efficiency but doesn't really stress any up-to-date CPU. Compiling/linking would give better CPU-related results though some complain linkers are never optimized for AMD.

 

[Guest]

Dear Tom,
In my opinion a very good idea is to introduce a new test in the suite the single core clocked at 3 GHz test among all the others, so that the reader will see the actual single core benefit of a processor. Much like the "Tom's CPU Architecture Shootout: 16 CPUs, One Core Each, And 3 GHz" was, only this time it will be tested on all the processors at release time. Please consider this idea because the article was one of the very best i have read about processor computing power and i believe everyone will respect and be glad to see such a test result. Thank you !!

 

[sidran32]

I vote for FL Studio. It's a music production program that has built in software synthesizers and other audio processing systems. It can make heavy use of the CPU, both for rendering and real-time playback.

On lower end CPUs, it will quickly start stuttering and you'll start dropping frames. I can watch all 4 cores on my CPU spike as I'm rendering in high quality, too.

This is my most CPU intensive program that I use regularly. The demo is fully functional, though you cannot save projects. This might be a roadblock for creating your own test project, if you don't want to buy it (relatively cheap software, comparatively), but it also does come with many example full-length projects built-in, which might be useful. The trial version has no problem opening existing projects, though. On occasion they may be a "CPU hog" (as is common to say in the comments) though my AMD Phenom II 955 X4 tends to handle most of them fine in realtime playback. Rendering, however, usually takes several minutes at a time. Since it's doing lots of heavy math (for audio processing), it's a good companion to video making software tests.

 

[wht1986]

I would suggest cyberlink's PowerDirector for video editing (besides being what i use) it's 64 bit and has ability to make use of various hardware accelerations.

 

[monkeysweat]

I would like to see how well a CPU handles multiple tasks, not just how fast can they unzip something,,, how about something realistic
download a file say ubuntu
play a HD movie
unrar a multipart rar (4-10 GB)
have a couple web pages open - all at the same time and see the cpu usage and how well the media stream plays and how long it takes for the decompression of the file.
i would say this is realistic as I am sure alot of people would do something such as this.

or run a torrent while video game is being played.....

 

[niceview]

Such test is very valuable for measuring disk I/O and chipset bandwidth efficiency but doesn't really stress any up-to-date CPU.

i'm not so sure that the strength of the CPU doesn't greatly influence the speed of installing large programs. I recorded the lengths-of-time it took to install such programs, and the results seemed to show that the fastest CPUs WERE the ones which could do it fastest, significantly.

i'd be willing to bet that if all else were equal (benching with the exact same HDD or SSD, and the same chipset), there WOULD BE a very noticeable spread in completion times, between the CPUs.

 

[ibobarreiro]

How about, some (DAWs) digital audio workstations, like Cakewalk Sonar, Cubase, Logic, 64 tracks at 24 bits with realtime plugins, nice benchmark

 

[cobra5000]

BULLDOZER BULLDOZER BULLDOZER
Whew, sorry I just had to get that out.

 

[pepe2907]

I think it would be nice if you have some CAD applications /not only the 3dFX ones like 3ds Max, Cinebench and Blender/.
Also once if I remember you include Mathematica and/or Mathlab tests, IMHO it would also be nice to see them again.
Maybe including some transaction oriented tests also be a good idea.
Maybe any of these are not exactly the most mainstream applications, but IMHO they will contribute to forming a more complex assesment of a CPU capabilities. Although archiving/compressing tests are interesting of a system point of view, they are not exactly the best for evaluating the CPU performance as they are limited mostly by memory and busses throughput and rely solely on integer operations /I know the same may apply also to transaction oriented tests I proposed/.
And finaly some spreadsheet calculations and financial or statistical calculation tests may also be interesting to see. I believe many people use computers to do this, maybe not at home, but the computers aren't used only for home entertainment.
In general my idea is including a broader set of professionaly oriented tests.

 

[Guest]

I want to see you run a quantum mechanical calculation on a simulated standard molecule as a benchmark or Prime 95.

 

[JoeMomma]

Three suggestions:

1. Multitasking - Most people work with many porgrams open at the same time. How about running several CPU intensive tests at the same time and report an aggregate score from all test or the total time it takes to complete all tests.

2. CAD - Use a program like SolidWorks or AutoCAD that has OpenGL disabled. Rendering complex graphics in software mode should tax a Cpu highly.

3. Folding@Home, Stanford University - This is a distributed computing application that manipulates molecular structures. It comes in many flavors (PC, Mac, Linux and GPU). I am using the Fermi version and have it set to use 50% of my GPU when I don't need to use it. The CPU version can by set to use as much of the CPU capacity that one wishes to assign to it. Also it relies on connecting to the internet to report results. I am sure a synthetic test can be devised to have each CPU test the same molecule. Sometimes a given task can take hours to compute.

 

[Guest]

Lots more people will be playing WoW than Metro, F1, Just Cause or AvP.....just saying.

Same with Starcraft 2. Gotta get the games in there that people actually play day to day and not just for bench marking.

 

[uuicked]

[citation][nom]Soma42[/nom]Agreed I'd love to see benchmarks for MATLAB, Solidworks or more CAD programs[/citation]

We use Solidworks where I work and if the files aren't broken down into small subassemblies the computer takes ages to process everything. I'd be curious to see which processors are best for that program and then continue to show test results with new CPU's as they come out

 

[legacy7955]

I agree with multi-tasking !

Also downloading large programs.

Programs that utilize hyperthreading.

 

[Guest]

Battlefield Bad Company 2 would be a much better game for benching.

 

[ahfergus1]

I'd really like to see some sort of rendering put into the testing suite.

LuxRender has made a cool little benchmark called LuxMark (http://www.luxrender.net/wiki/LuxMark) that uses their free OpenCL based raytracing engine.

It can be configured to run on your CPU, GPU, or both!

 

[mpavao81]

I would like to see benchmarks of running multiple Virtual machines. I use my computer to 3 virtual test servers for work. It would be nice to see a benchmark that would test virtual machines. Using something like VMware or virtual box.

 

[kittle]

One thing thats always bothered me about benchmarking weather its the latest game, or a synthetic benchmark, is that they all run by themselves. And even the very under-utilized systems have more than 1 app running. So run a few things in parallel to see how well the CPU handles task switching and such.

Now with most, if not all benchmarking programs they will detect how many cores a CPU has and run ONLY that many threads. But this doesnt give a picture of how well a CPU handles more threads/applications than it has cores. What happens when you run 10 parallel benchmarks on a 4-core CPU? Then for an 8-core? and how about a dual-core?
Id like to see some fixed number of parallel tasks run against all CPUs to see how well they handle task and context switching. it may prove nothing, or it may show strengths in areas we havent seen.

 

[buzznut]

AVP? Metro 2033? Well, I'd advise looking at some better (or newer) games since you do the "Best gaming CPU's..." article every month. How about Crysis 2, Skyrim, Rage, Modern Warfare 2 or 3, and WOW.