First off, I'd love to see itunes dropped altogether, but since there's an unfortunate number of people who use it as their primary media program anyways, let's see something alongside it, for those of us who haven't touched itunes save for on a mac.
I propose Cdex as an compliment/alternative to itunes' ripping, it works, it doesn't seem to come with any unnessiciary fluff, and isn't as much of a hog as itunes can be, at least in my findings.
Secondly, glad as I am to see the CS5 being benchmarked there, I can't help but wonder "How?"
Is it some kind of a synthetic benchmark, a script pieced together doing some optimized voodoo?
Or will it be a real-world benchmark, such as loading up a consistent (relative to benchmarking each CPU) set of 60-80 photos to be stitched into a panorama, a process that I've seen manages to nicely utilize a CPU, as well as chewing heavily into the RAM. Perhaps it'll be something else, rendering some 3D image and applying some effects, etc. Either way, if the benchmark suit will be downloadable to THG readers, I'd expect the relevant scripts and files required to come with it.
Relatedly, not everybody will have CS5, so it'd also be nice to see a freely available alternative to CS5 benchmarked. I don't use it personally (of late), and there'll likely be a horrible argument over it, but the Gimp is apparently pretty flexible, and one I do use called Hugin manages to do pretty well for costing nothing but a bit of time adding a DLL to it's bin folder.
On my third note, I'll second the statements that Blender should be tossed in beside/instead of Autodesk, I mean, the latter is nice *if* you have it, but let's face it. Most anyone reading THG reviews to build a custom PC at home for 3D modelling is more likely using whatever they can get for free. I might also like to see some kind of test involving media playback with ridiculously high res video, such as the 4K resolution youtube stuff (see
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2BQmjYlsV6A for an example, and set quality to 'original'). The kind of thing that brings a GPU accelerated q6600 running the latest version of flash in chrome to it's knees and stutters like a low-res GIF loading over dial-up. Anything worth using these days can do 1080p playback, but clearly, there's higher resolution stuff out there, and I won't be surprised to see more pop up.
To finish up this essay of a comment, I'll decide I'm just fine with the use of both winrar and 7-zip, indifferent about the synthetic benchmarks and games are games, my GPU will always be insufficient for the ones I'm playing as far as I'm concerned.
Two thousand six hundred and sixty nine characters later
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