Tom's Hardware Wants You: CPU Tests For 2011

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Blender rendering and compiler benchmark are the must. Modern CPUs are overkill for all practical purposes other than rendering computer animation and compiling huge programs. Even for games mainstream processor is OK as long as you have good graphic card.

Sure DVD recoding might be time consuming, but you do it only once, can do it in batch mode overnite etc. whereas you have to rerender ( animation) or recompile a program every time you change something. You might do it hundreds of times every day. And even if you only wait for one minute it is more than 1.5 hours of your work time wasted.

You don't recode movies or archive files over and over again. And game is waste of time any way no matter whether you push buttons or wait for the computer's reaction..

Since Pentium 4 I only upgrade to speed up blender rendering. So in your charts I look only at 3DS performance. But 3DS is too expensive and irrelevant for nonprofessionals or freelancers. Friends of mine, who are professional programmers, upgrade to speed up compilation.
 
Productivity: code compilation speed!

1) compile latest id Tech Engine (current id Tech 3, 2011: id Tech 4, C++, open source)
2) compile the latest linux kernel (C/C++, open source)

on two diferent compilers:

a) latest stable gcc (free)
b) latest Visual Studio (proprietary)

additional suggestion:

- the systems should use SSD drives to make sure that the hard disk will not be the bottleneck
 
Some kind of flash based browser based game like Bloons Tower Defense 4. If you set it to apocalypse mode and get up past round 60, it will bring any dual core cpu to its knees. lol. It even slows down with a quad core. If you can get to round 100, it will run indefinitely. Then just count the amount of money raised per minute and use that as a benchmark. If you minimize the browser window, the amount of gold per minute increases dramatically, so I think this makes a great benchmark of 2D processing.
 
I know the genre is not as popular as FPSs, but I would personally love to see some tests with a mmorpg title. Some mmorpgs lean on the cpu and gpu both at various times, making it somewhat different than most games that are either cpu or gpu dependant. Throw in the fact that you have to process multiple (hundreds at times) of player avaters, it just seems like a good source for seeing not only how well a cpu or gpu perform, but how they interact when the load shifts from one to the other.
 
discard all non dx10.1 game)just the vantage suite may remain) and all non multicore-aware programs and game. Also, in in review, if the game does not support either give it a very bad rating. I'm tired of playing game with a bad graphics such the one's with unreal engine 3, just look at the squares on the lightining effects, and also there's the problem of implementing directx 10.1 effects with directx9 code that slows it down a lot.
 
Please, please, please include a C++ compilation benchmark! Visual Studio Express (http://www.microsoft.com/express/Downloads/#2010-Visual-CPP) is free and so is GCC. Take a moderate to large sized open source C++ project of up to 20 million lines of code and make it into a benchmark. I'd love to see CPUs and HDDs/SSDs benchmarked for compilation.
This was done once on Tom's Hardware a few years back, but unfortunately it was a one off effort...
 
I would like to see some PC builds really geared towards low power consumption w/performance for people that live in remote areas aka. Alaska etc. power is REALLY expensive so the price of these builds is not the objective it is the wattage burnt here for the exceptional performance from the unit to maintain a playable game or two for hours during the long cold days of boredom really with the work economy the way it is don't you think we better start preparing a different way of thinking? sorry for the off track remark
 
Well, I'd like to see some sort of DAW (digital audio workstation) benchmark in there somewhere, as most of the main pro audio programs (Cubase, Pro-Tools etc) are well optimized for multi-core processors.

Currently, the benchmark standard (for Cubase at least) is to keep adding VST plugins till you bring the CPU to it's knees, is there a better way?

I reckon that a lot of people would like to see this, as there are a lot of pro and semi-pro DAW users out there.
 
Well, I'd like to see some sort of DAW (digital audio workstation) benchmark in there somewhere, as most of the main pro audio programs (Cubase, Pro-Tools etc) are well optimized for multi-core processors.

Currently, the benchmark standard (for Cubase at least) is to keep adding VST plugins till you bring the CPU to it's knees, is there a better way?

I reckon that a lot of people would like to see this, as there are a lot of pro and semi-pro DAW users out there.
 
How about running one Minecraft app for each core processor :)
Turn up the view distance to far on each game and see what happens.

How much longer will Minecraft be around to be relevant anyway? I say hop on the bandwagon!
 
I would like to see Folding@Home points per day on smp/bigadv units and tests for Adobe Premiere/After Effects CS5.
 
for ceck power consuption of an "usual user":
use a macro than move the mouse aound a browser and click like reload page or next and back very offen.
use some streaming program and let the computer watching a standard quality video on the browser ( like vlc or some browser integrated streaming program )
 
I am continually surprised how much I use Adobe Acrobat at work. Any time I open up the 'start' menu - Acrobat is at the top of the most used quick buttons. In the business / engineering world Acrobat allows you to share information to anyone, and keep it protected if required. We often have Acrobat files floating about that are quite large. I also use acrobat to save file size at times. (Images in Word keep the original size of scaled drawings - very bit intensive - while Acrobat just needs the print image). And any time I want to send out specific instructions Acrobat is the way to go. A word document might be altered later - messing up your best practice roadmap. That being said, Acrobat is very slow at times - so it would be really nice to see how it compares on various platforms. Testing the free reader on huge files would be good. Testing the distiller on large files would be better, but then you have to buy the licence.
 
It would be very useful to be able to see Linpack Benchmark. It is very easy to do this for intel CPUs, and also it can be used for AMD CPUs by Linx as anybody knows. I remember, last version of LinX was 0.6.4. With this benchmark, any user could easily compare Intel and AMD CPUs truely.
 
It would be great if you can include Adobe Premier CS4 or even better CS5.
People seem to be doing a lot more amateur video editing and it would be nice to see what the best options are.
 
Dear Chris, I love you guys! Please use Deep Fritz if you can. I want to build a duel processor computer. One processor is not enough.
Also please show this to Don Woligroski. I love his work with triple core processors in the system builder marathons. However 3 cores at 4.0GHz for gaming and 4 cores at 3.7GHz for everything else ain't cutting it no more.
Now I am just going to show of my stupid rig:
740 BE(in case anyone had any doubt[I could shut down a core on an i7950])
3870; 4870; 5870(and soon 6870[3 260's would work but it wouldn't be interesting]). Isn't it nice that we can just keep adding graphics cards instead of throwing them away.
One 160GB SATA and one 250GB SATA in raid 0 and one 320 GB SATA in raid 1.
The next three years will see 1 30GB SSD; 1 80GB SSD; and 1 120GB SSD.
Well that should be about enough of my nonsense so I will just say one more thing and than I will shut up. I know Intel processors are more powerful but they are boring, and one usually has to buy a new motherboard with their processor. Nvidia graphics cards have better drivers but we cannot mix and match them like we can with AMD. Boring!
And isn't it nice to know that we can mix and match any drives we want, within reason of course? The horrible thing is we have to buy the most expensive motherboard we can find with an 890FX chip set on it. It might cost as much as the cheapest X58 Mobo! Pass my apologies along to Intel and Nvidia and please ask them to try to be a little bit more interesting.
Thank you for indulging me and forgive me for tooting my own horn. I am obviously curious about building "CRAZY" config's more than playing chess.
Thanks again, mac4craig@cox.net(or just plain MAC)
 
I would like to see a multitask effect on the cpu. For example what happens to hand brake when its ripping with full threds utilized and you then try to surf the internet while thats happening. Or when Itunes is converting songs and you surf the net or work in adobe photoshop. Or what i do most of the time is play a netflix on one screen and a game on the other screen. We live in a world where if anything take more that 30 seconds to complete we switch to somthing else while waiting for it to complete. Most of the time is surfing the net while stuff runs. Also I agree with with some dude above. I would like to see the load time for heavy apps such as photoshop Your already opening these apps for your benchmarks just record them. A fresh load of windows I'd even like to see windows install times. If you removed the HDD bottleneck the times vary greatly. Thats a lot of decompressing and file moving the cpu has to handle. Also for the games I would like to see the linear time charts rather that catagorical bar graphs. If you look at the ground and don't more your fps is awsome if your sprinting through a forest with exposions and debree your fps die i would like to see how stable the fps are in the games.
 
Try asking the World Community Grid what tests they have for multiprocessing. They run lots of scientific projects like Folding @ Home, Fight AIDS @ Home, Help Conquer Cancer. They can use all the extra CPU cycles they can get.
 
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