Rated: 100% (3 votes)
Loading ...Skulltrail on its way
James Gorbold
I just finished a very productive phone call with Intel’s helpful PR chap. After discussing the merits of Christmas pudding he revealed that a Skulltrail demo kit (CPUs, motherboard, RAM, HSFs) is on its way to CPC, ETA this Friday. Hopefully this means we’ll be able to start uploading some benchmark results from this monster system sometime next week.
For those not aware what Skulltrail is its Intel’s attempt to provide the ultimate PC platform. Thus, it comprises two overclockable quad-core CPUs (not Xeons, but Core 2 Extremes) and a motherboard that supports SLI and CrossFire. Obviously its going to be extremely expensive, but it should generate some awesome benchmark numbers.
As the kit hasn’t arrived yet, I haven’t got any photo’s to show you, so here’s a cool photo of a skull shaped rock in the Mojave desert.
Rated: 100% (1 votes)
Loading ...Phenom in the Lab
James Gorbold
As we didn’t want to publish any of AMD’s silly canned benchmarks from its ridiculous event in Warsaw last week we’ve managed to borrow a Phenom from some kind lads up North (i.e. not AMD, which hasn’t exactly been forthcoming with samples). The chip is currently benching and we should be able to get some results up later today.
Rated: 100% (3 votes)
Loading ...Megatesting
James Gorbold
This week I’m stuck in the lab trying to benchmark as many CPUs as possible before:
a> I go mad staring at these four walls
b> I go mad watching Spode cycling around like a fool in the video in the multitasking test
c> Julie (our production editor) has a breakdown waiting for the results
d> Intel and AMD decide to launch any more CPUs
Rated: 57.83% (46 votes)
Loading ...Crysis in crisis
James Gorbold
Well, its official. After being shown off at various trade shows, and being the star of more dodgy videos than Paris Hilton, Crysis made its first public appearance at the i31 LAN party at Newbury this weekend.
Rated: 80% (4 votes)
Loading ...It’s Dream PC time
James Gorbold
As the guys finish off the last few pages of Issue 49 the first of this year’s Dream PCs have begun to arrive for review in Issue 50.
The Dream PC Labs test is a once a year event where we challenge a select number of manufacturers to build the fastest, most innovative and cool looking performance PC possible. We don’t set any price limit, all we ask is that the PC must be overclocked and stand out from the crowd of generic high-end PCs.
Although a Dream PC will set you back an arm and a leg, even if you don’t have that much money to spend, they are still very interesting to read about, as they have fully customised cases and cooling systems - perhaps providing you with some inspiration for what to do to your PC next.
Rated: 60% (2 votes)
Loading ...New benchmarks inbound
James Gorbold
For the last few months Spode and I have been working on getting the new version of our Media Benchmarks up and running. Spode has done all the programming, but every member of the Custom PC team has been busy testing each of the three new tests. This slow and painful process has led to more rebuilds than I care to remember and many late nights, but its critical we crush every bug before the benchmarks are released.
As before, the new version of the benchmarks comprises three separate tests, each of which measures the performance of your PC at completing a specific task. These range from editing digital photos, encoding a video and multitasking between several applications.
However, the applications themselves have changed from the last version of the benchmarks. One particular highlight is that the benchmark now uses GPL software so not only is nothing installed in the Windows registry, but it also means there are no more annoying “please register after 30 days” type notices. Another improvement is the ability to install and run from any drive, so if your fastest hard disk isn’t “c:” you can simply install the benchmarks onto it without having to re-format.
We’ve also carefully chosen applications that make extensive use of multithreaded programming techniques, so they will run much faster on multi-core/SMP PCs. Finally we’ve also improved the anti-cheating code so its much harder to cheat the benchmarks than before can get an unfairly high place on the leaderboard. The new benchmarks also run happily on Windows XP or Vista, allowing you to see how of a difference Microsoft’s latest OS sucks up system resources.
Other great new features include the ability to set the benchmarks run a certain a number of times or run in an infinite loop if you want to stress test how stable your new PC is.
Assuming the latest two bugs (discovered over the weekend) can be crushed there’s no reason why we won’t start using the new benchmarks in Issue 49 and make them available to download in the next few weeks.
Rated: 65.71% (7 votes)
Loading ...Be careful not to choose a motherboard just based on its maximum stable FSB
James Gorbold
For the last few weeks Chris and I have been working on a Labs test of DDR2 memory kits for the next issue of Custom PC (Issue 48).
Initially, we started testing using as Asus Striker Extreme motherboard, based on the Nvidia nForce 680i SLI chipset. We chose this motherboard because we know its such a great overclocker. However, after we had tested a dozen DDR2 kits a pattern started to emerge - the Striker Extreme is indeed capable of running a very high FSB stably, but its not able to run the RAM nearly as fast. This meant it was unable to run many of the high-end kits (PC2-9200) at their stock settings, let alone overclock them.
After making the painful decision to ditch all the benchmark results we had already gathered (a week’s work) we then switched to an Asus P5K Deluxe motherboard based on the Intel P35 chipset. As suspected, the Intel Northbridge not only overclocks to a similar or higher FSB than the Nvidia Northbridge, but also supports much higher memory frequencies.
For example, one kit overclocked to just 1GHz in the Striker Extreme, while in the P5K Deluxe it works fine at 1.2GHz.
So next time you’re thinking about upgrading motherboards its important not just to pay attention to the maximum stable FSB, but also how hard it can drive the memory.