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Our Approach
Testing is the one true way of measuring product quality and that’s why we take testing so seriously at Custom PC – so you can rest assured that a review is based on empirical benchmark results. We print several scores for each review, highlighting different aspects of a product. For instance, for a graphics card, we score according to how fast it is (Speed), its capabilities, cooling and bundle (Features), and its cost (Value). We then combine these to give an Overall score. The important thing to note is that the Overall score isn’t an exact average of the other scores, but is mathematically weighted. So, for example, as Speed is the most important characteristic of a high-end graphics card, we give it a greater weighting in the Overall score than for Features or Value. The weightings are noted above the percentages in the ratings box.
Application Benchmarks
Components: 2.8GHz Pentium D 820, 1Gb Corsair XMS2-5400 DDR2, 250Gb S-ATA II Samsung SpinPoint P120S hard disk, ECS Intel 945P motherboard.
We benchmark PCs, laptops and motherboards using our own Custom PC Media Benchmarks, normalising all scores against our reference PC, as specced out above. The reference PC scores 1.0, so a score of 1.30 is 30 per cent faster than the reference PC. The benchmarks comprise three tests, the first of which is a Paint Shop Pro image editing test that entails editing digital photos, creating a poster, and finally, generating a huge panorama. The next test is a video encoding benchmark, which uses TMPGEnc to encode a DIVX video into MPEG-2 in preparation for burning to DVD. The test is multithreaded, so multicore CPUs are fully tested, as they are in our final benchmark, a multitasking test that simultaneously runs the Paint Shop Pro test while WinRAR compresses a large number of files in the background.
3D Graphics Benchmarks
Components: 2.93GHz Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800, 2Gb SuperTalent PC2-8000 DDR2, 74Gb S-ATA Western Digital Raptor, Intel DX975XBX motherboard plus the graphics card we're reviewing.
We test all of our graphics cards using the PC you can see above. Using such a fast PC means that any limitations we see are down to the graphics card alone and, even better, using the same PC each time also makes it easy to compare graphics cards, regardless of the issue in which they were reviewed. We test all three games at maximum detail settings, which is how the game is meant to be played, and we use the four resolutions, and AA and AF settings listed above. Different cards at different price points suit different settings, and we write and weight our reviews accordingly. High-end cards should be able to sustain playable frame rates at higher settings, while 1,280 x 1,024 is more important for mid-range cards.
For a product to win an award it has to be something for which we’d personally fork out cash.
Any product with the CPC Approved award is a product we’d be proud to own. For the really special products that we’d sell our bodies to science to own, there’s the Premium Grade award, and for mad, over-the-top products, there’s the Crazy But Cool award.
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