IBUYPOWER Gamer Paladin F860-a

CINEBENCH R10

CINEBENCH places a heavy load on the CPU during the rendering tests, and can utilize a single CPU or multiple cores. The video subsystem has no bearing on the CPU rendering portion of this benchmark.

There's no denying that CINBENCH loves the Core i7; it performs incredibly well for rendering. Performance here is good but lags behind some of our other Core i7 systems (including an i7-920) with higher than stock base clocks.

PCMark Vantage

Our new standard for general platform performance is the PCMark Vantage suite that provides a wide series of tests, some of which focus on the CPU while others also utilize the video subsystem, and include digital photo manipulation, webpage loading, video transcoding, High Definition content playback, and so forth.

The Paladin does well here, scoring in the middle of the pack. In our look at the CyberPower system, we said that the WD "Green" hard drive was the main component holding back performance. This system scored very similarly to that one in most individual areas, with a large (1200 point) increase in the Hard Drive suite, raising the composite score as predicted.

SPECviewperf 10

Though these systems are intended for gaming, often the high-end hardware is useful for other purposes as well, such as CAD, artistic rendering, and medical software (though purists will tell you that professional graphics solutions are the only way to ensure that the driver packages will be completely accurate and stable). SPECviewperf is a set of benchmarks that measure the OpenGL performance of packages such as 3D Studio Max, Pro/Engineer, Solid Works, and other professional applications used daily by many individuals and companies. The software is free to download and test on your own system, but running all the tests will take several hours to complete. We ran all tests at a resolution of 1280x1024, and highlight two of these in our comparison chart.

Results can also be compared at the SPECviewperf website. We see the Paladin do much better than the Reactor due to the Core i7's rendering performance, but in turn it's handily beaten out in 3D Studio Max by the CyberPower system due to its higher GPU horsepower.