IBUYPOWER Gamer Paladin F860-a

3DMark Vantage

As we mentioned in previous reviews, 3DMark Vantage has replaced 3DMark06 in our test suite, and though the new payment scheme is inconvenient, it is still user reproducible. Vantage runs on Windows Vista only, and has four different default test settings: Entry, Performance, High, and Extreme.

The Gamer Paladin is only equipped with one HD 4870, and it simply can't keep up against systems with twice the GPU power like the CyberPower and the Edge Z55. The Maingear F131 (a Core2 Duo E8400 at 4.0 GHz with an NVIDIA GTX 260) matches the Paladin at High and Extreme levels where the GPU becomes the overriding bottleneck.

Crysis

Crysis is getting old, but it still stresses even the most recent PC hardware. This demo has two built-in benchmarks in the "bin32" folder, one "CPU" and the other "GPU". We ran all benchmarks three times, discarding the first result and averaging the other two. We ran all tests at "High" quality unless otherwise specified.

As indicated in 3DMark, we see the F131 and the Gamer Paladin neck and neck at high resolution without any anti-aliasing. However, with 4XAA enabled, the Paladin takes a solid lead. The CyberPower system has an HD 4870X2 2GB card, so comparing those results to the Paladin along with Derek's excellent article on two-GPU options should give a good feel for the performance boost possible with a GPU upgrade or SLI configuration.

Far Cry 2

Far Cry 2 is a new addition to our test suite. It's a fun game with great ratings, and has a fantastic built in benchmarking tool (located in the "bin" folder with the executable, or right-click on the shortcut in Games Explorer and select "Benchmark"). We've chosen to run our system tests with the reproducible settings shown below:

Far Cry 2 has good performance scaling in general, and AMD's new drivers have significantly improved stability and performance. The system is very playable at 1920x1200, but is completely trounced in the numbers by the CyberPower system.