The Future of Test Beds

WITH NEW BENCHMARKS comes a need for new zero-points and testbeds. Not only is this a pivotal step for our reviews, but it’s also important for our system builds as well. Test-beds are fairly complex things to organize, as you need to have some flexibility in them while also trying to keep them as closely aligned as possible to one another to reduce inconsistency. For instance, when testing AMD and Intel processors, if we’re comparing them to one from the competition, it’s ideal if we have motherboards that cost roughly the same, from the same manufacturer, with a similar feature-set across the two platforms. Then it’s all about pairing that with a single high-end GPU (in this case an RTX 2080 Super), two separate but identical SSDs for the OS (one install for AMD, and one for Intel) to avoid chipset and program conflicts, and then the same memory kit as well, in this case 32GB (2x16GB) of DDR4 @ 3600MT/s.

Moving to graphics cards and SSDs, however, complicates things. GPUs have typically always performed better with Intel processors due to higher IPC and single-core performance. Ryzen’s certainly come a long way since it first debuted, but it’s still slightly behind its blue competitor. But AMD has one trump card in its arsenal, and that’s the fact it’s the only platform right now that supports PCIe 4.0, doubling the effective bandwidth of any device that uses the connection standard compared to last gen.

There are two reasons why that’s important, and why for the first time in over a decade we’re turning to AMD for our graphics card testing. We expect that within the next 12-24 months to see the first PCIe 4.0 graphics cards emerge, especially as RTX matures in its second iteration. Committing time to testing GPUs on a PCIe 3.0 platform, and then needing to retest our entire inventory when the new cards launch is just not feasible. On top of that, there’s already a plethora of PCIe 4.0 SSDs on the market. So if we can keep a single high-spec platform available for both SSD and GPU testing together, it saves time and energy stripping down parts off of the test bench.