Proving Processor Performance
AS INTEL CONTINUES to push the limits of 14nm, and Ryzen prefers to do its own thing, we feel that overclocking outside of the world of LN2 is effectively dead for the majority of enthusiasts. For that reason OC benchmarks are out of the window straight away. That’s not to say we won’t try overclocking, rather that it’s something we’ll refer to in the copy. Instead, we will report on what exactly the maximum clock speed achieved is at stock for both single and multi-core performance under load.
For our synthetic tests, Cinebench R20, HWBOT x265 @ 4K, and HEVC’s H.265 Decode @ 1080p are perfect. These three tests deal with rendering, encoding, and decoding. The latter two use different file formats and resolutions to better replicate what most professionals are using in the digital world.
Moving on to our memory tests, and because memory bandwidth is mostly attributed to the number of memory channels supported and memory speed, we’re going to skip that. Instead, what does matter is memory latency, as it gives us an idea of how the core structure is set up. AIDA64 Extreme’s Memory Latency test is perfect for that.
The most interesting tests for us revolve around power draw and temperature. For this we’re going to use Prime95, HWMonitor, and a handy watt meter to get the results we need. We’ll run one instance of Prime95’s blend test and measure the maximum temperature and wattage pulled over a 10-minute run.
After that we move on to our realworld testing for gaming, video-rendering and editing. We’re running two AAA titles— TotalW ar:T hreeK ingdoms, and Assassin’sCreedOdyssey, both at 1080p. TotalWar has always been a CPUdependent title regardless of resolution, whereas Assassin’sCreed is the opposite, giving us a good spread as to how valuable the CPU is in the gaming department.
Then lastly we have our two Adobe real-world tests. With Premiere we’ll be rendering out a basic, five-minute video @ 4K, and then with After Effects we’ll render a freely available 10-second 4K intro template, and time both to give us a good guide as to how these processors perform under real-world conditions.