System and testing methodology

Here are the tables containing the technical specifications of the system used to perform the processor tests.

The tests were conducted on both the processor and on the GPU, using, for the latter, the RAM set both at 1333 MHz and at 1866 MHz, to detect any benefits from the maximum frequency supported by the processor and in this case also by motherboard. The CPU has been left to the standard frequency of 2900 MHz and compared with other AMD products and from competing solutions from Intel.In this case, the RAM has been set at a frequency of 1600 MHz CL8.

Following are the software used for CPU testing:

SYNTHETIC

3DMark Vantage: produced by Futuremark, 3Dmark Vantage is a useful tool to test the performance of your system.Primarily designed to track the performance of the graphics card, the 3DMark Vantage is suited for testing of the CPU that are increasingly a bottleneck in the system when it comes to graphics applications. The test was carried out only in relation to the CPU, disabling the 2 steps related only to vga.

PCMark Vantage: Another famous benchmark produced from Futuremark that has the task of analyzing the performance of the entire system.The tests made are CPU-related and include: data encryption, decryption, compression, decompression, image manipulation through the CPU, audio transcoding, video transcoding, and many other tests.

AIDA64: AIDA64 is a software product from FinalWire that monitors the system by providing detailed information on hardware components.The software includes a utility inside the bench capable of testing memory and cache inside the processor.

Passmark Performance Test 7: another application able to obtain detailed information about system hardware.It includes several benchmark utilities subdivided for each component. In this case, the tests were performed on the CPU and include the integer calculations, floating point calculations, tests of the SSE instructions and many others.

DATA COMPRESSION AND MULTIMEDIA

7zip 9.20: this well-known archive software contains within it a tool that can analyze system performance, reporting a value expressed in MIPS (million istruction per second).The tests include compression, decompression, and overall value.

Winrar 3 Beta 4: Another famous compression and decompression software for data archives.Inside it there is a benchmark utility that compresses a standard file suitable for this purpose; the software will return the compression speed in KB/s.

Cinebench 11.5 and 10: Software products from Maxon that allow, through the development of three-dimensional images and content, to test the CPU performance. Both the release allow to test the CPU using a single core, or all the cores inside the processor.

X264 HD Benchmark 3.0: software to measure the performance of the CPU using the x264 video encoding.

Handbrake 0.9.5: Multi-threaded video encoding software with which we will transform a file (a movie) to MP4; the process includes x264 video encoding, FAAC audio encoding and muxing into final MP4 container.The time it takes for the CPU to perform this task will be taken into consideration.