Hey guys, and welcome to the third and final part of the We Are Legion build. Obviously most of you were expecting this article yesterday, but yesterday was a holiday peeps. This man doesn’t work on Father’s Day!
I’m going to keep the text to a minimum here and mostly just feed you guys the results.
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PCMark 7
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Here I saw a nice jump in points going from 2288 to 4009. Like I said before, PCMark 7 isn’t a resource hogging test — rather it’s good for testing your PC as a whole.
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3DMark Vantage
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3DMark Vantage with the Performance settings saw a 321 point decrease in GPU Performance (fluctuation is my best guess), but did see a massive 4,157 point increase going from my old CPU to the new one.
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Moving onto the Extreme Settings mode, we see roughly the same types of results. Almost 500 points dropped from the GPU Score, and over 4,000 added to the CPU Score. I was hoping to see GAINS from the GPU, not losses in numbers, but alas what can you do?
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3DMark 11
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Running 3DMark 11 at the Performance Preset saw me gain a total of 57 points. This seems incredibly low, but after running the benchmark several more times with the PC at stock settings, this was the average.
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If I thought the Performance results were disappointing, imagine how I felt when the PC actually got LOWER marks when running the Extreme Profile Preset. It doesn’t make any sense. Not only was the score lower with the PC at default (CPU 3.8Ghz, Ram at 1333Mhz), it was also lower once I had overclocked the PC (CPU 4.2Ghz and Ram 1600Mhz @ CAS7). 3DMark 11 doesn’t like me I guess.
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Game Performance
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It wasn’t until I began testing Crysis 2 and Metro 2033 that I actually saw noticeable gains from the PC. Yes the PC feels extremely snappy when using it, but that speed isn’t showing up on synthetic benchmarks. Running both Crysis 2 and Metro 2033 at Max Settings, at the resolution of 1360×768 netted me small increases in both Minimum and Maximum FPS, while the Average stayed roughly the same. This goes to show that there wasn’t as much of a bottleneck as I thought there was on the HD 6870.
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Windows 7 Benchmark
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Just going straight from PC to PC saw a .1 increase in both CPU and Memory as well as both of the GPU related tests. The big increase is obviously the Hard-Drive, which jumped up to 7.8. Increasing the CPU to 4.2Ghz and the Memory to 1600Mhz @ CAS7 saw another .1 increase to both the CPU and Memory.
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Overall
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Overall I was a bit disappointed with the gains I saw as a whole from the PC. The thing that has me most excited though is the headroom it gives me for future upgrades. Not only can I throw in a new Video Card if I want, and not worry about it slowing it down, I can also throw in more memory, overclock the CPU up towards 5.0Ghz. With so many variables to play with, I can fine-tune this PC to do whatever I want it to do (except make me pancakes and rub my feet.. Although that would be AWESOME!)
Well, that wraps up the Building A Beast Mini-Blog (or whatever you want to call it). Stay tuned for more PC-Related articles in the near future (included an updated PC Buying Guide).
And don’t forget to check out our brand new Hardware Section at the top of the page. The Hardware Reviews will no longer be posted to the Homepage, and will only be visible from the Hardware Tab.
