14. Benchmarks

To provide a point of comparison to my own DIY HTPCs, I ran the PCMark benchmark, which Figure 27 shows came in at a respectable 3390 PCMarks. But something seems wrong when I compare the z556's score against the 2458 PCMarks obtained by my latest HTPC build! I remember being a bit suspicious about my system's score at the time, since 7% faster than a much older and slower PC seemed way too little.

So I did a little checking on Futuremark's Website and found systems similar to my system running at a little over 3000 PCMarks. So why was my score so low? After further investigation, it looks like the poky 160 GB PATA hard drives I used are the culprit since they scored very poorly in the HDD XP startup, HDD general usage and HDD virus scan tests. But even if I substituted a nice, new SATA drive into my DIY system, the z556's score would still beat mine by about 10%.

Figure 27: PCMark benchmark results

While HTPCs are not traditionally built to run high end games, I added the 3DMark benchmark to get a general idea of the potential gaming prowess of the z556. The score of 1174 (Figure 28) indicates that the z556 is capable of playing many of modern games, but with a slightly lowered resolution. Another cut at the z556's gaming abilities comes from the Tom's Hardware Guide VGA Charts, where you can compare the GeForce 6600 with other cards not only using 3DMark, but gaming benchmarks as well.

On the games tested in the VGA charts, the Geforce 6600 looks like it will play most games, just not well. It managed to hit a comfortable 58 frames per second on Quake 4, but the other games that were tested put it within 16-25 FPS.

Figure 28: 3Dmark benchmark results.

If you want more detail on the score, you can go here to Futuremark's site.

I also ran Intel's Digital Home Capabilities Assessment Tool (DHCAT), but am not including the results here because the DHCAT 1.0 version that I have been using ran into a number of problems with the z556's configuration (note that the program is still in Beta form). When I checked with Intel, it turned out that many of the problems had been addressed in DHCAT 1.5, which wasn't available in time. But I should have a copy of DHCAT 1.5 soon, which I'll use in future reviews.