4. Synthetic Benchmarks

PcMark gives the Dell a slight advantage in the overall and CPU scores, followed by a huge advantage in memory and GPU scores. The Phenom processor is known to have somewhat slow memory performance due to its L3 cache being disabled, but PcMark doesn’t seem to take the second GPU in the Radeon 3870 X2 into consideration. The hard drive scores close the PcMark benchmarks with a virtual tie.

SysMark shows a curious lead by the Dell system across the board, implying that it doesn’t really utilize more than four CPU cores.

Sisoft Sandra appears to take advantage of all 4 of the Phenom’s cores in the CPU benchmarks, where the Gamer Mage 855 wins three out of four tests. The dual-core Dell shows a curious but very large advantage in the multi-media int x8 iSSE3 test however.

In the Sandra memory tests, the tables turn and the Dell XPS beats the Gamer Mage by a sizable margin. We know the Phenom’s TLB errata BIOS fix leads to slower memory performance, but we’re still a bit puzzled since the Dell machine is using slower RAM.

3DMark 2006 generally shows the iBuypower Gamer Mage 855 at a notable advantage over the Dell XPS 630. There are a couple cases where the Dell will perform well at lower resolutions, but the iBuypower system’s dual-GPU Radeon really scales well as the resolution gets higher. We do have to keep in mind, however, that 3dMark will tend to show dual-GPU configurations in a much stronger light than real-world games. It will be interesting to see the actual game benchmarks.