Benchmarking Performance: CPU Legacy Tests

Our legacy tests represent benchmarks that were once at the height of their time. Some of these are industry standard synthetics, and we have data going back over 10 years. All of the data here has been rerun on Windows 10, and we plan to go back several generations of components to see how performance has evolved.

All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.

3D Particle Movement v1

3DPM is a self-penned benchmark, taking basic 3D movement algorithms used in Brownian Motion simulations and testing them for speed. High floating point performance, MHz and IPC wins in the single thread version, whereas the multithread version has to handle the threads and loves more cores. This is the original version, written in the style of a typical non-computer science student coding up an algorithm for their theoretical problem, and comes without any non-obvious optimizations not already performed by the compiler, such as false sharing.

Legacy: 3DPM v1 Single Threaded

Legacy: 3DPM v1 MultiThreaded

CineBench 11.5 and 10

Cinebench is a widely known benchmarking tool for measuring performance relative to MAXON's animation software Cinema 4D. Cinebench has been optimized over a decade and focuses on purely CPU horsepower, meaning if there is a discrepancy in pure throughput characteristics, Cinebench is likely to show that discrepancy. Arguably other software doesn't make use of all the tools available, so the real world relevance might purely be academic, but given our large database of data for Cinebench it seems difficult to ignore a small five-minute test. We run the modern version 15 in this test, as well as the older 11.5 and 10 due to our back data.

Legacy: CineBench 11.5 Single ThreadedLegacy: CineBench 11.5 MultiThreadedLegacy: CineBench 10 Single ThreadedLegacy: CineBench 10 MultiThreaded

x264 HD 3.0

Similarly, the x264 HD 3.0 package we use here is also kept for historic regressional data. The latest version is 5.0.1, and encodes a 1080p video clip into a high-quality x264 file. Version 3.0 only performs the same test on a 720p file, and in most circumstances the software performance hits its limit on high-end processors, but still works well for mainstream and low-end. Also, this version only takes a few minutes, whereas the latest can take over 90 minutes to run.

Legacy: x264 3.0 Pass 1Legacy: x264 3.0 Pass 2

Benchmarking Performance: CPU Office Tests Gaming Performance: Civilization 6 (1080p, 4K, 8K, 16K)
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  • MajGenRelativity - Thursday, July 27, 2017 - link

    You make a couple good points. Ryzen 3 is definitely on my watchlist
  • iwod - Thursday, July 27, 2017 - link

    What are the Power Load for each CPU and not whole system? Zen is more SoC like and harder to compare to Intel.
  • Ian Cutress - Thursday, July 27, 2017 - link

    System is variable. CPU numbers in a CPU review.
  • ampmam - Thursday, July 27, 2017 - link

    Great review but biased conclusion. Any idiot can sense it.
  • MrCommunistGen - Thursday, July 27, 2017 - link

    For us idiots, can you possibly elaborate what bias you're seeing?
  • vMax65 - Thursday, July 27, 2017 - link

    ampmam, good to know you are an idiot...Great review Ian.
  • Ian Cutress - Thursday, July 27, 2017 - link

    Biased in what way? I've been called an Intel shill and an AMD shill this week, will be glad to listen to what you think.
  • Oxford Guy - Thursday, July 27, 2017 - link

    Then don't open yourself up for these accusations by doing things like kneecapping Zen with 2400 speed RAM.

    If you think 2400 speed RAM is more beneficial than not then, at least, show the best case results for 3200 speed RAM and say "See — it's not important"

    It's not good to see the same site that overclocking by telling people testing for serious stability isn't important and which pumps unwise levels of voltage in hobbling the RAM that's used to test Zen, a platform that most everyone knows benefits more from faster RAM than Intel does.
  • silverblue - Friday, July 28, 2017 - link

    Perhaps it does, but it's not massive. Also, Ian did say he would test at faster settings at a later date.

    RAM prices are quite high at the moment for the higher clocked parts, which brings about an interesting observation - the Ryzen 3 is the cheapest part of this entire setup.
  • Oxford Guy - Saturday, July 29, 2017 - link

    The RAM that he used was rated at 3000 and he chose to downclock it.

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