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Ask and You Shall Receive: GPU Bench is Live

 by Anand Lal Shimpi on August 12, 2010 8:42 PM EST
70 Comments | Add A Comment
70 Comments

One day I got the bright idea to benchmark the living crap out of everything I could find. What resulted was a huge Excel sheet of CPU performance results. Then Intel released the X25-M and I realized that I would have much more repeatable and reliable numbers if I used SSDs (don't have to worry about defragging between runs), at which point I re-ran everything in the Excel sheet.

To make a long story short, we launched a feature called Bench. It's a comparison tool that lets you pit products against one another using our own internal test results. If you want to find out whether the Core i5 750 will be a significant upgrade from your Core 2 Quad Q6600 you can head over to Bench and find out. We have over 100 CPUs in Bench today across over 20 benchmarks. CPUs are being added all the time as they come out and we're constantly evaluating new benchmarks to introduce as well.

When I'm not testing CPUs, working with Brian on smartphones or playing with Mac gear, I'm knee deep in SSDs. I've been itching to write a follow-on to the SSD Relapse, however not enough has changed just yet. Plus with all that's happening in the other segments I cover directly, it's easier for me to focus on shorter SSD articles. Adding SSD performance data to Bench was an obvious next step, which I made not too long ago.

You all have been asking for three things when it comes to Bench fairly consistently. You want the ability to have all benchmarks sorted the same way (e.g. higher is better), the ability to compare more than two products and you want a GPU version of Bench. Today I'm happy to announce that the first version of GPU Bench is live.

We've tweaked the landing page for Bench a bit to let you access CPU, SSD and GPU Bench data even easier. As is the case with CPU and SSD Bench, as new cards get released we'll be expanding the GPU Bench database to include them. At present we go back as far as the GeForce 8800 GT and Radeon HD 3870 (at 1680 x 1050).

I hope you enjoy the addition and expect more Bench features to surface as the year goes on. As always, thanks for reading :)

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  • ghoti - Friday, August 13, 2010 - link

    'nuff said.

  • Regs - Friday, August 13, 2010 - link

    I asked!

  • Leeman - Friday, August 13, 2010 - link

    I can't find on your site what the base system is for the GPU benches. Curious what CPU and memory was used.

  • Burticus - Friday, August 13, 2010 - link

    I like it! The side by side comparisons are great. I am often wondering how much better X is than Y and this does it!

    Sadly some of my hardware is so old it predates some of your cpu and gpu choices, but I understand the need to stay with mostly modern stuff.

    Good work! Big thumbs up.

  • RMSe17 - Friday, August 13, 2010 - link

    I like the Bench, great job on it, and good to see some old cards available for comparison with future upgrades.

    A small request from me is to have more Crossfire tests, as currently the only current gen card with Crossfire is the 5870, which is a rather expensive setup. I am curious to see the results for Xfire of 5770, 5830, 5850.

    Thanks a lot! :)
    RMSe17

  • demonbug - Friday, August 13, 2010 - link

    I was actually hoping for more CF/SLI on older setups, so I can see if it makes more sense to add a second card (in my case a Radeon 4850) or wait a while and get a new card. I can get a new, matching 4850 for ~$100; I'd like to see how much I'd have to spend to beat that with a new card/cards.

    Though I guess I could take a look at the 4870 and estimate...

  • LoneNinja - Friday, August 13, 2010 - link

    I hope there are plans to include more benchmarks, and a much larger variety of cards to these tests. I personally don't own anything in that list, and I'm not in the market to purchase anything included in these tests. I don't play the games you benched either.

    I'd personally like to see some of the more low end-mainstream cards shown, and at a resolution below 1680x1050. I know that isn't enthusiast, but more people buy those than they do 5870's.

  • DJDave404 - Friday, August 13, 2010 - link

    Hi Anand

    In reviewing your results from the SSD section, I see the 256GB Crucial RealSSD C300 2.5-inch SATA 6GB/s was tested on a Intel motherboard with no Sata III connection.
    And that cut 100mb off the real speed of this drive. In the 4kb category it will not make much difference, as the drive has it's weak point there and cannot saturate the sata II port your were using.
    As more and more of the SSD Sata III drives come to market, this may be something you will need to address in the future of the Bench Statistics.
    My personal 256GB Crucial C300 goes right on by 300Mb/Second reads all the time on a Sata III controller. Write Benches show 200+ Mb writes as well

    Hope this Helps

  • ET - Saturday, August 14, 2010 - link

    That's a really nice feature. Hopefully it will grow to encompass a lot more cards. I'd love to see a lot more cards here, spanning all price ranges and ages. It could be an invaluable resource for people upgrading their cards.

  • bill4 - Saturday, August 14, 2010 - link

    thanks for the work.

    I remember at times Tom's had certain databases, but I dont think they were kept very up to date. Besides Tom's is a foreign site. This is much better.

    I strongly concur with making "higher is better" graphs for all as well. It's a bit annoying to look at the comparisons and have to mentally adjust from benchmark to benchmark
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