Nvidia and AMD might not release new cards until 2012 — who cares?

Tuesday, August 16th, 2011

I’ve become used to Nvidia and AMD rocking up with new graphics cards on a consistently quick schedule: since 2008 and beginning with the GeForce 9000-series, Nvidia has released six generations of GPUs, and AMD has replied with three of its own, starting with the Radeon HD 4000-series.

Both firms put the finishing touches on their current ranges in the spring, and the trail’s gone quiet since. Nvidia has confirmed that it won’t release any new cards before 2012, and AMD hasn’t mentioned any potential release dates for its new Radeon HD 7000-series — presumably taking extra time to further tweak and perfect the new chips. (more…)

Apple MacBook Pro 13in: where’s the Turbo Boost?

Thursday, March 10th, 2011

The Apple MacBook Pro 13in is a glorious laptop. It’s thin and light, gorgeous both to look at and to use, and it packs no small amount of power in its tiny chassis. Yet our tests have uncovered a performance issue that will affect every user.

We ran our new Real World Benchmarks on the top-end model, with a dual-core 2.7GHz Intel Core i7-2620M processor, 4GB of DDR3 and a 500GB hard disk. It’s a very fast laptop for its size, as a final score of 0.70 shows – that’s only around 20% slower than the top-end quad-core 17in model. Yet it’s not quite as fast as it should be. (more…)

The all-new PC Pro Real World Benchmarks

Wednesday, March 2nd, 2011

It’s our mission to bring you the most accurate and informative reviews on the market. That’s why we’ve updated our benchmarks to reflect the way real people use computers today.

Our new tests don’t rely on synthetic measures: we use real, current applications such as Microsoft Office 2010 and Photoshop CS5, as well as a completely new set of responsiveness tests, to get an all-round picture of a PC’s performance.

That means the benchmark scores you’ll see from this day on are not directly comparable with older scores, but they give the best ever insight into exactly what each system can do for you.

(more…)

All change at PC Pro

Thursday, February 24th, 2011

Over the next few months you’re going to see some big changes on PC Pro.

2011 benchmarks

In issue 200 of the magazine (on sale mid-April), we’re going to be unveiling our 2011 benchmarks suite. Written in-house using real-world applications such as Office 2010 and Photoshop CS5, the PC Pro benchmarks will deliver the most accurate measurement of PC performance to date, testing overall system responsiveness as well as typical desktop tasks and demanding multi-core workloads.

That will be graphically illustrated in issue 200’s CPU megatest, in which we’ll be testing every mainstream desktop CPU from both Intel and AMD to see which really offers the best performance for your money. We’ll explain more about how our new benchmarks work in the coming weeks.

(more…)

Taking the hype out of Hyper-Threading

Sunday, May 9th, 2010

In my recent review of AMD’s six-core Phenom II X6 1090T processor, I noted that, although this CPU has the same number of physical cores as Intel’s Core i7-980X, Intel’s Hyper-Threading technology lets the Core i7 service twice as many concurrent threads.

This prompted one commenter (giving his name as Wilbert3) to raise an insightful point. Hyper-Threading is great for everyday multi-tasking: for example, it lets a dual-core Core i5 CPU service four concurrent processes. But it works by presenting each core’s spare execution capacity to the OS as a virtual second core. Under heavy load, where there is no spare capacity, it would seem unable to offer any benefit. In such cases we shouldn’t expect to see a Core i5 achieve performance anywhere near what a true quad-core architecture would provide.

That analysis sounds persuasive, but is it borne out by the evidence? (more…)

Windows 7: surprising benchmark results

Wednesday, May 6th, 2009

Six months ago I benchmarked an alpha version of Windows 7. And I was surprised to find that, despite the new OS feeling much more snappy than Vista, application performance was actually identical.

Now Windows 7 has progressed all the way to Release Candidate status I thought it might be interesting to repeat the experiment with the almost-final code. So again I’ve been running our real-world benchmarks, this time on a Core i7-based system with 3GB of RAM, to compare performance in Vista to both clean and upgrade installations of Windows 7 RC.

This time the results surprised me even more:

As you can see, in most of our tests a clean installation of Windows 7 RC remains on a par with Vista, or at worst a few seconds behind. It’s faintly odd that, in the Photoshop and 3D tests, the upgrade installation was slower than a clean installation of either Vista or Windows 7, but the gap isn’t big enough to fret over.

But what sticks out like a sore thumb is Windows 7 RC’s dreadful performance in our Office test. This test involves extensive number-crunching and graphing in Excel, page formatting and printing in Word, database sorting in Access and slide creation in PowerPoint. Our Windows 7 alpha completed it in an identical time to Vista, but the RC took 70% longer in a clean installation. In an upgraded environment execution time was almost doubled.

(In case you’re wondering, the Multi-app test entails running the Office, audio and Photoshop benchmarks all at the same time, so 7’s relatively poor scores here are probably just another symptom of poor Office performance.)

I don’t yet know what’s causing the slowdown. It’s not unique to this particular setup: I repeated the test on an Athlon X2 system, which is architecturally pretty damn different to a Core i7, and saw a comparable slow-down on this benchmark.

But I’m continuing to investigate, and I’ll let you know what I find.

Follow-up: Benchmarking Windows 7

Wednesday, November 12th, 2008

Well, my last blog post certainly kicked up a storm. I’m glad so many people found it stimulating: I’m always interested to hear your responses.

But a few of you have raised good questions about the tests I used to compare performance between XP, Vista and Windows 7. So let me explain them in a bit more detail. (more…)

Windows 7: faster or just smarter?

Monday, November 10th, 2008

If you’ve been following the PC Pro blogs, you’ll know that we recently received a preview build of Windows 7. Useful work has pretty much ground to a halt as we’ve all set about nuking our Vista installations and upgrading our work PCs to this unsupported pre-alpha OS.

And the net effect? Surprisingly little. At this stage of development, over a year from release, Windows 7 looks almost identical to Vista. There are some welcome new features, as already noted by our esteemed editor and deputy editor (see their blog posts here and here); but the high profile changes (such as the snazzy new taskbar that Barry Collins saw in California the other week) are yet to be plumbed in. (more…)