Synthetic Benchmarks

Possibly the best known and widely used synthetic benchmark, 3D Mark 11 tests the gaming performance of the PC. Two sets of results are shown relative to CPU performance. First one is Physics score that represents solely processor raw power that can be delivered in games or such applications with main focus on physics calculations. Second set of results is Combined score which combines Physics and Graphics scores. Again this to show you what processor could achieve in perfect (synthetic) conditions, and in most cases these results are far from what you get in real life gaming when you take into account drivers, game developer preferences, multitasking optimizations etc.

PC Mark Vantage on the other hand tests more wider performance aspects of the PC like video encoding, home entertainment multimedia features, working in an office environment, and basic gaming. Results shown below are cumulative result of all tests in benchmark suite.

3D Mark Vantage v1.0.1

PC Mark Vantage v1.0.1

wPrime 1024M and SuperPI 1M

wPrime is a benchmarking application designed to use a highly multithreaded approach to calculate the square-roots of large amounts of numbers, while SuperPI calculates pi number to a specified number of digits after the decimal point. Both applications are primarily used by overclockers to check the stability and performance of overclocked CPUs. It's clear from results that wPrime is a multithreaded benchmark that uses all of the cores no matter if they are simulated with HyperThreading, while SuperPI uses just one core.