Digital Storm Core i7-965

3DMark Vantage

Vantage has replaced 3DMark 2006 in our test suite, and though the new payment scheme is inconvenient, it is still end-user reproducible. Vantage runs on Windows Vista only and has four different default test settings: Entry, Performance, High, and Extreme.

This is the first time the three GTX 285s have had a chance to stretch their legs, and they don't just break our previous high scores, they shatter them. CrossFire woes and an early Core i7 platform prevented the Velocity Micro system from scoring as high as it should have in these tests, but the Digital Storm offers fantastic performance.

Crysis

Crysis is aging but it still stresses even the most recent PC hardware. This demo has two built-in benchmarks in the "bin32" folder, one "CPU" and the other "GPU". We ran all benchmarks three times, discarding the first result and averaging the other two. We ran all tests at "High" quality unless otherwise specified.

Once again, we see incredibly high scores here, far surpassing previous HD 4870X2 and CrossFire HD 4870 results. We increased the quality to "Very High" and set antialiasing to 16xAA, reran the test at 1920x1200, and got a result of 48.4 fps.

Far Cry 2

Far Cry 2 is a new addition to our test suite. It's a fun game with great ratings, and has a fantastic built in benchmarking tool (located in the "bin" folder with the executable, or right-click on the shortcut in Games Explorer and select "Benchmark"). We've chosen to run our system tests with the reproducible settings shown below:

Far Cry 2 has good performance scaling in general, and it's worth noting that any of these systems can play the game well at high resolutions. Once again, however, we see the Digital Storm system crushing all competitors. Below is the graph generated by Far Cry, with an added result of 1920x1200 at 8xAA (126 fps average).