We continued with out current “in house” system which would be found in most mid range level workstation scenarios.   A reliable sound mid range level workstation platform which has plenty of scope for upgrading at later dates.

The mainboards, bios settings were left at default and it automatically adjusted the clock speed settings and voltages to facilitate the CPU’s and Memory to maintain the higher functionality which the mainboard has to offer.

Hardware Suppliers for the Review

Supermicro for the supply of the new Mainboard shown, Corsair, for the supply of their Dominator memory, Western Digital for the SATA Hard Disc, AMD for the supply of the FireGL V7600 professional graphics card, and finally but by no means least; Akasa for a majority peripherals required for this review.

With the support and help of all the companies involved this has been a cracking first look a AMD’s new FireGL card.   It gives you the reader a choice on upgrade paths that many of you look for here with the performance ratio’s each system has to provide.

Systems Integrators, OEM’s and VAR’s should contact all companies directly for pricing and availability of all components. Members of the public should contact their respective suppliers requesting the parts directly.

Diskeeper can be purchased from most leading Distributors and software retail outlets. Or those of you wishing a try before buy, a 30 day trial version maybe downloaded direct from Diskeeper Europe. We highly recommend the use of this software as performance increase can be quite considerable in many places.

Benchmarks and Software Used (32 Bit Mode) 

The plethora of benchmarks available in this arena; one could spend all day in producing results if the time permitted, paralysis by analysis!  The clock ticked hard and fast against us therefore we did only have a very short time in which to complete this basic but factual review.

Microsoft Windows XP Professional SP
Diskeeper 2007 Professional Premium Edition
Cinebench 10 *NEW*
SPECviewperf® 10.0

So that readers will be able to see how much performance increase has been gained throughout the range SPECviewperf® tests by the individual cards.   We have split up into their individual test categories from each test system and run.   Therefore one page has been dedicated for the Multi Threading Test and the Overall SPEC Viewperf and Full Scene Antialiasing benchmark results from each of the mainboards/system supplied.   This will give the reader an idea of what to expect when they plan in purchase. 

Each card completed the tests etc on a clean system hard drive to ensure that no residue drivers were left installed with all updates/patches applied.   A test/render has been completed many times over different periods of the system uptime.   Maintaining the fair play rules of SPECviewperf® we did not manipulate any of this mainboards functionality and left it at its default settings in which it was supplied.   All tests have been conducted at 1280 X 1024 @ 60Hz in 32 bit colour. Results that have been shown on this review are from the application/benchmarks first run in accordance with the SPECviewperf® fair play rules.  Not an average of 3 runs as some places seem to think is right.

The results speak very clearly for themselves as a picture paints a thousand words; so there is no need for a running commentary of the results gained from each system.  “Run Logs” the SPECviewperf® tests are available to those of you who wish to see them.    Please e-mail the administrator here who will forward them onto you on a first come first served basis.    This may take some time to get back to you as on first out launches of this nature we are undated with requests.