Testing & Methodology
To test each system or notebook, we want to stress every component of the system to check stability and performance, giving us an idea as to why those particular components were picked for this particular system. We use a wide variety of applications to gain a broad spectrum of results for comparing diverse aspects of system performance.
Games Used
All games are tested at both 1920 x 1080, 2560 x 1440 and 2160 x 3840 (4K). Please note that for systems which do not support a particular resolution, such as 1080p laptops, we will not test the higher resolutions on those devices.
- Rise of the Tomb Raider (Steam)
- DX12 Medium Preset
- Pure Hair Off
- Deus Ex (Steam)
- DX12 Medium Preset
- Ghost Recon: Wildlands (Uplay)
- Medium Preset
- Turf Effects Off
- Far Cry Primal (Uplay)
- Normal Preset
- Final Fantasy XV Benchmark Tool (Square Enix)
- Normal Preset – Nvidia Optimisation Settings Turned Off
Software Used
- 3DMark Fire Strike (download)
- FireStrike (1080p) Benchmark
- Unigine Superposition (download)
- 1080p Extreme Benchmark
- PCMark 10 Professional (download)
- Express Benchmark
- WPrime (download)
- 32M and 1024M
- CineBench R15 (download)
- CPU Multi
- CPU Single
- Handbrake (download)
- Custom MP4 to MKV 4K conversion (details below)
- AIDA64 Engineer (download)
- CPU-Z (download)
- HWMonitor (download)
Handbrake
To stress processors to their absolute limit and accurately judge their performance in video editing workloads, we transcode a 7.7GB compilation of gaming footage; this particular file is freely available from here. The captured footage is 22 minutes and 12 seconds long, it has a bit rate of 50.1 Mbps and it uses the Advanced Video Codec. Additionally, the video runs at a constant 30 frames-per-second and opts for a 3820 x 2140 (4K) resolution. Once loaded into Handbrake, we then transcode the 4K MP4 to an MKV file using the “normal” profile.
