benchmarking

1080P

1440P

4K

IT’S US; we’re the test dummies. Except we’re not dummies, because all three of these builds booted on first attempt. Big pat on the back for us, round of applause, bullhorns, etc. We’re pretty happy with how the build process went, barring the mechanical difficulty of installing the necessary brackets on the Fractal Design cooler in the 4K system. No significant hiccups to discuss here, though.

Before we get into the nitty-gritty details of our test results, let’s break down the decision-making process behind our next selection of benchmarks. You’ll be seeing these tests a lot in the coming issues of Maximum PC, so we felt it best to address why we chose the benchmarks we chose.

First up, we’re keeping two bits of software from our old benchmark tables: CrystalDisk and 3DMark FireStrike. CrystalDisk needs no real introduction; it’s a super-reliable drive speed test, which gives us real-world figures for easy comparison. We’re still using version 5.2 of the program, which we’ve found to be reliable and avoids the feature bloat of later iterations. With FireStrike (and its 1440p and 4K variants, Extreme and Ultra), we opted to keep it since it’s an extremely common choice of graphics and physics test, and the base test is available for free in the trial version of 3DMark.