Dream Machine 2012 - The Future Is Now (Part 4)

It's always a good idea to occasionally take stock of your life by looking back at where you've come from. While it's easy to take current circumstances for granted, closer reflection can reveal the true magnitude of our progress. We certainly found that to be the case when we looked all the way back to Dream Machine Mk1. Unleashed on the world in September 1996, the Dream Machine staked out an insane amount of power, storage, and performance.

The artwork forthe original Dream Machine story seems apt— so diminutive are the parts by today’s standards.

What made something a Dream in 1996? A 150MHz Pentium processor. That chip ran on a 66MHz bus, was built on a 350nm process, featured a whop­ping 3.3 million transistors, and con­tained no cache. That whopping 512KB of pipeline burst cache was mounted on the Supermicro P55-T2S mobo. To keep Windows 95 happy, a whopping 32MB of EDO SIMMs were used for RAM.

The Dream Machine was all about being the best, so EIDE was skipped in favor of an UltraWide SCSI III Quan­tum Atlas XP3125W drive with 2.1GB of storage. Yes, a $10 USB key has double the storage of the biggest, the worst hard drive you could find in 1996. We suspect that a typical USB key is actually faster than that hard drive, too.

Graphics in Dream Machine Mk1 came from a Matrox Millenium with 4MB of dual-ported WRAM. We paired the Dream Machine with a (then) mas­sive 17-inch Nanao CRT, the ultimate PC display, with 1027x768 resolution and 24-bit color. DM Mk1 also fea­tured a Zip drive, a Moto ISDN modem, a 6.7x Tosh SCSI CD-ROM, as well as an Adaptec 3940UW card and Sound Blaster AWE32 in an ISA slot. Oh, and for the keyboard, a classic IBM PC/AT.

Dream Machine 2012 in its element

Does performance even matter? Hells, yeah

Performance. Still. Matters. Don’t let any­one dissuade you from that fact. It's a core belief we will hold at Maximum PC until they cart us all off to the soylent green factory.

This year's Dream Machine 2012 lives up to that philosophy: Get the very best you can. But it's meaningless with­out valid metrics. To measure how fast Dream Machine 2012 is, we turned to our new stable of benchmarks: Premiere Pro CS6, Stitch.EFx 2.0, ProShow Producer 5.0, x264 HD 5.0, Batman: Arkham City, and 3DMark 11.

Our current desktop test bed consists of a hexa-core 3.2GHz Core Ĩ7-3930K ra 3.8GHz, 8GB of Corsair DDR3/1600, on an Asus Sabertooth X79 motherboard. We are running a GeForce GTX 690, an OCZ Vertex 3 SSD, and 64-bit Windows 7 Professional.

When we picked our benchmark suite, we intentionally balanced the applications so as not to unfairly favor highly threaded processors. Yes, some of our benchmarks do take advantage of high-thread-count procs but two don't, and Dream Machine 2012, despite all its brawn, can't out-muscle our zero-point, and even the tiny Fal­con Tiki (reviewed on page 74), in Stitch.Efx and ProShow Producer 5.0. Producer 5.0 tops out with four cores; after that it's the CPU’s microarchitecture and clock speed that impact performance. Since Intel has clock-blocked our Xeon E5-2867W, the most speed we could get from the chip was 3.5GHz, with Turbo technically taking it to 3.8GHz under soft loads. With the same essential microarchitecture as Sandy Bridge, the zero-point’s higher base-clock speed of 3.9GHz gave it a slight edge in per­formance in both Stitch.Efx 2.0 and Pro­Show Producer 5.0. But as we said earlier, Dream Machine is also about anticipating the future – and the fact is, more and more apps will add support for more cores.

In these scenarios the Dream Machine tells all others to just step the frak back. With our Premiere Pro CS6 benchmark confined to the CPU, the Dream Machine 2012 outran the zero-point by almost 20 percent. The same happened in the TechARP x264 HD 5.0 benchmark. That’s no slow chip in the zero-point, either. It's a hexa-core Sandy Bridge-E overclocked to just under4GHz. Even if we had goosed the SNB-E in the zero-point another 500MHz (just about the limit for most SNB-E chips) we doubt It would have won.

With our Premiere Pro CS6 benchmark confined to the CPU, the Dream Machine 2012 outran the zero-point by almost 20 percent

In gaming the contrast between Dream Machine and the zero-point was even more stark. Many have wondered if quad SLI scales, and we're here to say, "Damn straight.'' Dream Machine 2012's graph­ics performance in Batman: Arkham City gave up 67 percent more frames per sec­ond than the zero point and an 87 percent higher score in 3DMark 11. Let's remind you that our zero-point features a single GeForce GTX 690—not exactly chopped liver in GPU land. Against a single Ge­Force GTX 680? It's like having Thor's hammer land on your head. We saw a 262 percent speed bump with DM2012 against a stock Ivy Bridge box with a GeForce GTX 680 in Batman and a 176 percent bump in 3DMark 11.

We also wondered If the Dream Ma­chine 2012 offers more where multitask­ing is concerned, given its 16 threads on tap. For comparison, we took our Pro­Show Producer 5.0 benchmark and ran it while also running the x264 HD 5.0 benchmark on this month's stupidly fast and small Falcon Tiki. The Tiki might have managed to spank the Dream Machine 2012 in the tests that don't stress cores, but multitasking is another story. The Tiki was about 12 percent faster in ProShow Producer 5.0, thanks to its clock advan­tage and newer Ivy Bridge cores, but when ProShow is run with another task, you better go for a walk or do the laundry. The Dream Machine 2012 completed Pro­Show in 36 percent less time than the Tiki during multitasking, and it encoded at a 54 percent faster frame rate, too.

If you think these are silly, constructed tests that don't reflect real-world usage, think back to the days when your single core wasn't enough, and then your dual­-core wasn't enough. Face it, Skippy, we're not living in the days when a heavy task was using Netscape and encoding an MP3 at 128Kb/s. Today, your quad might be good enough, but believe us, in the fu­ture, even a hexa-core machine will start to feel pokey.