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At Techgage, we strive to make sure our results are as accurate as possible. Our testing is rigorous and time-consuming, but we feel the effort is worth it. In an attempt to leave no question unanswered, this page contains not only our testbed specifications, but also a detailed look at how we conduct our testing.

If there is a bit of information that we’ve omitted, or you wish to offer thoughts or suggest changes, please feel free to shoot us an e-mail or post in our forums.

Test Systems

The tables below list all of the hardware we use in our current CPU-testing machines.

When preparing our testbeds for any type of performance testing, we follow these guidelines:

General Guidelines

• BIOS or EFI is up-to-date with latest version (could include a beta).
• CPU power options are left default unless the CPU is automatically overclocked.
• No virus scanner or firewall is installed.
• The OS is kept clean.
• Machine has proper airflow and the room temperature is 80°F (27°C) or less.

To aide in the goal of achieving accurate and repeatable results, we stop certain services in Windows 7 from starting up at boot. This is due to the fact that these services have the tendency to start up in the background without notice, potentially causing inaccurate test results. For example, disabling “Windows Search” turns off the OS’ indexing which can at random times utilize the hard drive and memory.

The most important services we disable are:

• Windows Defender
• Windows Firewall
• Windows Search
• Windows Update

To ease the tedium of setting up an OS for a round of benchmarking, we rely on Acronis True Image to restore an install that we previously setup. These images include most of our benchmarks, a minimal number of drivers (LAN, graphics), an up-to-date OS and all of our above-mentioned tweaks.

Real-World & Synthetic Benchmarks

To help us deliver a well-rounded set of test results for each processor we evaluate, we use a variety of real-world applications and synthetic benchmarks.

Wallpaper Credit: Mohsen Kamalzadeh

Our current test suite consists of:

Real-world

• 7-zip
• Autodesk 3ds Max 2015
• Autodesk 3ds Max 2015 (SPECapc 3ds Max 2015)
• Autodesk Maya 2012 (SPECapc Maya 2012)
• Adobe Lightroom 5.6
• Adobe Premiere Pro CC 2014
• dBpoweramp R15
• HandBrake 0.9.9

Synthetic

• Cinebench R15
• Euler3D
• Futuremark PCMark 8
• Futuremark 3DMark
• POV-Ray 3.70
• Sandra 2014 SP3

Most tests are run twice over with the results averaged. If there is an unnatural variance between the first two runs, then we continue to run the test until we receive a result we believe to be accurate.