The Joys of Updating Our Test Suites… Part Thrice

Guess what’s tiring? If you said, “Doing a complete overhaul on all of Techgage’s methodologies and test suites”, you’d be absolutely correct! It feels like forever that I’ve been working on things around here, but we’re inching ever closer to completion, and I can’t wait. As mentioned before, our GPU scheme of things is all wrapped-up, and we’re in the process now of benchmarking our entire gamut of cards, so you can expect a review or two within the next few weeks with our fresh results.

As it stands right now, we’re eagerly working on revising our CPU test suite, and that’s proving to be a lot more complicated than originally anticipated. There’s obviously more to consider where CPUs are concerned, so we’re testing out various scenarios and applications to get an idea of what makes most sense to include. The slowest part is proving in getting prompt responses from all the companies we’re contacting, but that’s the nature of the business!

If there’s one thing you can expect to see in our upcoming CPU suite iteration, it’s a beefed-up number of tests. I don’t believe we’re lacking in that regard as it stands, and I certainly don’t want to go the opposite direction where we have too many results, but I do want to make sure we offer up the most robust set of results out there, to cater to not only the regular consumer or enthusiast, but also the professional. So in addition to tests such as 3ds Max 2010, we’re also going to add in Maya 2009. There are other professional and workstation apps I’m considering, but I won’t talk about those just yet.

Given that Linux is more popular than ever (and a decent number of our visitors are using the OS), I’d like to also introduce the OS again into our CPU content, and also possibly our motherboard content (not for performance, but rather compatibility). More on that later though, as we’re still looking to see which benchmarks would make the most sense with that OS (you can be sure one test would be application compilation).

Oh, and that machine in the photo above? That’s our revised GPU testing machine. Because the six titles we use for our testing total 55GB, we’ve opted to stick to a speedy Seagate Barracuda 500GB hard drive, while for memory, we’re using Corsair’s 3x2GB DDR3-1333 7-7-7 kit. Huge thanks to Gigabyte for supplying us with a brand-new motherboard for the cause, their EX58-EXTREME, and also Corsair for their HX1000W power supply. Other components include Intel’s Core i7-975 Extreme Edition and Thermalright’s Ultra-120 CPU cooler. And yes, that’s a house fan in the background, and no, it’s not part of our active cooling!