Cyberpower Gamer Infinity CrossFire HD

Putting It To The Test

Rather than run a full range of benchmarks and tests as we would do for graphics cards or motherboards, for full systems we only test 2d performance that provides a general performance figure for desktop work, and then work out best playable settings for the most intensive modern games: after all this is designed as a gaming machine. We feel this gives a better indication of the systems real world performance and simply throwing out 3DMark scores.

The tests we ran were:

Paint.NET x64

This is the 64-bit version of the popular free image editing software, Paint.NET. It's not as advanced as something like Adobe Photoshop CS3 or Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo X2, but it does serve well for most image editing tasks.

We used the PDNBench script to test the processing times for a range of images and filters. The multi-threaded software also takes advantage of multi-core processors quite effectively.

For more information on what the benchmark script entails, please see this thread on the Paint.NET forums.

Our custom File Compression and Encryption test:

Our file compression and decompression tests were split into two halves to cover a broad spectrum of performance. The first test we ran was to compress and encrypt a 176MB MPEG-2 source file with the highest quality compression ratio. Secondly, we compressed and encrypted the folder of 400 photographs with the same compression settings.

AutoMKV x264 Encoding

We tested x264 compression using AutoMKV version 0.95c and 64-bit x264 encoder to compress a 1.1GB DVD VOB file into 350MB MP4 file using a two-pass encode and we used a 112kbps LAME encoder to compress the audio. The whole process is dependent on both single and multi-core performance and the entire encoding time was recorded.

There's quite a shift to using MKV or MP4 wrappers for x264 content now, especially for movie content and those in the large anime fansubbing community. x264 doesn't have the same SSE enhancements as some other codecs, but the benefits of extra cache and better memory performance should still show notable improvements.

Results:

Paint.NET 3.20: 29.931ms

File Compression and Encryption:
Large Compression MT (Seconds), 117
Large DeCompression MT (Seconds), 10
Small Compression MT (Seconds), 85
Small DeCompression MT (Seconds), 16

AutoMKV 0.95c: 16 minutes 53 seconds

A sub-30 second Paint.NET is a fantastic result thanks to the 4GHz Core 2 Duo. Although more cores benefit this massively threaded software the pair at super high clocks work particularly well. Again in file compression and decompression the performance is exceptional beating even a Core 2 Quad Q9550 at 2.83GHz on a more recent P45 motherboard – the choice of Spinpoint hard drive seems to also do amicable in decompression.

Best Playable Gaming:

Call of Duty 4: Unsurprisingly, we were able to max every setting, enable 16x anisotropic filtering, 8x Antialiasing and run the game at 2650x1600 (30” monitor territory) with a perfectly smooth and playable framerate. The enormous graphics and anti-aliasing grunt of the twin 4870’s was incredibly impressive, and if you’re a CoD4 player, the Gamer Infinity CrossFire HD provides more grunt than you could possibly need.

Crysis: In the office we have a saying. “Crysis breaks PCs.” While it didn’t break the Gamer Infinity CrossFire HD in the permanent sense, it certainly pushed it to its limits. We were unable to get a consistently smooth frame rates at 1920x1200 with all detail settings at high and it even locking up the system a few times, no doubt due to colossal amount of heat being output by those notoriously toasty 4870’s and such a heavily overclocked CPU and motherboard. Dropping the resolution to 1600x1200 and High settings (marginally more demanding than 1680x1050) resulted in fantastic silky smooth gameplay on even the mostly graphically intensive levels, without the system falling over. This is certainly impressive considering the graphical demands of Crysis.

Race Driver GRID: Sadly, the use of Crossfire acted against the Gamer Infinity CrossFire HD in GRID, as the game has notoriously unreliable graphical performance in multi-GPU situations. Sadly, this was no different, and frame rates ranged from a silky smooth 70FPS at 2650x1600 with maximum detail and 4xMSAA, right down to a 5FPS chug-fest. This has always been the problem with multi-GPU platforms, in that in some games you’ll see simply phenomenal performance, and in others the Crossfire/SLI driver support will fail miserably. Such are the perils of using a multi-GPU where you have to wait for driver support to do its end of the bargain.

Noise: An additional part of our testing is a subjective consideration of the noise levels produced by the PC, and this is where the Cyberpower Gamer Infinity CrossFire HD really falls down. None of the seven 120mm case fans inside are low noise, or have adjustable fan speeds, resulting in a case that shares the problems of the Antec 900 design it tries to imitate – it’s a wind tunnel.

This PC is intrusively noisy even at idle, and when the HD4870’s get going, their screaming will permeate even the most committed gamers headphones. While we appreciate that all the extra cooling allows for the significant overclock that Cyberpower can provide, it means that this just isn’t a PC you could use for anything other than gaming. Watching a movie, you’d be constantly interrupted during quiet periods by the sound the cooling fans, and although I appreciate the method behind the noise, tagging a PC a “gaming” machine doesn’t mean it has to sound like a jet engine. We realise this is again one of several cases on offer, but just the ability to dial down the fans a touch would have been nice.