Intel HD 4000 Investigation

Testing

To evaluate Intel's new HD 4000 onboard GPU we teamed our test Core i5-3570K up with an Asus Maximus V Gene, as this board is well priced and m-ATX in size, so it’s ideal for a media PC or small office system that may see some occasional gaming. We used the same board for testing the HD 3000 graphics of the i5-2500K.

We turned to the competent ASRock A75 Pro4 when it came to benchmarking the AMD A8-3870K and to test the Radeon HD 6450 as we used the rather over the top Asus Crosshair V Formula. This was so that we could team the HD 6450 with the well priced AMD Phenom II X4 965 BE, a combination that made the CPU/GPU combination roughly the same price as the other platforms on test.

Test Setup

• Asus Maximus V Gene Motherboard
  
• ASRock A75 Pro 4
  
• Asus Crosshair V Formula
  
• 120GB Patriot Wildfire SSD
  
• 8GB (4GB DIMMs) 1,600MHz DDR3 memory (CL9)
  
• Titan Fenrir CPU Cooler
  
• PC Power & Cooling Silencer 750W PSU