Terragen 3

Website:Terragen 3

Planetside Software’s Terragen 3 is a highly realistic landscape generator used to create background images in films and games such as Star Trek: Nemesis, Stealth and The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus. Our script renders a single frame of a snowy mountain scene at 640 x 480 on all the available CPU execution units.

Cinebench R15 64-bit

Website: www.maxon.net

Cinebench uses Maxon's Cinema 4D engine to render a photo-realistic scene of some shiny balls and weird things (we miss the motorbike). The scene is highly complex, with reflections, ambient occlusion and procedural shaders so it gives a CPU a tough workout.

As Cinema 4D is a real-world application - used on films such as Spider-Man and Star Wars - Cinebench can be viewed as a real-world benchmark.

Power Consumption

For the power consumption tests, we measure via a power meter at the wall. We use Prime95's smallFFT test to put the CPU under 100 percent load, while also running an instance of the Unigine Valley benchmark to load up the GPU. Idle power results are taken with the PC idling at a Windows Aero-enabled desktop.