Maingear Potenza Super Stock SFF System Review

We continued our testing with SiSoftware's SANDRA, the System ANalyzer, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant. We ran four of the built-in subsystem tests (CPU Arithmetic, Multimedia, Memory Bandwidth, Physical Disks).
 

Preliminary Testing with SiSoft SANDRA Synthetic Benchmarks

Intel's Core i7 3770K is a fast processor to begin with and boasts four processing cores (eight threads) clocked at 3.5GHz to 3.9GHz, along with 8MB of cache. Combined with Maingear's Redline overclocking option (or you can take matters into your heads via Asus' AI Tweaker), it's no surprise to see the Potenza put up numbers like these.

More than anything else, the Corsair Force GT SSD that's included in our configuration is going to benefit day-to-day performance with fast load times and a snappy response to your input commands that just isn't possible with a mechanical hard drive. In Sandra, the SSD benched a scorching fast 494MB/s, while the 8GB of DDR3-1600 RAM put up impressive scores, as well.
 

Cinebench R11.5 64bit Content Creation Performance

Maxon's Cinebench R11.5 benchmark is based on Maxon's Cinema 4D software used for 3D content creation chores and tests both the CPU and GPU in separate benchmark runs. On the CPU side, Cinebench renders a photorealistic 3D scene by tapping into up to 64 processing threads (CPU) to process more than 300,000 total polygons, while the GPU benchmark measures graphics performance by manipulating nearly 1 million polygons and huge amounts of textures.

We used to point out how ridiculously brutal Cinebench can be on a system, but that's rarely the case these days, at least for gaming systems. Today's GPUs, like the GeForce GTX 670, pack enough firepower to hold their own in Cinebench. The benchmark is still tough on the CPU and favors multiple processor cores.