Futuremark today announced that it is pulling the plug on its decade-old benchmark suites, 3DMark Vantage and PCMark Vantage. Official support for the two products will end on the 11th of April, 2017. This would entail the two being removed from the Downloads section of Futuremark, a stoppage in software updates, and the all-important benchmark result validation service. The two will be relegated to the "legacy benchmarks" section, and will be available as free downloads. Incidentally, April 11 also happens to be the day Microsoft stops support for Windows Vista.

With the public release of Windows 10 coming up next week it's a good time for us to review our current line up. As a result, we have decided to move Peacekeeper, our browser benchmark, to our list of unsupported products.

Peacekeeper is a universal browser benchmark for measuring JavaScript performance. More than seven and a half million people have tested their browsers and mobile devices with Peacekeeper since its release in 2009. But today, competition between browsers has largely shifted from speed to features.

Modern browsers are typically fast enough on a wide range of hardware, and the differences in speed in everyday use are trivial. A browser's features, extensions, and memory use are now much more likely to be the deciding factors reducing the relevance of pure JavaScript performance benchmarks.

Wouldn't it be great if your computer's CPU could be pushed over 5Ghz with no sweat? Unfortunately, not all CPUs are packed with enough punch to deliver insanely high frequencies. Moreover, you can't expect all motherboards to withstand such overwhelming power and heat. Luckily, AMD has just released its 5GHz FX-9000 Series CPUs and a list of minimum system requirements for building an AMD certified 5GHz computing monster, and ASRock's 990FX Extreme9 is no doubt one of the best choices for this arduous yet rewarding task.

It isn't easy to be enlisted in the AMD FX 5 GHz support list. ASRock's flagship model 990FX Extreme9 has passed several tests to determine its build quality, and also proved itself worthy of recommendation through various benchmark tests. With a 990FX Extreme9 motherboard and AMD FX-9590 processor, first we've reached a high score of 8.55 on Cinebench R11.5, which is a whopping 25% increase compared to the former FX-8350! Next in line, 990FX Extreme9 passed Super PI 1MB test by 18.377 seconds. And then it rocketed up to 18894 points on PC Mark Vantage's PC Mark score, summing up to a huge 15.31% boost, and rocked PC Mark 8 (Home score) with 4777 points. Lastly the VGA performance was satisfying too, with a total of p38038 points on 3D Mark Vantage (Performance).

PC enthusiast "Toppc" with the Coolaler.com, with access to a Core i7 "Ivy Bridge-E" sample clocked to match specifications of the Core i7-4960X, wasted no time in comparing the chip to a Core i7-3970X "Sandy Bridge-E." The two chips share a common socket LGA2011 design, and run on motherboards with Intel X79 Express chipset. An MSI X79A-GD45 Plus, with V17.1 BIOS was used to run the two chips. Among the tests Toppc put the chip through, are overclocker favorites SuperPi mod 1.6, CPU Mark '99, WPrime 1.63, Cinebench 11.5, 3DMark Vantage (CPU score), and 3DMark 06 (CPU score).

The Ivy Bridge-E chip outperformed its predecessor by roughly 5-10 percent across the board. In Cinebench, the i7-4960X scored 10.94 points in comparison to the i7-3970X' 10.16; SuperPi 32M was crunched by the i7-4960X in 9m 22.6s compared to the 9m 55.4s of the i7-3970X; CPU Mark scores between the two are 561 vs. 533, respectively; 3DMark Vantage CPU score being 38,644 points vs. 35,804, respectively; and 3DMark 06 scores 8,586 points vs. 8,099 points, respectively. In WPrime, the i7-4960X crunched 32M in 4.601s, compared to its predecessor's 5.01s. Below are the test screenshots, please note that they're high-resolution images, so please open each in a new tab.

Global leading motherboard brand ASRock announced today to organize ASRock FM2 OC Competition with HWBOT, the top organization hosting the world's only 24/7 overclocking competition to bring together 35,000 participants and feature competitions in thousands of categories. The participants will be competing for the highest CPU-Z or 3DMark Vantage score which is submitted to HWBOT.org.

The contest, sponsored by several prestigious brands including AMD, Kingston and Cooler Master, starts from January 7 and runs until February 4. It is opened to all overclockers with ASRock brand motherboards and AMD Socket FM2 CPUs. The total prize is worth up to 6,740 dollars and the final champions of the CPU-Z and 3DMark Vantage event will be awarded with a top prize worth of 2,170 dollars respectively. The grand prize makes it one of the most eye-catching online OC competitions on FM2 platforms, which is estimated to attract enthusiastic overclockers worldwide.

GIGABYTE TECHNOLOGY Co. Ltd., a leading manufacturer of motherboards and graphics cards, today announces its latest overclocking competition, the 'GIGABYTE Winter OC Whiteout', an open overclocking competition hosted at HWBOT. The 'GIGABYTE Winter OC Whiteout' also features a special bonus prize for the snowiest and most festive submission photo.

The 'GIGABYTE Winter OC Whiteout' starts today, running until January 20th 2013 and is open to all overclockers using any Intel processor on any compatible GIGABYTE motherboard. The competition centers around three key stages, each containing a 3D benchmark with specific limitations imposed to level the playing field. A GIGABYTE Z77X-UD4H motherboard plus, a Cooler Master Seidon 120M liquid cooler will be awarded for the winner of each stage.

ECS, the world's top motherboard maker, now announce its "ECS Trinity Challenge" Online OC Competition with FM1/FM2 platform motherboards on HWBOT. Meanwhile, ECS is proud to announce its second cooperation with HWBOT for online OC competition globally. ECS would like to take this chance to introduce a series of new FM2-based motherboard to enthusiast community through this competition.

The competition starts from November 1st, runs until November 30th. There are two competition stages for overclockers. First stage- AMD FM1 platform: It is open to all overclockers with ECS brand motherboards only and the benchmark is: 3DMark06. Second competition stages- AMD FM2 platform: It is open to all overclockers with all brands of motherboards in the market, and the benchmark is: 3DMark Vantage. HWBOT general benchmark validation rules apply to both stages.

So you thought the 1.26 GHz core - 6.30 GHz memory feat was quite something, considering that Sapphire already has a card in the works that does 1.33 GHz core 5.73 GHz memory out of the box? Wait till you see the numbers an overclocker for the MyDrivers community achieved. With the right voltage assistance, coupled with the right kind of cooling (liquid nitrogen), the overclocker achieved a Radeon HD 7970 overclocked speed as high as 1700 MHz core, and 2000 MHz (actual) or 8.00 GHz effective GDDR5 memory speed, churning out memory bandwidth of exactly 384 GB/s. The best part is that this wasn't a hit-and-run feat, the setup was able to run 3DMark 11 and 3DMark Vantage. The scores are pictured below. Details of the volt-mod can be found at the source.

Previous preliminary reports have suggested that the forthcoming Ivy Bridge CPUs will have single threaded performance on par with the existing Sandy Bridge CPUs and will mainly deliver improvements to power consumption and integrated graphics - nothing for PC enthusiasts to get excited about. However, in leaked documents sent to partners, Intel have now revealed official performance figures for IB and they look rather good. They've produced a raft of benchmarks, which reveal improvements such as 56% in ArcSoft Media Expresso, 25% in Excel 2010 and a 199% gain in the 3D Mark Vantage GPU benchmark. Unfortunately, they haven't released any benchmarks based on high performance 3D games, but it's probably safe to say that they will be similarly improved. Now, on to the benchmarks, which compare their new 3.4 GHz i7-3770 (4 cores + HT) with the current 3.4 GHz i7-2600, also with 4 cores + HT:

Armed with a Radeon HD 6550D graphics core that has 400 stream processors, 8 ROPs, and full DirectX 11 support, AMD A-Series "Llano" accelerated processing unit (APU) was tested to be the fastest integrated graphics solution to date. The tests was run by a forum-member of TweakTown community with early access to engineering samples. On the test-bed was AMD A8-3850 APU, which has four x86-64 cores clocked at 2.90 GHz, and the Radeon HD 6550D IGP with engine clock of 600 MHz. Standard dual-channel DDR3-1333 MHz memory was used, even though the APU supports faster DDR3-1866 MHz. To seat the test bed, Gigabyte A75M-UD2H was used. It's important to note here that the CPU cores were overclocked to 3.773 GHz (145.13 MHz x 26.0), with an insane core voltage of 1.52V.

The setup was put though three generations of 3DMark benchmark, covering DirectX 9.0c, DirectX 10, and DirectX 11 performance. In 3DMark 06, the setup scores 10,492 points. In 3DMark Vantage, it scored P6160 (performance preset, validation). In 3DMark 11, it scored P1591 (performance preset, validation). More details can be read in the screenshots.

Here are the first performance projections of the AMD FX-series processors. FX-series is the market name of the latest line of 8-core, 6-core, and 4-core processors by AMD, based on its new Bulldozer architecture. The performance projections come from AMD's internal presentations to its industry partners, which was leaked to sections of the media.

In the performance projection, a compound bar graph, an AMD platform comprising of an 8-core FX series processor (unknown model, clock speed) with AMD Radeon HD 6670 discrete graphics, was pitted against its main competitor, Intel Core i7-2600K with its integrated Intel HD graphics. Perhaps AMD is suggesting that FX 8-core model used here along with a HD 6690 graphics card costs the same as a Core i7-2600K.

Corsair, a worldwide designer and supplier of high-performance components to the PC gaming hardware market, today announced that a PC equipped with its Dominator GT ultra-high performance DDR3 memory was used to set new world records with the 3DMark 11 and 3DMark Vantage benchmarks. Well-known overclockers Vince "K|ngp|n" Lucido and Illya "TiN" Tsemenko posted list-topping scores of P24347 in 3DMark 11 and P79364 in 3DMark Vantage.

The hardware used included an EVGA Classified SR-2 motherboard, dual Intel Xeon X5690 CPUs, four custom-modified EVGA GeForce GTX 580 GPUs, and three 2GB Corsair Dominator GT GTX2 DDR3 memory modules. A total of seven Kingpin Cooling liquid nitrogen pots were used to cool the CPUs, GPUs, and the Intel 5520 chipset.

3DMark Vantage seems to be becoming the new "3DMark 06", as the benchmark becomes passable by even the most entry-level DirectX 10 supportive GPUs. Rather Unexpectedly, Futuremark released a new update, v1.1.0, that comes with significant changes. To begin with, there's no more "trial edition". The Basic Edition, which cost $6.95, is now free. Users can now freely put their GPUs through all four of the main tests, view their scores online, and compare their scores with others' on the ORB.

Display scaling is added to improve display compatibility. By default a PhysX processor won't accelerate CPU tests. The Futuremark SystemInfo component is updated to detect the latest hardware, such as CPUs, GPUs, etc. The entire application is recompiled on Microsoft Visual Studio 2010. An expert developer we spoke to doesn't believe it brings about any change. 3DMark Vantage is a comprehensive 3D graphics hardware benchmarking suite that uses DirectX 10 API.

DOWNLOAD: Futuremark 3DMark Vantage 1.1.0

ColorFire released its new Xstorm HD 6850 graphics card. ColorFire is a sister-brand of Colorful, which focuses on AMD Radeon-based graphics cards, as Colorful specializes on NVIDIA GeForce ones. Shortly after its introduction, the ColorFire team led by overclocker Carl from China was able to break a 3DMark Vantage record for the Radeon HD 6850. The overclocker achieved P27751 points, some 3810 points ahead of the previous record-holder. The card sustained overclocked speeds of 1500 MHz core and 1275 MHz (5100 MHz GDDR5 effective) memory, and backed by an Intel Core i7-980X clocked at 5.7 GHz, with the entire setup being cooled by liquid nitrogen. The HWBOT validation can be found here.

The Xstorm HD 6850 from ColorFire features the same mid-range exorbitance characteristic of Colorful. It features a PCB with a strong VRM, making use of high-quality components; and a large cooler. It features 1 GB of memory, a 4+1 phase VRM, dual-BIOS, OCP unlock switches, and consolidated voltage-measure points. The VRM uses high-grade chokes and POSCAP capacitors. The cooler uses a large (quiet) fan to cool a big heatsink to which heat is conveyed by three heat pipes.More pictures of the setup and card follow.

Lenovo today announced the ThinkCentre M91p desktop designed to give large businesses the highest levels of performance, security and manageability. Available in tower, small form factor and eco small form factor versions, the desktop is designed for speed and performance with technologies including SATA III, USB 3.0, Lenovo Enhanced Experience 2.0 and support for four monitors as well as security and manageability with the latest Intel Core vPro processors.

"We've packed the new ThinkCentre M91p desktop with the latest performance technologies, like Intel Turbo Boost Technology 2.0, to give users and IT departments a noticeable difference in the way they work," said Tom Shell, vice president, ThinkCentre Desktop Marketing, Lenovo. "Now PC users can quickly open and save data, view graphics and video faster and stream work across four monitors."

Renowned overclockers elmor and Kinc did the unthinkable, breaching the 1500 MHz barrier for the core (geometry domain) clock speed of GeForce GTX 580. Using ASUS EN580GTX DirectCu graphics card, the duo managed to achieve 1504 MHz core, 3008 MHz CUDA cores, and 1253 MHz (5012 MHz GDDR5 effective) memory, churning out 240.6 GB/s memory bandwidth. With this in single-card configuration, the testbed consisting of Intel Core i7-990X clocked at 6.14 GHz and 6 GB of DDR3 memory clocked at 1750 MHz, and ASUS Rampage III Extreme motherboard, the duo achieved a 3DMark Vantage score of P45819 (performance preset), setting a new record.

The bench was powered by a 1200W Antec HCP PSU, the graphics card ran with a whopping 1.62V vGPU, and 1.86V vMem, it is estimated that the graphics card drew 600W (12V, 50A) of power in itself. The CPU and graphics card were cooled using liquid nitrogen evaporators, the GPU VRM was directly air-cooled, using a high-flow fan. A number of hard volt-mods were employed to achieve those voltages.

Renowned overclocker Duck set a new record 3DMark Vantage. The record was set at an event apparently conducted by Galaxy Tech. The record now stands at P75324 points. Duck used four Galaxy GeForce GTX 580 graphics cards in 4-way SLI to achieve the feat. It appears as if at least one, if not all, use an ASUS BIOS, perhaps to avail the VoltageTweak feature. Apart from the graphics cards, Duck's bench consisted of two Intel Xeon E5680 Westmere-EP 6-core/12-thread processors clocked at 5368 MHz, EVGA Classified SR-2 dual-LGA1366 motherboard, 6x 2 GB Corsair DDR3-2000 MHz CL7 memory, multiple 1200W PSUs (Corsair AX1200W + SilverStone Strider Gold SST-ST1200G), and Intel X25-M 80 GB SSD. In the cooling department, there are Duck's own JCA Water Bear Pot WB02A and K|ngp|n F1 cooling the two processors, K|ngp|n Tek9 4 and 5.0 cooling the GPUs, a custom heatsink cluster cooling the GPU VRM, and gobs of insulation.

The Lightning graphics card series from the world-leading graphics card and mainboard manufacturer, MSI, has been receiving unanimous recognition from power users and major media worldwide. The new member of the series, N480GTX Lightning, is tailored for extreme overclocking. By the world's first Power4 architecture to provide sufficient and stable power, the OC potential of the N480GTX Lightning has been significantly increased. With its incredible core clock - 1450MHz, N480GTX Lightning created the new world record of 3DMark Vantage at 39281. Without a doubt, the N480GTX Lightning is, by far, the top graphics card designed for Extreme Overclocking.

Furthermore, the N480GTX Lightning is equipped with a number of the latest MSI-exclusive features, including the Twin Frozr III thermal solution that maintains GPU temperature at 18°C lower than the reference thermal design; the GPU/Memory/PLL triple overvoltage functions by the Afterburner utility and the new-generation Military Class Components. In addition to showing MSI's demand for continuous improvement, these state-of-the-art features bring consumers more powerful OC features beyond their imagination.

Futuremark, the developer of the world's most popular benchmarking software, today announced 3DMark 11, the latest version of their industry standard benchmark for real-time 3D graphics. Designed to measure the performance of DirectX 11 gaming PCs, 3DMark 11 uses a native DirectX 11 engine created in-house. To accompany the announcement Futuremark has released a trailer and screenshots taken from a 3DMark 11 tech demo called "Deep Sea".

Deep Sea is a demonstration of DirectX 11 technologies created using an early development build of the 3DMark 11 engine. The Deep Sea trailer features submersibles exploring the sea floor. Volumetric lighting illuminates the seabed with tessellation used to add rich detail to the rock, coral and manmade structures. Post processing delivers depth of field and other lens effects. The music is an original composition.

ASUS has come up with a Frankenstein solution which enables 4-way SLI on the Rampage III Extreme motherboard with full PCI-Express 2.0 x16 bandwidth, called the ROG Xpander. The device is a daughterboard that sits on the motherboard with connections to its PCI-E 2.0 x16 slots. While it might not fit into cases, it is intended to work on test-benches. The two PCI-E x16 connections from the motherboard are wired to two NVIDIA nForce 200 bridge chips, which give out two x16 links each, driving the four x16 slots on the daughterboard. It takes input from one 6-pin PCI-E power input, and three 4-pin Molex inputs, though not all may be required.

The ROG Xpander ideally would draw 12W of power per nForce chip, and with its own power inputs, will not draw any power from the motherboard for the four PCI-E cards. The point of using this device is that ASUS did not give 4-way SLI capability to the Rampage III Extreme from the factory, even though it already has four PCI-E x16 slots (x8 each when all are populated). A fan seated on the Xpander ensures components on the motherboard under it aren't suffocated of cool air. ASUS ran a 4-way SLI test of four GeForce GTX 480 graphics cards on 3DMark Vantage, where the Core i7 980X @ 6 GHz powered setup scored P52422 points.

In an overclocking feat by XtremeSystems community members Elmor and Kinc, an ASUS EAH5870 MATRIX Radeon HD 5870 graphics card was able to achieve a mind-boggling core speed of 1525 MHz (core) from its default speed of 894 MHz, and AMD reference speed of 850 MHz. This translates into 70% over default speeds, and 79% over reference speeds. The not-so-relevant memory overclock was 1300 MHz (5.2 GHz effective), an 8.3% overclock. The card was cooled using liquid-nitrogen evaporators.

This wasn't a "hit-and-run" feat, either. The stability of the GPU at 1500 MHz was proven with a run of 3DMark Vantage, where it scored P29342 points at the performance preset. The rest of the bench comprised of an Intel Core i7 980X Extreme Edition six-core processor running at 4492.9 MHz, at 1.52V, also cooled by liquid nitrogen, ASUS Rampage III Extreme motherboard, 6 GB of Corsair Dominator GTX DDR3 memory, and Antec 1200W power supply. The validation for the 3DMark Vantage run where it scored P30542 can be found here.

Galaxy's graphics card in the works that uses two GeForce GTS 250 GPUs has finally taken shape. Galaxy designed this card out of NVIDIA's specifications, from scratch. The company also designed a cooler that uses two GPU heatsinks, each with spirally-projecting aluminum fins, with its own 80 mm fan, and a heatsink over other parts of the card such as memory and VRM. The card draws power from two 6-pin power connectors. It has 512 MB of GDDR3 memory per GPU.

Out of the box, the card comes with clock speeds of 600/1500/1000 MHz (core/shader/memory). With the bundled Galaxy Magic Panel HD software, it can be overclocked further. In a certain test, clock speeds of 675/1000/1696 MHz were used. A 3DMark Vantage run with Performance preset yielded a score of P13964. In the pictures, the piece of PCB sticking out next to the PCI-Express interface is a rudimentary spacer. It won't be present on retail cards.

A team of overclockers Sampsa and Stummerwinter set a new world-record score for 3DMark Vantage (Performance preset). The duo set the record using a test-bed made of Intel Core i7 975 Extreme Edition, four ASUS ATI Radeon HD 5870 in CrossFireX mode, 6 GB of Corsair Dominator GTX2, and the upcoming ASUS Rampage III Extreme motherboard to seat it all.

The Core i7 975 XE processor sailed through to 5508.9 MHz (27 x 204 MHz @ 1.664V, HTT on), with the memory running at 2040 MHz DDR (7-8-7-21). The four ASUS Radeon HD 5870 cards were hand-picked from a batch of 18 pieces. Core/memory speeds of 1325 MHz / 1300 MHz, were set. Catalyst drivers version 9.12 were used for the record feat.

The team achieved a 3DMark Vantage score of P47002, with a GPU score of 53,911 points, and CPU score of 33,949. To cool the machine, F1 EE & Tek 9.0 liquid nitrogen evapourators were used for the GPUs and CPU. The duo credit their success (besides their skills), to Kinc and Christian from ASUS and Thomas from Intel.

AMD released its latest version of the ATI Catalyst Software Suite to date, Catalyst 9.12 WHQL, which provides drivers and system software for the company's ATI Radeon graphics processors, AMD 7-series chipset IGPs, ATI multimedia products, and the AMD FireStream GPGPU processors. Version 9.12 announced today, comes with expanded GPU support for DirectCompute 10.1 for specific GPUs, includes performance increments, OpenGL 3.2 extension support, along with the usual application-specific fixes.

To begin with, application-specific performance increments include an overall performance improvement as high as 9% on the ATI Radeon HD 5800 Series and ATI Radeon HD 5700 Series, for 3DMark Vantage. GT1 - Jane Nash performance improves as much as 15% and FT4 - GPU Cloth improves up to 15%. Performance improves as much as 6% on single card configurations for S.T.A.L.K.E.R. - Call of Pripyat. The release provides DirectCompute 10.1 support for ATI Radeon HD 4800 and HD 4700 GPUs in both single and multi-GPU configurations. Lastly, this release adds support for certain OpenGL 3.2 extensions for all GPUs from Radeon HD 2000 series and upward (HD 3000, HD 4000, and HD 5000).


DOWNLOAD: ATI Catalyst 9.12 WHQL for Windows 7/Vista 32-bit | Windows 7/Vista 64-bit | Windows XP 32-bit | Windows XP 64-bit

For more information, refer to the Release Notes document.

Apart from being the industry's leading 3D graphics benchmark application, 3DMark has had a long history of 3D graphics hardware manufacturers cheating with their hardware using application-specific optimisations against Futuremark's guidelines to boost 3DMark scores. Often, this is done by drivers detecting the 3DMark executable, and downgrading image quality, so the graphics processor has to handle lesser amount of processing load from the application, and end up with a higher performance score. Time and again, similar application-specific optimisations have tarnished 3DMark's credibility as an industry-wide benchmark.

This time around, it's neither of the two graphics giants in the news for the wrong reasons, it's Intel. Although the company has a wide consumer base of integrated graphics, perhaps the discerning media user / very-casual gamer finds it best to opt for integrated graphics (IGP) solutions from NVIDIA or AMD. Such choices rely upon reviews evaluating the IGPs performance at accelerating video (where it's common knowledge that Intel's IGPs rely heavily on the CPU for smooth video playback, while competing IGPs fare better at hardware-acceleration), synthetic and real-world 3D benchmarks, among other application-specific tests.