youngpro

after the long hours of trying to get this two work the result is two top places in pcmark05 and pcmark vantage...

PLATFORM:
Gigabyte X58A-UD3R w/ gulfy 980X
MSI Lightning 5870 GPU
Corsair GTX2 rams
Corsair FORCE sandforce SSDs
Areca 1280ML raid controller
ANS ACARD 9010
Western Digital Velicoraptors sata3 600GB
GTX280 for XP pcmark05

I have so much respect for guys like SteveRo, MikeGuava, CptPlanet and even my team mate Dino. This platform is extremely difficult to bench and to get any good score on it you really need to know you stuff, not only that, put in a big effort in learning the bench to maximize your performance.

Even when you get it right, these big raid0 arrays can let you down easily, so have your image and your ghost bootable usb handy!

NO TWEAKS here, if you want to try and pick apart my benches, please do it, nothing to hide in my benches

Taking a look at the platform,

The Gigabyte UD3R is a really nice little board. I picked this board because it is what I need for this bench, offering all the functionality of a UD9 (of course with not as many PCIE slots) and not a huge amount going on with the board. This is important when there is so much going on with the raid array and the rest of the setup.

The MSI Lightning 5870 is a considerable jump over all the stock 5870s I have tried, this GPU goes to 1040MHz Vantage stable on stock cooling and is happy to push way past 1400 MHz on LN2, an outstanding GPU.

Corsair GTX2 ram, this is the kit I rely on to pull out the big numbers. I am not even pushing it on this occasion, 1070 at 7-7-7 would be a breeze for future runs I do.

Areca 1280ML is a legendary raid controller, it is unpeered in all the benchmarks we play with, and has been for years. I have tried raid controllers from 3 other vendors and my scores can no touch this raid controller. If you want to win at pcmark, you need ARECA.

Corsair Force SSDs, wow these SSD have some power in them. Dino prove that a pcmark vantage score is possible with them, and we already know with the right configuration they kick ass at pcmark05 also

Of course I always use my WD Velicoraptor as my bench drive, it is fast, stable, 600GB lets me run many OS variations and it can handle higher PCIE than when I use SSD.

Oh just a few quick tips, pcmark vantage, make sure your benching drive has enough free space like 3GB+ or the bench might not run. PCMARK Vantage I run on server 2008 R2, you need to enable desktop experience this gives you windows mail and media player.. or bench wont run. I find for pcm05 that w7 64 is better because it gives a more consistent memory latency especially, or else it goes up and down a bit when pushing the rams... 4k stripe size on the pcmv and PUSH your pcie as hard as you can...

Here are of course the scores!

39k PCMark Vantage
39k futuremark valid


144k HDD score


35K PCMARK05
35k futuremark valid


29K PCM05 on XP - my score for ORB as it only allows XP


Now for some photos, this is the best part of this platform, the EPIC look!

full tilt


the lightning ready to go


my warm up rig with the new heatsink from zero infinity, more of this soon

Uncle Fester

WELL DONE MATE

cowie

You totally own pcmark pro,have for yrs. ... nice read
whats the number of ssd's and ram?

youngpro

cheers boys,

i wanted to do pcmark again for a while now, i wanted to do it right, no tweaks, no doubt over if the score is legitimate or not, felt it important to prove myself on that,

4 ssds used in pcmark05, none in pcmv,

i am using 8GB of DDR1 in the IRAMS and 4GB of DDR2 in the acards.. a mix of corsair, cellshock, kingston and just generic branded gear in there...

dino has experimented alot with SSD arrays and found that they can be great, he is in 4th place right now overall, but for the absolute top spot the IRAMS win and you can understand why..

but it looks like maybe with the sata3 based raid controllers, it might be possible to beat the irams/arecas with ssds... lets wait and see

1Day

Once again you have raised the bar - this is for me one of the most complex benchmarks to get right, and very specific in the kinds of hardware needed. To see someone do it so well time and time again is brilliant. I do assume that you will be pushing the benchmark with some tweaking in the near future. Or at least I hope so.

Outstanding

dinos22

Hey James,

I had a crack at it today too

PCMARK Vantage: 39,275

• GIGABYTE X58A-UD9 with 980X @ 5.55ghz
• GIGABYTE 5870 SOC GPU
• Corsair GTX2
• GIGABYTE iRAM x5
• ARECA 1231ML raid controller with only 2GB cache
• Corsair AX1200 1200W PSU
• F1 Gemini CPU pot

http://service.futuremark.com/compare?pcmv=365739

T_M

Whoa great score Dino!