Review: Maingear Shift Gaming System

3DMark 11 – 3 Tests

For 3DMark 11 we disabled PhysX as well just to be sure, but the scores should be unaffected by PhysX as 3DMark 11 removes the Nvidia advantage with the CPU test and PhysX with a different Physics engine. Below you can see our results from all three tests and the results (when compared to similarly built systems) were in middle of the bell curve of systems. So, this system didn’t graphically outperform others by much, but it also didn’t underperform either. Since this test is mostly a test of graphical capability and the GPUs were not overclocked, it isn’t necessarily surprising to see such performance. Once again, checking HWBot yields a similar result in 3DMark 11 showing that against similarly clocked and built systems it performs properly.

SiSandra

In SiSandra, we ran three different benchmarks to compare and contrast the 2600K against other processors as well as a stock clocked 2600K. This way it would be a little easier to see the benefit of getting an overclocked system over a fully stock clocked one.

In the Arithmetic Test, the Shift attained 113.35GFLOPS compared to the stock clocked 2600K at 68.64GFLOPS, this is an increase of 60% over the stock clocked model. Taking into consideration that this processor is overclocked 41%, this is a pretty nice achievement. It also more than doubles the AMD Phenom 2 X6 1090T (which is now considered a dated CPU as of a few days ago).

In the 2nd Arithmetic Test, the Shift performed well against against the stock 2600K and Phenom 2 1090T, but was still beaten by the Core i7 980X which is a 6 Core Intel processor with triple-channel memory bandwidth.

Finally, in the Multimedia Test, the same results occurred with the Shift beating out the Turbo Mode 980X in floating calculations but losing in integer calculations.