Introduction
Welcome to PC Part Charts! This is a benchmark comparison site with benchmarks for most kinds of CPUs, video cards, and laptops. Here you will find some tools to assist you in choosing a CPU, graphics card, or laptop.
The CPU benchmarking data comes from Passmark, the video card benchmarking data comes from Futuremark, and the pricing data comes from Newegg and Pricewatch. The performance rating is an integer which is derived from a variety of different tests. Visit the companies' web sites to learn more about how the benchmarks work.
The performance to price ratio (or "bang for buck", as some call it) is calculated by simply dividing the performance rating by the price. The higher the number, the more you are getting for your money. To assist with builders who prioritize their selections based on performance rather than price, there is an option called "Performance takes priority over price". This applies a weighted "bonus" to the performance to price ratios for processors with more performance. It also helps to filter out older CPUs and graphics cards which may have incredibly high ratios due to the price dropping over time. To also assist with filtering out older components, there is a "minimum rating" text field. To assist with picking a minimum rating, you can choose a component in the drop down box under "must be better than this".
To begin, click on one of the incredibly large buttons below.
Updates
Laptop comparison tables - Compare prices, video cards, processors, and performance to price ratios for all different types of laptops from Newegg. The layout is basically the same as the others, except this time it's in table form with numbers instead of a bar graph.
New graphics cards - The new Radeon-5-series GPU is coming out, and benchmarking data should be available soon. Be advised, Futuremark's data for these new cards will be pretty inaccurate until they have been out for a few weeks.
Deviation from Trend line - This is a new feature I'm experimenting with. Basically, you plot the performance of something against its price, and then generate a best fit curve. What this curve does, given a price, is approximate what the performance should be. So, if something is 50 dollars, this best fit curve will approximate the number of Futuremark points or Passmark points it should be getting with a price of 50 dollars. Then what it does is subtract how much performance the curve predicts from how much performance it is actually getting. But what is that telling us? It's simple; if the card has a large positive value, it is an overachiever for its price range, and delivers more than what's expected. If it has a large negative value, it is an underachiever, and probably overpriced. So, concisely, deviation tells us the difference between where the card performs and where it's expected to perform.
2/3/2010 - New site layout!
2/13/2010 - Added a new page, Intel vs AMD. It contains several statistics on the processors manufactured by the two companies.
3/8/2010 - Finally! Futuremark appears to have fixed their rating system. The ratings for the graphics cards should be more accurate now.
6/10/2010 - Added some quick-find fields next to the "Highlight these entries" drop downs so you can quickly find the component you want to highlight.
11/18/2010 - I've been rather busy lately so I haven't made any big changes. I removed "Performance takes priority over price", since the deviation value accomplishes the same thing.
2/10/2011 - Added "Total Rating" to the laptop page, which is a normalized sum of the CPU and GPU weightings. The performance to price ratio value now uses this value for performance so it should be more accurate.
3/22/2011 - I remade the flash bar graphs in HTML5, so the CPU and GPU page should now work on mobile Apple devices. It doesn't play nice with Internet Explorer so I'm keeping the flash bar graphs on the main page for now.
5/5/11 - Added the ability to create 2 columns. The code's getting kinda messy which prevents me from implementing features as easily as I'd like. So, I think a site makeover is in order.
5/18/11 - Futuremark finished the new GPU benchmark results page! So now the GPU page is finally back up.
8/26/11 - I'm pretty much rewriting all of the behind-the-scenes code. The new code should be far more organized which will allow me to deploy new features more easily.
12/15/11 - Putting the finishing touches on a vastly improved back-end to the website. Now time for a new design...
Disclaimer
DISCLAIMER:
Also, since GPU clock speeds and memory configurations vary a lot based on the manufacturer, the actual graphics card you buy may perform slightly differently than the performance rating in the database.
FAQs
FAQs:
Q: Why is [graphics card A] listed as being better than [graphics card B]?
A: Futuremark, for some reason, produces really inaccurate results for several weeks or months after the release of a new graphics card. For example, the GTX 275 was listed as being better than the GTX 285, and the single-GPU Radeon HD 5870 was miraculously better than the dual-GPU GTX 295. After a long time the results start to average out to more realistic levels. Passmark's video card list is more accurate but their benchmarks do not scale efficiently over multiple GPUs, which is why I don't use their GPU data for anything other than laptops (because the vast majority of laptops have single GPUs).
Q: Why are the Crysis frame rates "predicted"?
A: Frame rates were not available for all cards that used the 1680x1050 benchmark standard. To correct this, the update script makes a best fit curve to approximate the Crysis frame rate as a function of the Futuremark score for all the cards. Keep in mind that the Crysis frame rate is a rough approximation and is meant to be used to get a feel for how powerful the card is (since the Futuremark score isn't that intuitive for everyone).
Q: How do I see which video card/processor I have?
A: 1. Press Window+R to bring up the run dialog box (the window key usually has a Windows logo on it). You can also go to Start>Run.
2. Type "devmgmt.msc" (without the quotes) and hit enter.
3. There should be a window that comes up titled "Device Manager". Expand the items labeled "Processors" and "Display Adapters", where you will find the name of your processor and graphics card.
Additional Info*
Additional information:
*Crysis
The FPS data for Crysis are obtained from frame rate averages on various benchmarking sites (mostly Tom's Hardware). It is recorded from the first level (Contact) with FRAPS at 1680x1050, 0xAA, Trilinear, and everything at High Quality. Since FPS data is not always available for all cards at these settings (1680x1050, 0xAA), unknown values have to be interpolated using a statistical model. Keep in mind that the predicted frame rates are a rough estimate.
*Performance takes priority over price
Note: It is probably better to use deviation than this option.
You may have noticed this option in the graphs. This only alters performance to price ratio data by applying a weighted "bonus" to CPUs or graphics cards with higher performance. This is included for builders who prioritize their hardware selections more on how powerful they are, and not so much their price. For example, the Athlon 7750 Dual Core has a much better performance to price ratio than the Core i7 920. If you were looking for a budget processor that would do basic things, then the 7750 would probably be better. However, if you wanted more power in your PC, you would see performance as being more important and would probably go with the Core i7 920. If you check "Performance takes priority over price" you will notice that the i7 920 is much better than the 7750 in terms of performance to price ratio.
*Deviation
Deviation is just a fancy form of performance to price ratio. It is best explained by this pretty graph:
As you can see, there is a best-fit curve approximating the performance of the processors as a function of price. If the dot is way above the curve, it is an overachiever. If it is way below, it is an underachiever. If it is somewhat close to the curve (within about 200 Passmark points) then it's probably within the error bounds of the approximating curve and you can't say very much.
The way this is different from regular performance to price ratio is that it is adjusted for its price range. As you can see, doubling the amount you pay for a processor does not necessarily double the performance; the relationship is logarithmic. Because of this, one could argue that simply comparing performance to price ratio is unfair because it benefits the lower-end components. So, this compensates for that.
However, I would not recommend using this for a budget build; this is more for if you're undecided on how much you want to spend. For a budget build I would strongly recommend just setting a minimum performance value and simply picking the component with the highest performance to price ratio.
Legal
Seriously; who reads the legal section? I guess you do. You're unusual. In fact, you're creeping me out because you're probably a lawyer. Please switch to another tab right now.
GPU Database
CPU Database
Laptop Database
Other stuff:
A comparison of the two biggest chip manufacturers; Intel and AMD. I made this page to try and shed some light on the hotly contested question; who is better?