Benchmarking The Past

I’ve recently done some shopping for computer hardware and read a number of reviews on both processors and graphics cards. As with every upgrade of hardware a lot has changed since I last purchased a computer. There are now 24+4 power supplies and 20+4s are being phased out, DDR2 replaces DDR, the new AMD socket is the am2, etc, etc. But even after you get up to speed on the technology and start looking at benchmarks you are still lost. Why? Your CPU and/or graphics card are years old, models behind and don’t register anywhere on the test results.

What would be nice is if for example on a graphics card test of Quake 4 (random example) the testers would show the system being reviewed, the few modern cards they are reviewing and then a few older cards that meet the minimum requirements, or minimum recommended requirements for that game. Assuming that game is something you’ve played on your old system and plan to play on your new system you should be able to more accurately register the performance benefits of those new card(s), cpus, etc, etc in your mind. What you’d then be able to compare is not the single digit performance point differences between recent CPUs but multiple digit points between both new and old CPUs.