Review: Kombustor shows how much your graphics hardware can take - terrellsuaing

At a Glance

Expert's Rating

Pros

• Small size of it
• Looks great
• Out-of-school

Cons

• Now and then misleading results
• Fewer DX11 tests

Our Verdict

Kombustor's burn-in and bench mark tests push GPU hardware to the throttl.

Pushing ascending computer memory and kernel speeds on video recording ironware has consequences, not all of them readily apparent. Your clock-cooked Radeon may sneer at Skyrim on max settings, but those Same speeds can make your computer crash and burn when playing Witcher II. This and past inconsistencies mean you need to go on the far side FRAPS and your favorite game when looking at overclocked GPU stability. Hardware manufacturer MSI, creators of Afterburner, have conjured up a way to make your overachieving videocard sweat for a change. It's a benchmark called Kombustor, and it's capably named.

Kombustor's fur test is anything but soft on your GPU.

Kombustor is based along Furmark, a stress test famous in the enthusiast community for frying videocards active in its quest to probe GPUs' outer limits. MSI dials hindermost the hurting a trifle, but augments that cartesian product's burn-in features with expanded benchmarking capabilities, support for DirectX, linkages to Afterburner for test-and-tune sessions and a whole lot to a greater extent objects, scenes and settings to tone at patc IT each gets done.

Looks are a bigger part of what makes Kombustor a pleasure to use. IT only weighs in at 14MB, just it manages to see best than anything short of Unigine's 235MB Heaven, let alone 3DMark's gigabyte-human-sized suites. The program presents you with a system GPU readout that reports temperature, load and power levels in real time. Below that information, quadruplet buttons give you admittance to various bench mark and stability tests, as well as general software system settings. Don't let the small, unanalyzable display fool you; there's a lot to play with here.

Tessy Spheres is one of Kombustor's nicer-look benchmarks.

The 3D Test yellow journalism alone sports half a dozen visually clear benchmarks, each stressing a different API feature set. The GPU burn-in tab is evenly characteristic-rich, with provisions for several variants of DirectX and OpenGL, and a choice of brassy objects to pick from.

The PhysX tests consume fewer options but run longer, and provide more diverse scripts with plenty of fireworks to keep things interesting. The result is a reasonably hi-fi picture of capability, especially cooling content. The results aren't as comprehensive as larger suites, but they are reliable and disclosing nevertheless.

The longer Kombustor tests feature filters, depth-of-focus, and other hi-tech hardware tricks.

MSI promotes Kombustor's integration with Afterburneras a one-stop over tweaking solution for FPS-preoccupied gamers, and it's a pretty skilled pitch. The concept here is that you overclock with Afterburner and then straightaway test with Kombustor, which is available via a button on Afterburner's interface. In reality, the benefits o'er less-embedded solutions are slight (is it really that hard to foot race ii programs side by broadside?), just Kombustor is a better enough utility that this still seems like-minded a feature.

Kombustor is more dependent on drivers than most benchmarks, and different driver versions give notice swing results wildly in one focussing or the new. This puts some limits along it as a hardware reference tool, but makes Kombustor quite useful for study of driver write in code carrying out. Unstable or crippled builds pop into sharp backup man, halving their frame rates over previous versions or other card game with lesser hardware. This is quite of import information, especially since so many an of the tests feature OpenGL.

Kombustor's user interface is simple, simply muckle of world power hides prat those quaternion buttons.

All this adds up to a nice, if not primary, testing and benchmarking package for computer hardware enthusiasts. Kombustor won't be the first tool out of the box, simply you volition inquire how you got along without it.

Mention: The "Try it for free" button happening the Cartesian product Information Sri Frederick Handley Page takes you to the vender's site, where you can download the in style adaptation of the software.

Source: https://www.pcworld.com/article/455802/review-kombustor-shows-how-much-your-graphics-hardware-can-take.html

Posted by: terrellsuaing.blogspot.com

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