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AIDA64 is a full 64-bit benchmark and test suite utilizing MMX, 3DNow! and SSE instruction set extensions, and will scale up to 32 processor cores. An enhanced 64-bit System Stability Test module is also available to stress the whole system to its limits. For legacy processors all benchmarks and the System Stability Test are available in 32-bit versions as well.

In the highly compute centric Queen tests we barely register a difference with the new drivers, but the Photoworxx test gives us a 5% uptick, definitely outside the margin of error.

There isn’t much change in the encryption tests either, with just very slight increases due to the driver update.

Once again, the floating point tests don’t give us much of a reason to upgrade to the beta drivers. The CPU-centric tests seem not to benefit too greatly from the new drivers, although there is a slight overall increase. Let’s look at Sandra.

SiSoftware Sandra 2014

SiSoftware Sandra is a 32- and 64-bit client/server Windows system analyzer that includes benchmarking, testing and listing modules. It tries to go beyond other utilities to show you more of what is really going on under the hood so you draw comparisons at both a high and low-level in a single product. You can get information about the CPU, GPGPU, chipset, video adapter (GPU), ports, printers, sound card, memory, network, Windows internals even .NET and Java.

The first Sandra tests show a little bit of a different story here. The new 14.2 Beta drivers improve the aggregate score by nearly 10%, the Cryptography score by over 8%, and the memory bandwidth by over 6%.

The arithmetic and multi-media scores are nearly identical between the driver versions, but the GP Processing scores shows huge improvement with a score nearly 65% better. I think we found the sweet spot for the 14.2 Beta drivers, and it doesn’t have much to do with the CPU.

Cinebench R15

CINEBENCH is a cross-platform testing suite that measures hardware performance and is the de facto standard benchmarking tool for leading companies and trade journals for conducting real-world hardware performance tests. With the new Release 15, systems with up to 256 threads can be tested. CINEBENCH is available for both Windows and OS X and is used by almost all hardware manufacturers and trade journals for comparing CPUs and graphics cards.

The Cinebench tests show similar results to the Sandra tests. The CPU benchmarks show slight improvement, but the OpenGL score improves by almost 20%.