Digital Storm Bolt 3 SFF Gaming PC: A Compact Powerhouse

Futuremark PCMark 8 Simulated Application Performance

PCMark 8 simulates the workloads computers face in several different settings, including home and office use. The benchmark also has a test that simulates a creative professional’s usage, as well as battery and storage tests. We ran the tests with OpenCL acceleration enabled to leverage the power of the Bolt 3's CPU and GPU.

Curiously, the Bolt 3 performed better than any other system we've recently tested on PCMark 8's Home Accelerated test, but did much worse on its Work Accelerated test. We're not sure why the discrepancy exists, as we didn't get a sense that the Bolt 3 was that slow on any other benchmark we ran. Chalk this one up to PCMark 8 fussiness or differences with drivers between the systems. Display drivers especially can affect OpenCL acceleration.

Cinebench R15 64-bit Content Creation Performance

Based on Maxon Cinema 4D software, this test uses a 3D scene and polygon and texture manipulation to assess GPU and CPU performance. We run the Main Processor Performance (CPU) test, which builds a still scene containing about 2,000 objects, for a total polygon count above the 300,000 mark. We also run the OpenGL test to get a quick-and-dirty assessment of graphics performance with a professional workload.

The Bolt 3's single-core performance was exceptional among systems we've recently tested. Its multi-core performance put it right in the middle of our charts, but we'd expect that when comparing this quad-core desktop to hex-core systems. The i7-4970K CPU inside the Bolt 3 is formidable and fast—especially if you're using software that can take advantage of multi-core setups.