Intel Core i7-3960X Extreme Edition Sandy Bridge-E CPU

Name: Intel Core i7-3960X Extreme Edition
Brand: Intel

by Marco Chiappetta — Monday, November 14, 2011, 03:00 AM EDT

Cinebench R11.5 and POV-Ray

Cinebench R11.5 is an OpenGL 3D rendering performance test based on Cinema 4D from Maxon. Cinema 4D is a 3D rendering and animation tool suite used by 3D animation houses and producers like Sony Animation and many others. It's very demanding of system processor resources and is an excellent gauge of pure computational throughput. This is a multi-threaded, multi-processor aware benchmark that renders and animates 3D scenes and tracks the length of the entire process. The rate at which each test system was able to render the entire scene is represented in the graph below.

Cinebench R11.5

3D Rendering Benchmark

Here we're running just the CPU test module in this benchmark suite.

In terms of its single-thread / core performance, the Core i7-3960X Extreme Edition performs on par with the Core i7-2700K (not surprisingly). Tack on a couple more cores, however, and the Core i7-3960X Extreme Edition pulls well ahead of the 2700K and clearly outpaces the Core i7-990X as well. The Core i7-3960X Extreme Edition is also nearly twice as fast as the FX-8150 here.

POV-Ray Performance

Ray Tracing Benchmark

POV-Ray , or the Persistence of Vision Ray-Tracer, is an open source tool for creating realistically lit 3D graphics artwork. We tested with POV-Ray's standard 'one-CPU' and 'all-CPU' benchmarking tools on all of our test machines and recorded the scores reported for each. Results are measured in pixels-per-second throughput; higher scores equate to better performance.

Once again we see the Core i7-3960X Extreme Edition offering similar single-threaded performance to the Core i7-2700K, but in terms of multi-threaded performance Intel's new flagship couldn't be touched. The Core i7-3960X Extreme Edition finished well ahead of the second-place Core i7-990X.