Intel Core i7-3820 Quad-Core Sandy Bridge-E CPU Review

Name: Intel Core i7-3820
Brand: Intel

by Marco Chiappetta — Monday, January 16, 2012, 10:43 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

In terms of its single-thread / core performance, the Core i7-3820 Extreme Edition performs on par with the Core i7-2700K (not surprisingly). The Core i7-3820 pulls slightly ahead of the 2700K in the multi-threaded test though. The Core i7-3960X Extreme Edition and 990X, which both have more cores than the 3820, hold onto the lead.

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.

POV-Ray tells essentially the same story as Cinebench. In these tests, the Core i7-3820 performs right about on par with the Core i7-2700K, but trails the Intel processors with more cores.