Dell 6-Core Studio XPS 7100 Review
SiSoft Sandra & CineBench
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We continued our testing with SiSoftware's SANDRA 2009, the System ANalyzer, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant. We ran four of the built-in subsystem tests (CPU Arithmetic, Memory Bandwidth, Physical Disks). All of the scores reported below were taken with the processor running at its default clock speed and with 6GB of DDR3-1333 RAM (4 DIMMs).
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Are you starting to detect a theme yet? Overall, the scores are in line with what we would expect from a rig of this caliber, which is to say they're very good, not great. Without an SSD, second GPU, or Core i7 processor under the hood, there's only so far the Studio can go.
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Maxon's Cinebench R11.5 benchmark is based on Maxon's Cinema 4D software used for 3D content creation chores and tests both the CPU and GPU in separate benchmark runs. On the CPU side, Cinebench renders a photorealistic 3D scene by tapping into up to 64 processing threads (CPU) to process more than 300,000 total polygons, while the GPU benchmark measures graphics performance by manipulating nearly 1 million polygons and huge amounts of textures.
If there's one area we would expect Dell's Studio to strut its stuff, this would be it. Maxon's CineBench R11 stresses the GPU and CPU separately, spitting out a score for each one. Since CineBench is very much a multi-threaded benchmark, this is as good a place as any to kick the tires on AMD's six-core chip.
Or at least, it should have been. In this case, the tires came up a little flat. It has nothing to do with Dell's ability to build a machine, and falls squarely on the OEM's decision to build around AMD's Phenom II X6 platform. Once again, Intel's Core i7 architecture proves too strong for AMD, even though AMD has a core count advantage.
