Intel Core i7-6950X 10-Core CPU Review: Broadwell-E Takes Flight


Cinebench R15, POV-Ray, Fluid Dynamics Tests

Cinebench R15 is a combination CPU and OpenGL 3D rendering performance test based on Cinema 4D from Maxon. Cinema 4D is a 3D rendering and animation tool suite used by animation houses and producers like Sony Animation and many others. It's very demanding of system processor resources and can utilize any number of threads, which make is an excellent gauge of 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
3D Rendering Benchmark

cinebench 6950x

The 10-core, Broadwell-E based Core i7-6950X simply crushes every other system in Cinebench's multi-threaded test. Those extra cores allow it to pull ahead of every other platform by a wide margin. Singe-thread performance trails the 6700K, however.  If you want to see something really insane though, watch the video on this page.
POV-Ray Performance
Ray Tracing Benchmark

POV-Ray , or the Persistence of Vision Ray-Tracer, is an open source tool for creating realistically lit images. 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 6950x 

The story is essentially the same with POV-Ray. Here, the Core i7-6950X once again takes the top spot in the multi-threaded benchmark. In the single-threaded test, the Core i7-6950X was also able to overtake 5960X, but the Skylake-based Core i7-6700K was somewhat faster.

STARS Euler3d
Computational Fluid Dynamics

STARS Euler3d is a computational fluid dynamics benchmark which uses a CFD grid that contains 1.23 million tetrahedral elements and 223 thousand nodes. The benchmark executable advances a mach 0.50 Advisory Group for Aerospace Research, or AGARD, flow solution for an aeroelastic test wing. The benchmark score is reported as a CFD cycle frequency in Hertz.

stars 6950x
This benchmark is heavily threaded and is also dependent on platform bandwidth -- all areas where the Broadwell-E based Core i7-6950X excel. As such, it easily dominated the rest of the systems.


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