Intel Core i7 975 Extreme Edition Processor Review
Cinebench R10 and POV-Ray Rendering Performance
Cinebench R10 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.
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This is a multi-threaded, multi-processor aware benchmark that renders a single 3D scene 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.
It's not hard to see that the Intel Core i7 is in a class of its own, when it comes to raw computing throughput. On a multi-core level the trend we've seen in our previous benchmark runs continues here with Cinebench. Intel's fastest Core i7 975 processor is some 57% faster than AMD's fastest Phenom II. Comparing single-threaded performance, Intel's new flagship is about 39% faster. However, you have to remember, Intel's Core i7 Extreme Editions are currently also 4 times the price of a Phenom II 955. A more balanced comparison from a pricing perspective would be the Core i7 920, though even then, you still have to factor in total platform costs, including Intel's more expensive triple-channel DDR3 implementation and the higher price of X58 chipset-based motherboards.
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POV-Ray , or the Persistence of Vision Ray-Tracer, is a top-notch open source tool for creating realistically lit 3D graphics artwork. We tested with POV-Ray's standard 'all-CPU' benchmarking tool 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.
Looking at POV-Ray ray-tracing performance, we see very much the same sort of spread amongst the Core i7 lineup, only this time the Core i7 975 chalks a smaller 5% gain over the Core i7 965.
