Intel Core i7-3970X Sandy Bridge-E CPU Review

Name: Intel Core i7-3970X Sandy Bridge-E CPU Review
Brand: Intel

by Marco Chiappetta — Thursday, May 16, 2013, 09:00 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

In terms of its single-thread / core performance, the Core i7-3970X Extreme Edition performs on par with the Core i7-3770K (not surprisingly). With its additional cores, however, and the Core i7-3760X Extreme Edition pulls well ahead of the quad-core chips in our reference group and squeaks past the Core i7-3960X.

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.

Our results with POV-RAY look much like those from Cinebench above. The Core i7-3970X puts up the best multi-threaded score by a fair amount and its single-threaded performance is among the best as well.