Haswell-E Debuts: Intel Core i7-5960X Processor Review

by Marco Chiappetta — Friday, August 29, 2014, 12:00 PM EDT

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Cinebench and POV-Ray

Cinebench 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

3D Rendering Benchmark

In the multi-threaded portion of this benchmark, the Core i7-5960X clearly takes the lead. Those two additional cores work wonders in highly-threaded workloads such as this. In the single-threaded test, however, the Core i7-5960X trails the higher-clocked Intel platforms.

The same holds true in Cinebench R15. The Core i7-5960X chews through multi-threaded workloads like nobody's business, but when running a single-thread it can't quite keep pace with the higher-clocked setups.

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.

The story is slightly different with POV-Ray. Here, the Core i7-5960X once again rules the roost in the multi-threaded benchmark. In the single-threaded test, the Core i7-5960X was also able to overtake IVB-E and SB-E, despite the latters' higher clocks. The Core i7-5960X's additional memory bandwidth and huge cache probably helped it here.