Intel Core i7-970 Processor Review, Lower Cost 6-Core
Cinebench and POV-Ray Rendering
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.
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The Core i7-970 is less than two percent slower than the Core i7 980X in this test, where multi-threaded throughput is more important versus pure clock speed. From there, Cinebench R11.5 scales almost linearly with additional cores, as is evident by the Core i7-980X Extreme's approximate 49% lead over the Core i7-975, where its 6 cores offer roughly 50% more processing resources at the same clock speed. The Core i7-970 also muscles far past the Core i7 975 in this test, underscoring the fact that some potential customers might confuse the processor numbering not realizing how much more multi-threaded performance it has available under its hood.
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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.
POV-Ray tells us two things here. The additional compute resources of the Core i7-970 give it a huge boost in the multi-threaded rendering test over the fastest quad-core that Intel has to offer. In the single threaded test however, we see that Intel's previous generation core architecture, clock-for-clock is on par with the current six-core designs. Here the Core i7-970 falls slightly short of the Core i7-975 processor, when only one of its cores is being exercised.
