Intel Core i9-7980XE And Core i9-7960X Review: Intel Attacks AMD Threadripper

Intel Core i9-7980XE And i9-7960X - Cinebench, POV-Ray, Fluid Dynamics

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

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The Core i9-7980XE and Core i9-7960X dominate the Cinebench tests. They put up multi-threaded scores ahead of both Threadripper processors and single-thread results that were much faster as well.

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 

Our POV-Ray results look very similar to Cinebench. The Core i9-7980XE and Core i9-7960X jump out to a clear lead over every other desktop processor in the multi-threaded benchmark, with strong single-threaded results as well.

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.

This benchmark is multi-threaded, but is also dependent on platform bandwidth, so the final results are not determined by compute performance alone. Cache and memory bandwidth and latency affect the score as well...

stars
This benchmark loves the additional compute resources and bandwidth afforded by the Core i9-7980XE and Core i9-7960X and its quad-channel memory. As such, Intel's latest flagship processors break away from the pack and finish with significant advantages over any other processor.

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