X58 Showdown: ASUS Rampage II vs. MSI Eclipse
Cinebench and POV-Ray Rendering
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Cinebench R10 is an OpenGL 3D rendering performance test based on Cinema 4D. Cinema 4D from Maxon 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 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.
The Core i7 matched up with the Core 2 Quad Q9400 in the single-threaded cinebench rendering run, but was no match for the sheer speed of the Core 2 Extreme, which finished with a score roughly 16% higher. However, due to the efficiency of the Core i7 and the re-addition of HyperThreading, these CPUs managed to pull ahead of the Core 2 Extreme in the multi-threaded benchmark.
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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 included benchmarking model on all of our test machines and recorded the scores reported for each. Results are measured in pixels-per-second (PPS) throughput.
POV-Ray Rendering results had the Core i7 920 / X58 slipping behind the Core 2 Extreme by a decent margin, but faster than both the Core 2 Quad and AMD Phenom X4. As with the Cinebench rendering, we were able to get the most out of the MSI Eclipse as far as the X58 boards go, although the margin of difference this time over the Rampage II Extreme was far less, amounting to less than a percent.
