Intel's Core i7 870 & i5 750, Lynnfield: Harder, Better, Faster Stronger
by Anand Lal Shimpi on September 8, 2009 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
3dsmax 9 - SPECapc 3dsmax CPU Rendering Test
Today's desktop processors are more than fast enough to do professional level 3D rendering at home. To look at performance under 3dsmax we ran the SPECapc 3dsmax 8 benchmark (only the CPU rendering tests) under 3dsmax 9 SP1. The results reported are the rendering composite scores:
And we're back down to utter dominance yet again. The i5 750 is 12.6% faster than the Phenom II X4 965 BE and 18.8% cheaper. Harder, better, faster stronger.
Blender 2.48a
Blender is an open source 3D modeling application. Our benchmark here simply times how long it takes to render a character that comes with the application.
To get Blender to perform right on Lynnfield we actually had to update our graphics drivers. It looks like the on-die PCIe does require the latest NVIDIA/ATI drivers to work properly. The results aren't unusual; Intel has done very well in these tests and Lynnfield continues to dominate. The i5 750 is a bit slower than the 920 (and Q9650) thanks to its missing HT support.
Cinebench R10
Created by the Cinema 4D folks we have Cinebench, a popular 3D rendering benchmark that gives us both single and multi-threaded 3D rendering results.
The single threaded benchmark tells us everything we need to know. The Core i5 750 and i7 870 are two of the fastest processors we've ever tested at single-threaded applications. Very few microprocessors will be able to retire instructions from a single thread as quickly as Lynnfield. This is actually very noticeable in simply using the OS. Many tasks still aren't multithreaded but they execute very, very fast on Lynnfield.
Crank up the threads and Lynnfield is still competitive. Because it's missing Hyper Threading, the i5 750 is barely faster than the Phenom II X4 965 BE. Although I understand Intel wanting to segment its product line, it seems that the i5's missing HT goes a bit too far.
POV-Ray 3.73 beta 23 Ray Tracing Performance
POV-Ray is a popular, open-source raytracing application that also doubles as a great tool to measure CPU floating point performance.
I ran the SMP benchmark in beta 23 of POV-Ray 3.73. The numbers reported are the final score in pixels per second.
We see the same results under POV-Ray. Regardless of thread count, Lynnfield delivers the best performance possible short of a $1000 CPU.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
343 Comments
View All Comments
yacoub - Tuesday, September 8, 2009 - link
lol, what a stupid comment. yes it's "cheating" to benchmark the processor the way it comes out of the box, which also happens to be how it is used in the real world environment.Voo - Tuesday, September 8, 2009 - link
Well there are many users who don't bother with overclocking so the tests aren't "illegal" or anything.But I tend to agree that most users who would be interested in buying an i7 920 or i7 860 would overclock it, so turbo mode wouldn't help at all, as we see with the OC results.
I'm curious if PCI-e on die is the only problem and if we'll see new chips who benefit from turbo mode even when overclocked. After all the principle behind turbo mode doesn't change if you overclock, does it?
james jwb - Tuesday, September 8, 2009 - link
IF that's true, i'm not at all happy with this review. But i'll wait for someone else to confirm this for obvious reasons... anand, confirm!Voo - Tuesday, September 8, 2009 - link
You read the text, didn't you? It was mentioned several times..james jwb - Tuesday, September 8, 2009 - link
i don't have time to read through all of it right now, was just flicking through and immeditaly thought to ask the question. I will read it fully later on, though.Hence why i asked the question. You say "it", as in which way, benches had turbo, benches didn't?
snakeoil - Tuesday, September 8, 2009 - link
yes again, turbo was on for all the benchmarks which is illegal and biased.maxxcool - Tuesday, September 8, 2009 - link
yes, the federal government says making a feature that makes your product better is legal.JarredWalton - Tuesday, September 8, 2009 - link
Illegal and biased? Yes, Intel is illegally making their CPUs run better at all workloads for normal users that don't overclock. Someone should arrest them! What would be biased is to test these CPUs in a fashion that artificially limits performance. Sure, it would be nice to see performance compared with and without Turbo enabled, but generally there's not enough time to run every potentially interesting test scenario.snakeoil - Tuesday, September 8, 2009 - link
there you go, finally you said it.all the benchmarks have at least 600 mhz over the processor's stock speed.
that is outrageous, then if you want to compare the result with phenom 2 you have to overclock phenom 2 at least 600 mhz over stock speed.
just to be fair
Anand Lal Shimpi - Tuesday, September 8, 2009 - link
The processor's stock speed is variable according to the workload it's running, that's what turbo mode does. AMD will enable similar functionality in 2011. This is the out-of-box performance of Lynnfield. Turbo mode is a feature of the processor as it has been since the mobile Penryn days (and more recently Nehalem). There's no reason to disable it as no end user would, unless you want to make Intel look worse for some reason.We also ran Turbo on vs. off numbers in the review: http://anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=36...">http://anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=36...
Take care,
Anand