Intel's Core i7 970 Reviewed, (Slightly) More Affordable 6-core
by Anand Lal Shimpi on July 29, 2010 3:23 AM EST3dsmax 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.
You get 9% better performance than a Core i7 975 and 98% of the performance of the 980X. Not too shabby, but then again you're not saving a ton of money by comparison. The Core i7 970 still costs roughly $900.
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.
Single threaded performance is very competitive, which is due entirely to Intel's well architected turbo modes. You get a 6-core processor that can act like the fastest single-core CPU on the planet if needed.
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.
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spunlex - Thursday, July 29, 2010 - link
don't forget cruncherskuwan - Friday, July 30, 2010 - link
If you're a photographer doing image editing then Bibble 5 Pro will fully utilize 6 cores +HT. Bibble actually scales all the way up to 32 cores.Cheers
Golgatha - Thursday, July 29, 2010 - link
I was all ready to read up until I realized I can't afford it.AstroGuardian - Thursday, July 29, 2010 - link
How come the 920 scores lower than the 750? Considering they are the same chip but the 920 has HT.ViRGE - Thursday, July 29, 2010 - link
They're not the same chip. 750 is Lynnfield (1156) while 920 is Bloomfield (1366). They do happen to have the same core and uncore clock speeds, but the 750 can turbo boost to higher clockspeeds than the 920 can. So that's most likely the reason the 750 is winning some tests.jfelano - Thursday, July 29, 2010 - link
Intel and affordable don't belong in the same sentence.afkrotch - Thursday, July 29, 2010 - link
Don't see how they can't be in the same sentence. Who had the cheapest dual cores, when they first hit the market? I'll give you 1 hint. It wasn't AMD. Hell, I went with an Intel dual core, simply cause it was $200 dollars cheaper than anything AMD had to offer during the time.But hey, if all you're looking for is crappy $100 or less processor, then yes. Intel is not meant for you.
medi01 - Friday, July 30, 2010 - link
Yep. Intel had "cheapest" (and crapiest) dual cores, which was an EXCEPTION from Intel's practices. How come it supports your argument?tech6 - Thursday, July 29, 2010 - link
I was really hoping this CPU would fall in the $500-$600 range but the price sort of makes sense as there really is no competition at this performance level from AMD so Intel can pretty much charge whatever it wants.Etern205 - Thursday, July 29, 2010 - link
Even AMD's 12 core Operteron is cheaper than Intel's "slightly affordable" hex.http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8...
8-core
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8...