The Sandy Bridge Preview
by Anand Lal Shimpi on August 27, 2010 2:38 PM 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:
This is another one of those situations where the Core i5 2400 without Hyper Threading is able to perform on par with the Core i7 880 with Hyper Threading. Compared to the i5 760 it’s 20.5% faster.
With Hyper Threading enabled, the Core i5 2400 is actually dangerously close to the 6-core 980X. Whatever Intel has done to Sandy Bridge's FP is big.
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.
Cinebench was particularly surprising because it gives us a good opportunity to look at single threaded FP performance. Compared to a similarly clocked Lynnfield, Sandy Bridge can deliver 11% better performance. Compared to a similarly positioned Lynnfield, Sandy Bridge is about 20% faster. Note that this is without turbo enabled. The retail 3.1GHz chip should turbo up to 3.4GHz in this test, giving it a 9.6% frequency boost.
In the multithreaded test Sandy Bridge’s per-core performance is even better than Lynnfield with HT enabled.
I also ran a few numbers using Cinebench R11.5. I didn’t have the opportunity to test the i5 2400 with HT enabled in this test so I measured performance of the i7 880 with HT enabled/disabled to compare per-thread performance.
Sandy Bridge's FP performance is very good. Clock for clock we see a 15.6% improvement over Lynnfield (4C/4T vs. 4C/4T). Compared to the proposed similarly priced Core i5 760, the i5 2400 would be 29.5% faster.
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.
The similarly positioned/priced Core i5 760 is beat by 17%. There’s no replacement for more cores/threads however as the i7 880 and X6 parts both pull ahead. Turn on HT to level the playfield (at least within Intel) and Sandy Bridge is 15% faster than Lynnfield.
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Mithan - Tuesday, August 31, 2010 - link
I will be buying one of these the day it comes out.The only question will be between whether I get a CoreI5 or the Corei7. It will depend on price I guess, as the max I am willing to spend on a i7 CPU is $250.
Anyways, should be a nice upgrade to my E8400.
starfalcon - Tuesday, August 31, 2010 - link
Considering how great of a quad core the Core i5-750 is at $195, hopefully they'll have some great quad cores at about $200.Sabresiberian - Tuesday, August 31, 2010 - link
I've often wondered why people don't use WoW to test their video performance in the computers they are testing, and the obvious occurred to me - it so much depends on where you are and what the population is in the area you are in, that the frame rates vary widely. I imagine the frame rates reported here were for an area like Durotar with no one else in sight, heh. It would be a good place in terms of consistency, anyway, though less taxing that somewhere in Storm Peaks.WoW is often described as a CPU-intensive game, and so a great game to be included in tests of CPUs like you are doing here. Thanks for including it! I hope it is used for more video card tests as well; WoW may not be the most taxing test bed at lower end video, but at upper end in some areas it can hit 4 GHz i7 based Crossfired systems hard. I like playing at 85 Hz everywhere in the WoW universe I go - and Cataclysm will bring new video challenges, I'm sure.
drunkenrobot - Tuesday, August 31, 2010 - link
I'm a bit disappointed at Intel's attempt to completely lock us out of over clocking all together. But maybe this is AMD's chance to win back the enthusiast market. If AMD sold only unlocked parts, they would have a market segment all to themselves...theangryintern - Wednesday, September 1, 2010 - link
OK, didn't see it in the article and don't really feel like wading through 200 comments. What I want to know is will we be able to either A) disable the onboard graphics if we have the latest and greatest bad-ass video card...or even better, B) Will it be able to run both at the same time in a configuration where when I'm doing just generic web surfing, emailing, etc, the Intel GPU is doing the work and the discrete card can power down (quieter and less heat generated), and then when I fire up a game, the discrete powers up and the onboard powers down?JonnyDough - Thursday, September 2, 2010 - link
Intel is screwing over minorities! Colorblind people unite!"Both H67 and P67 support 6Gbps SATA, however only on two ports. The remaining 4 SATA ports are 3Gbps. Motherboard manufacturers will color the 6Gbps ports differently to differentiate."
JonnyDough - Thursday, September 2, 2010 - link
Higher performance integrated GPU's should help bring some of the gaming market back to the PC. That is a very good thing. :)starx5 - Tuesday, September 7, 2010 - link
I'm sorry anand but is this because your intel frendly?Come on..you have to run high resolution(2560x1600 or higher eyefinity) gaming benchmark too.
Sandbridge is nothing if it doesnt have much supiror performance in high resolution gamming.
But I know intel sucks. Even 980X is sometimes sucks in high resolution gaming.
When I see your bench, I can clearly SEE your intel frendly. Espesilly in gaming part.
Anand, of course your site is very popular(even in my country korea).
But in reality..your nothing but a intel suckass indian.
wut - Friday, September 10, 2010 - link
Stop. You're making yourself look like a bigoted fool.mekdonel - Friday, November 5, 2010 - link
Naaah, you're not a Korean. Only Americans make dumb spelling mistakes like "your" in place of "you're".