The Core i7 980X Review: Intel's First 6-Core Desktop CPU

PAR2 Multithreaded Archive Recovery Performance

Par2 is an application used for reconstructing downloaded archives. It can generate parity data from a given archive and later use it to recover the archive

Chuchusoft took the source code of par2cmdline 0.4 and parallelized it using Intel’s Threading Building Blocks 2.1. The result is a version of par2cmdline that can spawn multiple threads to repair par2 archives. For this test we took a 708MB archive, corrupted nearly 60MB of it, and used the multithreaded par2cmdline to recover it. The scores reported are the repair and recover time in seconds.

An application needs to be more than multithreaded to take advantage of the 980X, it needs to demand more than four threads. And our PAR2 test is pushing it as is, there's no advantage to the 980X here.

WinRAR - Archive Creation

Our WinRAR test simply takes 300MB of files and compresses them into a single RAR archive using the application's default settings. We're not doing anything exotic here, just looking at the impact of CPU performance on creating an archive:

Our WinRAR test takes advantage of the larger L3 cache and thus we see roughly a 9% performance advantage for the 980X compared to the 975.

Microsoft Excel 2007

Excel can be a very powerful mathematical tool. In this benchmark we're running a Monte Carlo simulation on a very large spreadsheet of stock pricing data.

If you're running any sort of computationally intensive Excel macros, the 980X will deliver. The financial market just wet themselves.

Sony Vegas Pro 8: Blu-ray Disc Creation

Although technically a test simulating the creation of a Blu-ray disc, the majority of the time in our Sony Vegas Pro benchmark is spend encoding the 25Mbps MPEG-2 video stream and not actually creating the Blu-ray disc itself.

Even when the application doesn't scale perfectly with core count, we still see some impressive gains. Our MPEG-2 Blu-ray creation test showed a hefty 20% performance improvement over the 975. If you do any sort of video encoding or Blu-ray authoring, the 980X is perfect for you.

Sorenson Squeeze: FLV Creation

Another video related benchmark, we're using Sorenson Squeeze to convert regular videos into Flash videos for use on websites.

FLV authoring shows another healthy gain of 30% over the quad-core 975.