The Sandy Bridge Review: Intel Core i7-2600K, i5-2500K and Core i3-2100 Tested
by Anand Lal Shimpi on January 3, 2011 12:01 AM EST3D Rendering Performance
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.
At the risk of sounding like a broken record, we have a new champ once more. The 2600K is slightly ahead of the 980X here, while the 2500K matches the performance of the i7 975 without Hyper Threading enabled. You really can't beat the performance Intel is offering here.
The i3 2100 is 11% faster than last year's i3 540, and the same performance as the Athlon II X4 645.
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 sees a huge improvement with Sandy Bridge. Even the Core i3 2100 is faster than the 980X in this test. Regardless of workload, light or heavy, Sandy Bridge is the chip to get.
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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7Enigma - Monday, January 3, 2011 - link
Do you happen to remember the space heater.....ahem, I mean P4?DanNeely - Monday, January 3, 2011 - link
I do. Intel used bigger heatsinks than they do for mainstream parts today.panx3dx - Monday, January 3, 2011 - link
The article states that in order for quick sync to function, a display must be connected to the integrated graphics. Since p67 does not support the IGP, then quick sync will be disabled???panx3dx - Monday, January 3, 2011 - link
Opps, just saw Doormat already asked the question on page three, and I can't find a way to edit or delete my post. However no one has yet to give a clear answer.Next9 - Monday, January 3, 2011 - link
There is not any problem with BIOS and 3TB drives. Using GPT you can boot such a drive either on BIOS or UEFI based system. You should only blame Windows and their obsolete MS-DOS partitioning scheme and MS-DOS bootloader.mino - Monday, January 3, 2011 - link
Microsoft not supporting GPT on BIOS systems (hence 3TB drivers on BIOS systems) was a pure BUSINESS decision.It had nothing to do with technology which is readily available.
mino - Monday, January 3, 2011 - link
In the table there is "N" for the i3 CPUs.But in the text there is: "While _all_ SNB parts support VT-x, only three support VT-d"
Could you check it out and clarify? (there is no data on ark.intel.com yet)
mczak - Monday, January 3, 2011 - link
It's not exactly true that HD3000 has less compute performance than HD5450, at least it's not that clear cut.It has 12 EUs, and since they are 128bit wide, this would amount to "48SP" if you count like AMD. Factor in the clock difference and that's actually more cores (when running at 1300Mhz at least). Though if you only look at MAD throughput, then it is indeed less (as intel igp still can't quite do MAD, though it can do MAC).
It's a bit disappointing though to see mostly HD2000 on the desktop, with the exception of a few select parts, which is not really that much faster compared to Ironlake IGP (which isn't surprising - after all Ironlake had twice the EUs albeit at a lower clock, so the architectural improvements are still quite obvious).
DanNeely - Monday, January 3, 2011 - link
That's not true. Each AMD SP is a pipeline, the 4th one on a 69xx (or 5th on a 58xx) series card is 64 bits wide, not 32. They can't all be combined into a single 128 (160, 196) bit wide FPU.kallogan - Monday, January 3, 2011 - link
I'll wait for 22 nm. No point in upgrading for now