AMD Launches 125W Phenom II X4 965 CPU

AMD Launches 125W Phenom II X4 965 CPU

POV-Ray, x264 HD, WME9, Folding@Home

POV-Ray:

POV-Ray is a free raytracing program. Version 3.7 beta has 64bit support and native SMP capability. We used the built-in benchmark to test multithreaded performance.

x264 HD Benchmark:

x264 is a free library for encoding H264/AVC video streams. Tech ARP has a nifty benchmark app to bring some automation and standardization to the encoder. Simply execute a batch file and it will run three tests using two different encoder versions. We are only reporting the newest version since its scores are a little better. This is multithreaded and maintained very high CPU usage, especially during the second pass.

Windows Media Encoder 9 - x64 Edition:

Windows Media Encoder 9 x64 Edition is free from Microsoft and is yet another multithreaded app. The conversion was actually a two pass process, but WME only reports a final time. The first pass doesn't fully utilize all CPU power, but the second pass comes pretty close to full utilization. For this test we used a 10 Min ~130 MB video to re-encode to the 2Mb/s DVD quality format.

Folding @ Home Benchmarks:

We at EXTREME Overclocking are Folding @ Home nuts! If you fold then you have probably seen the EOC Folding Stats pages. Using the Folding@Home benchmark CD created by notfred, we ran the benchmark64 app to get these numbers. The benchmark doesn't run any of the new SMP work units, but it does give general relative performance of each processor.

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Intel Core i7 Mobile CPU (Clarksfield) Review

Intel Core i7 Mobile CPU (Clarksfield) Review

Cinebench R10 and POV-Ray

Cinebench R10 is an OpenGL 3D rendering performance test based on Cinema 4D from Maxon. Cinema 4D is a 3D rendering and animation tool suite used by 3D animation houses and producers like Sony Animation and many others. It is very demanding of system processor resources and is an excellent gauge of pure computational throughput.

This is a multi-threaded, multi-processor aware benchmark that renders a single 3D scene and tracks the length of the entire process. The rate at which each test system was able to render the entire scene is represented in the graph below.

Three of the four comparison desktop CPUs outperformed the Core i7-920XM on the multi-threaded iteration of Cinebench R10; but the Core i7-920XM was faster than every single one of the comparison systems on the single-threaded version of the test. Once again this is direct result of the Core i7-920XM's ability to scale its processor speed up to 3.2GHz using Turbo Boost Technology.

POV-Ray, or the Persistence of Vision Ray-Tracer, is a top-notch open source tool for creating realistically lit 3D graphics artwork. We tested with POV-Ray's standard 'all-CPU' benchmarking tool on the test machines, and recorded the scores reported for each. Results are measured in pixels-per-second throughput; higher scores equate to better performance.

Our results with the POV-Ray benchmark nearly mirror those of Cinebench R10 above. The only notable difference is that on this benchmark, the 3.4GHz AMD Phenom II X4 965 edges out the Core i7-920XM for top honors on the single-threaded workload. As this test is very sensitive to raw CPU speed, it's not a complete surprise that the processor running at the highest speed was the one to put in the fastest single-threaded performance.

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