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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dragunover - Thursday, July 29, 2010 - link
This CPU is a joke until it's getting sold for under four hundred dollars....AstroGuardian - Thursday, July 29, 2010 - link
Why just not take i5-750 and overclock the heck out of it and beat the "crab" out of the i7-970?Taft12 - Thursday, July 29, 2010 - link
Does overclocking net you additional cores now?(Sarcasm aside, you CAN net additional cores on an AMD CPU!)
afkrotch - Thursday, July 29, 2010 - link
Cause then you can overlock the i7-970 and beat the "crab" out of anything else, minus the 980X.medi01 - Friday, July 30, 2010 - link
Which still won't justify 5 times higher price.afkrotch - Monday, August 2, 2010 - link
Never said it did. I can't see why anyone would ever pay $500 or more for a processor you'll be using at home. I'd say it's a different story if it's a work related business expense.Me, I will never buy a proc that costs more than $350. I always stay within that budget. I find that the sweet spot. You can get a fast processor and you can usually overclock it to match the $1000 ones.
swaaye - Friday, August 13, 2010 - link
Intel's pricing strategy seems to pay off in the end, historically. :)Will Robinson - Thursday, July 29, 2010 - link
It's pricey but very quick at pretty much everything.Thanks for the look anyway.
Could AT consider an article highlighting the need for software that really shines on this hardware?
Who's coding 6 core +HT stuff anyway?
Give them a push Anand :)
AstroGuardian - Thursday, July 29, 2010 - link
"If you're doing a lot of 3D rendering, video encoding or other heavily threaded tasks it makes sense. Otherwise, despite the class leading performance, it's not a good value. "Read the review!!! .... damn it
Taft12 - Thursday, July 29, 2010 - link
Server workloads and animation professionals.