Sandy Bridge-E Benchmarked: Intel Retains the Performance Crown

Posted 11/14/2011 at 10:57am | by Gordon Mah Ung

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PCMark

PCMark7 is the latest in FutureMark's popular all-around performance tests. It's not designed to test just the CPU as it factors in storage and graphics into its score, too. The overall score is based on storage performance tests in Windows Defender, importing pictures, gaming as well as video playback and transcoding performance, image manipulation, web browsing and decrypting. Since we use the same hard drives and GPUs in our tests, the graphics performance and storage components should be mostly even. The differences you see here should mostly be the result of image manipulation, web browsing, and decrypting and video transcoding here. The Core i7-3960X just edges the Core i7-2600K and yields an advantage over the Core i7-990X. We've read reports that the test is multi-threaded but we suspect it tops out with but four cores. Again, the score is heavily weighted by storage subsystems. Since we used the same Raptors across the board, our scores are significantly lower than those using an SSD.

POV-Ray

The Persistence of Vision Raytracer or POV-RAY is a freeware raytracing app that reaches all the way back to the 1980s and drew inspiration from the Amiga. The two six-cores again take the lead and surprise, the FX-8150 just pushes the Core i7-2600K aside. The six-core Phenom II X6 also has a good showing.

ProShow

We've long used ProShow Producer 3.5 to benchmark machines. The application is a popular slideshow creator used by professional photographers. It's multi-threaded but we've found for some time that it doesn't seem to scale beyond four cores. For our test, we take a folder of 200 or so JPEG files shot with a 21MP Canon EOS 5D Mk II, add random transitions, a sound track and output it to a 1080p video file.

Again, the Core i7-3960X offers seriously fast performance coming in about 20 percent faster than the Core i7-990X part and the Core i7-2600K which are about tied. There's also good news for AMD here. While its top end CPU can't compete head on with the Core i7-2600K part, the chip is showing fairly good improvements in encoding tasks. For example,look at the score from the six-core Phenom II X6—it's simply dragging butt while the FX-8150 closes the gap with Intel.

Sony Vegas Pro

We've been using Sony Vegas Pro for the last couple of years to measure how fast a machine is at rendering a video from this popular non-linear editor. We normally run Vegas Pro 9, but decided to update to Vegas Pro 10 for this set of processors. (We're also looking at Premiere Pro CS5 but didn't have a benchmark assembled in time.) For the workload, we use a video shot with a Canon EOS 5D Mark II, apply numerous filters to it, and spit it out to Window Media Video at a high-bit rate setting.

The Core i7-3960X, sigh, again kicks ass with a render time almost 30 percent faster than the Core i7-990X processor. Against the Core i7-2600K, you're looking at almost a 45 percent performance difference. On the AMD side, we're again seeing the FX-8150 offer significant performance increases over the Phenom II X6 in video-related duties. It's not enough to beat the Core i7-2600K, but it ain't bad in a category that Intel has ruled for a long time.

Sandra

For memory bandwidth we tapped the good old SiSoft Sandra. We haven't been blown away by the triple channel performance of the Core i7-990X so we didn't know what to expect here. The answer is whoa mama! A huge increase in memory bandwidth from the quad-channel Core i7-3960X. It's roughly twice the bandwidth of the Core i7-990X with its triple-channel setup. For the record, we tested the quad-channel CPU with four 4GB DIMMs of DDR3/1600, the tri-channel with three 2GB DIMMs of DDR3/1600 and all three dual-channel rigs with two 4GB DIMMs of DDR3/1600. And no, we didn't test the FX-8150 at DDR3/1866 speeds. Believe us when we say that that little bit of memory bandwidth won't suddenly propel it past the Core i7 parts.

Unigine

Can a faster CPU make a different on-GPU test that's nearly completely reliant on the GPU? Yes! No, not at all, actually. So why does this chart from the DX11 Unigine 2.5 bench say otherwise? Look closer at it and you'll see the oldest trick in the book: a chart that makes seemingly minor differences seem huge. We left this in because our Excel defaulted to this setting when we created the test and to show you how it's easy to warp things.

This (below) is actually what you should expect from benchmarks (and games) that are bottlenecked solely by the GPU. There is virtually no difference between the Core i7-3960X and the lowly Phenom II X6 1100T chip. That's despite us using a $500 GPU—a GeForce GTX 580—for our tests. Would it make a difference if we ran three GTX 580 cards in tri-SLI? Unlikely. Today's games are still highly reliant on the graphics card rather than the CPU. That's not true in all cases though. Many games are finally starting to use enough threads to require a quad-core chip and a small number of games will actually use six cores or more to enhance your game play experience. So why this chart? We just want to emphasize to those who are the 100 percent gamers that your best investment is the fastest GPU you can get. Frankly, we don't think there's such a thing as a 100 percent gamer because video encoding, transcoding, image editing, and other chores that rely heavily on a fast CPU are performed by all enthusiasts.

Valve Particle Test

Valve's particle benchmark dates back to the first quad-core chips. We still use it as a gauge of CPU performance on particle effects in gaming though. The benchmark doesn't really scale beyond four cores so we've been surprised by the performance of the six-core Core i7-990X. We've always attributed that to either the large L3 cache or the additional memory bandwidth the chip has over dual-channel configurations. The performance of the Core i7-3960X may back that up as it has even more memory bandwidth and a huge amount of L3 cache. But then we get to the FX-8150 which has more cache than the Phenom II X6. Maybe it's time to call Scooby, Shaggy and have them truck over here in the Mystery Mobile so they can find Old Man Withers hiding down in the silicon.