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Published: November 3, 2008 | Source: Intel | Author: James Napier

Core i7 Nehalem Benchmarks Preview

PCMark Vantage
 
PCMark Vantage is the latest benchmarking suite from Futuremark. Differing significantly from their 3DMark suites, PCMark performs a series of benchmarks designed to recreate and benchmark scenarios of a PC being used for everyday tasks. Vantage has a Vista only requirement as it actually relies on several different components from the OS in order to run correctly.
 
 
 
Early speculation surrounding the Core i7 suggested that the chip would be more suited to server tasks than to gaming, but if the results above are anything to go by, this speculation just got blown right out of the water. PCMark places the i7 a whopping 3698 points ahead of the QX9650 in the gaming results and even comes close to doubling the results from the Q6600. As expected, the Memory and Productivity results are also well ahead of the other systems thanks to the insane memory bandwidth and 4 core / 8 thread architecture.
 
 

Pov-Ray

 
POV-Ray is a Persistence of Vision Raytracing tool for producing high-quality computer graphics. The freely available software suite is bundled with a benchmarking scene that uses many of POV-Ray’s internal features to heavily test the abilities of the CPU in both single and multi-core modes.
 
 
Much like the single-core based SuperPI test seen on the previous page, the Core i7 produces marginally better results than its predecessors when POV-Ray is run in single-core mode. However, if we perform the same test again, this time using the Multi-Core option, the 8 threads of the Core i7 kick in to action pushing the results more than 1000PPS higher than the QX9650 and over 1600PPS higher than the Q6600.
 
 
Cinebench 10
 
Cinebench 10 is a benchmarking tool based on the powerful 3D software Cinema 4D. The suite uses complex renders to gauge the performance of the entire PC system in both single-core and multi-core modes. Testing was performed a total of 5 times with the highest and lowest results being omitted and an average created from the remaining 3 results.
 
 
 
A similar story to POV-Ray can also be seen in Cinebench, with the i7 offering a slight performance improvement over the QX9650 when rendering with only a single thread, but completely trouncing the other systems when running on all eight threads.