Intel 980x Gulftown
Synthetic Benchmarks cont
Published: 12th March 2010 | Source: Intel | Price: £850 - estimated |
Synthetic Benchmarks
Cinebench
With Intels shift to 32nm Hex Core today, and the AMD six core processors on the horizon it's time for us to move to the latest version of CineBench. In this case it's R11.5 which provides a big speed boost to the results rendering compared to the R10 we've used up to now.
Words cannot do justice to either the results we obtained today, or quite how visually impressive it is. When all 12 threads are at full chat the render occurs at speeds almost incomprehensible. So impressive is the i7 980x it makes the i7 965 look positively lethargic.
POV-Ray
POV-Ray, the Persistence Of Vision raytracer is freeware and regularly updated. The latest 3.7 beta provides support for as many threads as you can throw at it, and similarly to CineBench the latest in-built benchmark is vastly quicker to the old one. We also get a render window so we've something to watch too. Once again the English language is incapable of adequately describing the simple joy to be found from seeing a render so complex that it used to take all night, take a minute.
PassMark
PassMark, from PassMark software, is a comprehensive benchmarking suite that tests all aspects of your computer to give you a great feel for how your system as a whole will perform. The rigorous nature of the testing means that, unlike some comparable products, only an immense step up in performance will give a significantly larger final score.
Therefore the extra 200 points from the stock clock and 600 points that the overclocked 980x gives truly demonstrate that the latest Intel revision has the power of the Hoover Dam.
PC Mark Vantage
Futuremarks PC Mark Vantage suite uses a plethora of in-built applications and utilities to give results that should translate well to actual performance. Our testing makes it appear that PC Mark Vantage doesn't take advantage of all six cores as the results are mainly a result of clockspeed and architectural changes rather than the increase we'd expect to see from a 33% increase in potential performance.
WinRAR
WinRAR is most definitely something that will take advantage of every last ounce of processing performance you can give it and this is borne out in our results. Stunning.
Most Recent Comments
Blimey that's a bit of kit. Dear Santa
So wish I could afford to splurge on one of these, I wouldn't have to upgrade for tiiiiime.
Maybe with some ATI 5870's in crossfire, or Nvidia equivalents we could see 80 frames + from crysis
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Originally Posted by name='BloomerzUK'
OT: Love the avatar Tom.
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No way will it be worth it buying it. and there is no way on earth any one here is going to need that much power except for good scores on test benches and braging rights wich means naff all in real world.
Thats like getting a car to compenswte for the fact you cannot be good in another department.
still good good review though but way out of my budget range and some thing ill never own unless OC3d are gving it away as a ""PRIZE"" hint hint ....lol
Great review btw.
Out of interest, did you manage to get a Super PI 1m at all? I just want to see some pwnage
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Originally Posted by name='alexhull24'
Some serious power, I enjoyed the review tom. Cost is the problem here though, but this is always the case with bleeding edge hardware. Most of us have to wait for it to trickle down into our price range, which doesn't usually take long.
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Originally Posted by name='mayhem'
£850 est. come on guyes thats raly taking the piss.
No way will it be worth it buying it. and there is no way on earth any one here is going to need that much power except for good scores on test benches and braging rights wich means naff all in real world. Thats like getting a car to compenswte for the fact you cannot be good in another department. still good good review though but way out of my budget range and some thing ill never own unless OC3d are gving it away as a ""PRIZE"" hint hint ....lol |
6x cpus are allowing those at the top end of benchmarking to exploit their donations at this point. We've already seen this week Shamino cream the 3dMark Vantage record by some 5000 points with a single 'retail' GTX480 in one run, but my argument would be that with a 4x cpu, or his 6x with a 5870, would it only be a few thousand.
It's going to take a long time, imo, for these Intel offerings to calm down on the pricing stake. Maybe it'll take a really good AMD 8x to do it, but as far as extreme top-end cpus go for pricing, I can remember my QX9650 being priced at less than half of this.
If ur thinking 980x will remain the top cpu for these sockets forever, then u can appreciate it being £1k - but I somehow doubt that with Intel sticking with this socket set for a good few years to come, that the 980x will be the top end for it's duration.
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