AMD Phenom II X4 940 Black Edition - 3D Rendering

While many people will associate 3D performance with a graphics card, for CAD applications a lot of the grunt work is still performed on CPUs so this is something we've put to the test. We use two industry standard tests, called POV-Ray and Cinebench. Both programs can be freely downloaded and the benchmark begins with just a single click so they're a really easy comparison tool if you fancy seeing how your system shapes up.

Cinebench has both a single-threaded and multi-threaded test while POV-Ray is just multi-threaded. Slightly disappointingly, Cinebench only returns a score, rather than a time to completion, so the numbers in isolation don't really mean anything. However, when compared they adequately show up any difference in performance.

Cinebench




We're definitely starting to see a trend now. Phenom II is a significant step up from what came before but clock for clock it still can't come close to the competition from Intel. And when you take multi-threaded performance into account the decision seems even clearer.

POV-Ray



Yup, more of the same here.