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Intel Core i7 Performance Analysis Review
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TrustedReviews NewslettersWhile 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 is a 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
Wow!
With it's new and improved Hyper-Threading, Core i7 simply trounces the competition in the multi-threaded version of Cinebench and it doesn't exactly do badly in the single-threaded version either.
POV-Ray
It's more of the same in POV-Ray, though the real story here is just how poor AMD's Phenom is in this benchmark.
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ilovethemonkeyhead said on 4th November 2008
eyepopper said on 4th November 2008
@Ed, judging by some of the follow-up remarks, I seem to have got my point across.
basicasic said on 5th November 2008
As a once keen overclocker (my first effort was a P75 oc to 90Mhz!!! wow) I'm well past the faster is better mindset. My Q6600 will oc easily to 3.6Ghz with a little extra jui... more
Jay said on 7th November 2008
with multicore processers if you run say 2 single core processes does it use 2 of the cores or just one of them?
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i can see hyper threading being used properly. it certainly improved my old pentium 4. i remember trying my pc (loaded with rubbish, mind) without hyper transport... painful...