Refine search for CPUs and Memory

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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 back to clock speed ruling the roost in the single threaded test but it's interesting to note the AM3 platform brings less of an improvement. That extra core pays dividends once again for the 810 when it comes to this multi-threaded test. Still no significant impact from the move to AM3, though.

POV-Ray

We see a similar trend in this test with more cores beating fewer faster cores when it comes to multi-threaded software. This test also seems to benefit little from the extra memory bandwidth of AM3.

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