The Core i7 980X Review: Intel's First 6-Core Desktop CPU
by Anand Lal Shimpi on March 11, 2010 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
PAR2 Multithreaded Archive Recovery Performance
Par2 is an application used for reconstructing downloaded archives. It can generate parity data from a given archive and later use it to recover the archive
Chuchusoft took the source code of par2cmdline 0.4 and parallelized it using Intel’s Threading Building Blocks 2.1. The result is a version of par2cmdline that can spawn multiple threads to repair par2 archives. For this test we took a 708MB archive, corrupted nearly 60MB of it, and used the multithreaded par2cmdline to recover it. The scores reported are the repair and recover time in seconds.
An application needs to be more than multithreaded to take advantage of the 980X, it needs to demand more than four threads. And our PAR2 test is pushing it as is, there's no advantage to the 980X here.
WinRAR - Archive Creation
Our WinRAR test simply takes 300MB of files and compresses them into a single RAR archive using the application's default settings. We're not doing anything exotic here, just looking at the impact of CPU performance on creating an archive:
Our WinRAR test takes advantage of the larger L3 cache and thus we see roughly a 9% performance advantage for the 980X compared to the 975.
Microsoft Excel 2007
Excel can be a very powerful mathematical tool. In this benchmark we're running a Monte Carlo simulation on a very large spreadsheet of stock pricing data.
If you're running any sort of computationally intensive Excel macros, the 980X will deliver. The financial market just wet themselves.
Sony Vegas Pro 8: Blu-ray Disc Creation
Although technically a test simulating the creation of a Blu-ray disc, the majority of the time in our Sony Vegas Pro benchmark is spend encoding the 25Mbps MPEG-2 video stream and not actually creating the Blu-ray disc itself.
Even when the application doesn't scale perfectly with core count, we still see some impressive gains. Our MPEG-2 Blu-ray creation test showed a hefty 20% performance improvement over the 975. If you do any sort of video encoding or Blu-ray authoring, the 980X is perfect for you.
Sorenson Squeeze: FLV Creation
Another video related benchmark, we're using Sorenson Squeeze to convert regular videos into Flash videos for use on websites.
FLV authoring shows another healthy gain of 30% over the quad-core 975.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
102 Comments
View All Comments
- Thursday, March 11, 2010 - link
how are you getting your productivity numbers/percentages ???Anand Lal Shimpi - Thursday, March 11, 2010 - link
Also note that I limited my voltage to a ~15% increase. I believe with more voltage it's possible to go higher, but you really start driving power consumption up at that point.Take care,
Anand
zartok - Thursday, March 11, 2010 - link
I saw on tweakers.net they were able to run it 3.45GHz on 1V and on 4.26GHz on 1.38V (or 1.33V can't tell that well due to the image size), without even trying hard. So are sure that it's the CPU that's limiting the OC and not something else eg the motherboard?Bolas - Thursday, March 11, 2010 - link
How does this cpu compare to the 6-core 32nm Xeon server chips that are launching around the same time? Any cost information on those yet? I mention this because I'm seriously considering EVGA's new dual socket W555 motherboard, which requires the dual QPI cpu's.goinginstyle - Thursday, March 11, 2010 - link
Is Intel offering 18 months no interest no payment plans for this? I really want one but I also want to eat and live in something besides a box for the next six months. Good article and nice to know the X58 boards we already have should work with nothing more than a BIOS upgrade.JonnyDough - Thursday, March 11, 2010 - link
This processor isn't for you then.It's for people who have nothing better to blow money on AND have money.
DrMrLordX - Thursday, March 11, 2010 - link
This is mostly a paper launch since few people will pay $1k for a CPU. As has been said so many times in the CPU/OC forums, keep your eyes out for the 32nm Xeon quads that will be appearing for LGA1366. They won't be 920 d0 cheap but they will be cheaper than the 980 and probably OC pretty well.erwos - Thursday, March 11, 2010 - link
If it's in the channel, it's not a paper launch. Period, end of story. Just because you can't afford it doesn't mean others can't.DrMrLordX - Friday, March 12, 2010 - link
It's not that it's unaffordable . . . it's just that I'm not that crazy. Close, but not quite.JumpingJack - Friday, March 12, 2010 - link
Maybe a career change that pays more :) ... j/k.