Digital Storm Core i7-965

CINEBENCH R10

CINEBENCH places a heavy load on the CPU during the rendering tests, and can utilize a single CPU or multiple cores. The video subsystem has no bearing on the CPU rendering portion of this benchmark.

The Core i7 processors excel at rendering, and here we have the highest single CPU and multiple CPU scores that we've seen on a system, with a "Multiprocessor Speedup" of 4.13. Three GTX 285s will require all the CPU they can get, so these scores are encouraging for later tests.

PCMark Vantage

Our new standard for general platform performance is the PCMark Vantage suite that provides a wide range of tests, some of which focus on the CPU while others also utilize the video subsystem. Tests include digital photo manipulation, webpage loading, video transcoding, HD content playback, and so forth.

The system provides great performance here as well, beating out our previous leader, the Velocity Micro system with CrossFire ATI HD 4870 GPUs.

SPECviewperf 10

Though these machines are intended for gaming, often the high-end hardware is useful for other purposes as well, such as CAD, artistic rendering, and medical software (though purists will tell you that professional graphics solutions are the only way to ensure that the driver packages will be completely accurate and stable). SPECviewperf is a set of benchmarks that measure the OpenGL performance in packages such as 3D Studio Max, Pro/Engineer, SolidWorks, and other professional applications used daily by many companies. The software is free to download and test on your own system, but be aware that running all the tests takes several hours to complete. We ran all tests at a resolution of 1280x1024.

Here we see the system struggling, and in fact this is the only real stumble this system encountered. During the test runs, we observed rendering oddities (flickering and missing textures) that are likely driver related. While most single GPU solutions will run these applications reasonably well, the SLI configuration does not play nicely with these software suites. We can't fault the system much for this, as it's not intended for these applications. In this case, we'd definitely recommend professionals look to a system better suited for their intended use.