The Rest of Clarkdale: Intel's Pentium G6950 & Core i5 650/660/670 Reviewed
by Anand Lal Shimpi on March 24, 2010 4:00 PM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
3dsmax Performance
Today's desktop processors are more than fast enough to do professional level 3D rendering at home. To look at performance under 3dsmax we ran the SPECapc 3dsmax 8 benchmark (only the CPU rendering tests) under 3dsmax 9 SP1. The results reported are the rendering composite scores:
For a 3D rendering workstation the choice should almost always be more cores. The Athlon II X3 440 is a bit faster than the Pentium G6950 here and the more expensive Core i5 6xx CPUs are easily trumped by the quad-core 750.
Cinebench R10 Performance
Created by the Cinema 4D folks we have Cinebench, a popular 3D rendering benchmark that gives us both single and multi-threaded 3D rendering results.
Here we have the one redeeming quality of the dual core i5 lineup: great single threaded performance. Even the Pentium G6950 offers better single threaded performance than other CPUs way above its pay grade.
Crank up the thread count however and things go back to normal. The Pentium G6950 does better than AMD's dual core offerings, but isn't nearly as good as the X3 440.
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Teloy - Friday, March 26, 2010 - link
"It's GPU still only runs at 733MHz though"... "It's" is not quite right... Take care.8steve8 - Thursday, March 25, 2010 - link
why was the G45 omitted on pg2 in the graph of power consumption under load with integrated graphics?I was keen to see how much more efficient HD graphics were than g45.
-stephen
bpdski - Thursday, March 25, 2010 - link
It would have been nice to see the benchmarks run with the overclocked G6950 also.- Brian
Taft12 - Thursday, March 25, 2010 - link
I have a hard time comprehending what Intel/AMD's TDP ratings mean in light of the "Load Power Consumption" graph.How is it that Intel CPUs with higher TDP ratings consume MUCH LESS power at load than AMD CPUs with lower TDP ratings. Just looks at the results -- all of the Intel core i3/5 CPUs are 73W TDP but the Athlon X2 255 is rated at 65W yet consumes 20 more watts at load. Is the 790FX motherboard that inefficient? WTF???
Lower idle consumption for Intel I understand due to the smaller process and excellent design, but do the TDP ratings truly mean nothing? This is a disastrous result for AMD.
strikeback03 - Friday, March 26, 2010 - link
Both companies rate their TDP differently, and in either case it is not designed to be a measure of power consumption.Nickel020 - Thursday, March 25, 2010 - link
It would be nice if you could include the 661 in the power consumption charts. Does its higher TDP actually lead to higehr power consumption?Sunburn74 - Thursday, March 25, 2010 - link
If you're gonna talk about the value of a 4.4 ghz overclocked processor, you gotta include it the benchmarks. Duh!crochat - Thursday, March 25, 2010 - link
Why the hell is it necessary to always put discrete graphics card in systems with integrated graphics and do power consumption tests with it? Is the benchmark used for power independent from the graphics card?I understand that it is much simpler to measure watts only, but what is important is the resulting task energy consumption, taking into account the efficiency of the processor..
strikeback03 - Friday, March 26, 2010 - link
Because some of the tested systems don't have integrated graphics. So for the application performance comparisons shown to be valid, the discrete GPU has to be kept in there. Wouldn't want someone thinking they could get 69.1 FPS in Crysis Warhead with the power consumption of only the integrated graphics.Taft12 - Thursday, March 25, 2010 - link
It's necessary to save many hours of work the testers could spend on more articles. What counts is the delta in power consumption between CPUs/platforms at idle and load.I'm an AMD fan, but the bottom line is Intel systems are more power efficient, period.