Blender

Blender is an open-source, free content creation suite of 3D modeling, rendering, and animation capabilities. Originally released in 2002, it's available in versions for Mac OS X, Windows, Linux, and several Unix distributions. It supports rigid and soft-body objects and can handle the draping and animation of cloth, as well as the rendering and animation of smoke, water, and general particle handling.

Our Blender test renders multiple frames of an animation of a rotating chunk of ice, with translucency and reflections. Rendering of this model uses ray-tracing algorithms and the program reports the rendering time for each of the animation's 25 frames. The results are a summation of the rendering times for all frames and the lower the score, the better. Bear in mind, though, that Blender can dispatch a maximum of eight threads, so the full power of the 980X and 3960X isn't being used here.

Another win for the Core i7-3960X: its score is 19% better than the Core i7-2600K. Since the 3960X is limited to eight threads in this test, the same number as the 2600K, I'd guess the win reflects the extra cache the Sandy Bridge Extreme CPU brings to the party.

POV-Ray

The Persistence of Vision ray tracer is a free, open source 3D modeling program that uses ray-tracing algorithms to generate realistic three-dimensional images. Ray tracing is very computationally intensive, and the POV-Ray program has a handy built-in benchmark to let you check the performance of your system. Although AMD again brings up the rear, the FX-8150 really does pretty well, coming very close to the performance of the 2600K. But unlike Blender, POV-Ray can use as many threads as a CPU will give it, so the six core CPUs win again.

In the next section I'll present my final thoughts and conclusion on the ASUS P9X79 Pro motherboard.

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