CINEBENCH 11.5 Multi-Core Rendering Test

Maxon CINEBENCH is a real-world test suite that assesses the computer's performance capabilities. CINEBENCH is based on Maxon's award-winning animation software, Cinema 4D, which is used extensively by studios and production houses worldwide for 3D content creation. Maxon software has been used in blockbuster movies such as Spider-Man, Star Wars, The Chronicles of Narnia, and many more. CINEBENCH Release 11.5 includes the ability to more accurately test the industry's latest hardware, including systems with up to 64 processor threads, and the testing environment better reflects the expectations of today's production demands. For this test I ran the multi-core rendering test, which resulted in 12 threads rendering the test scene. The CINEBENCH score is a dimensionless number that's only useful for comparison to other CINEBENCH results.

In the synthetic tests in the previous section, we saw performance scores ordered, for the most part, by memory speed, which the Kingston DDR3-2133 memory winning every test and the other memory kits lining up behind it.

But those were synthetic memory tests designed to highlight the smallest performance differences. In our first application test, we see virtually no difference, with less than 1% separating the lowest and highest scores.

Blender/Icetest

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.

The G.SKILL F3-12800CL9Q-16GBZL kit wins this one...but again, the delta is so narrow-- less than two percent better than the slowest score-- that it should be considered within the margin of error.

Handbrake 0.95

The immense power (and cost!) of Intel's Sandy Bridge Extreme Core i7-3960X CPU virtually ensure that it will see a lot of video rendering and transcoding work, since this is one of the few applications that can really use the resources this processor has. My standard Handbrake test transcodes a standard-definition video of a Family Guy episode to the "iPhone and iPod Touch" presets. I report the time it took to perform the transcode in seconds; lower scores are better.

Here again we see razor-thin differences: with the Kingston HyperX 2133MHz memory, the test system completes the encode a mere 0.8 seconds faster than it does when equipped with the generic DDR3-1333MHz memory, and only 0.7 seconds faster than with the much less expensive Ripjaws 1600MHz set.

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