Benchmark Results: Media And Transcoding Apps
Because Apple’s popular iTunes application isn’t threaded, two extra cores do nothing for Core i7-980X here. For the most part, clock rate is going to be the principal determinant of performance—highlighted by the fact that our Core i5-750 gets Turbo Boosted ahead of the more expensive Core i7-920, which doesn’t have as aggressive of a Turbo implementation. The Core i7-980X is still fast, but not at all worth its price premium in titles that can’t take advantage of its six cores.
In contrast to iTunes, MainConcept most definitely is able to put Gulftown’s six cores to use. Even at the same clock rate, Core i7-980X sees as much gain from two additional cores as the 3.33 GHz i7-975 gets over the 2.66 GHz i7-920. In turn, the i7-920, running at 2.66 GHz, demonstrates a similar boost over the 2.66 GHz i5-750, which lacks Hyper-Threading. Now that’s what I call ideal scaling.
The Phenom II X4 965 bests Intel’s slightly more expensive Core i5-750, but it’s certainly a close match-up. The Core i7s simply outclass AMD’s best effort here.
As with MainConcept, the freely-available HandBrake heavily favors multi-core architectures. The Core i7-980X is a great way to go if you’re crunching on a lot of video work. In fact, it’s the best way to outperform Intel’s previous flagship. And given the same price point, you might as well be comparing performance to the Core i7-920 when judging value—the decision to buy an i7-980X over the i7-975 is really a no-brainer in cases like these.
We again see the Phenom II X4 and Core i5-750 neck-in-neck, which is good news for AMD, given a slightly lower price point and slightly better transcode times.
Our DivX encode sees Intel’s Core i7-980X again rising to the top, besting the company’s previous flagship by more than 30 seconds. However, the Xvid workload was never able to finish correctly on the Gulftown setup, hanging up just before the test was supposed to come to a close. According to Intel, this is due to a bug in the Xvid codec related to the way it detects cores. Remember back to the issues AMD experienced when it launched Phenom II X3? This is a remnant of that, and should be patched quickly. None of the other titles in our test suite experienced problems due to a non-power-of-two thread count.
We wouldn’t have expected much out of the i7-980X anyway, since this metric is clearly limited by clock frequency (indicated by the Phenom II’s first-place finish, followed by the 3.33 GHz Core i7-975).
Impressive chip. I believe we have a new King.
Two things:
I find these graphs cluttered. In my opinion, a graph should give you one piece of information. Including AA results in with every gaming benchmark makes it hard to see what the graph is trying to illustrate. From the looks of things, enabling AA just brings things to a GPU limited situation anyway so why have them in a CPU review in the first place? I think that Tom's graphs need to be simplified. These graphs show a progression or trend across a number of products. One should be able to get this information at a glance and not have to spend 2 minutes rereading the graph heading to see what the data are actually telling us.
Just FYI, thinner oxide thickness will increase leakage current. However, using thinner gate oxides will allow for lower gate voltages to be used which will decrease the amount of leakage current.
Pretty much exactly the performance we expected, impressed by the lower peak power though!
Yes we have a king in terms of productivity but on gamming field woops...
it's not worth that money at all we are back with this old conclusion that most of games are rather gpu heavy and cpus are far from being bootleneck here.If you want to pay 5 times more to get 5-10% boost in games it's your call.
One could ask why tom's hardware isn't using at least pair of 5850 ?
thanks to that we see only gpu bootleneck and graphs without quality information.
I must say Chris Angelini that your articles are a pleasure to read. Knowledgeable, well-written and well aware of the realistic needs of most readers.
I have a Phenom II X4 and its fine for gaming. I7s are way more than I need or can afford. Still an interesting read; its always nice to see how far tech is being pushed these days.
I agree with Fox Montage here, why on earth are TH benchmarking the procs with games at settings that can only give scores that can be accredited to the gpu's capabilities.
I know it is to give some "REAL" world situations, but it is a test of the cpu's capabilities and limitations, not how easy it is held back by a graphics card.
to a certain extent it is fine, because the game graphs are supposed to show just that, that this CPU IS NOT FOR GAMERS
a decent dual core or low cost quad core is more than enough for games, and that's exactly what the game graphs show
All us FSX 'gamers' are dying to know how this performs
this new Intel cpu is awesome but its too much of power that we don't need it in our day life (maybe you need it if u wana make nuke rocket in your home
) ,and to much expensive ...that amd 965 black has almost same results but Intel is better so intel problem is to cost of cpu compared to amd .....(o.O by the way im intel fan boy O.o so don't u intel-guys mad of me .|.)
Interesting read.
Hmm, nice chip..but for games? Like some of the other comments I don't see much point in getting this CPU beyond bragging rights. What also strikes me is just how well that AMD chip keeps up - and at a much lower cost.
So that leaves all the other things you'd want to do with six cores. In the case of video transcoding, is it actually practical to spend this amount of money on a CPU, or is it better to go the GPU route? Perhaps THG could provide a follow-article..
Also looking forward to seeing AMD's new CPU's in the near future
$1000 for speed gains of 8-30 seconds in most areas? No thanks.
Buy yourself an AMD 965, and if gaming is your thing, spend the extra cash you have left on your GPU[s].
Well we all know that for most games out there its the graphics card that makes it and yet we keep seeing these tests repeated on Crysis etc.
Please bring back the fsx tests. The game may be 4 years old but I've yet to see a proceesor that can run it yet.
Today Aria are claiming to have them in stock (though the link to the product page says they're on pre-order), but at £881 I don't think I'll be buying one anytime soon (it more than twice what I'd want to pay for a complete system given I have no heavy processing needs).
Today Aria are claiming to have them in stock (though the link to the product page says they're on pre-order), but at £881 I don't think I'll be buying one anytime soon (it more than twice what I'd want to pay for a complete system given I have no heavy processing needs).
I don't think most of us here would buy it - it's simply not needed and the gains it gives are not worth the price.
To be honest I think AMD are playing it smart here - they're letting Intel do all the legwork, advertising things like this 6-core.
I have been an Intel user since I started using PCs, but I'm switching to AMD on my new build. Their 965 does everything I need and is half the price of the i7.
Intel is far too overpriced right now. Yes they have the newest releases, but is it worth the price?