WHAT DO THE i7 PROCESSORS
MEAN FOR 3D APPLICATIONS?
3dspeedmachine.com and RenderStream have teamed up to produce this in depth review of Intel's i7 processor. We'll examine the features of the i7 and observe how those effect the render time of our 3D Studio Max + Mental Ray scene. We'll also show you how the new i7's compare to some of the older processors in use today.

The machine we used for these tests was a custom RenderStream 3D workstation. We tested the auto overclocking and hyper threading features of the i7. Each configuration was run at least 3 times and we averaged the render times of each configuration. While RenderStream overclocks systems for customers, the intent of the report was to probe the basic hyperthreading and overclocking attributes of the new i7 architecture without doing any serious ovrclocking.

We'll also observe how the room temperature will effect render time.

With auto overclocking and hyper threading disabled, it's no surprise that we see the slowest render times with this configuration. This configuration was run 3 times at a room temperature of 72 degrees.


By enabling auto over clocking we see our render times improve by 5%. This configuration was run 3 times at a room temperature of 72 degrees.


 


In this test we left auto overclocking off and enabled hyper threading. This result yielded a 27% speed increase compared to auto overclocking off and hyper threading off. What is hyper threading? "Today's Intel Hyper-Threading Technology delivers thread-level parallelism on each processor resulting in more efficient use of processor resources."

The intel i7 920 chip we used in this test is a 4 core CPU. If you examine the performance tab of the windows task manager you will see 4 CPU's being graphed. When you enable hyper threading you will see 8 processors present! Pretty impressive. However, as we see above, this doesn't mean that you will render twice as fast with hyper threading enabled.

This configuration was run 4 times at a room temperature of 72 degrees.

  


In this test, auto overclocking and hyper threading were both enabled. This result yielded a 30% speed increase compared to auto overclocking off and hyper threading off. This configuration was run 10 times at a room temperature of 72 degrees.



In this test, auto overclocking and hyper threading were both enabled exactly as they were is the test above. The variable here was the air temperature of the room. Lowering the air temperature by 4 degrees yielded a 1% speed increase on average. This configuration was run 10 times at a room temperature of 68 degrees.


For comparison purposes we ran the same scene on an Intel Q9450 2.67Ghz (quad core) system with 4GB of 800mhz DDR2 ram and an Nvidia GTX-280 graphics card. The i7 machine was on average 7 minutes 32 seconds faster rendering our test scene.


It should be noted that the i7 test machine was running software to monitor various aspects of the hardware components. As a result, this caused the average render time to increase by about 3 seconds across the board. The fastest render time we saw was 11 minutes and 24 seconds without running the monitoring software.

The bottom line:
At 1.66 times faster than the previous generation Core 2 2.67 GHz Q9450 processor, Intel's new 2.67 GHz i7-920 provides phenomenal performance. This is a must have for the professional 3D artist.

Special thanks to RenderStream for running the tests on their 3D workstation. RenderStream manufactures high end workstations fine tuned for 3D artists and animators.