NEW Benchmark scene (Max 8 Vray RC3 required)

[arobbert]

Has anyone tested the I7 960, 970 or 980X? They do very well compared to dual Xeons in other benchmarks.

[Alan Iglesias]

Has anyone tested the I7 960, 970 or 980X? They do very well compared to dual Xeons in other benchmarks.

i7 960 3.2GHz

-Alan

[arobbert]

i7 960 3.2GHz

-Alan

[ATTACH=CONFIG]4903[/ATTACH]

Not Bad! Thanks for the post.

[jrandom]

980X @ 4.0 ghz six post's ago

[arobbert]

980X @ 4.0 ghz six post's ago

Yes I've been looking at that and forgot before my post (thanks for posting it by the way!). That's an awesome time and I don't want to sound like I'm berating your machine. Butttt.....

The thing that has me wondering is the time posted by jstrob on 5-9-10. He shows 59.5 with a dual Xeon 5520. You can get a Dual 5620 (a much more up to date processor than the 5520, which should be faster) for a lot less than a similar 980X setup. Your time is about 15 seconds better than his (44.4). I'm curious about whether it makes more sense to go with lower cost dual quad core Xeons compared to the newer I 970 hex cores. It's difficult to tell with minimal benchmark information. Does anyone have thoughts on this?

[jrandom]

You don't sound like that at all

I did consider dual xeon's too, the build price wasn't all that much different but I do alot of work that is not yet multithreaded so having a faster single core speed was important, if I were building a dedicated render/sim box I would for sure build up a dual intel or quad amd. For about $2000 US you can get a pretty quick slave built up.

[jstrob]

I just upgraded my E5520 dual quad core for L5640 dual six-cores... And I almost had a heart attack when seeing the bencmark on those... I rendered like 4 times to be sure. With the 6 cores, I can't get under 1 minutes (when I could with the quad cores)!!! Yes you read right: it's SLOWER!!! I really don't understand. I will have to try with a scene built from scratch. Maybe because the scene is old or else what???

Intel Xeon L5640 Westmere 2.26GHz 12MB L3 Cache LGA 1366 60W Six-Core ($1,036.47 x 2)


Intel Xeon E5520 Nehalem 2.26GHz 4 x 256KB L2 Cache 8MB L3 Cache LGA 1366 80W ($384.99 x2)


Now I think I want my money back...

[jujubee]

For whatever reason, your scene seems brighter in the latest rendering which could add to extra rendering time. Plus, since it's a new machine, are there any operating system differences? Last but not least, I cannot download the benchmark file. If it uses IR/LC, do you have your LC "Number of passes" set to 12?

[Donald2B]

This scene is not really a good test since it is so quick. Most machines can get within a certain time now no matter how fast it is. Most of the time is spend preparing the scene and doing things that are only single threaded (Or at least that is what it looks like to me on my end). It would be better to open up an old project you have done that takes at least 30min or so on the old machine and then see how fast the new machine is.

I do know that the new dual Hexacore setup is FAST! It more than doubles the performance of my dual Xeon 5355.

Start a thread in the new hardware section with all the specs of your new computer and we can see if we can help you figure out what is going on.

[arobbert]

Did you turn up the number of threads for the Light Cache?

Are running HT? You could try turning it off or on.

[jstrob]

Hi thanks all for your answers. I will post in the hardware forum soon cause my core speed seems to stay at 1600.3 MHz even when rendering (it has to do with "speedstep" a feature for power saving.

My machine is the same, I just swapped the cpus. My LC passes were at 4, I put them at 12, but still getting only 1m 6.0s.

I will try turning off HT and/or turbo and/or speedstep...

[arobbert]

This scene is not really a good test since it is so quick. Most machines can get within a certain time now no matter how fast it is. Most of the time is spend preparing the scene and doing things that are only single threaded (Or at least that is what it looks like to me on my end). It would be better to open up an old project you have done that takes at least 30min or so on the old machine and then see how fast the new machine is.

I do know that the new dual Hexacore setup is FAST! It more than doubles the performance of my dual Xeon 5355.

Start a thread in the new hardware section with all the specs of your new computer and we can see if we can help you figure out what is going on.

It's been discussed before that the existing benchmark is not adequate for testing the new fast machines. The discussion seems to end when we discuss the creation of the new scene. I have suggested that we just increase the rendered size of the existing scene say by 2 or 3 times. We could also just decrease the noise threshold to .001 and increase the global subdivisions. Problem solved with very little work.

[jujubee]

You might want to try resetting your BIOS if you just swapped out chips.

[Da_elf]

i think we need to revert to my tower as the test scene. hehehe i need to revive it one of these days and see how quick it renders with current technoloy and new vray

[Donald2B]

@Da_elf: That would be a great idea! Thanks for offering! If I wasn't stuck in IT hell, I would have at least attempted to put something together.

Part of me would like to get the exterior scene from ChaosGroup that they used in the Demo @ Siggraph. That seemed to be pretty heavy with lots of geometry and shadow detail.