These Kentsfield scream in 3dsMax. Rendering out a scene that previously took a little over 13 minutes on my dual Xeon 3.2 system now takes just a shade over 3 minutes! Currently, I am running my QX6700 at a mild overclock, running it at 9x355FSB at 3.2Ghz (1420 FSB). One thing that I have noticed is that these chips love extra bandwidth. Just increasingly the multiplier gave me modest gains, but upping the FSB and lowering the multiplier gives a dramatic boost. Right now I am having some seating issues with my Tuniq Tower heatsink, so I don’t want to push the machine any further until I can can reseat it to lower temps a smidge, but overall, I am very impressed with the chip.
Too bad the viewport performance still leaves a lot to be desired though. Even with my new 8800GTX, its still crawls along. In fact, under OpenGL, the card actually benches about two times as slow as my old Softmodded 6800GT.
D3D as well - however I can’t speak for the Quadro series. I can say there was a huge performance increase in 8 using D3D with all my ‘gamer’ level cards.
Just thought I’d post back my results from switching from OpenGL to D3D. Performance has jumped through the roof. Using the bmark4 benching script my scores have jumped almost ten fold in some instances. Here is a comparison between OpenGL and D3D on my system.
Will try the script on my 8800gtx later today and see how it goes. Dont think it will be all that good as drivers are still crap and it seems slower than my old 7800gtx.
If using directx 9 with a geforce 7950 what’s the optimal driver settings inside of max for best performance? i.e. Used Cached DX3DXmeshes, Use triangles strips, Redraw scene, etc. These settings always kind of baffled me :? .
just took delivery of a new workstation today with a intel extreme Quad core.. the whole system cost £1200.. It just beat my dual opteron 275 dual core system by 4 mins on the same scene! i paid £2600 for the amd system 6 months ago! Gutted to say the least.
Yeah, amd quads are actually very fast dual socket x2s, that don’t require registered ram and other expensive stuff that 2xx opterons needed.
And they drink a lot of power…
At least this is the quad core solution that’s supposed to compete with the kentsfields.
just took delivery of a new workstation today with a intel extreme Quad core.. the whole system cost £1200.. It just beat my dual opteron 275 dual core system by 4 mins on the same scene! i paid £2600 for the amd system 6 months ago! Gutted to say the least.
Any news on the amd Quads?
Natty
Natty, hope you don’t mind me asking, but which reseller was this from?
