The Core i7 980X Review: Intel's First 6-Core Desktop CPU

Windows 7 Application Performance

We're testing out a few new additions to our Bench database, so what we've got here are some updated application tests run under Windows 7. The CPUs compared are going to be different since we don't have as much historical data, but we'll be building it up over the coming months.

x264 HD Encoding Performance

It's what you've all been asking for - our x264 encoding test with an updated version of x264. In this case we're using TechARP's x264-HD 3.03 bench and x264 version 1342.

7-zip Benchmark & Performance

We use WinRAR for our compression test under Vista, but more and more users are switching to 7-zip. The performance is more CPU dependent so we're going to look at it. First up is the built in 7-zip benchmark:

Here we're taking the same 300MB set of images from our WinRAR test and are compressing them using 7-zip. We divide file size by completion time to get compression speed in KB/s:

The actual 7-zip archive creation process is limited to two threads, and here the 980X actually falls behind the 975 presumably because of its higher latency L3 cache. The built in 7-zip benchmark can run across all 12 threads and thus performs much better on the 980X, serving more as a bandwidth benchmark than anything else.

Sonar 8 Multi-track Audio Export

We've had some requests for digital audio workstation benchmarks so we're adding a multi-track audio export from Sonar 8. Performance is expressed in KB/s:

Again, we see a small gain here thanks to the larger cache but the extra cores aren't doing much.