Intel Core i7 980X Review

Testing:

Office 2007 Excel Big Number Crunch: This test takes a 6.2MB MIcrosoft Excel speadsheet and performs about 28,000 sets of calculations that many of the most commonly used calculations in Excel. The measure of this test is how long it takes to refresh the sheet.

Lower Is Better

POV Ray 3.7: This program features a built in benchmark that renders an image using Ray Tracing. The latest versions offer support for SMP (Symetric MultiProcessing) enabling the workload to be spread across the cores for a quicker completion.

Higher Is Better

PCMark Vantage x64 is used to measure complete system performance. We will be running a series of tests to gauge performance of each individual CPU to see which CPU, if any, rises above the others.

In these benchmarks there is not a single test where the six cored Core i7 980X is out performed. The Excel testing shows that it is almost 1.5 seconds faster in the calculations than the Core i7 965. In POV Ray and PCMark Vantage the performance advantage is overwhelmingly in favor of the Core i7 980X.