Review: Sandy Bridge Core 2011 processors from Intel

Real world tests

LightWave 3D 9.6 x64 tests

Our first real world test is LightWave 3D. This is an industry standard 3D Animation and rendering software from Newtek.  Our rendering tests with LightWave 9.6 have changed. I have always been a fan of the Classic Camera and the multi-pass PLD anti-aliasing that it offered. However, what I did not know was that this type of camera model was only capable of about 75-80 percent CPU utilization.

This makes it very inefficient (as I am sure you guessed) so we made the shift to the newer perspective camera and are using its much better (100 percent CPU utilization) threaded engine as well as a newer and more efficient form of anti-aliasing. Along with this new camera model we get ray tracing and some other nice features.

We have also leapt from the 1080p resolutions we used before and are now setup with a 35mm 4k resolution of 4096 x 3072. This should give the CPU a nice workout. To show off the vast difference in performance between the two we ran both and show you the render times here. This also shows what you can do when your application is truly written for a multi-threaded CPU.

Looking at these numbers it is hard not to be impressed. They are simply excellent for the market range this CPU is aimed at.

AutoGK 2.55 tests

AutoGK is a compilation of transcoding applications wrapped up into a very nice installer and front end application. It is a great 'one-stop' for transcoding or even re-encoding files. For our testing we transcode a 2-hour movie at 100 percent quality and record the time it takes to complete.

No surprises here, the Sandy Bridge duo are simply fast.

Adobe Light Room 2.7 x64 RAW file conversion

This one has been requested more than once. We took 100 15.1 MP RAW files as shot by our Canon T1i camera and used Adobe's Light Room 2.7 x64 to convert them to JPEG. We set the resolution to 1280x853 and the quality up to 75 percent but left everything else as shot. Then we timed how long it took the system to convert these files.  We ran the test three times and used the middle score for our results. The settings used are shown below.

Once again we find that the 2600 and 2500 are great performers. Interestingly though it is the overclocked 2500K that tops out our list.

After Effects CS5 tests

After Effects is an application that allows you to add 3d animation and rendered effects to still photography or to video that you import. It is very multi-thread aware and is also an excellent test for memory and HDD usage. We have a stock project that was provided to us by Peter Kapas.

Although these are the first two CPUs in our new After Effects testing the numbers here are very good for this project.