Maxon Cinebench 10 x64

Website: Cinebench

Maxon Cinebench is based on Maxon's popular animation software, Cinema 4D, which is used extensively by studios and production houses worldwide for 3D content creation. We've used the built-in CPU benchmark, which uses a 3D scene file to render a photo-realistic image of a concept bike. The scene makes use of various CPU-intensive features such as reflection, ambient occlusion, area lights and procedural shaders.



Again, should you get a good-clocking Phenom 9600 Black Edition, it should scale nicely and in the multi-CPU test, it outperforms the ES 9600, but suffers in single core testing quite a bit.

Final Thoughts

It's clear that the extra north bridge frequency does have some effect but generally not a lot - certainly nothing noticeable unless you spend your life encoding x264 content. It's a real shame that both our Black Edition Phenom 9600 processors didn't enjoy the extra frequency but sometimes that's just how the cards play out.

Reading around the various other Black Edition overclocking articles on the net, it looks like watercooling might help, but our Zerotherm Nirvana NV120 kept our CPUs consistently under 50˚C when loaded, even despite putting a hefty 1.5V vCore through it.

From the results, if you can get 2.6GHz+ from one it should scale wonderfully, however given the problems AMD seems to be having with scaling its retail CPUs means it looks like getting a good chip is very much luck of the draw. And it could turn out to be an expensive mistake if you consider that every Intel Core 2-based CPU we've ever used has easily achieved 3GHz.

We'd love to have some solid competition and choice again, especially for us enthusiasts but it unfortunately just doesn't look to be the case. What we risk is the current price difference between Q6600 and Q6700 - more than double for an extra 266MHz. That's only because the Phenom 9600 loosely relates to the performance of the Core 2 Quad Q6600 and Intel wants to be super-competitive.

With Penryn CPUs literally just weeks away - more specifically, the new dual core Wolfdales, which should be positively bursting with potential, a wise investment for your hard earned cash would be to still overclock an Intel processor.

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What do these scores mean?