Intel Xeon W5580: Nehalem EP

Test setup

Due to the lack of heavily multithreaded consumer software, it makes little sense to buy a workstation-class CPU such as a Xeon W5580 and use it solely for gaming or general office tasks.

However, we recognise that some bit-tech readers will want a single PC to perform every task, which is why we’ve designed a comprehensive suite of consumer and professional application benchmarks for this review. These range from 3D animation and rendering packages to real-world HPC (high-performance computing) simulations that are usually run on mammoth clusters.

Consumer applications

Here is a list of the consumer applications we used for our testing:

• Sisoft Sandra 2009 SP1
  
• 7-Zip
  
• Handbrake
  
• GIMP
  
• Media Player Classic
  
• WPrime
  
• Prime95

Games

Here's a list of the games we used for our testing:

• Crysis v1.20
  
• X3: Terran Conflict

Professional applications

Here is a list of the professional applications we used for our testing:

• 3ds Max
  
• Cinebench R10 x64
  
• Euler 3D
  
• FlamMap
  
• LightWave 9.6
  
• Terragen 2

To measure the speed of a pair of Xeon W5580s, we ran the same suite of benchmarks on a system comprising a pair of Intel’s previously fastest Xeon X5482 CPUs, and a pair of Core 2 Extreme QX9775s in an Intel D5400XS Skulltrail motherboard. The Xeon W5580s were tested in a Supermicro X8DA3-O motherboard.

We also built a workstation system from a pair of quad-core AMD Opteron 2382 CPUs and a Supermicro H8DA8-2 motherboard. Although AMD has announced the faster Opteron 2386SE, no samples are currently available.

Supplemental Hardware

Graphics Card: Zotac GeForce GTX 260 AMP
Hard Drive: Samsung SpinPoint P120S 250GB SATA II
Power Supply: Enermax Galaxy 1kW
Drivers: Nvidia GeForce 182.08
Operating System: Windows Vista Ultimate x64 SP1

Memory

Memory: Crucial CT3KIT25672BB1339, Crucial CT12872AF80E, Supermicro 533MHz DDR2

Before we crack on with the results, first a note about the memory configurations of the different test rigs. In the Xeon W5580 system, each Xeon has a triple-channel memory controller, and so to work as designed, needs to be able to access three DIMMs - so the system needs six in total - and each slot was populated with a 2GB stick of DDR3, giving the system 12GB of RAM in total. The two older Xeon systems, the X5482 and Skulltrail QX9775s use dual-channel FB-DIMMs. These aren't common, and we weren't able to source higher capacity modules than 2GB, so each system was set up with two, giving 4GB in total. The AMD system required ECC DDR2, and again, this is hard to source, so it was set up with 4GB RAM in total.

While there is a disparity in total memory available to the test systems, we felt it best to make this clear at the outset, and we felt that on balance, it's better to include more results from more systems in the article. This is especially the case given that most of the benchmarks we used focus on CPU performance, and so simply don't benefit from having more than 4GB of system memory.