3ds Max 2009

Website: 3ds Max 2009

The first professional application to give the Xeon W5580s a significant workout was Autodesk 3ds Max 2009, a leading 3D modelling, animation and rendering package used by game developers and film makers. Our test renders 25 frames (just over one second) of a complex model of a spaceship travelling through space with multiple light sources at full HD resolution (1,920 x 1,080).


The Xeon X5482s struggled in this test, taking a lengthy 22 minutes and 47 seconds to complete the render, while the QX9775s took slightly longer at 23 minutes and 33 seconds. In contrast, the 16 processing threads of the Xeon W5580s finished the test in just 17 minutes and one second.

While this is still a pretty long period of time to render one second of animation, the Xeon W5580s are an astonishing 34 percent faster than the Xeon X5482s. Unfortunately, due to an unresolved DRM issue with 3ds Max refusing to activate, we were unable to run this benchmark on the Opteron system.

Cinebench R10

Website: Cinebench R10

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.


The Xeon X5482s scored a lightning-fast 24,864 in this multithreaded CPU rendering test, with the Skulltrail rig just a few hundred points slower. The Opteron 2382s scored a disappointing 18,563. However, the star of the show was the Xeon W5580 system, which broke new ground with a score of 28,980 - 17 percent faster than the Xeon X5482s.

Euler3D

Website: Euler3D

We also ran the Euler3D HPC benchmark from the CASE lab at Oklahoma State University. This benchmark analyses airflow over a section of the wing of an aircraft in a virtual wind tunnel travelling at Mach 0.5 (half the speed of sound) using CFD (computational fluid dynamic) calculations. Euler3D presents its results expressed as a CFD cycle frequency in hertz, so a higher number is better.


While the eight cores of the Xeon X5482s achieved a CFD frequency of 3.568Hz and the eight-way Opteron 2382 system scored 2.780Hz, the Xeon W5580 system achieved an unparalleled 6.897Hz. That’s an astonishing 93 percent faster than the Xeon X5482s, despite eight of the Xeon W5580s cores being logical Hyper-Threaded cores as opposed to physical cores. In short, if your company performs CFD analysis, a dual-Xeon W5580 workstation is a must buy.