Blender

Website: Blender.org

Blender is a free, open source software 32-bit 3D modelling, animation, rendering, post-production, and gaming program. Initially developed by Ton Roosendaal's company NaN in the Netherlands, its popularity, and capabilities, have grown over the years. There is a large and active user base with ongoing development by dedicated hackers, making Blender a powerful and viable 3D software solution.

It can be used for modelling, UV unwrapping, texturing, rigging, skinning, animating, rendering, particle and other simulating, non-linear editing, compositing, and creating interactive 3D applications.

Blender has a robust feature set similar in scope and depth to other high-end 3D software such as Softimage|XSI, Cinema 4D, 3ds Max and Maya. These features include advanced simulation tools such as rigid body, fluid, and soft body dynamics, modifier based modelling tools, powerful character animation tools, a node based material and compositing system and Python for embedded scripting.



The QX9650 is again the best performing CPU out there, and steps out a bit more of a gap compared to what we've previously seen over the previous 65nm Intel CPUs. The combination of increased front side bus and core quantity seems to help and even the dual core AMD 6400+ seems to match the quad core Q6600 in terms of performance here.

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 the extra cache and memory performance helps make the difference here for the QX9650, with a massive gain in performance over the QX6850 in multi-core performance. In a multi-CPU Harpertown Xeon and Stoakley setup you should see exponential improvements again if you are upgrading from Clovertown or two/four CPU Opteron set ups. A Pair FX-74s have a "typical" value of around 10,000 (depending on system configuration), so any standard desktop board with a QX9650 will outperform it by around 33 percent.