Cinebench 64-bit CPU test

Download from: www.maxon.net

Cinebench uses Maxon's Cinema 4D engine to render a photo-realistic scene of some shiny balls and weird things (we miss the motorbike). The scene is highly complex, with reflections, ambient occlusion and procedural shaders so it gives a CPU a tough workout.

As Cinema 4D is a real-world application - used on films such as Spider-Man and Star Wars - Cinebench can be viewed as a real-world benchmark.

We're in the process of transferring to version R15 but as we've got a useful backlog of results including those for CPUs we no longer have, we thought it would be handy to include the results from both R11.5 and the newer R15.

Power Consumption

For all of the performance tests, we disable all power-saving technology in order to give us a consistent set of results, and also best-case performance numbers - even though technologies such as Intel's SpeedStep might only take microseconds to kick in, that can make a difference in some tests.

However, for the power consumption tests we re-enable everything in order to get a real-world power draw. The power draw is measured via a power meter at the wall, so the numbers below are of total system power draw from the mains, not the power consumption of a CPU itself. Measuring the power draw of any individual component in a PC is tricky to impossible to acheive.

Idle Power Consumption

For this test, we leave the PC doing nothing but displaying the Windows 7 desktop (with Aero enabled) for a few minutes and record the wattage drawn from the wall via a power meter.

Load Power Consumption

For this test, we want to only stress the CPU, so use the smallfft stress test of Prime95 to fully load all available processors (logical as well as physical). We leave Aero enabled, and wait a few minutes for any power saving technology to kick in and for the power consumption to level out before taking our reading.