Terragen 3

Website:Terragen 3

Planetside Software’s Terragen 2 is a highly realistic landscape generator used to create background images in films and games such as Star Trek: Nemesis, Stealth and The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus. Our script renders a single frame of a snowy mountain scene at 640 x 480 on all the available CPU execution units.

Cinebench R15 64-bit

Website: 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.

Power consumption

For the power consumption tests, we measure 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. We use Prime95's smallFFT test to put the CPU under 100 percent load, while idle power results were taken with the PC sitting at a Windows Aero-enabled desktop.

With many LGA2011-v3 motherboards still having issues running memory above 2,600MHz without forcing the CPU strap to 125MHz and increasing power consumption as a result, we also add absolute default idle power consumption to the graphs using 2,133MHz memory too. Here, we literally set the memory speed and that's it. This will give you an indication of how much of a power saving you'll make if you opt for cheaper memory and run your CPU at stock speed.