Cinebench rendering
Graphics is a classic example of a computing problem that's easily parallelizable, so it's no surprise that we can exploit a multi-core processor with a 3D rendering app. Cinebench is the first of those we'll try, a benchmark based on Maxon's Cinema 4D rendering engine. It's multithreaded and comes with a 64-bit executable. This test runs with just a single thread and then with as many threads as CPU cores are available.

This is the kind of application where a pair of Core 2 Extreme QX9775s can really come into their own. They even put some pretty good distance between themselves and the older-gen Xeons, probably thanks to the Penryn core's clock-for-clock improvements in certain areas, like its faster divider.

POV-Ray rendering
We caved in and moved to the beta version of POV-Ray 3.7 that includes native multithreading. The latest beta 64-bit executable is still quite a bit slower than the 3.6 release, but it should give us a decent look at comparative performance, regardless.

3ds max modeling and rendering

The Skulltrail system's dominance continues through our POV-Ray and 3dsmax rendering tests. For this sort of work, this system is ideal.