AMD Phenom II X4 980 Black Edition Review

1. Introduction2. The AMD Phenom II X4 980 Black Edition3. Testing Methodology and Overclocking4. Pairing up with the Noctua NH D14 Cooler5. SiSoft Sandra6. Cinebench R11.5 64 bit7. AIDA 648. Cyberlink Espresso9. 3D Studio Max 201110. Clock for Clock 4.4ghz: SiSoft Sandra11. Clock for clock 4.4ghz: Cinebench R11.512. Clock for Clock 4.4ghz: Super Pi 1.5 Mod13. Clock for Clock 4.4ghz: PcMark Vantage14. Clock for Clock 4.4ghz: Cyberlink Espresso15. Closing Thoughts16. View All Pages

V2011 is the first release of 3DStudio Max to fully support the Windows 7 operating system. This is a professional level tool that many people use for work purposes and our test will show any possible differences between board design today.

Autodesk 3ds Max Design 2011 software offers compelling new techniques to help bring designs to life by aggregating data, iterating ideas, and presenting the results.

Streamlined, more intelligent data exchange workflows and innovative new modeling and visualization tools help significantly increase designers’ creativity and productivity, enabling them to better explore, validate, and communicate the stories behind their designs.

Major new features:

• Slate: A node based material editor.
• Quicksilver: Hardware renderer with multithreaded rendering engine that utilizes both CPU and GPU.
• Extended Graphite Modeling Toolset
• 3ds Max Composite: A HDRI-capable compositor based on Autodesk Toxik.
• Viewport Canvas toolset for 3D and 2D texture painting directly in the viewport
• Object Painting: use 3D geometry as ‘brushes’ on other geometry
• Character Animation Toolkit (CAT): now integrated as part of the base package
• Autodesk Material Library: Over 1200 new photometrically accurate shaders
• Additional file format support: includes native support for Sketchup, Inventor
• FBX file linking
• Save to Previous Release (2010)

We render a customised Kitguru scene at 3200×2100 and record the time taken, lower is better.

AMD six core processors are competitive, however the four core designs fail to deliver the same levels of performance, even with higher clock speeds. Intel's Core i5 2500k is a full minute ahead of the 980 Black Edition.

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