Experimental Tests
Euler 3D Fluid Dynamics

This fluid dynamics simulation is very CPU and memory intensive.  From the benchmark source website:

The benchmark testcase is the AGARD 445.6 aeroelastic test wing. The wing uses a NACA 65A004 airfoil section and has a panel aspect ratio of 1.65, a taper ratio of 0.66, and a 45 degree quarter-chord sweep angle. This AGARD wing was tested at the NASA Langley Research Center in the 16-foot Transonic Dynamics Tunnel and is a standard aeroelastic test case used for validation of unsteady, compressible CFD codes. Figure 1 shows the CFD predicted Mach contours for a freestream Mach number of 0.960.

The benchmark CFD grid contains 1.23 million tetrahedral elements and 223 thousand nodes. The benchmark executable advances the Mach 0.50 AGARD flow solution. Our benchmark score is reported as a CFD cycle frequency in Hertz.


Nehalem Revolution: Intel's Core i7 Processor Complete Review - Processors 102

Nehalem Revolution: Intel's Core i7 Processor Complete Review - Processors 103

This high performance computing test clearly sees an advantage with a HyperThreaded Core i7 processor – the fastest score on the QX9770 is still 87% slower than the top score provided by the Core i7-965 EE.  For a more fair comparison we can look at the 4 thread results from the two CPUs: there we see a 5% or so gain from the QX9770 up to the Core i7-965 EE with Turbo Mode disabled.  If we look at just a single thread we about the same difference in speed: 5.5% or so.


Microsoft Image Composite Engine

This application takes any number of images and attempts to “stitch” them together to make a single panoramic image.

Nehalem Revolution: Intel's Core i7 Processor Complete Review - Processors 104

Nehalem Revolution: Intel's Core i7 Processor Complete Review - Processors 105

While I was really hoping this benchmark would help to show some every day benefits to running a Core i7 platform the performance differences just aren’t there.  The QX9770 processor actually completed the job faster than the Core i7-965 EE processor without Turbo Enabled.

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