INTEL BUILD
Feature
AMD vs.INTEL
On to the nitty-gritty. You can build
all the fancy workstations you want,
but if you don’t have some way of
measuring real-world performance
across them (which is, let’s face it, the
entire point of this feature), it
amounts to very little outside of
hypothetical potential throughput.
Synthetic benchmarks are good at
giving you a rough idea of how a system
responds, but they’re also fallible. Just
take a step into Asus’s Crosshair VI
BIOS, and you’ll quickly spot the option
to enable performance boosts for both
Cinebench and GeekBench, if you
should so desire.
Which brings us to the question of
what benchmarks we should use. For
both our Intel and AMD builds on the
following pages, we stuck with our
traditional suite, which we use across
most of the systems we build for those
pages – more game-heavy, with a peek
at processor performance and storage
output. However, for this feature, we
really wanted to focus on a more
accurate depiction of how each
platform operates in a working
environment. Which meant delving
into real-world programs.
From the get-go, we knew we
wanted to include something that
utilised CAD clients. Because most
software associated with CAD reaches
the tens of thousands of pounds mark,
we opted for SPECviewperf, a
free-to-download benchmark, whichruns a number of CAD
applications to truly test your
GPU’s design capability. Next
on the list was video editing –
for this, we took a copy of the
latest version of Adobe’s
Premiere Pro CC, and coupled
it with a fairly gargantuan
project file we borrowed from
our parent company’s
corporate advertising division.
For photomanipulation, we
went with Gigapan Stitch.
Designed to test memory
capacity, bandwidth, and CPU
prowess, this takes hundreds, if
not thousands, of images, and
stitches them all together to
create a massive panorama,
with PSB files reaching upward
of 96GB in some places,
depending on DPI settings.
Finally, we ran a few more
synthetics for our own
understanding of how the
systems performed across
memory, and our traditional
rendering benchmarks,
including SiSoft
Sandra and X265,
which are available
for free or on trial.VIEWSET RYZEN WORKSTATION
ZERO
POINT INTEL WORKSTATION3ds Max (Index) 95.72 (-39%) 157.54 124.3 (-21%)Catia (Index) 103.42 (20%) 85.93 105.69 (23%)Creo (Index) 81.41 (31%) 62.32 62.6 (0%)Energy (Index) 4.06 (-53%) 8.57 11.7 3 (37%)Maya (Index) 75.2 (-45%) 136.04 175.4 3 (29%)Medical (Index) 34.32 (-31%) 49.72 52.64 (6%)Showcase (Index) 65.43 (-36%) 101.71 141.35 (39%)SNX (Index) 96.79 (1,011%) 8.71 10.52 (21%)SW (Index) 111.9 7 (84%) 60.98 67.80 (11%)
0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100% 0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100%SPECVIEWPERF 12.1 BENCHMARKS
Our desktop zero-point has a Core i7-7700K running at a stock frequency of 4.5GHz, an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 8GB,
16GB of Corsair Vengeance LPX DDR4-2400, and a 250GB Samsung 850 Evo, mounted on an Asus Maximus IX Hero mobo.