A Desire to Game

Since the release of the i5 750, I have been very intrigued by its price tag and the performance it has in Photoshop. However, after reviewing the latest benchmarks from DH, Tom's Hardware, and AnandTech, I am still left with no idea how it compares to an AMD 965BE.

One thing all the benchmarks have in common is that the i5 750 is just a little behind the i7 920. But what about the 965 BE???

Can someone shed some light on who's benchmark should theoretically be more accurate?

Is the i5 750 a great pickup for Photoshop CS4?

DH - 965BE beats all i7 and i5 except for the i7 975

Toms - 965BE gets smoked by everything

AnandTech - 965BE barely loses to everything


http://www.hardwareheaven.com/reviews....=837&pageid=15

Benchmark Results: Productivity - Review Tom's Hardware : Intel Core i5 And Core i7: Intel?s Mainstream Magnum Opus

AnandTech: Intel's Core i7 870 & i5 750, Lynnfield: Harder, Better, Faster Stronger

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Three is my new favorite number. (SATA III, USB 3.0, and triple channel memory)

Veridian3

There is one argument which says that all of the above results are correct and useful, that you should look at them and see what is best. Unfortunately there are quite a few aspects which need some consideration when making an informed decision.

For example, from the test specs on Anands site we can see that they are using memory configurations which are quite different to ours... whether they are relevant to you is something worth thinking about.

On our test rig the 965BE used 4x2gb DDR3-1600 which we feel represented a reasonable setup for a real-world enthusiast/professional system. It also exactly matched the Intel 700/800 system to provide comparable results. At Anand we can see that they have three memory specs listed and nothing about which configuration is used on which system (a guess could say 2x2gb DDR3-1333 for AMD, 4x1gb DDR3-1333 for Intel). If that was the case then it makes the configuration issue even harder to replicate as the 4x1gb configuration on Intel i7 900 means Channel A has 2gb vs Channel B and C on 1gb each... reducing the performance of the memory bandwidth (essentially its top heavy). As there are only a couple of boards which support 4 sticks, using 3 or 6 would have been a more useful i7-900 configuration from Anand in my opinion.

Looking at Toms results they will be impacted by the Turbo Boost feature which is on during their testing (as is power saving) so the CPU MHz rating will be all over the place as the system changes CPU spec dependant on workload. For our test power saving and turbo is disabled to show performance at a static 2.66/2.93GHz and then later we look specifically at the effect of Turbo so that you have the full story on performance.

On top of that, there will be some argument about which is a more real world test. Ours involves actually sitting using Photoshop, and specifically a number of filters which recreate actual use of the program by an end user. Anand runs a short automated test, if they were more in depth the results may change. Information on Toms testing is limited so its hard to say what they are doing and how good a benchmark it is. The fact that we make ours publically available and that sites like HardOCP use it should tell people something about how confident we are in our benchmark.

It could also come down to aspects like the patch version of the software, we always use the latest drivers, OS patches and software versions. For Photoshop CS4 (off the top of my head) that is 11.0.1... not sure what the other sites are using.

In summary, we feel that testing with configurations which are as identical as possible, with the latest software is essential to giving readers the correct and useful information they are looking for. On top of this we feel that real world testing is of paramount importance, synthetic or automatic benchmarks tell us nothing about how a program runs.

Hope the above helps in some way!

Cow_160483

Excellent clarification on those results V3 thanks for clearing up some of that confusion for us

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Decode!
Muhahahahah!

A Desire to Game

And that is why I come to you guys for my questions/reviews/benchmarks. Thanks a million...once again.

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Three is my new favorite number. (SATA III, USB 3.0, and triple channel memory)